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8 - Ordinary French Houses

Revisiting the Dependency vs. Phrase Structure Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2024

By
Timothy Osborne
Edited by
Eva Duran Eppler ,
Nikolas Gisborne  and
Andrew Rosta
Eva Duran Eppler
Affiliation:
Roehampton University, London
Nikolas Gisborne
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Andrew Rosta
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire, Preston
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Summary

The manuscript revisits the dependency vs. phrase structure debate that occurred in 1980–1 between Richard Hudson on the one hand and Östen Dahl and Pertti Hietaranta on the other. The debate is taken up first in the area of adjective scope. Dahl’s argument in favor of phrase structure based on adjective scope (e.g. ordinary French house) can be convincingly countered in terms of the component unit of dependency syntax. The component and two additional units of dependency syntax – the full component and the full catena – are presented and developed here. The claim is that the motivation for the layered trees of many phrase structure grammars disappears if the much flatter Dependency Grammar analyses acknowledge these units of dependency syntax. The overarching message, then, is that barring the analysis of coordinate structures, the theory of syntax does not need the higher nodes associated with phrase structure, in line with Hudson’s original message back in 1980.

Keywords

componentconstituentdependency grammarfull catenafull componentphrase structure grammarscope
Type
Chapter
Information
Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency , pp. 178 - 199
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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