Dependency Grammar - History

History

The notion of dependencies between grammatical units has existed since the earliest recorded grammars, e.g. Pāṇini, and the dependency concept therefore arguably predates the constituency notion by many centuries. Ibn Mada, who lived in Cordoba and Sevilla in the 12th century, may have been the first grammarian to use the term dependency in the grammatical sense that we use it today. In early modern times, the dependency concept seems to have coexisted side by side with the constituency concept, the latter having entered Latin, French, English and other grammars from the widespread study of term logic of antiquity.

Modern dependency grammars, however, begin primarily with the work of Lucien Tesnière. Tesnière was a Frenchman, a polyglot, and a professor of linguistics at the universities in Strasbourg and Montpellier. His major work Éléments de syntaxe structurale was published posthumously in 1959 – he died in 1954. The basic approach to syntax he developed seems to have been seized upon independently by others in the 1960s and a number of other dependency-based grammars have gained prominence since those early works. DG has generated a lot of interest in Germany in both theoretical syntax and language pedagogy. In recent years, the great development surrounding dependency-based theories has come from computational linguistics. Dependency-based systems are increasingly being used to parse natural language and generate tree banks. Interest in dependency grammar is growing at present, the first international conference on dependency linguistics having taken place recently (Depling 2011).