dominance

[Marco Antonio Young Rabines]

Dear listers:

I have some questions on the history of a popular hierarchical relation
that is part of the formal apparatus of most generative grammars:
"dominance".

1. Who was the first linguist that employed the term?
2. Where did the term appear for the first time in linguistics?
3. What were the formal or mathematical properties that were for the first
time assigned to this hierarchical relation?
4. Was the notion of "dominance" created "out of nothing" or was it built on
a previous concept from another discipline?
5. Does the notion of "dominance" in early transformational generative
grammar have some relationship with the notion of "representation" (THE
LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF A LINGUISTIC THEORY, 1955: 173)? This concept was
stated as follows:

"The level P is based on a relation of representation which we will denote
by p ("rho"). This is the relation holding, in English, between NP and
the^old^man, between Sentence and NP^VP, between the latter and
John^came^home,
and between N and John. Tentatively, the converse of p can be read as "is
a".
That is,

2.  p(NP, the^man) if and only if the^man is a NP.
The relation p has the following properties:
3. p is irreflexive, asymmetrical, transitive and nonconnected.

Thus p gives a partial ordering of the strings of P. There is a unique prime
of P which essentially stands "first" in this ordering. This is the prime
Sentence (S). S is the unique prime that represents every grammatucal
string. There are also certain primes that are last" in this ordering, i.e.,
that bear the relation `p to no string. We will call the set containing just
these primes and the strings formed from them the set P."

Please respond to venuspeter at latinmail.com. Any hints on this most welcome.
I shall post a summary.


Marco Antonio Young Rabines
Departamento de Lingüística
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
Av. Venezuela s/n
Lima 1
Perú