2 - Properties of the grammar
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2010
Summary
Dick Feynman told me about his “sum over histories” version of quantum mechanics. “The electron does anything it likes,” he said. “It goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave function.” I said to him, “You're crazy.” But he wasn't.
Freeman DysonGrammatical assumptions: Government-Binding theory
In order to properly investigate the nature of the relation between syntax and perception, it is necessary to begin with a discussion of the syntactic framework being assumed. I will outline two aspects of syntactic phenomena as they are treated within the GB framework: the generation of structure and the relations which exist between elements in a syntactic representation. The particular type of structure I will consider is a phrase-structure tree. Structural relations involving discontinuous dependencies will first be discussed from the derivational perspective of standard GB (Chomsky 1981). I will then turn to the representational approach of Koster (1986). As noted in Chapter 1, it is this representational form of GB which I will assume in subsequent discussion of the parser's properties (Chapter 4).
As noted above, there are many aspects of syntactic theory in general, and GB in particular, which I will gloss over or ignore. The intent of this chapter is to describe the form of syntactic knowledge in sufficient detail so that we can, in a meaningful way, address the issue of the manner in which syntactic knowledge is put to use in the perceptual process.
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- Syntax and Parsing , pp. 9 - 42Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995