1. The History of the Phrase
As a notion in linguistic
Part I

2. The Phrase Today phrases are an essential and undeniable truth
Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann:
F4: Words are composed into units with hierarchical structure i.e. phrases.
Given this, they should have been discovered a long time ago
So when did linguists start referring to phrases?

3. Brief Overview of the History of Linguistics
The history of linguistic investigation goes back more than years:
Before 600 BCE Indian linguistics
only ‘discovered’ in Europe many centuries later
Socrates ( BCE),
one of the first to write on Greek linguistics
only through secondary sources (e.g. Plato )
Study of Latin, Arabic and Hebrew after Greek
Other European languages only in late Middle Ages

4. Indian Linguistics
Started as a way of preserving an understanding and correct pronunciation of Vedic Sanskrit
Changed over the centuries (as languages do)
Was the language of the scriptures and of religious rituals
Wanted to maintaine an understanding and correct pronunciation of Vedic for religious purposes
So they started to write grammars

5. Panini One of the most important of the Indian Linguists
Not because he was one of the earliest
His grammar was written sometime between 500 and 300 BCE
But because it is the most extensive
Contains nearly 4000 rules
And because of it’s remarkable advanced nature
It contained notions not found in western linguistics until the 20th century
The phoneme
Null phonemes
Formal rules
Rule ordering

6. The Nature of Sanskrit Sanskrit was a highly inflecting language
A lot of Case and agreement morphology
Word order was much freer than in languages like English
Raamah pustakam pathati Ram books reads
Raamah pathati pustakam
Pustakam Raamah pathati
Pustakam pathati Raamah
Pathati Raamah pustakam
Pathati pustakam Raamah

7. What did Panini say?
Not surprising that most of the grammar is about phonology and morphology
Had very little to say about syntax

8. Phrase Structure Rules?
According to Kiparsky Panini’s grammar contained rules like:
A  AA /C _ D
‘A’ becomes ‘AA’ in the context of a preceding ‘C’ and a following ‘D’
This looks very similar to a phrase structure rule:
S  NP VP
‘S’ is made up of an ‘NP’ followed by a ‘VP’
But
This is not Panini’s representation of this rule – it’s Kiparsky’s
It isn’t a phrase structure rule, but a morphological one
It is a reduplication rule
A is reduplicated (AA) in a certain context

9. Why Panini didn’t discover the phrase
Although very advanced, it understandably concentrated on the most obvious aspects
Morphology – because there are many forms of many words
Phonlogy – because the written system had a phonetic base (unlike Chinese)
Because of the free word order, syntax was not so obvious
Because Indian grammarians studied no other languages
didn’t compare Sanskrit to other systems and so couldn’t notice patterns in syntactic phenomena

10. Greek Ancient Greek was a written language over 1400 BCE
Mycenaeans - Linear B
Based on the Minoan syllabic system
Wasn’t ideal for Greek and we still can’t work out how this early version of Greek sounded
The first written system was forgotten until about 900 BCE
Then a new written system was developed
Based on Phoenician script
Phonetic representation – more suited to Greek pronunciation
Developed over the years
Now is the basis of most European written systems
We can therefore assume that the Greeks were interested in their language (at least phonetic aspects of it) from about this time

11. Greek Language Philosophers
Socrates ( BCE)
No written records of anything that Socrates said
We have the reports of other Greek philosophers (e.g. Plato)
Unclear whether these accurately portray Socrates' ideas or whether they portray Plato’s ideas
Plato ( ) also had things of his own to say about language
Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) furthered these ideas
The Stoics (310 – 50 BCE) probably gave the most thorough treatment

12. What the Greeks had to say
Greek linguistics was bound up in Greek philosophy
Mathematics; Physics; Astronomy; Biology; Ethics;
Logic (study of ‘valid arguments’); Rhetoric (the study of persuasive speaking); Epistemology (the study of understanding)
E.g. whether words derive in nature or are man made?
the nature of objects themselves are the origin of words
man gave names to objects randomly
Obviously these sorts of questions are not likely to reveal much about syntactic structure

