Constituency Relation
In linguistics, phrase structure grammars are all those grammars that are based on the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation associated with dependency grammars; hence phrase structure grammars are also known as constituency grammars. Any of several related theories for the parsing of natural language qualify as constituency grammars, and most of them have been developed from Chomsky's work, including
-
-
- Government and Binding Theory,
- Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar,
- Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar,
- Lexical Functional Grammar,
- The Minimalist Program, and
- Nanosyntax.
-
Further grammar frameworks and formalisms also qualify as constituency-based, although they may not think of the themselves as having spawned from Chomsky's work, e.g.
-
-
- Arc Pair Grammar and
- Categorial Grammar.
-
The fundamental trait that these frameworks all share is that they view sentence structure in terms of the constituency relation. The constituency relation derives from the subject-predicate division of Latin and Greek grammars that is based on term logic and reaches back to Aristotle in antiquity. Basic clause structure is understood in terms of a binary division of the clause into subject (noun phrase NP) and predicate (verb phrase VP).
The binary division of the clause results in a one-to-one-or-more correspondence. For each element in a sentence, there are one or more nodes in the tree structure that one assumes for that sentence. A two word sentence such as Luke laughed necessarily implies three (or more) nodes in the syntactic structure: one for the noun Luke (subject NP), one for the verb laughed (predicate VP), and one for the entirety Luke laughed (sentence S). The constituency grammars listed above all view sentence structure in terms of this one-to-one-or-more correspondence.
Read more about this topic: Phrase Structure Grammar
Famous quotes containing the words constituency and/or relation:
“Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)