Carnie, Andrew (2010) Constituent Structure. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press
Description
This book explores the empirical and theoretical aspects of constituent structure in natural language syntax. It surveys a wide variety of functionalist and formalist theoretical approaches, from dependency grammars and Relational Grammar to Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Minimalism. It describes the traditional tests for constituency and the formal means for representing them in phrase structure grammars, extended phrase structure grammars, X-bar theory, and set theoretic bare phrase structure. In doing so it provides a clear, thorough, and rigorous axiomatic description of the structural properties of constituent trees.
Andrew Carnie considers the central controversies on constituent structure. Is it, for example, a primitive notion or should it be derived from relational or semantic form? Do sentences have a single constituency or multiple constituencies? Does constituency operate on single or multiple dimensions? And what exactly is the categorial content of constituent structure representations? He identifies points of commonality as well as important theoretical differences among the various approaches to constituency, and critically examines the strengths and limitations of competing frameworks.
This new edition includes textual revisions as well as a new final chapter and ensures that Constituent Structure remains the definitive guide to constituency for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, as well as theoretical linguists of all persuasions in departments of linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, and related fields.
Hardback: ISBN: 9780199583454
Paperback: ISBN: 9780199583461
First Edition
Review of the Second edition
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Linguist List 22-2415: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-2415.html (Reviewer Kalyanamalini Sahoo)
Reviews of the First Edition
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Linguist List Review (reviewer: Fredrik Heinat): http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-1856.html
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Review in Lingua (reviewer: Mark Baltin): Lingua 119 (2009) 1096–1100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2008.08.005
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Journal of Linguistics 44.3: 752-757 (reviewer Dirk Bury) https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226708005392
Errata
Ordering Information:
Table of Contents
Part 1: Preliminaries
1. Introduction
2. Constituent Structure
3. Basic Properties of Trees: Dominance and Precedence
4. Second Order Relations: C-command and Government
Part 2: Phrase Structure Grammars and X-bar Theory
5. Capturing Constituent Structure: Phrase Structure Grammars
6. Extended Phrase Structure Grammars
7. X-bar Theory
Part 3: Controversies
8. Towards Set-Theoretic Constituency Representations
9. Dependency and Constituency
10. Multidominated, Multidimensional, and Multiplanar Structures
11. Phrasal Categories and Cartography
References
Index