13. Specific Greek Ideas on Language
Phonetics, but only to the extent that it involved the written system
No written system is purely phonetic and so what they had to say on the subject was not particularly interesting
Semantics, but more as a part of logic
Distinguished subject and predicate from a semantic point of view, but didn’t realise that this had any realisation in the sentence
Plato was first to split sentence into two major elements:
onoma (noun)  subject
rhema (verb)  predicate
Words, not phrases
identified morphologically
They were interested in words and their ontology
led to questions of categories

14. Specific Greek Ideas on Language
They were interested in sentences and their functions
declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives
Not so much in their forms
They were interested in morphology
created paradigms of all the different forms of types of word
And terms for these forms

15. The Nature of Greek
It is not surprising that the Greeks were not so interested in syntax
Greek, like Sanskrit, was highly inflectional and had free word order
The obvious aspects of the language were morphological and not syntactic
Studied just one language (Greek)
Their philosophical interests lead them in a different direction

16. On Subordination
Plato identified two basic elements (words) of the sentence
Greeks also knew other words were subordinate to these
Is this the beginning of the phrase?
Today subordination = something is part of something
Greek notion more like ranks in the Army
Captains are subordinate to Generals
Doesn’t mean that captains are part of generals
Hierarchy – but not constituent structure

17. Dependency X is subordinate to Y = X depends on Y
Dependency marked morphologically (i.e. By agreement)
Not semantically – meaning was the domain of logic, not linguistics
Free word order meant that there was no compulsion to see this relationship in terms of phrase structure

18. Latin The Romans impressed by Greek intellectualism
encouraged the Greeks to continue their studies
Study of Latin very much influence by Greek linguistics
Most attempted to make what the Greeks said fit Latin
Latin similar to Greek
But not the same as Greek
categories and terms did not fit perfectly
This dependency on Greek linguistics meant that the Romans did not produce much innovation

19. Priscian
Priscian (500 CE): one of the most influential grammars of Latin
basis of the study of Latin even after the fall of the empire
Almost entirely based on Thrax’s (170 – 90 BCE) Greek grammar
Thrax’s grammar did not even mention syntax
Priscian had 2 volumes on it
Nothing of interest in these chapters
contained rather dubious philosophical arguments
Latin is basically S V because existence precedes actions
He did mention the notion of a subordinate clause
But again, the use of subordination was that of the Greeks rather than the modern linguistic one

20. The Middle Ages
The middle ages starts with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends with the start of the Renaissance
From a linguistic point of view we can split it into two parts
Scholasticism
Not particularly interesting – mostly based on Priscian grammar
Speculative Grammar
More innovative – the start of the study of other languages

21. Scolasticism
The main idea to bring all knowledge under one (Christian) framework
It strongly rejected ‘pagan’ Greek learning
Latin became a lingua franca
Most linguistic work = producing Lain grammars for teaching
Ironically this maintained Greek influence
based on Priscian grammar, which itself was based on Thrax

22. Speculative Grammar
Interests in other languages than Latin started to gather strength
Through influence of Arabic linguistics from Moors in Spain
(influenced by Aristotelian ideas)
Through influence of Hebrew linguistics from Biblical studies
Perhaps because of this, more emphasis was put on syntax
Speculative grammarians first to unify syntactic and semantic notions of subject and predicate

23. Thomas of Erfurt (1310)
Socrates albus currit benne Socrates white runs well “white Socrates runs well”
‘albus’ is dependent on ‘Socrates’ and ‘benne’ is dependent on ‘currit’
Does this mean subject made up of ‘Socrates albus’ and a predicate made up of ‘currit benne’?
i.e. phrase structure analysis?
But he took the meaning of dependency to be the traditional one
“one part of a construction stands to another either as depending on it or satisfying its dependency”

24. Thomas of Erfurt (1310)
Also took Greek idea that dependency is based on morphology
verb agrees with subject, so verb is dependent on subject
Therefore the subject is the main element of the sentence
Socrates albus currit benne
Very different analysis to modern phrase structure based one
There is no evidence here of the notion of a phrase

25. The Renaissance (starting 14th C)
The Renaissance was both forward and backward looking
Revived interest in classical studies (Greek)
Rejected current wisdom
Rise of the idea of nation  more emphasis placed on national languages and less on the lingua franca
Surprisingly not much innovative thinking from a linguistic point of view
Most attempted to force the analysis of national languages into the framework of Priscian
who had already tried to force the analysis of Latin into the framework of Thrax!

