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).
