Chapter : Phrase Structure Grammar*

James P. Blevins Ivan A. Sag

University of Cambridge Stanford University

To appear in M. den Dikken (ed.)

The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax

. Origins of phrase structure analysis

To understand the properties of modern phrase structure grammars, it is useful to
place their development in a wider formal and historical context. Phrase structure
grammars and associated notions of phrase structure analysis have their proximate
origins in models of Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis. Although inspired by the
programmatic syntactic remarks in Bloomfield (), these models were princi-
pally developed by Bloomfield’s successors, most actively in the decade between the
publication of Wells () and the advent of transformational analyses in Harris
() and Chomsky (). The central intuition underlying models of IC analysis
was that the structure of an expression could be exhibited by dividing the expression
into parts (its immediate constituents), further subdividing these parts, and contin-
uing until syntactically indivisible units were obtained. This style of analysis was
motivated in part by a belief in the  of syntactic relations, in particular the
view that the most important relations held between immediate constituents.
The process of analyzing syntax is largely one of finding successive lay-
ers of ICs and of immediate constructions, the description of relation-
ships which exist between ICs and the description of those relationships
which are not eciently described in terms of ICs. The last is generally
of subsidiary importance; most of the relationships of any great signif-
icance are between ICs. (Gleason : )
Within the Bloomfieldian tradition, there was a fair degree of consensus regard-
ing the application of syntactic methods as well as about the analyses associated with
dierent classes of constructions. Some of the general features of IC analyses find an
obvious reflex in subsequent models of analysis. Foremost among these is the idea
that structure involves a part-whole relation between elements and a larger superor-
dinate unit, rather than an asymmetrical dependency relation between elements at
* We thank Stefan Müller and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of this

chapter.


the same level. The Bloomfieldians’ preference for binary branching analyses like-
wise reemerges in later models of phrase structure, and their practice of extending
syntactic analysis below the word level, to include stems and inflectional forma-
tives, survives largely intact in the transformational tradition. Some other features
of IC analyses are less faithfully preserved. These include general properties such
as the recognition of discontinuous and overlapping constituents or the representa-
tion of intonation. More specific proposals, such as the classification of elements
(notably coordinating conjunctions) as ‘markers’ (Hockett : ) were not re-
habilitated until nearly  years later (Gazdar et al. ,Sag et al. ,Pollard and
Sag : chapter ). The encoding of dependency relations within a part-whole
analysis (Nida ) was also suppressed until the development of feature-based
models such as LFG (Kaplan and Bresnan  and chapter  of this volume) and
HPSG (Pollard and Sag  and section .. below) that could explicitly express
valence dependencies within syntactic representations.

.. Procedures of IC analysis

The development of constituent structure analysis within the Bloomfieldian tradi-
tion was held back by, among other things, the lack of a perspicuous format for
representing syntactic analyses. The formats explored by the Bloomfieldians were
cumbersome, ranging from annotated circuit diagrams in Nida () through the
chart representation in Table . or the ‘Chinese box’ arrangements in Table ..

John is here

Table .: Chart-based IC Analysis (Hockett : chapter )

John P can → go

Table .: Chinese box-based IC Analysis (Gleason : )

The shortcomings of these representational formats were particularly evident in

the analysis of the discontinuous and overlapping constituents recognized by the
A partial list of constructions that were analyzed as discontinuous by the Bloomfieldians would
include parentheticals (Bloomfield : , Nida : ), coordination (Bloch : ), ditransi-
tives (Pike : ), complex predicates (Nida : ), phrasal verbs (Wells : ), polar ques-
tions (Pike : , Hockett : , Gleason : , Nida : ), non-subject relatives (Nida
: ), non-subject constituent questions (Nida : , Gleason : ).
The analysis in Table . also represents functional and even dependency information, as it illustrates
the convention that “the arrow points towards the head” in a modifier-head construction and that “the P
always faces the predicate” in a subject-predicate construction (Gleason : ).


Bloomfieldians. While generally preferring continuous (and binary) analyses, they
also admitted a range of constructions that violated these preferences.

Most linguists operate on the principle that cuts will be made binary
whenever possible, but that cuts giving three or more ICs will not be
excluded a priori. In the same way, they will make cuts giving contin-
uous ICs wherever possible, but discontinuous ICs are not excluded on
principle. (Gleason : )
The descriptive challenges that arose in extending these formats to the descrip-
tion of discontinuous dependencies are illustrated by the representation of phrasal
verb constructions, which were taken to be discontinuous from at least Wells ().