26. Port Royal Grammarians
One group of Renaissance linguists did have some interesting ideas about syntax
Connect syntax to meaning unfortunately
rather than the traditional (Greek) view that morphology was its basis
the start of the ‘notional definition’ of categories (a noun is a name, etc.)
More interestingly, developed a new view of subordination
Subordination is a superficial representation of independent constructs:
The invisible God created the visible world 
God is invisible. God created the world. The world is visible.
This view necessarily precludes the idea of phrases
the complex sentence is not made up of connected elements, but of independent simple ideas.

27. Comparative Linguistics
During the Renaissance more languages than ever before came to be studied
But not much thought about possible connections between languages
Assumed system devised by the Greeks was applicable to other languages, it was
Not assumed that other languages had developed from Greek
There had been several theories, from Biblical sources, that held that European languages all descended from a single parent language

28. Scythian Hypothesis
According to the Bible, God made everyone speak different languages after the tower of Babel incident
But, then the flood killed everyone, except for Noah and his family
Legend has it that Noah’s son, Japheth, was the father of Europe
he spoke a language from which all European languages have descended
This language, apparently, was called Scythian (Goropoius 1569)
Scythian died out a long time ago

29. Confirming the Scythian Hypothesis
Once enough attention had been turned to European languages, it started to be noted that there were similarities between them
Furthermore, regularities in the differences between languages could be noted
These mainly concerned the forms of words:
Latin English
pisces fish
pede foot
pater father
pinna feather
pugnam fight
So it seemed that the Scythian Hypothesis could be correct. Throughout the 17th century it gained popularity

30. Indian linguistics comes to Europe
The Indian linguistic tradition had been known about in Europe since the 1500s
Walter (1733) added Sanskrit to Scythian family
real interest in the Indian tradition started
Comparative Linguistics virtually swept all other linguistic interests away
The notion of the Indo European language family really took off
On a scientific basis more than a religious one
It had been thought that Hungarian was not an Indo European language since the early 18th Century,
1770 Sajnovics - Hungarian and Lapp are related and
1799 Gyármathi - Hungarian and Finnish are from the same family

31. Neogrammarians
Towards the end of the 1800s a group of particularly aggressive young linguists in Germany dominated linguistics
They criticised previous comparative linguistics for being too wishy-washy
Believed that sound laws should be inviolable
laws that govern how languages change over time and hence can be related to common ancestors
if there were exceptions to these laws, they cannot have been stated right

32. Why Comparative Linguistics did not discover the phrase
The main focus of the comparativists was on the lexicon
easy to collect and compare vocabularies of languages to discover similarities and patterns in differences
not easy to do the same with syntactic phenomena
Some languages have free word order, others have more fixed orders
Some languages have basic SVO organisation, others VSO or SOV
These things don’t seem to have much of a connection
Therefore, not much attention was paid to syntactic phenomena,
no surprise that no new discoveries were made in the area for the nearly 200 years that comparative linguistics dominated the study of language

33. European Structuralists
The dominance of comparative linguistics was finally broken
Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘A course in general linguistics’ published 1916
three year after his death
This ushered in a period known as Structuralism
A hopeful title, from our perspective

34. What Structuralists Believe
The elements that make up a language form a system which can only be understood in terms of each other
The elements are signs
An arbitrary link between form and meaning
The meaning of the signs is dependent on the meaning of other signs in the system
The 8.25 to Paris

35. Did the Structuralists discover phrase structure?
Unfortunately not
Like the comparativists, the structuralists were concerned more with words
Their pronunciation (the Prague school)
Their meaning
Saussure had virtually nothing to say about syntax as we conceive of it today

36. Conclusion From the beginnings of the study of language
Prior to 600 BCE
To the Structuralist period in Europe
Until after the 2nd World War
No one came up with the notion of a phrase
Reasons
The languages which were studied initially did not make syntactic discoveries easy
The later study of other languages were concerned with applying old ideas to new situations, rather than being innovative
The interests of the times (philosophical issues, language families, languages as systems) were more easily satisfied through looking at words

