Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics

LACL 2001: Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics pp 17–43Cite as

On the Distinction between Model-Theoretic and Generative-Enumerative Syntactic Frameworks

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2099))

Abstract

Two kinds of framework for stating grammars of natural languages emerged during the 20th century. Here we call them generative-enumerative syntax (GES)an d model-theoretic syntax (MTS). They are based on very different mathematics. GES developed in the 1950s out of Post’s work on the syntactic side of logic. MTS arose somewhat later out of the semantic side of logic. We identify some distinguishing theoretical features of these frameworks, relating to cardinality of the set of expressions, size of individual expressions, and ‘transderivational constraints’. We then turn to three kinds of linguistic phenomena: partial grammaticality, the syntactic properties of expression fragments, and the fact that the lexicon of any natural language is in constant flux, and conclude that MTS has some major advantages for linguistic description that have been overlooked. We briefly consider the issue of what natural languages in MTS terms, and touch on implications for parsing and acquisition.

Abstract

Early versions of some of this material were presented to the Chicago Linguistic Society, the Ohio State University, and the Australasian Association for Philosophy. We thank John Goldsmith, Lloyd Humberstone, Phokion Kolaitis, Paul Postal, Frank Richter, Jim Rogers, Arnold Zwicky for advice, comments, and assistance. We particularly thank Patrick Davidson, Line Mikkelsen, Glyn Morrill, Chris Potts, and Michael Wescoat for comments on the first draft of this paper. It should not, of course, be assumed that any of these people agree with what we say here; some of them definitely do not.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Backofen, Rolf; James Rogers; and K. Vijay-shanker (1995): A first-order axiomatization of the theory of finite trees. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 4: 5–39.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Blackburn, Patrick and Claire Gardent (1995): A specification language for lexical functional grammars. Proceedings of the 7th EACL, 39–44. European Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Blackburn, Patrick, Claire Gardent, and Wilfried Meyer-Viol (1993): Talking about trees. Proceedings of the 1993 Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 21–29.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Blackburn, Patrick and Wilfried Meyer-Viol (1997): Modal logic and modeltheoretic syntax. In M. de Rijke (ed.), Advances in Intensional Logic, 29–60. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bresnan, Joan and Ronald M. Kaplan (1982): Introduction: grammars as mental representations of language. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, ed. by Joan Bresnan, xvii–lii. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Buttke, Kurt (1969): Gesetzmässigkeiten der Wortfolge im Russischen. Halle: Max Niemeyer.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chomsky, Noam (1955): The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Unpublished dittograph, MIT. Published in slightly revised form by Plenum, New York, 1975.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Chomsky, Noam (1957): Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Chomsky, Noam (1959): On certain formal properties of grammars. Information and Control 2 (1959) 137–167.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  10. Chomsky, Noam (1961): Some methodological remarks on generative grammar. Word 17, 219–239. Section 5 republished as ‘Degrees of grammaticalness’ in Fodor and Katz (1964), 384–389.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Chomsky, Noam (1964): Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton. Page reference to reprinting in Fodor and Katz, eds.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Chomsky, Noam (1986): Knowledge of Language: Its Origins, Nature, and Use. New York: Praeger.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Chomsky, Noam (1995): The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Dixon, Robert W. (1963): Linguistic Science and Logic. The Hague: Mouton.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Ebbinghaus, Heinz-Dieter, and Jorg Flum (1999): Finite Model Theory. Second edition. Berlin: Springer.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Emonds, Joseph E. (1976): A Transformational Approach to English Syntax. New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Evans, Gareth (1981): Reply: syntactic theory and tacit knowledge. In S. H. Holtzman and C. M. Leich (eds.), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, 118–137. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Fillmore, Charles W. and Paul Kay (1999) Grammat ical constructions and linguistic generalizations: The What’s X doing Y? construction. Language 75: 1–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Fodor, Jerry A. and Jerrold J. Katz, eds. (1964): The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Gazdar, Gerald; Ewan Klein; Geoffrey K. Pullum; and Ivan A. Sag (1985): Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Gazdar, Gerald; Geoffrey K. Pullum; Bob Carpenter; Ewan Klein; Thomas E. Hukari; and Robert D. Levine (1988): Category structures. Computational Linguistics 14: 1–19.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Gold, E. Mark (1967): Language identification in the limit. Information and Control 10: 441–474.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Harris, Zellig S. (1968): Mathematical Structures of Language (Interscience Tracts in Pure and Applied Mathematics, 21). New York: Interscience Publishers.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  24. Hetzron, Robert (1972): Phonology in syntax. Journal of Linguistics 8, 251–265.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Hill, Archibald A. (1961): Grammaticality. Word 17, 1–10.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Hockett, Charles F. (1955): A Manual of Phonology. Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum (forthcoming): The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Hughes, G. E. and M. J. Cresswell (1984): A Companion to Modal Logic. London: Methuen.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  29. Immerman, Neil (1998): Descriptive Complexity. Berlin: Springer, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Jackendoff, Ray S. (1977): X̄ Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Johnson, David E., and Paul M. Postal (1980): Arc Pair Grammar. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  32. Joshi, Aravind (1987): An introduction to tree adjoining grammars. In Alexis Manaster-Ramer (ed.), Mathematics of Language, 87–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Keenan, Edward L. and Edward Stabler (1996): Abstract syntax. In Configurations: Essays on Structure and Interpretation, ed. by Anna-Maria Di Sciullo (ed.), 329–344. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Keller, Frank (1998): Gradient grammaticality as an effect of selective constraint re-ranking. In M. Catherine Gruber, Derrick Higgins, Kenneth S. Olson, and Tamra Wysocki, eds., Papers from the 34th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society; Vol. 2: The Panels, 95–109. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