Verb phrases of the type verb+prepositional adverb (up, away, through,

etc.) may seem to deserve being treated as constituents even when they
are discontinuous: wake up your friend and wake your friend up are al-
most synonymous. (Wells : )

Expressions such as wake up your friend presented no new diculties. However,

the ‘shifted’ order in which the object intervened between the verb and particle re-
quired a means of indicating that ICs formed units at non-adjacent levels One of
the representational extensions explored by Hockett () is shown in the chart in
Table .. Box diagrams provided a somewhat more flexible format, as illustrated in
Table ..

wake your friend up

Table .: Chart-based Analysis of ‘shifted’ Phrasal Verb

wake up
your friend

Table .: Box-based Analysis of ‘shifted’ Phrasal Verb

.. Phrase structure analysis

As suggested by the contrast between the analyses in Table . and Table ., graph
theory provided the natural formalization of the intuitions underlying models of
IC analysis, though this idea was not developed until McCawley (). Instead, IC


analyses were interpreted as representing the successive segmentation of an expres-
sion into sub-expressions, each of which was annotated with a word class label and,
usually, other types of information. It was not until the early transformational ac-
counts that IC analyses were incorporated into explicit grammar formalisms rather
than treated as procedures of classification, and the fact that these procedures were
first formalized by the Bloomfieldians’ successors had the eect of simplifying them,
much as the Bloomfieldians had themselves simplified Bloomfield’s more intricate
constructional perspective (Manaster-Ramer and Kac ). In Chomsky (),
phrase structure grammars are proposed as “the form of grammar [that] corresponds
to [the] conception of linguistic structure” expressed by IC analysis (). Chom-
sky’s insight consisted in recognizing how informal procedures for segmenting and
classifying expressions could be expressed by means of rules of the form A → ω
that would ‘rewrite’ a single word class label A by a string ω (which could consist
of labels along with words and formatives). Thus a rule such as S → NP VP would
rewrite a sentence S by a subject NP and a VP predicate, and the rule V → took would
classify took as a verb.
By starting with the sentence label ‘S’ and applying a sequence of phrase structure
rules, one could define a ‘derivation’ that terminated in the expression that would
be the starting point for procedures of IC analysis. The syntactic analysis assigned
to an expression by a phrase structure grammar was conventionally represented by
a phrase structure tree, though in Chomsky’s initial formulations, analyses are rep-
resented by stringsets that he termed  . These sets contain strings
from equivalence classes of derivations diering from one another solely in that
they apply the same rules in a dierent order (e.g., a derivation where the subject
NP is rewritten before rewriting the VP and a second derivation where the VP is
rewritten first).

. Extended phrase structure systems

As clarified particularly in Scholz and Pullum () and Pullum (), phrase
structure (and transformational) grammars represent linguistic applications of the
general string rewriting systems developed in Post (, ). Despite the evident
success attained by grammatical models based on rewriting systems, it was soon
apparent that standard systems were not always ideally suited to the description of
natural languages.

.. ‘The dicult question of discontinuity’

In particular, initial formulations of phrase structure grammars were incapable of
representing the classes of discontinuous constituents recognized by the Bloomfiel-
dians, a point that Chomsky () was initially freely prepared to concede.
Chomsky appears to maintain the representational assumptions in Chomsky (: chapter VII)
when he later suggests that “We take these objects [i.e. levels of linguistic representation, JPB/IAS] to
be phrase markers in the familiar sense, (represented conventionally by trees or labelled bracketings)”
(Chomsky : ).


 This [the treatment of ‘long components’ in the sense of Harris ]
is an important question, deserving a much fuller treatment, but it will
quickly lead into areas where the present formal apparatus may be in-
adequate. The dicult question of discontinuity is one such problem.
Discontinuities are handled in the present treatment by construction of
permutational mappings from P [the level of phrase structure, JPB/IAS]
to W [the level of word structure, JPB/IAS/], but it may turn out that
they must ultimately be incorporated somehow into P itself. (Chomsky
: )
The transformational tradition never did reconsider whether discontinuities could
be handled better within a phrase structure analysis and no general approach to this
issue was explored within constituency-based grammars until the development of
Head Grammars (Pollard ) and linearization-based models of HPSG (Reape
; Müller , ; Kathol ). These models rehabilitated many of the
same intuitions about syntactic and semantic units that had been explored in ‘wrap-
ping’ analyses in the Montague grammar tradition, particularly in the accounts of
Bach () and Dowty (). However, Chomsky sought to reinforce the case
for ‘permutational mappings’ (i.e., transformations) by disputing the feasibility of
applying procedures of IC analysis to ‘derived’ constructions such as polar and in-
formation questions.

The case for indirect representation, not based on the relation of mem-
bership, becomes even stronger when we consider such sentences as
“did they see John” or “whom did they see”. T   
          -
      –, i.e. no one would ask how they
can be subdivided into two or three parts, each of which has several
constituents, going on to use this subdivision as the basis for analysis
of other sentences, and so on. Yet there is nothing in the formulation
of principles of procedure for IC analysis that justifies excluding these
sentences, or treating them somehow in terms of sentences already an-
alyzed. (Chomsky : f.; emphasis added JPB/IAS)

In the emphasized passage, as elsewhere in Chomsky’s writings about the Bloom-

fieldians, a position possibly consistent with the practice of Zellig Harris is incor-
rectly attributed to the Bloomfieldians as a group. Virtually all leading American
linguists of the time, including Hockett, Gleason, Nida, Pike and Wells, among oth-
ers, not only considered applying – but in fact  apply – procedures of IC analysis
to questions in English. In particular, the analysis of polar questions was regarded as
a solved problem and presented as such in the introductory textbooks of the day. In
the passage below, Gleason gives what he takes to be an uncontroversial IC analysis
of polar questions to exemplify the notion of discontinuous constituents.
In English, discontinuous constituents occur. One common instance
occurs in many questions: Did the man come? This is clearly to be cut
did … come | the man. (Gleason : )


