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What are the other common approaches to study syntax?

Note: the source is an example question from the on-topic question list in Area51.

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As a quick sidenote, MIT teaches a course every other year on different approaches to syntax, and they have lecture notes and readings up on their website: ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/… and stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/fa09/24.960/index.html (I've never looked at them, though, so I don't know how good they are.) – grautur Sep 14 '11 at 16:13
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I believe that is the course commonly referred to as "bad guys", so keep that in mind when reading these. ;) – Alan H. Sep 14 '11 at 23:58
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On the one hand, things should indeed be read with the author and the intended audience in mind. On the other hand, any academic department is going to go through changes in 30 years, so keep that in mind when reading comments like Alan H's. – Aerlinthe Oct 8 '11 at 14:02
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory would be a step back, right? – Anno2001 Nov 3 '12 at 20:10

6 Answers

up vote 12 down vote accepted

If you want to go in depth, check the links. To name a few:

  1. Cognitive Grammar developed by Ronald Langacker.
  2. Construction Grammar (CxG): "CxG is typically associated with Cognitive Linguistics, partly because many of the linguists that are involved in CxG are also involved in Cognitive Linguistics, and partly because CxG and Cognitive Linguistics share many theoretical and philosophical foundations."
  3. Cognitive Linguistics: "Cognitive linguists deny that the mind has any module for language-acquisition that is unique and autonomous. This stands in contrast to the stance adopted in the field of generative grammar."
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up vote 12 down vote

You may want to check out Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, which is a non-derivational generative grammar, developed at Stanford beginning in 1987.

See: Pollard, Carl; Ivan A. Sag. (1994). Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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up vote 10 down vote

and many many more.

I will add that in NLP/CL circles, Chomsky's approaches (Principles & Parameters, Minimalist Program) seem to be mentioned only for historical reasons. Chomsky's approaches have been superseded and seem to have been almost completely abandoned. Though dependencies are not exactly a grammar formalism, they seem to be far more commonly used than all of the above in NLP/CL circles. Having said that, I believe that many psycholinguists still use Chomsky's systems for their work.

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Do you have any ideas on which is more important or more widespread, and in comparison to Chomskyan PSG? – Mitch Sep 14 '11 at 16:16
I'm not sure what would give the idea that TAG (Tree Adjoining Grammar) is not Chomskyan. It is a different tree structure and derivation process than the structures Chomsky and his collaborators have used in their papers, true. But it relies on the same core idea as much of his work: a mathematically formal system in the mind, specific movement and adjunction operators, etc. – Constantine Sep 14 '11 at 18:37
LExical Functional Grammar (LFG) is often used in computational linguistics because it has multiple interfaces that work nicely from a programing perspective. Also, LFG is "non-Chomskyan" in that Joan Bresnan (one of the original architects of LFG) was a student of Chomsky's back in the 70s and much of LFG comes out of her disagreements with his position. – LaurenG Sep 14 '11 at 22:13
I think HPSG is probably the most common formalism besides principles and parameters/minimalism. – Alan H. Sep 15 '11 at 0:01
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Principles & Parameters/Minimalism is certainly not dominant in NLP/CL circles, but not absent either. Have a look, for example, at the work of UCLA's Ed Stabler and Sandiway Fong of the University of Arizona. – pensator Mar 7 '12 at 13:12
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up vote 7 down vote

Don’t forget the “no particular approach” approach.

Haspelmath: “If there are no frameworks, then what should I teach my students in syntax classes? My answer is: The best syntax class is a field methods course, and the second best syntax class is a typology course.” ( http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/Frameworkfree.pdf )

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Oooh, nice. Reminds me, need to get a hold of Dixon's BLT-books (it's a sandwich! it's Basic Linguistic Theory!) one of these days. – kaleissin Sep 20 '11 at 20:30
I disagree with Martin Haspelmath. There is no such thing as "framework-free" analysis or linguistics. In the paper you mentioned he says that "grammatical descriptions must make use of abstract general entities such as rules, schemas and constraints". I wonder how he establishes those "abstract" general entities in a framework-free approach. – Alex B. Apr 19 '12 at 23:24
up vote 2 down vote

Role and Reference Grammar

Briefly, from Wikipedia:

In RRG, the description of a sentence in a particular language is formulated in terms of (a) its logical (semantic) structure and communicative functions, and (b) the grammatical procedures that are available in the language for the expression of these meanings.

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up vote 2 down vote

Automodular Grammar (Sorry, no Wikipedia page)

A framework by Jerrold Sadock in which each module of language (Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, etc.) is completely independent of the others.

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