English Word Grammar

by Richard Hudson (1990, Blackwell) Amazon link

 

This is one of the main books about Word Grammar.

  • Part 1 presents a reasonably well-developed theory of language dealing with propositions, inheritance, the place of language in general knowledge, and the general ideas behind morphology, syntax and semantics. Some of my ideas have changed since then (e.g. about how default inheritance works), but the main outlines of later versions of the theory are recognisable.
  • Part 2 presents a detailed grammar, including lots of lexical entries, for English.  The original notation is clumsy, both in the diagrams and in the formalised rules in the text, but in some places I’ve redrawn the diagrams using more recent conventions.

The book is out of print but some of the chapters and sections are available for download, as marked below.  If you particularly want to see other chapters, let me know and I’ll see if I can scan them.

Table of contents

  • Preface
  • PART I:      THEORY
  • 1   GENERAL INTRODUCTION
    • 1.1 Some Recent Trends in Linguistics                                           3
    • 1.2 The Main Tenets of Word Grammar                                      10
  • 2   PROPOSITIONS AND THEIR FORMAL PROPERTIES
    • 2.1 General
    • 2.2 Predicates                                                                             16
    • 2.3 Arguments
    • 2.4 Quantification                                                                        21
    • 2.5 Retrieval and Inference                                                          24
  • 3   DEFAULT INHERITANCE
    • 3.1 General
    • 3.2 Concept Names                                                                    31
    • 3.3 Isa and Inheritance                                                                35
    • 3.4 Derivation and Unification                                                      37
    • 3.5 Overriding of Defaults
    • 3.6 Prototypes and the Best Fit Principle
  • 4   LINGUISTIC AND NON‑LINGUISTIC CONCEPTS
    • 4.1 General                                                                                 53
    • 4.2 Processing                                                                            56
    • 4.3 Words as Actions                                                                 63
    • 4.4 Actions as Words                                                                 66
    • 4.5 Companions                                                                          69
    • 4.6 Grammars and Encyclopedias                                                72
    • 4.7 Towards a Conceptual Hierarchy                                          75
  • 5 CATEGORIES IN LANGUAGE
    • 5.1 Non‑Relational Categories                                                     84
    • 5.2 An Overview of Relational Categories                                    88
    • 5.3 Morphology                                                                           90
    • 5.4 Coordinate Structures                                                            97
    • 5.5 Other Syntagmatic Relations                                                   98
  • 6 SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES
    • 6.1 The Elements of Syntactic Structure                                      103
    • 6.2 Dependency                                                                         105
    • 6.3 Dependency in Modern Syntactic Theory                              107
    • 6.4 Relaxing the Formal Constraints on Dependency Structures    113
    • 6.5 Grammatical Relations as Types of Dependent                      120
    • 6.6. Summary of Syntactic Structures and Notation                     121
  • 7 SEMANTIC STRUCTURES
    • 7.1 Overview of WG Semantics                                                 123
    • 7.2 Sense and Referent                                                               125
    • 7.3 Semantic Types and Syntactic Types                                    134
    • 7.4 Sets and Quantifier Scope                                                    139
    • 7.5 Semantic Phrasing                                                                146
    • 7.6 Lexical Decomposition and Semantic Relations                     151
  • PART II: ENGLISH
  • 8 WORD CLASSES
    • 8.1 Word‑Types                                                                 167
    • 8.2 Morpho‑Syntactic Features                                           172
    • 8.3 Word‑Forms                                                                176
    • 8.4 Derived Types                                                              179
    • 8.5 Summary                                                                      180
  • Appendix 8 Morphology
    • 8A.1 Word Structures                                                                181
    • 8A.2 Suffixes                                                                             183
    • 8A.3 Stem Allomorphy                                                              184
  • 9 DEPENDENCY TYPES
    • 9.1 Predependents and Postdependents                                                189
    • 9.2 Extraction and Visitors                                                                    192
    • 9.3 Complements and Adjuncts                                                             202
  • Appendix 9 Word‑Order
    • 9A.1 Head‑Dependent Ordering                                                           211
    • 9A.2 Dependent‑Dependent Ordering                                                   216
  • 10 SIMPLE CLAUSES
    • 10.1 Root Verbs, Finiteness and Mood                                                219
    • 10.2 Subject‑Verb ‘Agreement’                                                           225
    • 10.3 Head‑Marking and Dependent‑Marking                                      229
    • 10.4 Subject‑Pronoun Morphology                                                      230
    • 10.5 Complements of Verbs                                                                232
    • 10.6 Polarity (‘Auxiliary’) Verbs                                                           239
    • 10.7 Adjuncts                                                                                      244
  • Appendix 10 Some Lexical Entries for Verbs                                            250
  • 11 SIMPLE NOUN‑PHRASES
    • 11.1 Introduction                                                                                  268
    • 11.2 ‘Determiners’ and Pronouns                                                           268
    • 11.3 Possessive Pronouns                                                                     276
    • 11.4 Distributives, Alias ‘Quantifiers’                                                      282
    • 11.5 Definiteness and Co~reference                                                      293
    • 11.6 Numerals and Quantity Adjectives                                                 302
    • 11.7 Predependents of Common‑Nouns                                                309
    • 11.8 Postdependents of Common‑Nouns                                              313
    • 11.9 Gerunds and Clitics                                                                       316
  • Appendix 11 Some Lexical Entries for Nouns                                             326
  • 12 PASSIVES
    • 12.1 Overview                                                                                      336
    • 12.2 The Distribution of Passive Participles                                            339
    • 12.3 Subject‑Demotion                                                                         340
    • 12.4 Object‑Promotion                                                                         341
    • 12.5 Prepositional Passives                                                                   346
  • 13 EXTRACTION: TOPICS, INTERROGATIVES AND RELATIVES
    • 13.1 Extraction                                                                 354
    • 13.2 Topicalization                                                           358
    • 13.3 Interrogative Clauses                                                361
    • 13.4 Relative Clauses                                                       383
  • 14 COORDINATION
    • 14.1 Coordinate Structures                                                             404
    • 14.2 Coordination and Subordination                                              411
    • 14.3 Gapping                                                                                  416
  • References                                                                                                   422
  • Special Symbols Used in the Text                                                                 435
  • Index                                                                                                            436