 This discrepancy between procedures of IC analysis and phrase structure gram-
mars is of more than purely historical interest. One of the criticisms levelled by
Chomsky against phrase structure grammars turned on their inability to represent
discontinuous dependencies, particularly within auxiliary verb phrases.
To put the same thing dierently, in the auxiliary verb phrase we re-
ally have discontinuous elements … But discontinuities cannot be han-
dled within [Σ, F] grammars [i.e. phrase structure grammars, JPB/IAS].
(Chomsky : )

.. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG)

For the most part, modern phrase structure systems preserve Chomsky’s preference
for describing discontinuous dependencies indirectly, usually in terms of relations
between dierent parts of a single structure or correspondences between dierent
types of structures. However other restrictions on phrase structure systems have
been more comprehensively revised. The most severe of these was the assump-
tion that the ‘nonterminal’ vocabulary of a phrase structure grammar should consist
solely of atomic labels such as ‘S’, ‘NP’ ‘V’, etc. The case for relaxing this restriction
is made initially by Harman (), who objects that “it is irrational to restrict the
amount of information expressed by the grammar to statements about grammatical
category” (). The response in Chomsky (: f) dismisses Harman’s pro-
posal out of hand as a “terminological equivocation” and appears to construe any
refinement of phrase structure grammars as a case of a patent infringement rather
than as a genuine attempt to understand the scope and limits of constituent struc-
ture grammars. Partly as a consequence, Harman’s ‘defense of phrase structure’ had
little direct influence on the field at the time. Hence, the descriptive potential of fea-
ture ‘decompositions’ of atomic symbols was not fully realized until the later work
on unbounded dependencies and coordination (Gazdar ).
By this time, a limited amount of feature decomposition had been incorporated
into transformational models that adopted some version of the X-bar conventions.
However, features were assigned a tightly circumscribed role in Chomsky (),
and these restrictions were preserved in subsequent accounts. Two constraints were
particularly decisive. The first of these restricted propagation through an endocen-
tric X-bar projection to the word class features ±N and ±V (Chomsky : f.),
excluding other types of lexical and inflectional properties. The second constraint
limited feature ‘percolation’, as it came to be known, more generally by “tak[ing] fea-
ture complexes to be associated only with lexical categories, and permit[ting] com-
plex symbols to dominate a sequence of elements only within the word” (Chomsky
: ). These restrictions precluded the use of constituent structure links as
a conduit for the propagation of complex feature bundles. Likewise, although the
In the continuation of this passage, Chomsky notes that the second constraint has merely been car-
ried over from Chomsky (: f.) and appears willing to countenance the idea “that certain features
should also be associated with nonlexical phrase categories”. Yet the accompanying footnote immediately
characterizes the arguments supporting previous proposals as “very weak”, and Chomsky does not in fact
propose a general relaxation of the constraints on complex feature bundles that would allow the inflec-
tional features associated with a lexical category to be propagated to or shared with a phrasal projection.


‘nondistinctness’ condition on complex symbols in Chomsky (: ) anticipated
the unification operations of later constraint-based formalisms, this condition could
play no role in regulating the distribution of features within a projection.

... Nonlocal dependencies

As with the representational constraints that barred discontinuities, restrictions on
the ‘flow’ of feature information prevented feature-based mechanisms from encroach-
ing on the role reserved for structure-changing rules and derivational operations in
transformational models. By relaxing these restrictions, extended phrase structure
models could exploit the descriptive value of feature information for describing local
and nonlocal grammatical dependencies. Unbounded dependencies had long been
taken to require the power of a transformational grammar, or at any rate to defy
analysis in terms of phrase structure grammars, as suggested in the quotation from
Chomsky () on p.  above. Hence the rehabilitation of phrase structure analysis
began, somewhat counterintuitively perhaps, with an analysis of unbounded depen-
dencies that was developed in the late s but first published in Gazdar ().
The simple intuition developed in this work was that the constituent structure links
of a phrase structure tree provided a suitable conduit for the flow of information
about displaced elements. The components of the analysis were equally straightfor-
ward: feature attributes that could take categories as values, the insight that infor-
mation about ‘missing’ elements could be treated in terms of a feature (Bear ),
and feature ‘passing’ conditions that could match features between the ‘mother’ and
‘daughter’ nodes in a phrase structure tree. By passing the value of a category-valued
attribute along a chain of local mother-daughter nodes, a phrase structure analysis
could match the properties of a ‘missing’ element at an ‘extraction site’ with those of
the ‘dislocated’ element that typically occurred at the periphery of a construction.
The components of what came to be known as the ‘slash category’ analysis of
unbounded dependencies are exhibited in the analysis of the English indirect ques-
tion in Figure . below. The lowest occurrence of the category-valued  feature
encodes the properties of the missing object NP that is governed by the transitive
verb saw. These properties are passed up successively to the superordinate VP and
S nodes until they can be matched against the properties of the ‘filler’ what.
To a large degree, the early phrase structure analyses carried over prevailing as-
sumptions about the structure of unbounded dependency constructions from trans-
formational accounts. In contrast to the IC analyses adumbrated in the descriptivist
tradition, the structure in Figure . assumes that the dislocated element what is
higher in the tree as well as to the left of the extraction site. This assumption is
retained in most subsequent analyses of unbounded dependencies. In addition, the
structure in Figure . preserves the assumption that the extraction site is occupied
by an empty placeholder ‘gap’. Since this assumption had no internal motivation
within phrase structure models, the analysis developed in Sag and Fodor ()
and Bouma et al. () dispensed with null terminals. These analyses neverthe-
less retain the strategy of using dedicated attributes to represent information about
extracted elements. In this respect unlike categorial analyses, such as Steedman
(), which use the slash notation both to indicate the argument of a functor and


