Chapters of Dependency Grammar: A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière PDF
Preview Chapters of Dependency Grammar: A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Chapters of Dependency Grammar A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière Edited by András Imrényi Nicolas Mazziotta Chapters of Dependency Grammar Studies in Language Companion Series (SLCS) - This series has been established as a companion series to the periodical Studies in Language. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/slcs Founding Editor Werner Abraham University of Vienna / University of Munich Editors Werner Abraham Elly van Gelderen University of Vienna / University of Munich Arizona State University Editorial Board Bernard Comrie Elisabeth Leiss University of California, Santa Barbara University of Munich William Croft Marianne Mithun University of New Mexico University of California, Santa Barbara Östen Dahl Heiko Narrog University of Stockholm Tohuku University Gerrit J. Dimmendaal Johanna L. Wood University of Cologne University of Aarhus Ekkehard König Debra Ziegeler Free University of Berlin University of Paris III Christian Lehmann University of Erfurt Volume 212 Chapters of Dependency Grammar A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière Edited by András Imrényi and Nicolas Mazziotta Chapters of Dependency Grammar A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière Edited by András Imrényi Eszterházy Károly University, Eger Nicolas Mazziotta University of Liège John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia (cid:52)(cid:45) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of (cid:32) the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, z.-. ./slcs. Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: () / (-) () (-) © – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com Table of contents Aspects of the theory and history of dependency grammar 1 Nicolas Mazziotta and András Imrényi Chapter 1 Syntactic relations in ancient and medieval grammatical theory 23 Anneli Luhtala Chapter 2 The notion of dependency in Latin grammar in the Renaissance and the 17th century 59 Bernard Colombat Chapter 3 How dependency syntax appeared in the French Encyclopedia: From Buffier (1709) to Beauzée (1765) 85 Sylvain Kahane Chapter 4 Dependency in early sentence diagrams: Stephen W. Clark 133 Nicolas Mazziotta Chapter 5 Sámuel Brassai in the history of dependency grammar 163 András Imrényi and Zsuzsa Vladár Chapter 6 Franz Kern: An early dependency grammarian 189 Timothy Osborne Chapter 7 Some aspects of dependency in Otto Jespersen’s structural syntax 215 Lorenzo Cigana Chapter 8 The Russian trail: Dmitrievsky, the little drama metaphor and dependency grammar 253 Patrick Sériot Index nominum 277 Index rerum 279 Aspects of the theory and history of dependency grammar Nicolas Mazziotta and András Imrényi Dependency and constituency are alternative frameworks for syntactic analysis. They provide conceptual and formal tools to describe how words combine to form utterances. Modern syntactic theories are grounded on one logic or the other. Constituency is the core concept of phrase structure grammars (henceforth “PSG”). These focus on how words are grouped together to form larger constructions that, in turn, can be grouped with other constructions. The resulting diagram shows part/whole (mereological) relations, and foregrounds unit types (e.g. N, V, NP, VP). As a first approximation, dependency analysis can be regarded as a description of pairwise hierarchical relations between words. In this approach, the focus is on specific relations that can be classified into different types (Kahane & Mazziotta, 2015; see Chapter 4, Section 4 for a more detailed comparison). The family of theories taking the latter perspective is called “dependency grammar” (henceforth “DG”). The difference between the two approaches appears clearly when analyses are en- coded in diagrams (Figure 1). S VP lovesV MaryN NP subject object N lovesV MaryN cars modifier redAdj carsN Adj red (a) Constituency tree (b) Dependency tree Figure 1. Constituency tree (a) vs. Dependency tree (b) Chomsky’s Syntactic structures (1957) marked the beginning of decades dominated by PSG frameworks, particularly in theoretical linguistics, so much so that DG https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.212.01maz © 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company 2 Nicolas Mazziotta and András Imrényi has been shunned for years by many scholars.1 Consequently, many studies that make use of DG constantly have had to explain what dependency is (e.g. Osborne, 2006, Section 5), and justify its usefulness, sometimes through criticizing PSG (e.g. Maxwell, 2013). However, interest in dependency grammar is growing, mainly through the development of large treebanks and through the results achieved by natural language processing, up to the point that due to the acceptance and spread of dependency in computational linguistics, […] overlooking DG is becoming more