Tài liệu Constituent Structure - Part 4 pptx

Moving from left to right on the page, we combine two elements

creating a new object, then we combine2 this new structure with the

next word to the right, and so on.

(4) (a) Nemo
ate

(b) (Nemo
ate)
Dory’s

(c) ((Nemo
ate)
Dory’s)
seaweed

(d) (((Nemo
ate)
Dory’s)
seaweed)

Let us call this the structured-concatenation hypothesis. This ap￾proach does not suVer from the problem of (2), in that any subpart

of (4d) is not identical to a subpart of any of the strings in (3). For

example, the Wrst concatenation in (4) is not identical to the Wrst

concatenation of (3b):

(5) (Nemo
ate) 6¼ (Dory
ate)

This is what we want, since we do not want sentence (2) to mean the

same thing as (3b). Nevertheless, the structured concatenation hypoth￾esis suVers in a diVerent, important, way. If you look closely at the

brackets in (4d), you will note that Dory’s is structurally closer to ate

than it is to seaweed. We can capture this more precisely by counting

the number of parentheses enclosing each item. If we were to number

matching opening and closing parens, we get the annotated structure

in (6):

(6) (1(2(3Nemo
ate)3
Dory’s)2
seaweed)1

You will note that all of {Nemo, ate, Dory’s} are enclosed in the (2)2

parentheses. Seaweed is excluded from this set. In this set-theoretic

sense then, Dory’s is closer to ate than it is to seaweed. However, this

Xies in the face of native-English-speaker intuitions about what words

go together with one another. On an intuitive level, we know that

Dory’s has a closer semantic relationship to seaweed than it does to ate.

You might think we could get around this problem by reversing

the order of concatenation and starting at the right. Indeed, for the

example sentence (1), this gives us a structure corresponding to the

intuition about the closeness of Dory and seaweed:

2 I use the symbol
here roughly in the sense in which it is used in Head Driven Phrase

Structure Grammar (HPSG): as a list-addition operator which is not commutative:

a
b 6¼ b
a. Though technically speaking
operates over set-theoretic objects,

I abstract away from this here. Also, the brackets in (4) are not actually part of the represen￾tation, I put them in this diagram as a heuristic for the reader. The symbol
is meant here as

the rough equivalent of ^ in Chomsky’s Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975).

10 preliminaries