    Google Scholar 

  35. [2000]Keller, Frank (2000): Gradience in Grammar: Experimental and Computational Aspects of Degrees of Grammaticality. PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  36. Kempson, Ruth; Wilfried Meyer-Viol; and Dov Gabbay (2001): Dynamic Syntax: The Flow of Language Understanding. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  37. King, Paul John (1999): Towards truth in head-driven phrase structure grammar. Bericht Nr. 132, Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereich 340, Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft, Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Kornai, Andràs and Geoffrey K. Pullum (1990): The X-bar theory of phrase structure. Language 66: 24–50.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Kracht, Marcus (1989): On the logic of category definitions. Computational Linguistics 15: 111–113.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Kracht, Marcus (1993): Syntactic codes and grammar refinement. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 4: 41–60.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  41. Kracht, Marcus (2001): Logic and syntax: a personal view. In Michael Zhakharyaschev, Krister Segerberg, Maarten de Rijke and Heinrich Wansing (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic 2. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  42. Lakoff, George (1971): On generative semantics. In Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovitz (eds.), Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, 232–296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

    Google Scholar 

  43. Langendoen, Terry and Paul M. Postal (1984): The Vastness of Natural Languages. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Lasnik, Howard (2000): Syntactic Structures Revisited: Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Miller, Philip, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Arnold M. Zwicky (1997): The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: Four apparent counterexamples from French. Journal of Linguistics 33: 67–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Perlmutter, David M. (1971): Deep and Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Pollard, Carl and Ivan A. Sag (1994): Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Pollard, Carl (1999): Strong generative capacity in HPSG. In Gert Webelhuth, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Andreas Kathol (eds.), Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation, 281–297. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Post, Emil (1943): Formal reductions of the general combinatory decision problem. American Journal of Mathematics 65 (1943) 197–215.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  50. Post, Emil (1944): Recursively enumerable sets of positive integers and their decision problems. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 50 (1944) 284–316.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  51. Prince, Alan and Paul Smolensky (1993): Optimality Theory (Technical Report RuCCS TR-2, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science). Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Barbara C. Scholz (1997): Theoretical linguistics and the ontology of linguistic structure. In 1997 Yearbook of the Linguistic Association of Finland, 25–47. Turku: Linguistic Association of Finland.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Barbara C. Scholz (forthcoming): Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review, in press.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Rogers, James (1996): A model-theoretic framework for theories of syntax. In 34th Annual Meeting of the Assocation for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference, 10–16. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  55. Rogers, James (1997): “Grammarless” phrase structure grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 721–746.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Rogers, James (1998): A Descriptive Approach to Language-Theoretic Complexity. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  57. Rogers, James (1999): The descriptive complexity of generalized local sets. In Hans-Peter Kolb and Uwe Mönnich (eds.), The Mathematics of Syntactic Structure: Trees and their Logics, (Studies in Generative Grammar, 44), 21–40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Google Scholar 

  58. Sag, Ivan A.; Gerald Gazdar; Thomas Wasow; and Stephen Weisler (1985): Coordination and how to distinguish categories. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 117–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  59. Sag, Ivan A. and Thomas Wasow (1999): Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  60. Schütze, Carson (1996): The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Thomas, Simon (1986): Theories with finitely many models. Journal of Symbolic Logic 51: 374–376.

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  62. Thomas, Wolfgang (1990): Automata on infinite objects. In J. van Leeuwen (ed.), Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, 135–191. New York: Elsevier Science.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, 95064, USA

    Geoffrey K. Pullum

  2. Department of Philosophy, San José State University, San José, California, 95192, USA

    Barbara C. Scholz

Authors
  1. Geoffrey K. Pullum
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Barbara C. Scholz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA Lorraine, 615 rue du Jardin Botanique, B.P. 101, 54602, Villers-lès-Nancy Cedex, France

    Philippe de Groote

  2. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Jordi Girona Salgado, 1-3, 08028, Barcelona, Spain

    Glyn Morrill

  3. Faculté des Sciences, Institut de recherche en Informatique de Nantes (IRIN), 2, rue de la Houssinière, B.P. 92208, 44322, Nantes Cedex 03, France

    Christian Retoré

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Pullum, G.K., Scholz, B.C. (2001). On the Distinction between Model-Theoretic and Generative-Enumerative Syntactic Frameworks. In: de Groote, P., Morrill, G., Retoré, C. (eds) Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics. LACL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2099. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48199-0_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48199-0_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42273-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48199-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation