12. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Abstract

This paper presents a left-branching constructionalist grammar design where the phrase structure tree does not correspond to the conventional constituent structure. The constituent structure is rather reflected by embeddings on a feature STACK. The design is compatible with incremental processing, as words are combined from left to right, one by one, and it gives a simple account of long distance dependencies, where the extracted element is assumed to be dominated by the extraction site. It is motivated by psycholinguistic findings.

Respectively interpretation and Binding Conditions A and B

“…If the verb seemed in this sentence is semantically a two-place predicate as it is standardly assumed to be, then the variable contributed by the reflexive themselves is not outranked by any other variable in any of the elementary predications, in violation of the version of Binding Condition A formulated above. Reinhart & Reuland (1993) and Müller (2021) state that an observation like this constitutes evidence that Binding Condition A needs to make reference to syntactic representations as opposed to semantic representations. In fact, however, a sentence like (34) does not necessarily show that Binding Condition A needs to make reference to syntactic structure.…”