37. The History of the Phrase
As a notion in linguistics
Part II

38. Linguistics in the USA before 19th C
Specifically American linguistics is a relatively new thing
Previously American linguists were doing European linguistics (especially Indo-European based Comparative linguistics)
America has a wealth of its own languages (Amerindian)
But until the late 1800s there was little intellectual interest in these cultures
Americans were interested in expanding their own European based culture and the native populations were a hindrance
The European attitude towards native peoples of the Americas had been one of cultural imperialism from the start
So linguistic efforts were always geared to teaching the natives European languages rather than learning theirs

39. Boas: the father of American linguistics
Franz Boas ( ) was a German anthropologist
He started as a physicist and geographer
became deeply interested in Amerindian culture on an expedition to Canada
Moved to America in 1887
He saw the study of Amerindian cultures and languages as urgent as they were fast disappearing
many had already died out
Devised ‘field methods’ to train linguistic students so they could rapidly form grammatical descriptions without having to learn the language

40. Discovery Procedures
Boas’ discovery procedures were a set of tools linguists could apply to discover the grammar of a language
The best known of these are based on the notion of distribution
The minimal pair test
If two sounds appearing in the same context produce different words then they are distinct sounds (= phonemes)
[khæt] – [phæt] [kh] and [ph] are distinctive
[phæt] – *[pæt] [ph] and [p] are not
In cases where sounds are in complementary distribution, they are non- distinctive
[spæt] – *[sphæt]
This is different to the case where a sound is not part of a language
*[Xæt], *[sXæt],

41. Boas’ Philosophical Assumptions
Boas was a believer in cultural relativity
Against the idea that cultures pass through stages of development with Western culture as the highest
Cultures cannot be evaluated against one another as higher or lower
Cultures develop their own ideas from which they view the world and thus cannot be compared on any external measure
To understand a culture you need to study it from its own position

42. Linguistic Relativity
Humboldt ( )
Inner form of a language
Languages don’t necessarily differ in the concepts they can express
They differ in how they combine concepts in order to view the world
Boas combined Humboldt’s inner form with cultural relativity in ‘linguistic relativity’
The belief that we cannot make generalisations about a language based on what we learn of another language
Goes against European linguistic tradition since the Greeks
Linguists must study a language in its own terms
Hence discovery procedures
Implies that languages can vary without limit
Supported by the fact that Amerindian languages seemed very different from European langauges

43. Boas Reprieve Linguistic Relativity Discovery Procedures
Languages can only be studied in their own terms
Discovery Procedures
There are methods we can apply to discover the units that languages make use of
However, Boas did not discover the phrase

44. Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield ( ) was the founder of American Structuralism
But he wasn’t always a structuralist
He trained in Germany under the Neogrammarians
He became very impressed by the Wilhelm Wundt ( )
Wundt is said to be the father of experimental psychology
His aim was to make psychology scientific
He used introspection
Bloomfield wanted to make Linguistics more scientific

45. Bloomfield and Boas Bloomfield was also influenced by Boas
Particularly in terms of linguistic relativity and the use of discovery procedures

46. Bloomfield 1914
His influences from Boas and Wundt were brought together in his short book An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914)
This became a popular course book for linguistics in America
It contained chapters on all aspects of linguistics, including syntax
It contained the word ‘phrase’ twice
Both times referring to what we would call an idiom
Clearly at this time he did not know about phrases

47. Bloomfield and Structuralism
In the1910s, Wundt became heavily criticised for his methods
Introspection was not really scientific
Bloomfield needed something else to base his linguistic science on
In 1923 he published a seemingly positive review of Saussure’s work
This book still had no mention of the phrase
But even then, it was apparent that he had replaced Wundt with Behaviourism

48. Behaviourism Behaviourist Psychology took an extreme empiricist stance
To account for human behaviour all one needed was to directly connect
The environment (stimuli)
The subsequent behaviour (response)
There is no need to refer to unobservable things like ‘mind’
Behaviourism in Linguistics is a bit tricky
There is plenty of stuff that we cannot directly observe
Bloomfield thought it was possible
If every abstract level was ultimately based on what is observable – sound
Phonetics  phonology  morphology  syntax

