Browse by Topic

# Is Syntactic Binding Rational?

Wed 26 September 2012 | in Talks |

Graf, Thomas, and Natasha Abner

Abstract Recent results show that both TAG and Minimalist grammars can be enriched with rational constraints without increasing their strong generative capacity, where a constraint is rational iff it can be computed by a bottom-up tree automaton. This raises the question which aspects of syntax can be adequately formalized using only such constraints. One of hardest phenomena commonly studied by syntacticians is binding theory. In this paper, we give a high-level implementation of (the syntactic parts of) binding theory in terms of rational constraints, and we argue that this implementation is sufficiently powerful for natural language. This conclusion is backed up by data drawn from English, German, and American Sign Language.

Files [pdf] [code]

@Misc{GrafAbner12TAGposter,
author    = {Graf, Thomas and Abner, Natasha},
title     = {Is Syntactic Binding Rational?},
year      = {2012},
note      = {Poster presented at the 11$^\text{th}$ International
Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms
(TAG+11), September 26--28, University Paris-Diderot,
Paris, France}
}