 S.

NP S[ ]

what NP VP[ ]

Max V NP[ ]

saw e

Figure .: ‘Slash category’ analysis of indirect question

to encode information about extracted elements. In the categorial analysis in Fig-

ure ., the category ‘(S\NP)/NP’ marks the transitive verb saw as a functor that
looks rightward for an NP to form a functor that in turn looks leftward for an NP to
form an S. The overloading of this notation is reflected in the fact that the category
‘S\NP’ encodes the ‘missing’ object NP in the expression Max saw.

what Max saw

S/(S\NP) (S\NP)/((S\NP)/NP) (S\NP)/NP
S\NP
S

Figure .: Gap-free categorial analysis (cf. Steedman )

As recognized by those working to extend the empirical coverage of phrase struc-

ture models, category-valued features oered a novel perspective on a range of phe-
nomena that interacted with unbounded dependencies. In particular, the assump-
tion that information about missing constituents formed part of the syntactic in-
formation associated with a node interacted with the independent assumption that
coordination was restricted to syntactically like elements. One immediate conse-
quence was an account of the parallelism that Ross () had termed ‘across-the-
board’ extraction. The central observation was that in a coordinate structure, if one
conjunct contained an extraction site, then all of the conjuncts must. In transfor-
mational models, this condition had been attributed to dedicated devices, such as the
Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross ) or the Across-the-Board convention of
Williams (), which, as Gazdar et al. (b) noted, incorporated a construction-
specific and somewhat imprecise extension to the notion of phrase marker. In con-
See Steedman and Baldridge () for recent synopsis of combinatory categorial approaches.
Though subsequent work has called into question whether this parallelism is restricted to coordi-
nate structures (Postal ) and whether the constraint ultimately reflects more general semantic or
discourse factors (Goldsmith ; Lako ; Kehler ).


trast, the parallelism requirement on extraction from coordinate structures followed
on a phrase structure analysis. Two conjuncts of category X[ ] were syntac-
tically alike, whereas a conjunct of category X[ ] and one of category X were
not. In the analysis in Figure ., the two conjuncts of category S[ ] are
syntactically alike and can be conjoined, but neither could be conjoined with a full S
to yield unacceptable examples such as *what Felix heard and Max saw the intruder
or *what Felix heard the intruder and Max saw.

. ]
S[

S[ ] and S[ ]

NP VP[ ] NP VP[ ]

Felix V NP[ ] Max V NP[ ]

heard e saw e

Figure .: ‘Across-the-board’ extraction from coordinate indirect question

Gazdar () also clarified how constraints on extraction, which had typically
been described in terms of conditions on rule application, could be recast in terms of
restrictions on the ‘paths’ of category-valued features that connected extraction sites
to dislocated fillers. In classical transformational accounts, there had been no rea-
son why information about missing constituents should trace a path along the con-
stituent structure links of a tree. But once extraction was characterized in terms of
the sharing of category-valued features along a sequence of mother-daughter links,
it became clear that any restrictions on the extraction of elements out of specified
‘island’ domains (Ross ) would correspond to paths in which those domains
occurred somewhere along the path between extraction sites and fillers.

... Local dependencies

The demonstration that complex-valued features could provide an analysis of un-
bounded dependencies inspired surface-based analyses of more local syntactic phe-
nomena within the nascent community that had begun to explore the potential of
monostratal models. The English auxiliary system had long been an obvious can-
didate for reanalysis. The system consisted of a finite inventory of modal and auxil-
iary elements, which were subject to ordering constraints that determined a (short)
The analysis in Figure . introduces the coordinating conjunction as a sister of the conjuncts, rather
than associating it with the second conjunct, though nothing here hinges on this dierence.
Indeed, there was a considerable delay before the tradition even addressed the challenge of assigning
a derived constituent structure to transforms, an issue that had been raised as early as Stockwell ().
See Ladusaw () for discussion of the contrast between linguistic ‘levels’ and ‘strata’.


