35.1749, Review: Syntax on the Edge: Krivochen (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1749. Wed Jun 12 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1749, Review: Syntax on the Edge: Krivochen (2023)

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Date: 12-Jun-2024
From: Andrew Carnie [carnie at arizona.edu]
Subject: Computational Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax: Krivochen (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.62

AUTHOR: Diego Gabriel  Krivochen
TITLE: Syntax on the Edge
SUBTITLE: A Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Sentence Structure
SERIES TITLE: Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Andrew Carnie

SUMMARY

This monograph takes a novel approach to the description of syntactic
structure by using independently motivated ideas from the mathematical
field of Graph Theory (GT) and supplementing them, where necessary,
with additional syntactic conditions. Key to the proposal at hand is
the idea that one wants to minimize the number of nodes in one’s
description, and instead exploit the ability to have multiple
connections among those nodes. The book investigates a large number of
empirical phenomena and shows how GT provides a superior and
explanatory account of them.

Chapter 1, Introduction: Setting the Scene, provides the historical
and theoretical context for the book, drawing upon critical ideas from
transformational grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Relational
Grammar, Arc Pair Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and other perspectives.
Some of the key foundational assumptions that are motivated include
(1) The idea that the Graph-Theoretic (GT) approach is not grounded in
typology, language acquisition, nor learnability, but is instead about
description. (2) The book makes no claims about universal grammar. (3)
The book entirely divorces the issues of linearization and abstract
semantic structure, concentrating almost exclusively on the latter.
(4) The approach abandons the single root condition on trees as well
as the extension condition. (5) The author takes the programmatic
perspective that an ideal theory of syntax minimizes the number of
nodes, particularly avoiding abstract nodes, and maximizes the number
of connections among these nodes. (6) The connections among nodes are
motivated by semantic factors, as in a dependency grammar. (7) The
approach is also declarative and constraint-based, rather than
procedural and derivational. These assumptions, paired with Graph
Theory, allow for greater explanation for such phenomena as
discontinuous constituents, apparent instances of mixed computation,
and the range of phenomena that have been suggested to fall out from
multidomination.

The theoretical meat of the approach is found in Chapter 2,
Fundamentals of Graph-Theoretic Syntax. The chapter starts with a
primer on the fundamentals and critical definitions from GT (e.g.,
graphs, vertices (nodes), edges, cyclicity, adjacency, directionality
and order, neighborhood sets, traversal, paths, trails, vines,
domination, root, connectedness, completeness, etc.). It also sets out
some definitions that are specific to syntactic theory (e.g., arbor,
elementary and derived graphs, union, intersection, substitution,
adjunction, addressing). Critical to the application of GT to
syntactic description lies in the content of vertices (nodes) and how
they determine the edges in the graph. The approach advocated here
makes use of semantic types instead of categories. These determine a
relation of predication, which in turn determines hierarchical
ordering of nodes in the graph.

Chapter 3, A Proof of Concept: Discontinuous Constituents,
demonstrates how GT captures the correct semantico-syntactic
relationships between items in situations such as verb-particle
constructions, right node raising, across the board phenomena, and
relative clause extraposition, where the items exhibit properties of
constituents, but are not linearly contiguous. The crux of the matter
is that in GT, linear ordering is not a syntactic concern. This
combined with the fact that the theory allows multidomination and has
abandoned both the non-tangling condition and the requirement that
syntactic structures have a single root allows for edges (i.e. lines
in the diagram) to cross, thus giving a straightforward description of
these kinds of constructions.

The approach advocated in Chapters 2 and3 is then extended and
examined in comparison to other approaches in Chapter 4, Some
Inter-Theoretical Comparisons. The approach is first compared to Tree
Adjoining Grammar (TAG) and Metagraph theory. However, perhaps the
most important contribution of this chapter lies in its comparison of
GT to Dependency Grammar (DG). At first blush, GT syntax looks
suspiciously like a dependency grammar, albeit a version couched in an
independently motivated mathematical formalism. But deeper inspection
shows that it differs from the standard implementations of DG in some
critical ways: It allows multiply rooted graphs; it imposes a stricter
correspondence between predicates and their arguments; and there is no
strict one-word/one node correspondence.

One of the critical features of the GT approach is its relatively flat
non-configurationality, where the structure is determined by semantic
dependencies rather than by constituency. The challenge then comes
when it’s important to identify different grammatical functions (e.g.
subject, object, etc.), which are traditionally defined, at least in
the Chomskyan tradition, in terms of hierarchically organized
constituency. If you have a set of semantic domination relations {(v1,
v2), (v1, v3)}, where v1 is a predicate and v2 and v3 are arguments of
v1, there is no way to distinguish v2 and v3 for relations like
subject and object. The solution to this problem is discussed in
Chapter 5, Ordered Relations and Grammatical Functions. Krivochen
adopts insights from Relational Grammar and LFG that there is a
hierarchy of grammatical functions (roughly: subject < object <
indirect object, etc.). This is encoded by ordering the sets of
dependencies: <(v1, v2), (v1, v3)>. There is then an interpretive
principle that identifies the first pair in the order as the subject,
the next as the object, etc. There are some challenges to such an
approach. For example, expletives in unaccusative constructions such
as “there arrived a package at the office” are not actually treated as
subjects since they are not semantic arguments of the predicate.