49. Bloomfield’s Linguistics
In 1933 Bloomfield rewrote his earlier textbook in a much enlarged version Language
In this book the chapter on Syntax concerns itself with constituent structure
The term phrase is used to mean a constituent
Therefore we know that the notion of the phrase was introduced at some point between 1914 and 1933, probably in the 1920s
The origins are a combination of:
Bloomfield’s empiricism
His application of discovery procedures
Phone  phoneme  morpheme  word  phrase  sentence

50. Bloomfield on Phrases The chapter on syntax is not very long
It is rather superficial
Containing a few not very detailed examples
Poor John
And no attempt at representation
Some discussion of the notion ‘head’ of phrase
Head is defined distributionally
A head is a word which has the same distribution as the phrase
Endocentric phrases have heads
Poor John  John
Exocentric phrases don’t have heads
In the park; if John ran away
But the man doesn’t have a head by this definition
the man has the same distribution as poor John, so they are of the same category
So the head does not determine the category of the phrase – unlike current view

51. Open, closed and partially closed phrases
An open phrase is something that can be added to and still be the same type of phrase:
students – interesting students – these interesting students
A closed phrase cannot be added to without changing into another phrase
these interesting students – * polite these interesting students – saw these interesting students
A partially closed phrase can be added to, but not by everything that could be added to an open phrase
black dogs – big black dogs – the big black dogs
big dogs – * black big dogs
This is not very illuminating
Just gives names to phenomena without explaining it

52. Neo-Bloomfieldians
After Bloomfield’s death (1949) his students carried on his work
Zellig Harris ( ), Charles Hockett ( )
Hockett gave more detail to the Immediate Constituent Analysis
Harris formalised the system to a greater extent

53. Hockett
Hockett’s A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958) contains 3 detailed chapters on the Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis
It is interesting to go into detail about these ideas as they show that Hockett’s view of the phrase is not the same as today’s
Like Bloomfield, he used distributional devices to define syntactic notions such as ‘head’
With the same problems
He did try to represent structure
Though he said this was not important in itself – just useful for linguists

54. Chinese Box representation
Hockett represented structure like this
This representation allows things that is not allowed in current phrase structure diagrams (trees)
Disappearance of elements
Markers – add no meaning
Discontinuous Constituents
Constituents split by material which is not part of them

55. The Start of Modern Phrases
Chomsky (1928- ) was a student of Harris during the 1950s
1957 Syntactic Structures
A small book for computer science students
Contained his own version of the Structuralist IC analysis
Phrase Structure Grammar
This was a ‘straw man’
Designed to show what Chomsky thought was wrong with the IC analysis

56. Phrase Structure Grammar
Made up of rewrite rules, e.g.
S  NP VP
VP  V NP
These produce phrase structures, represenatable as a tree
This is now how we conceive of a phrase
Phrases have positions inside other structures
Phrases have structures of their own

57. How do phrases differ from ICs
It is impossible to have discontinuous constituents in a phrase structure grammar
Rewrite rules concern mothers, daughters and sisters
S  NP VP
S is the mother of NP and VP
NP and VP are daughters of S
NP and VP are sisters
Mothers and daughters stand in a dominance relation
Sisters stand in a precedence relation

58. Discontinuous constituents and crossing branches
A structure with discontinuous constituents must contain crossing branches
This involves a precedence relation between Aux and NP
These are not sisters
NP is the great aunt of Aux
Phrase structure rules do not refer to grandmothers, aunts, great aunts, etc. and so cannot produce these structures

59. Why is there a difference?
The structuralists did not adopt a restrictive theory of phrases
The Chinese box representation placed very few limitations on what could be represented
Even if there were things that were difficult to represent, this would not have mattered
Representations were not important – only tools for the convenience of the linguist
Chomsky’s PSGs are restrictive theories of phrase structure
There are clearly things that they cannot do (restricted)
The representations come directly from the theory (rules) and so are important for making the restrictions obvious

