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WHY TREES IN SYNTAX?
Author(s) -
Karlgren Hans
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9582.1976.tb00634.x
Subject(s) - syntax , linguistics , sentence , transformational grammar , grammar , abstract syntax , representation (politics) , computer science , tree (set theory) , natural language processing , mathematics , philosophy , combinatorics , politics , political science , law
Summary For better and for worse, modern linguistics when at all mathematical is mostly preoccupied with tree structure (or trivially equivalent structures such as labelled bracketings). This choice of representation is justified mainly by long tradition, and in view of the formal difficulties in transformational grammar alternatives should be seriously investigated. Especially, the use of more general graphs than trees should be at least attempted. A preliminary exploration of how graphs could be used with less prejudice in syntax strengthens the suspicion that trees are not necessarily the most adequate tools for describing sentence structure.