The next nine chapters concern the implementation and refinement of
the theory to account for a variety of syntactic phenomena. In Chapter
6, Krivochen looks at classic examples of raising and control. Chapter
7 looks at parentheticals and clitic climbing in Spanish. Krivochen
proposes a theory of licensing, with exceptions being made when a
graph is self-contained. Chapter 8 provides an account of binding
theory in terms of parallel arcs and locally defined graphs. Chapter 9
compares the properties of non-restrictive relative clauses from
restrictive ones, the former having paratactic properties and the
latter allowing hypotactic structure. Wh-constructions are the topic
of Chapter 10, where filler gap dependencies are a consequence of the
fact that the sets of dominance relations are in an ordered set where
the wh-element is visited twice via the edge set. Chapter 11 concerns
Bach-Peters sentences. Chapter 12 looks at two different kinds of
coordination. In Chapter 13, there is an investigation of
relation-changing constructions such as passive and dative shift,
which amount to lexical alternations rather than syntactic ones.
Chapter 14 surveys a number of phenomena that are more challenging for
the approach, including restrictions on rightward extraction; null and
implied arguments, resumptive pronouns, and issues surrounding
reflexive interpretation when the antecedent is quantified.

The key components of the GT approach are surveyed in the concluding
Chapter 15, which is followed by a short appendix that compares the
theory to other graph theoretic approaches that have been proposed in
Minimalism and Dependency Grammar.

EVALUATION

This book is an important contribution to syntactic theorizing, quite
independent of whether or not a researcher adopts the particular
approach advocated by the author. First, the work demonstrates that by
peeling back many of our linguistics-specific assumptions we can often
find insightful analyses that follow from the mathematical foundations
at the heart of the formalisms we use. Second, it highlights a variety
of problematic phenomena that have escaped explanatory analyses based
in constituency based approaches such as Transformational Grammar and
Minimalism. Finally, it provides a rigorous formal language
perspective on the kinds of formalisms and graphical devices we can
use for explicating phenomena.

This is a rich and thorough treatment of the connections that lie
among syntactic objects, and because it takes a novel approach, there
is a lot of ground to cover. Befitting such a work, Krivochen touches
on a remarkable range of theoretical, meta-theoretical, philosophical
and empirical issues. So, this is definitely not light reading for the
beach. I have to confess I had trouble following the organization and
logic of the first two chapters, in particular. Krivochen skips from
topic to topic in Chapter 1, often without obvious connections – at
least for me – among the items being discussed. One finds everything
from questions of the ontological status of representations, to formal
language theory, to particular empirical challenges to mainstream
thinking in syntax all bundled together. The flow of argument in
Chapter 1 was challenging for me. That said, as I mentioned, when
taking an entirely new approach, one has a lot of ground to cover, and
I appreciated the thoroughness with which Krivochen carefully
motivated the myriads of issues that are foundational to his approach.


As mentioned above, two of the most compelling parts of the work are
its formal rigor and empirical breadth. That said, there is an area
that I wish could have seen a little more ink: the link, or lack
thereof, between GT representations and linear order. Krivochen
excludes linear order from his consideration, concentrating only on
hierarchical relations. He justifies this methodological decision in
Chapter 3. It’s important to note that Krivochen is not operating in a
vacuum here. There is a long tradition of divorcing linear order facts
from hierarchical structure dating back to at least Relational Grammar
but also found extensively in recent works in the Chomskyan tradition,
where for example the effects of so-called head-movement are just
reduced to morpho-phonological conditions (see for example the
discussion in Chomsky 2000, Matushansky 2006). So, in this regard, the
absence of more than a passing discussion of linear order is not
unusual. That said, I was often left wondering how the graphs
translated into the surface orders we see, and I think the book would
have benefited from at least a little speculation about how this might
work. For example, in Krivochen’s system, the NPs that appear before
raising verbs such as ‘seem’ are not arguments of the predicate so are
not connected to it directly in the GT representation; and as such
they are literally not considered subjects of the raising predicate.
But then there are numerous unsolved mysteries about these NPs, all of
which would follow from them actually being the subjects of the
raising verb: Why do they take nominative case? Why can they bind
reflexive experiencer arguments of the raising verb (e.g. Marie seems
to herself to be right)? And, of course, why do they appear linearly
before the main clause verb like other subjects? I assume these are
all solvable problems, but in cases like this and others (e.g. the
rightward position of the shared constituent in RNR constructions, the
leftward position of wh-elements in wh-questions in English, the
differences among SVO and SOV and VSO languages, etc.), I was left a
little unsatisfied. This doesn’t take away from the impressive
empirical results of the GT treatment and the book is already a fairly
lengthy tome, but I would have wished for at least a little
speculation on these kinds of issues. This however is a minor
complaint.

Scholars from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives will find
this volume of interest. The specific use of an independently
motivated branch of mathematics to capture the properties of syntactic
structures is an important part of understanding the deeper properties
of syntax and helps to refine our thinking about how to approach
syntactic analysis and description.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam (2000) Minimalist Inquiries; The framework. In Roger
Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka (eds), Step by Step: Essays
on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik. MIT Press. Pp 89-155.

Matushansky, Ora (2006) Head Movement in Linguistic Theory. Linguistic
Inquiry 37.1, pp 69-109

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Andrew Carnie is Professor of Syntactic Theory and Dean Emeritus at
the University of Arizona. He specializes in the syntax, morphology
and phonology of the Celtic languages, with a particular emphasis on
Irish and Scottish Gaelic. He has theoretical interests in
constituency and dependency, case, and VSO languages. He’s the author
or editor of 13 books, including the best-selling textbook “Syntax: A
Generative Introduction” from Wiley and “Constituent Structure” from
OUP.



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