60. Was Chomsky right to criticise ICs?
PSGs were a straw man – meant to be knocked down
PSG and IC analysis were clearly not exactly the same
But the structuralists had no theory
So they were immune from criticism
But at the same time, they made no real claims
In order to see the problems with the IC analysis, Chomsky was forced to invent the theory
One of his points was that the lack of formal theories of language is one of the weaknesses of linguistic investigation since the classical period
With the exception of Panini

61. Conclusion The notion of a phrase first came into being in the 1920s
If the history of the study of Language were put into 1 hour, the phrase would have been discovered less than 15 seconds ago
It probably developed out of two ideas
Radical empiricism
Discovery procedures
Everything must be based on what is observable and can be discovered by observing the distribution of elements at various linguistic levels
Bloomfield didn’t really develop the notion much beyond the basics
Hockett went into more detail and tried to represent it
Chomsky introduced the current view in the 1950s
Differs from the original view
Based on phrase structure rules
More restrictive

62. The History of the Phrase
As a notion in linguistics
Part III

63. Are phrases a linguistic fact?
Today, most syntacticians assume the existence of the phrase
A lot of them think of this as unquestionable
It has been demonstrated beyond doubt
It is so obvious
But in empirical science, nothing should be beyond doubt
All facts are theory dependent
Proof is impossible
In order to see how viable the assumption of phrases is we must review evidence for and against them

64. Evidence for the existence of phrases
There are three types of argument that have been put forward to support the assumption of the phrase
Arguments that descriptions based on non-(phrase)structural grounds are inadequate
Theoretical arguments that phrases are necessary
Empirical evidence for the existence of phrases

65. Arguments against non-phrase based descriptions
Chomsky (1957) demonstrated that a grammar that did not assume phrases could not account for syntactic phenomena
Finite State Grammar
Represents a network of ‘states’ connected to each other
The grammar travels from one state to another as it parses a sentence
The sentence is grammatical if the grammar enters the final state at the same time as parsing the last word of the sentence
Two things allow the grammar to move from one state to another
Conditions on the state
The word of the sentence currently being parsed

66. An example of a FSG SI is the initial state, SF is the final state
From SI the grammar can move to S1 or S2
If the first word is a determiner, it moves to S1
If the first word is a proper noun, it moves to S2
From S1, it can move to S1 (if the next word is an adjective = recursion) or S2 (if it is a noun)
From S2 it can move to SF if the next word is a verb

67. Sentences this FSG can parse
John left
The boy left
The old man left
The old confused man left
Etc.

68. What a FSG can’t do Embedding Two ways to account for this
Sentences can be part of sentences
The man [who John met] left
Two ways to account for this
After the noun we add a further set of states which allows another sentence to be parsed
We allow the network to recurs back to the initial state

69. Including sentence networks inside sentence networks
But this reduplicates exactly the same network
There can be an infinite number of embedded sentence, so the grammar would have to be infinitely big

70. Recursing to SI
This uses the same network again, so it is better than the other idea
But it won’t work as the final state will be arrived at too soon
The man who John met (end of sentence)
How can we get the final verb?

71. Conclusion on Finite State Grammars
This is just one problem faced by a Finite State Grammar
There are many others
They are not adequate models for parsing human languages

72. Arguments for the necessity of phrases
Chomsky has argued that phrases are necessary because all syntactic processes are dependent on phrase structure
E.g. Auxiliary inversion
The man is being watched  is the man being watched
Take the first auxiliary and move it in front of the subject
But
The man who is tall is being watched 
* is the man who tall is being watched
The reason this doesn’t work is that the auxiliary that moves must be the one of the main clause, not any embedded clause
Thus the process is sensitive to the structure of the sentence

73. Empirical Arguments for Phrases
Boas’ discovery procedures are still in common use as a way to determine phrase structure (distribution tests, pronominalisation test, coordination test, etc)
The tests may be turned round and used as evidence for the existence of phrases
If there were no phrases, why do the tests work?
John ran up the hill John ran up a bill
John ran there * John ran there
Up the hill, John ran * Up a bill, John ran
John ran up the hill and * John ran up a bill and down the road up a debt