difficult. In fact a critical mass may be reached at some point, in which case extensive awareness of the dependency vs. constituency distinction could extend from computational linguistics to theoretical linguistics, and from theoretical linguistics to pedagogical applications. (Osborne, 2015, p. 1043) Osborne’s final remark suggests that the spread of DG in pedagogical applications may be triggered by advances in theoretical linguistics. However, in many parts of the world, traditional (pedagogical) grammar has long been more DG- than PSG-oriented to begin with (cf. Mel’čuk, 1988, p. 3, see Section 1 below), and it is hardly a coincidence that many of the grammarians whose work is reviewed in the present volume had a strong pedagogical commitment. Overall, it seems fair to say that DG has had a strong, and growing, status in syntactic analysis that is geared toward practical application, in partial independence from the trends of theoretical linguistics. As practical applicability is increasingly seen as a criterion for evaluating the fruitfulness of grammatical research, the future of DG appears to be bright in theoretical linguistics as well. Since 2011, the International Conferences on Dependency Linguistics (Depling)2 have been held every two years (in Barcelona, Prague, Uppsala, Pisa and Paris), which testifies to an ever growing community using DG models.3 1. Quotations such as the following are emblematic of stances that reject DG on an a priori basis: “In fact, dependency trees smack more of semantics than of syntax, in that the value category of each functor stands not so much for a well-defined set of syntactic properties as for a semantic value in a model, whereby the highest value category S can be interpreted as a truth value in a model. While this can be considered to have the advantage of integrating syntactic and semantic description, it must at the same time be admitted that the formal syntactic part of the equation is not entirely transparent.” (Seuren, 2015, p. 405). We will not discuss thoroughly the compared validity of PSG and DG, but the sole existence of efficient formal DGs (→4.3) suffices to reject such criticism. 2. See <http://www.depling.org/>. 3. Additionally, Timothy Osbone presented an unpublished poster at Depling 2013, demonstrat- ing a growing interest in DG through the increasing number of hits on the pages of Wikipedia devoted to dependency. Aspects of the theory and history of dependency grammar 3 In this introduction we will first focus on the need for historical studies on DG (→1). Section →2 offers a brief presentation of the eight chapters of this book in order to introduce their primary topics. Each chapter contains cross-references to other chapters. To complement this, Section →3 emphasizes some global char- acteristics that may be used to define a common ground about what dependency is. Section →4 briefly acknowledges some related topics that are out of the scope of this book. 1. The need for studies on the history of dependency grammar The popularity of DG has increased in the last decade, but little attention has been paid so far to the historical precedents of DG-oriented theories. The most renowned scholar in the history of dependency linguistics is Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954). His seminal book, Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959), is often considered as the birth certificate of dependency-based approaches. Tesnière’s key concept is “connection” (Fr. connexion):4 [A] sentence of the type Alfred speaks is not composed of just the two elements, Alfred and speaks, but rather of three elements, the first being Alfred, the second speaks, and the third the connection that unites them – without which there would be no sentence. A connection is a hierarchical grammatical relation between words, where a gov- ernor word (Fr. régissant) is connected to a subordinate word (Fr. subordonné) (Tesnière 1966/2015, Chapter 2; Kahane & Osborne, 2015, p. xxxviii), that is to say, it is a genuine syntactic dependency. It was not until 2015 that Tesnière’s book (second edition, 1966) was finally translated in English (Tesnière 1966/2015), whereas translations in other major languages had been made available before: German (1980), Russian (1988), Spanish (1994), Italian (2001). It seems that the longer the wait, the more focus Tesnière drew in the DG community (Ágel et al., 2003, Part II, contains ten papers on Lucien Tesnière’s life and works). However, “Tesnière is not the first inventor of depend- ency grammars” (first sentence of the abstract of Chapter 8, by Patrick Seriot), and, to quote Mel’čuk (1988, p. 3): Dependencies as a formal means of representing the syntactic structure of sen- tences have been the staple diet of traditional syntacticians for centuries, especially 4. A more precise term would be “structural connection”: Tesnière distinguishes between structural connections (i.e. syntactic ones) and semantic connections (Tesnière 1966/2015, Chapter 21).
The list of books you might like
