This thesis will outline some aspects of Local Grammar, a non-transformational linguistic theory that is presented as an alternative to transformational grammar. The formalism does not have a transformational component.Instead, the lexicon is enriched and a well-defined semantic component is provided. The work of this thesis is an outgrowth of work done jointly by the author and Rick Saenz as well as the work of other researchers (Bresnan 1978, Dowty 1978 and Montague 1973). Chapter II presents an overview of the Local Grammar formalism. It then provides a non-transformational analysis of some constructions which have been said to be caused by the transformation of Wh-Movement in transformational analyses. The ability of the Local Grammar framework to handle phrase structure rules of the form X ---> 0 is crucial to the analysis. Chapter III considers the problem of formulating explicit parsing algorithms to parse sentences with respect to grammars written within the Local Grammar framework. These parsing algorithms are based on parsing algorithms for context-free grammars. Two algorithms are constructed, one top-down and the other bottom-up. It is argued that the bottom-up algorithm is more suitable as a parser for Local Grammar than the top-down algorithm. Chapter IV attempts to constrain the algorithms developed in Chapter III to obey some of the psycholinguistic parsing strategies proposed by Frazier (1979), Frazier and Fodor (1978), and Fodor and Frazier (1980). It is shown that, for the most part, both the top-down and bottom-up algorithms can be made to model these strategies equally well. Chapter V summarizes the results of the thesis in two different ways, as providing one coherent proposal for a linguistic theory and as investigating many important linguistic issues.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7500 |
| Date | 01 January 1981 |
| Creators | ROSS, KENNETH MARK |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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