Syntax: A Cognitive Approach
Gibson, Edward A. F.
ISBN 10: 0262553570 ISBN 13: 9780262553575
Published by The MIT Press, 2025
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Synopsis:
Syntax provides a cognitive basis for syntactic structures across languages. Edward Gibson observes that there is a cognitive cost associated with connecting words that increases with the dependency length, such that shorter connections are preferred. A transparent formalism to represent this observation is dependency grammar, in which a word is simply connected to another word via a dependency arc to form a larger compositional meaning. This formalism can explain numerous aspects of word order universals across languages.
This book contrasts dependency grammar with the industry standard going back to Chomsky’s phrase structure grammar with transformations. Dependency grammar is a simpler formalism: it does not posit the existence of categories that combine words. Furthermore, there are no transformations. Gibson argues that a construction-based dependency grammar is not only simpler than a phrase structure with transformations approach, but it also accounts for language phenomena more effectively.
About the Author: Edward A. F. Gibson is Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He is a coauthor of Coherence in Natural Language and a coeditor of The Processing and Acquisition of Reference (both MIT Press).
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Bibliographic Details
Title: Syntax: A Cognitive Approach
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2025
Binding: paperback
Condition: Fine