Syntax

A simple grammar formalism—dependency grammar—motivated by the observation that longer distance connections between words are harder to make.

Syntax provides a cognitive basis for syntactic structures across languages. Edward Gibson observes that there is a cognitive cost associated with connecting words that increases with the dependency length, such that shorter connections are preferred. A transparent formalism to represent this observation is dependency grammar, in which a word is simply connected to another word via a dependency arc to form a larger compositional meaning. This formalism can explain numerous aspects of word order universals across languages.

This book contrasts dependency grammar with the industry standard going back to Chomsky’s phrase structure grammar with transformations. Dependency grammar is a simpler formalism: It does not posit the existence of categories that combine words. Furthermore, there are no transformations. Gibson argues that a construction-based dependency grammar is not only simpler than a phrase structure with transformations approach, but it also accounts for language phenomena more effectively.1 Introduction
2 Preliminaries: Components of language structure
3 Dependency grammar
5 Dependency length minimization as a constraint on grammars
6 The surprising lack of dependency locality in Legalese
7 Alternative grammar formalisms
8 Chomsky’s movement-based theories of grammar
9 Language and thought
10 Language as communication
11 Final thoughts
12 Acknowledgments
13 ReferencesENDORSEMENTS

“This is a wonderful book—a view of syntax by a leading psycholinguist at MIT. His evidence supports word-word dependencies as the basis for syntax and a separate area of the brain just for languages, and it tracks the author’s journey to a new theory of language processing. The book is beautifully written and stuffed with fascinating ideas and data.”
—Richard Hudson, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, University College London

“This is a landmark work by one of the leading psychologists of language in the modern era laying out his cognitive approach to syntax. It is replete with experimental findings that support the proposed descriptions and explanations for many syntactic phenomena; it is critical of the data collection methods, argumentation, and innateness hypothesis associated with Chomsky's generative syntax; and it presents compelling arguments for a different formalism from phrase structure grammar, namely dependency grammar. This is a must-read for all linguists!”
—John A. (Jack) Hawkins, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of California Davis; Emeritus Professor of English and Applied Linguistics, Cambridge UniversityEdward A. F. Gibson is Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He is a coauthor of Coherence in Natural Language and a coeditor of The Processing and Acquisition of Reference (both MIT Press).