The innovative element of this volume is its overview of the fundamental psycholinguistic topics involved in sentence processing. While most psycholinguistic studies focus on a single language and induce a general model of universal sentence processing, this volume proposes a cross-linguistic approach. It contains two distinct features first embraced in the 18th century by brothers Freiherr Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt. First, it offers a linguistic theory that characterizes universal cognitive features of the human language processor (or the mind and its biological...

To paraphrase, of the making of syntactic categories there is no end. For any theory of syntax, questions arise about its classificatory scheme: what are the categories? What properties do they have? How do they relate to each other? Eleven essays address these questions by inquiring whether there is a clear distinction between lexical and functional categories, how syntactic categories relate to semantic categories, the relation between syntactic and morphological information, as well as other inquiries. Above all the essays highlight the centrality of questions about syntactic categories...

Volume 34 of Syntax and Semantics is a thorough and accessible overview and introduction to Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), a theory of the content and representation of different aspects of linguistic structure and the relations that hold between them. The book motivates and describes the two syntactic structures of LFG: surface phrasal organization is represented by a context-free phrase structure tree, and more abstract functional syntactic relations like subject and object are represented separately, at functional structure.The book also presents a theory of semantics and the...

This book presents the most complete exposition of the theory of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), introduced in the authors' "Information-Based Syntax and Semantics." HPSG provides an integration of key ideas from the various disciplines of cognitive science, drawing on results from diverse approaches to syntactic theory, situation semantics, data type theory, and knowledge representation. The result is a conception of grammar as a set of declarative and order-independent constraints, a conception well suited to modelling human language processing.
This self-contained volume...