74. How good are these arguments?
FSGs are in adequate for modelling human language
But FSGs are not the only non-phrase based grammar
Other models do not suffer the same problems
Structure based processes
It is clear that syntactic phenomena are limited by something that is not simply linear
But that doesn’t mean they must be limited by phrase structure
Empirical evidence
Certainly shows something
But if it can be accounted for without phrases, it isn’t an argument for phrases

75. Against the phrase The phrase developed out of 2 structuralist ideas
Radical empiricism
Discovery procedures
Chomsky has been severely critical the American Structuralist movement
The empiricist stance is not scientific
Behaviourism involves after the fact explanations
How do we know what any instance of human behaviour is a response to – given a situation, a person in principle might say anything
It cannot account for certain facts
How can children learn language
There is no reason to believe that there should be discovery procedures
There are no discovery procedures employed in any other science
We get our data from wherever we can get it

76. The big question
If Chomsky is dismissive of empiricism and discovery procedures, why did he accept phrase structure which followed from these?

77. Non-structure based theories
Dependency Grammar
Similar to traditional view of subordination
Usually semantically based, not morphological
Always one word which is not dependent
All other words are dependent
Not very good at accounting for word order
In principle any word order would be possible
No reason why branches shouldn’t cross

78. Absolute vs. Relative linearity
A FSG organises sentences in an absolute linear way
There is a first position followed by a second position, etc.
But linear order can be relative
A is in front of B
C is in front of B C D A B or C A D B or A C D B, etc
D follows C
As there are a choice of possible orders, we need some way to choose which one of them is the best
Optimality Theory is a way to determine the best of a set of alternatives

79. Optimality Theory We start with an input
We generate a number of possible candidate expressions
We evaluated the candidates against set conditions
Constraints
Constraints are
Conflicting (nothing can satisfy them all)
Ranked (in the case of conflict the higher ranked one is adhered to)
The candidate which best satisfies the set of constraints is optimal (grammatical)

80. How it works

81. Does this answer criticisms?
Embedding
Assuming that the input is a dependency arrangement
Ordering of words done with respect to dependent words
The man who John met left
Left – man
Man – the
Man – met
Met – John, who
The same conditions will be relevant for both the main clause and the embedded one, so there is no redundancy
All words will find there position in the sentence with respect to the words they are dependent on

82. Structure dependency of linguistic processes
Again, the dependency relations in the input are enough to determine the relevant information without phrases
The man who is tall is being watched
Is – tall
...
Tall – man
Man – watched
Is – watched  this is the auxiliary that inverts

83. Empirical evidence Phrases Have distribution Can be pronominalised
Can be coordinated

84. Distribution
Words are ordered with respect to the words the are dependent on
the dependent word will appear wherever the superordinate word appears:
The man likes Mary
Man is subject – in front of verb
Determiner is in front of noun
Mary likes the man
Man is object – behind verb
Thus they will behave like a unit even if the grammar does not define them as such
The phrase is an epiphenomenon

85. Pronominalisation Pronouns stand instead of nouns
They are positioned by the same constraints (as subjects, etc.)
Pronouns cannot be modified, nouns can
Therefore nouns can have more dependents
The pronoun seems to replace more than the noun
Phrases are epiphenomena

86. Coordination Words of the same type can be coordinated
Some of these words will have dependents
These dependents will be positioned with respect to them
The coordinated words will be positioned with respect to the coordination
John and the tall woman
And – John, woman
Woman – the, tall
This gives the appearance that what is being coordinated is bigger than words
Phrases are epiphenomena

87. Which is better: a theory with phrases or without?
Too soon to decide
But the issue is in danger of not being addressed
Too many linguists have dismissed phraseless theories
They are not being investigated
So we are not discovering what they are capable of

88. Conclusion The phrase is a relatively modern notion
First introduced in the 1920s and developed in the 1950s
Since its introduction syntacticians have enthusiastically embraced it
To the detriment of the opposite assumption
Real linguistic theory started after the 1950s
So phraseless theories have not really been explored
Though the assumption that sentences are organised without phrases is a much older idea
Until such investigation takes place, we will never really know whether phrases are a necessary part of human languages