maximum expansion. The expansions were indeed almost as restricted as pronom-
inal clitic sequences in Romance languages, and, like these sequences, exhibited
some of the ordering rigidity characteristic of morphological formations. Even the
selectional dependencies tended to relate pairs of adjacent elements. So there was
nothing that presented any intrinsic diculties for a phrase structure analysis.
The ‘ax hopping’ analysis of Chomsky () had long been held as one of the
crowning achievements of transformational approaches. However, Gazdar et al.
(a) showed that the strategy of ‘hopping’ axes from one point in a terminal
string to another was a solution to a self-inflicted problem and hence dispensable in
a model with complex-valued features. If one auxiliary element could select the verb
form of the head of a phrasal complement, there was no need to assemble inflected
forms in the course of a syntactic derivation. Instead, the admissible expansions
could be determined by the subcategorization demands of individual elements. The
first component of this analysis is a feature classification of verbal elements that
distinguishes tense, aspect and voice properties, along with form variants, such as
participles, infinitives, etc. The second is a generalization of the X-bar feature con-
ventions that allows these ‘head’ features to be shared between a mother and head
daughter node. The final ingredient is, again, category-valued features that permit
a verbal element to select a complement headed by a particular form variant.
These components are set out in detail in Gazdar et al. (a) and in much
subsequent work within Generalized Phrase Structure models. One type of analysis
that they define is illustrated in Figure . below. The advantages of this analysis
are summarized in Gazdar et al. (a: .), though one immediate benefit was
the avoidance of the formal problems that had plagued the ‘ax-hopping’ analysis
since its initial formulation (see, e.g., Akmajian and Wasow ; Sampson ).

V.

V V
[+] [+,+]

must V V
[+,+] [+,+,+]

V V
have [+,+,+] [+,–,+]

V V
been [+,–,+] [+]

being persecuted

Figure .: Passive auxiliary expansion (cf. Gazdar et al. a: )

The analyses in Gazdar et al. (a) thus established that the same basic feature-


passing strategy used in the treatment of unbounded dependencies could provide an
account of local dependencies. Patterns of subject-auxiliary inversion were amenable
to a similar analysis using grammar rules systematically related to the basic rules
via metarules, a device whose utility in the grammar of programming languages had
previously been established. Figure . exhibits the analysis of the polar question
cited by Gleason () on p.  above. The invertibility of modals and auxiliaries is
encoded here via compatability with the [+] specification that is required of the
verbal head in a phrase structure rule licensing the ‘inverted’ structure. Independent
motivation for this feature comes from lexical restrictions on the distribution and
interpretation of auxiliary elements. Some elements, such as sg aren’t, are obli-
gatorily inverted, while others, such as better, are obligatorily uninverted, and yet
others, such as may, have a dierent range of meanings depending on whether or
not they are inverted.

V.
[+]

V V
[+] [+]

did NP V
[+]

V
the man [+]

come

Figure .: Subject-auxiliary ‘inversion’

.. Node admissibility and constraint satisfaction

More generally, it turned out that all of the alternations and dependencies that had
been described by transformational models had simple – and, in at least some cases,
arguably superior – phrase structure analyses. One might have expected that this
result would have produced a general rapprochement between transformational and
phrase structure approaches and an attempt to arrive at broadly accepted criteria for
evaluating the dierent strategies for describing these patterns. In fact, just the
The analyses of unbounded dependencies and auxiliary selection/inversion outlined above were fol-
lowed by phrase structure treatments of, among others, an expanded range of extraction constructions
(Pollard and Sag : chapters –, Levine and Hukari ), passives (Pollard and Sag : ,
Manning and Sag ), control constructions (Sag and Pollard ), anaphoric binding (Pollard and
Sag ). Contemporary work in Lexical Functional Grammar (Dalrymple et al. ) and Tree Adjoin-
ing Grammar (Joshi and Schabes ) explored a similar range of empirical extensions. See also Johnson
and Lappin () for a comprehensive comparison of constraint-based and derivation perspectives.


