Understanding the Models of Grammar

This article provides comprehensive explanation about several models of grammar. The first model of grammar which is explained is considered from the functional grammar and associated with the American linguist Noam Chomsky that is Transformational Grammar. This model of grammar is consisted of three components they are phrase structure rule, the lexicon, and transformation. The second model of grammar which is explained in this article is Minimalist Grammar. This article also compares her understanding in two models of grammar they are Transformational Grammar and Minimalist Grammar.

The minimalist grammar of action

Language and action have been found to share a common neural basis and in particular a common ‘syntax’, an analogous hierarchical and compositional organization. While language structure analysis has led to the formulation of different grammatical formalisms and associated discriminative or generative computational models, the structure of action is still elusive and so are the related computational models. However, structuring action has important implications on action learning and generalization, in both human cognition research and computation. In this study, we present a biologically inspired generative grammar of action, which employs the structure-building operations and principles of Chomsky's Minimalist Programme as a reference model. In this grammar, action terminals combine hierarchically into temporal sequences of actions of increasing complexity; the actions are bound with the involved tools and affected objects and are governed by certain goals. We show, how the tool role and the affected-object role of an entity within an action drives the derivation of the action syntax in this grammar and controls recursion, merge and move, the latter being mechanisms that manifest themselves not only in human language, but in human action too.

Acquisition by Processing Theory: A theory of everything?

Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth T&SS) propose a novel theory of language acquisition, ACQUISITION BY PROCESSING THEORY (APT), designed to account for both first and second language acquisition, monolingual and bilingual speech perception and parsing, and speech production. This is a tall order. Like any theoretically ambitious enterprise, the APT shares certain properties with much that has gone before. Like the Competition Model (CM; MacWhinney, 1987, 1997; MacWhinney and Bates, 1989, inter alia) and other associative network connectionist learning models, the APT eschews a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) by treating acquisition as the strengthening of levels of representation activation. A parser can produce multiple representations of a parse string in parallel, which then ‘compete’ as analyses for an input string. Unlike the CM, however, the APT is not motivated by a solid program of empirical studies in language acquisition or cross-language processing. Nor does it strike me as theoretically coherent, for the APT, unlike the CM, assumes that knowledge of language involves knowledge of grammatical structure and that the parser makes deterministic use of Universal Grammar in the form of a Minimalist grammar. The determinism is important here; the claim to eliminate LAD hinges on it.

Two systems of remnant movement II and extraction from specifier position

In the wake of Kayne's Antisymmetry Hypothesis and Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), there has been much fruitful research attempting to adjust syntactic analyses to those permitted by Kayne's restrictive system. In doing so, analyses which at first seem counter-intuitive may tum out to provide solutions to old problems. Two cases in point are the analysis of Malagasy involving extensive Remnant Movement [henceforth RM1 described in Rackowski & Travis (2000), Pearson (2001), and elsewhere; on the one hand, and the analysis of Hungarian and Dutch verbal clusters in Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000) [henceforth R&T, Pearson, and K&Sz]. The original motivation (in part) for examining L&Sz and subsequently R&T was that it is the extensive use of iterated RM which increases the computational complexity of languages generatable in Stabler's "Strict Minimalist Grammar" formalism over that of context-free grammars. It has also been noted that allowing extraction from complex specifiers created by Merge (as opposed to Move) increases the level of complexity even further (lens Michaelis, p.e.). Both R&T and K&Sz make extensive use of RM; R&T allow extraction from complex specifiers, while K&Sz do not. Although the specifiers in both cases are created by Move, not Merge, we nevertheless feel that there is enough intrinsic linguistic interest in trying to limit extraction possibilities to pursue the comparison of these two systems with regard to this point.