 

 

PREFACE

This book is an attempt to provide a coherent theory of all the main parts of grammar ‑ morphology, syntax, semantics, the lexicon. The main theore­tical gaps are phonology and word‑formation. One of the main tenets of the theory is that grammar is just a special case of propositional knowledge, so I have had to suggest the outlines of a more general theory of propositional knowledge as well. Most of this is derived from my understanding of quite standard views in cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence, and it fits comfortably with at least my version of common sense, but I know that it is less well grounded than the more linguistic parts.

The theory of language is called ‘Word Grammar’, and is a direct descendant of the theory with the same name which I described in a book (also with the same name) that was published in 1984. There are important differences between the two versions which make the current one both more sound and more user‑friendly, but the similarities are sufficient to justify the shared name.

The word ‘English’ appears in the title of the book because I have applied the general theory of grammar to a reasonably wide range of constructions and well‑known problems in English grammar. The grammar I offer is very far from being ‘complete’ (whatever that might mean), but it is broad enough in its coverage to allow a reader to evaluate the theory’s potential.

I take great pleasure in acknowledging my very real intellectual debt to Billy Clark, John Fletcher, Norman Fraser, Tokumi Kodama, Andrew Radford, And Rosta and Max Volino, all of whom read and commented on some of the chapters of this book as well as giving me a lot of stimulating discussion of various topics in it. The book has been heavily influenced by them, as they will no doubt be able to see. The influence of a great many other fellow‑linguists will be apparent throughout the book, but Chuck Fillmore deserves special mention both for his help and encouragement and for his ideas on lexical semantics. I received significant practical support from the IBM (UK) Scientific Research Centre, from the ESRC (who funded my research for half a year) and from my departmental chairman Neil Smith (who pretended the funding was for a full year).

 

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