opposite occurred. Transformational models abandoned their flirtation with a ‘rep-
resentational’ interpretation, a perspective that had been developed particularly in
Koster (, ), and adopted a more resolutely derivational orientation.
While transformational accounts were following the developmental pathway
that led to current Minimalist models (see chapter ), extended phrase structure
models began to incorporate insights and perspectives from other monostratal ap-
proaches. Following McCawley (), models of Generalized Phrase Structure
Grammar (Gazdar et al. ) had already adopted – and, indeed, refined – a ‘node
admissibility’ interpretation of phrase structure rules. On this interpretation, a rule
such as S → NP VP is interpreted as directly ‘licensing’ a local subtree in which S im-
mediately and exhaustively dominates NP and VP daughters, and the NP daughter
immediately precedes the VP daughter. A node admissibility interpretation imme-
diately eliminated the need for string-rewrite derivations and string-based repre-
sentations of phrase structure (‘phrase markers’). Instead, rules could be regarded
as partial  of the subtrees that they sanctioned and the admissibility of
a tree could be defined in terms of the admissibility of the subtrees that it contained.
In large part, this reinterpretation of phrase structure productions supplied graph-
theoretic modelling assumptions that were a better fit for the classes of IC analy-
ses initially proposed by the Bloomfieldians. The schematization adopted within
models of X-bar Theory similarly deprecated phrase structure rules within transfor-
mational models, though without substantially revising the string-based model of
phrase structure represented by phrase markers (as discussed in footnote ).
Furthermore, a node admissibility interpretation clarified the fact that conven-
tional phrase structure rules bundle information about structure (mother-daughter
links) together with information about order (linear arrangement of daughters).
GPSG accounts showed how these two types of information could be expressed sep-
arately, by means of a set of Immediate Dominance (ID) rules that just constrained
mother-daughter relations and a set of Linear Precedence statements that applied to
sisters in a local tree. For example, the information represented by the phrase struc-
ture rule S → NP VP would be expressed by an ID rule S → NP, VP and the general
LP statement NP ≺ VP. The absence of an applicable LP rule would not sanction
unordered trees, but rather trees in which the NP and VP occurred in either order.
An overriding consideration in the development of GPSG was the goal of keep-
ing analyses as explicit as possible and the underlying grammatical formalism as
formally restrictive as possible. The central role of context-free phrase structure
grammars largely reflected the fact that their properties were well-understood and
provided a formal basis for transparent analyses. In some cases, analyses were con-
strained so that they did not take GPSG models outside the class of phrase structure
grammars. For example, requiring that sets of ID rules and LP statements must op-
erate over the same local domains, ensured that they could in principle be ‘reconsti-
tuted’ as phrase structure grammars. LP statements were thus restricted to apply to
sister nodes. As a consequence, LP statements could allow free or partial ordering
of VP-internal elements, but they could not impose any ordering of subjects and
VP-internal elements other than those that followed from the ordering of a subject
and full VP expansion. Yet there was no direct empirical support for this restriction.
Hence the tight association between the domains of ID rules and LP statements


undermined the fundamental separation of structure and order in the ID/LP format
since certain types of ordering variation dictated a flat structure. This was perhaps
acceptable as long as there was some independent motivation for remaining within
the class of context-free phrase structure grammars. But by , the demonstration
of non-context-free patterns in Swiss German subordinate clauses (Shieber )
and Bambara compounds (Culy ) had weakened the empirical grounds for this
restriction and the non-transformational community shifted their focus to identify-
ing restricted classes of weakly context-sensitive grammars that were descriptively
adequate. This was a natural development within the family of phrase structure ap-
proaches, given that the interest in context-free grammars had been driven by an
interest in explicit formalisms with clearly-defined and well-understood properties.
Hence the move from the limited word order freedom defined by the ID/LP for-
mat in GPSG to ‘domain union’ in HPSG (Reape ) extended the dissociation
of structure and order in ways that allow for the interleaving of non-sisters in an
explicit but non-context-free formalism.

. Model-theoretic grammar

In the subsequent development of phrase structure grammars, the interpretation of
rules as partial descriptions of trees provided the model for a more comprehensive
constraint-based or model-theoretic perspective. As in models of Lexical-Functional
Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan ; chapter  of this volume), rules and grammat-
ical principles came to be construed as  that described or were satisfied
by corresponding types of . This move to a uniform model-theoretic
orientation permitted much of the complexity that had been associated with rep-
resentations to be confined to the constraint language that described structures.
In addition, a general model of constraint satisfaction provided a conception un-
der which the diverse feature distribution principles of GPSG could be subsumed.
The gradual accretion of constraints and conditions in GPSG had led over time to
a theory in which the components that regulated feature information included fea-
ture co-occurrence restrictions and feature specification defaults, in addition to the
immediate dominance rules, linear precedence statements and other devices, such
as metarules. As detailed in Gazdar et al. (: chapter ), the constraints in these
components exhibited fairly intricate interactions. On a description-theoretic inter-
pretation, these constraints and interactions could be modelled in a more uniform
and transparent way.
The emergence of a constraint-based perspective was accompanied by the adop-
tion of richer sets of structures and more expressive constraint languages. These
developments provided clearer conceptions of the lexicon, valence and valence al-
ternations than had been possible in GPSG. The phrase structure systems proposed
in Chomsky () had oered only very rudimentary treatments of the lexicon and
valence demands, and incorporated no notion of a lexical valence-changing process.
The closest counterparts of ‘lexical entries’ in these simple systems were rules of the
form V → sleep, which rewrote a nonterminal symbol as a terminal element. The
Reape () was widely circulated in draft form, as of 


