Gábor Alberti:
Indo-germanic world order phenomena in a totally lexicalist grammar
Abstract:
A new sort of generative grammar (GASG: Generative/Generalized Argument Structure Grammar) is demonstrated, which is more consistently and radically “lexicalist” than any earlier grammar, in two areas of Indo-Germanic word order phenomena. An English “toy grammar” with auxiliaries, wh words and not is discussed in Section 3, and a comparative analysis of infinitival constructions in English, German and Dutch is provided in Section 4 – after a theoretical “introduction” to the idea of total lexicalism in Section 1 and a general demonstration of GASG in Section 2.
GASG can be regarded as a modified Unification Categorial Grammar from which the principal and single syntactic “weapon” of categorial grammars, Function Application, has been omitted. What has remained is the Saussure–Pollard notion of lexical sign and the mere technique of unification as the engine of combining signs (which promises a straightforward implementation in Prolog). The computation thus requires no kind of linguistic operation, which makes GASG a distinguished grammar worth studying from a metatheoretical point of view.
