Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar

Know this topic well? Help others and get FREE products!

Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics

A generative grammatical theory from the family of unification grammars. GPSG arose from the work of Gazdar as he attempted to oppose a formally limited grammatical model of the generative Revised Extended Standard Theory ( transformational grammar). GPSG has just one level of representation and no transformations. The syntactic representation is a tree diagram whose non-terminal nodes are syntactic categories in the form of partially specified feature structures. The grammatical formalism of GPSG provides a complex system of rules and conditions which determine the wellformedness of the local trees in the representation of a sentence, and thereby the grammaticality of the sentence. The phrase structure rules of GPSG correspond to a version of X-bar theory. They are annotated with feature descriptions which allow the transmission of features. Many of the syntactic regularities described in transformational grammar by transformations are represented in GPSG by metarules which generate phrase structure rules from other phrase structure rules: for example, the rules for a passive construction can be derived from the rules for an active construction. Every category in the syntactic structure must satisfy the feature co-occurrence restrictions and the feature specification defaults, i.e. conditions which ensure wellformedness. The transmission of features is achieved through feature unification in the local tree and is guided by three global conditions: (a) the Head Feature Convention provides for the transmission of features like number and gender from the mother constituent to the head constituent; (b) the Foot Feature Principle guarantees the transmission of features which should pass to immediate constituents; (c) the Control Agreement Principle regulates the congruence of constituents on the basis of their semantic properties. GPSG uses the ID/LP format. In contrast to the traditional phrase structure grammar, immediate dominance and linear precedence are described by different types of rules. The lexicon of GPSG contains little information. Subcategorization involves a feature [subcat] whose numeric value selects the ID rule, which introduces the lexical element. Long-distance dependencies, such as those found in wh-questions and topicalization, are handled by the interaction of metarules and the transmission of features. Meanings are represented using formulae from intensional logic in the style of Montague grammar.

Gawron, J.M. et al. 1982. Processing English with a Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. ACL Proceedings 20. 74–81.

Gazdar, G. 1981. Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure. LingI 12. 155–84.

——1982. Phrase structure grammar. In P.Jacobson and G.K.Pullum (eds), The nature of syntactic representation. Dordrecht. 131–86.

Gazdar, G. and G.K.Pullum. 1981. Subcategorization, constituent order and the notion ‘head.’ In M. Moortgat, H.D.V.Hulst, and T.Hoekstra (eds), The scope of lexical rules. Dordrecht. 107–23.

Gazdar, G., G.K.Pullum, and I.A.Sag.

1982. Auxiliaries and related phenomena in a restrictive theory of grammar. Lg 58. 591–638.

Gazdar, G., E.Klein, G.K.Pullum, and I.A.Sag. 1985. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA.

Gunji, T. 1986. Japanese phrase structure grammar. Dordrecht.

Kilbury, J. 1988. Parsing with category cooccurrence restrictions. COLING 88 1. 324–7.

Phillips, J.D. and H.S.Thompson. 1985. GPSG: a parser for Generalized Phrase Structure Grammars.Ling 23:2. 245–61.

Pollard, C. and I.A.Sag. 1988. An information-based syntax and semantics, vol. 1: Fundamentals. Stanford, CA.

Sells, P. 1985. Lectures on contemporary syntactic theories. Stanford, CA.

Shieber, S.M. 1986. A simple reconstruction of GPSG. COLING 86. 211–15.

Stucky, S. 1986. Order in Makua syntax. New York.

Uszkoreit, H. 1986. Word order and constituent structure in German. Stanford, CA.

Verheijen, R. 1990. Generalized phrase structure grammar and contrastive analysis. In J.Fisiak (ed.), Further insights into contrastive analysis. Amsterdam. 67–84.

This is the complete article, containing 575 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).

View More Summaries on Generalised phrase structure grammar