valence of a predicate was likewise represented implicitly by the other elements that
were introduced in the same rule expansions. GPSG enriched this spartan concep-
tion by locating terminal elements within lexical entries that specified distinctive
grammatical features of an element other than word class. Corresponding to the
preterminal rules of a simple phrase structure grammar was a class of ‘lexical ID
rules’ which introduced lexical heads indexed by a subcategorization index. This
index (technically the value of a  feature) was then cross-referenced with a
class of lexical entries. For example, the rule VP → H[] would license a local VP
subtree that dominated a unary tree whose mother was V[] and whose daughter
was an intransitive verb, such as sleep, whose entry contained the index .
In eect, the use of subcategorization indices achieved a limited type of context
sensitivity within a context-free formalism. Yet, as Jacobson (: .) pointed
out, the fact that lexical items did not directly represent valence information cre-
ated numerous complications in GPSG. The most acute arose in connection with the
treatment of valence alternations. There was no way to formulate a passive rule that
mapped the transitive entry for devour onto a (syntactically) detransitivized entry
devoured, because entries themselves contained no direct representation of transi-
tivity. This led to an analysis of passivization in terms of metarules that mapped a
‘transitive expansion’ such as VP → W , NP to a ‘detransitivized expansion’ such as
VP[] → W (where W is any string). However, it then became necessary to con-
strain metarules so that they only applied to lexical ID rules. But lexical ID rules
were serving as proxies for underinformative entries, so the obvious solution lay in
associating valence information directly with lexical items and introducing a class
of lexical rules to map between entries, as suggested by Pollard ().

.. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)

The models of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar outlined in Pollard and Sag
(, ) develop a number of these revisions in the context of a broad constraint-
based conception of grammar. A central component of these models is the set of as-
sumptions that have come to be known as the ‘formal foundations’ of HPSG. As in
LFG, grammatical constraints and lexical entries are interpreted as partial descrip-
tions of structures, though the representational conventions and model theories of
the two theories dier significantly. One representational dierence concerns the
interpretation of attribute-value matrices (AVMs). Whereas in LFG, AVMs of the
sort illustrated in Figure .a are used to represent f(unctional)-structures, in HPSG
they represent descriptions, i.e. sets of constraints. The structures   (or
which ) a set of constraints are represented as graphs like the one in Fig-
ure .b.
A distinctive aspect of the HPSG model theory is the role assigned to the 
system. The core idea is that each kind of structure is associated with certain sorts
of attributes, and that each attribute is associated with a type of value. For example,
a referential index (object of type ref in Figure .) is associated with the attributes
(), () and (). Each attribute takes values from a partitioned
By virtue of the Head Feature Principle (aka the Head Feature Convention), the metavariable ‘H[]’
would license a preterminal V[] that shared the word class features of the VP mother.


 ·rd



  → ·.ref ·sing
ref 
 rd  
  
 
 sing 
a. b. ·masc
 masc

Figure .: Descriptions and structures in HPSG

value space, which in the present case just represents traditional person, number
and gender contrasts. The empirical eects of this type system derive from two
additional assumptions. The first is that structures must be  -
(Carpenter , chapter ) in the sense that they must be assigned a value for
each appropriate attribute. This constraint precludes, for example, the assignment
of a number-neutral structure as the analysis of English sheep, given that number is
distinctive for English nouns (each occurence of sheep is unambuously singular or
plural). A separate requirement that structures must be - (Pollard and
Sag : ) permits only ‘fully specific’ feature values and thus bars disjunctive
case values from occurring in a wellformed structure. Hence sheep could not be
treated as neutral by assigning the attribute  a maximally general value such as
number, which subsumes the resolved values sing and plur. Given that entries are
interpreted as descriptions of lexical structures, the English lexicon can still contain
a single underspecified  for sheep, one that specifies either no  attribute or
a  attribute with a non-sort-resolved value. But the lexical structures described
by the entry must be totally well-typed and sort-resolved.
These general assumptions have the eect of ensuring that structures are max-
imally specific and that all underspecification is confined to descriptions. A neutral
description is not satisfied by a correspondingly underspecified structure but by a set
of structures, each of which supplies dierent, fully resolved values for underspeci-
fied attributes. This technical point has a number of consequences. On the positive
side, the assumption that structures must be totally well-typed and sort-resolved
does some of the work of the completeness and coherence conditions in LFG, and
facilitates type-based inferencing within HPSG. However, these assumptions also
lead to apparent diculties in accounting for the types of patterns described in Ingria
(), in which the neutrality of an item seems to permit it to satisfy incompatible
demands simultaneously, most prominently in coordinate structures.
Note further that in a model theory that only contains fully specified structures,
it is somewhat anachronistic to describe the processes that determine feature com-
patibility in terms of feature structure , as had been the practice in GPSG
and PATR-based formalisms (Shieber ). A more accurate characterization of a
See Blevins () for a recent review and discussion of these types of cases.


model-theoretic linguistic framework would be as -, a term that
has garnered a certain acceptance in the non-transformational community. Within
HPSG, configurations in which a single object occurs as the value of multiple at-
tributes are described in terms of -, a term that refers to reen-
trance in the graph-theoretic models typically assumed in HPSG.

... Valence, raising and control

Raising constructions illustrate how structure sharing interacts with complex-valued
attributes to provide an insightful analysis of grammatical dependencies. The term
‘raising’ derives from transformational analyses in which the subject of a comple-
ment is taken to be ‘raised’ to become an argument of the raising verb. However,
complex-valued features permit an analysis in which raising involves the identifi-
cation of arguments within the argument structure of a raising predicate. Patterns
involving the sharing of purely morphological properties oer the clearest support
for this analysis. As discussed by Andrews (), among others, modern Icelandic
contains verbs that may govern ‘quirky’ non-nominative subjects. One such verb is
vanta ‘to want’, which occurs with the accusative subject hana ‘her’ in (.a). These
quirky case demands are preserved by raising verbs such as virðist ‘seems’. As ex-
ample (.b) shows, virðist is, in eect, ‘transparent’ to the accusative case demands
of vanta, which are imposed on its own syntactic subject.
(.) Quirky case in Icelandic raising constructions (Andrews )
a. Hana vantar peninga.
her. lack. money.
‘She lacks money.’
b. Hana virðist vanta peninga.
her. seem. lack money.
‘She seems to lack money.’
The constraints in Figure . first identify hana as a sg feminine accusative
NP, and indicate that the verb vanta selects an accusative subject and complement
(though category is suppressed here). In place of the integer-valued  feature
of GPSG, HPSG represents the core valence demands of a verb by means of list-
valued  and  features. The value of the  attribute can either be an
empty list or a singleton list, whereas the  value may contain as many depen-
dents as a verb can select. The boxed integers in the indicated constraints for vanta
represent the fact that the subject term corresponds to the first element of the lexi-
cal argument structure (-) of vanta and the complement term corresponds to
the second term. This correspondence is not established by individual entries, but
instead reflects a general relationship between - and  and  lists. By
treating the correspondence as canonical rather than as invariant, HPSG accommo-
dates divergences between argument structure and grammatical relations (Manning
and Sag ).
The analysis in Figure . then illustrates how these valence features regulate
basic valence requirements. Adapting the idea of ‘argument cancellation’ from cate-


     ⟨ [ ]⟩
 3rd  1  acc
 

 sg   ⟨ [ ]⟩
   
   2  acc 
  fem   ⟨ ⟩ 
hana:  acc vanta: - 1, 2

Figure .: Constraints on accusative NP and ‘quirky’ accusative-governing verb

gorial approaches, elements are ‘popped o’ valence lists as arguments are encoun-
tered. Hence the term in the  list of the verb vantar is structure shared with
the syntactic object peninga in Figure ., producing a VP with an empty  list.
The subject term is in turn identified with the syntactic subject hana, yielding a ‘sat-
urated’ clause, with empty  and  lists. The terms in the - list of the
verb vanta are also structure-shared with the syntactic arguments. However, in ac-
cordance with the locality constraints of HPSG, - values are only associated
at the lexical level, so that elements that combine syntactically with the clause in
Figure . cannot access information about the dependents it contains.
[ ]
 . ⟨ ⟩
 ⟨ ⟩

  
 3rd  ⟨ ⟩
  
 sg 
  
1

1 
  fem   ⟨ ⟩
 acc
 ⟨ ⟩    
 1  3rd
 ⟨ ⟩    sg 

   
hana  2  2 
 ⟨ ⟩   masc 
- 1, 2  acc

vantar peninga

Figure .: Regulation of valence demands in HPSG

Given this general treatment of valence, the transparency of virðist can be repre-
sented by the entry in Figure .. The cross-referencing of the two  values (via
the boxed integer ‘ 1 ’) indicates that the  attribute of virðist literally shares its
value with the  value of its complement. Identifying the values of the two 
attributes ensures that any constraints that apply to the  of the complement of
virðist will apply to its own syntactic . Hence when vanta occurs as the head
of the complement, as in Figure ., its accusative  demands will be identified
with the  demands of virðist. Only an accusative subject such as hana can satisfy


these demands. So this analysis forges a direct association between hana and the
complement vanta peninga, but the association is established by means of structure
sharing, rather than through constituent structure displacements.
 ⟨ ⟩ 
 1
 ⟨ [ ⟨ ⟩]⟩
 
 2  1 
 ⟨ ⟩ 
virðist: - 1 2

Figure .: Lexical entry of subject raising verb

[ ]
 . ⟨ ⟩
 ⟨ ⟩

  
 3rd  ⟨ ⟩
  
 sg 
  
1

1 
  fem   ⟨ ⟩
 acc
 ⟨ ⟩ 
 1  ⟨ ⟩
 ⟨ ⟩ 
   1
hana  2  2 
 ⟨ ⟩  ⟨ ⟩
- 1, 2

virðist vanta peninga

Figure .: Subject ‘raising’ as structure sharing

This analysis shows how the complex-valued features that provide an account
of basic valence demands in Figure . interact with structure-sharing to allow the
subject demands of a raising verb to be identified with those of its complement.
Furthermore, precisely the same elements oer an analysis of ‘control’ construc-
tions, in which the higher controller merely identifies the reference of the subject of
the complement. The properties of control constructions are discussed in detail in
Sag and Pollard () but they can be broadly subsumed under the generalization
that control verbs are not transparent to the syntactic demands of the head of their
complement. The contrast with raising verbs is reflected in the fact that the sub-
ject of the control verb  ‘hope’ in (.b) follows the default nominative pattern
and does not inherit the accusative case governed by its complement  in (.a)
(repeated from (.a)).
A similar analysis is proposed within LFG in terms of ‘functional control’ (Bresnan ).


 (.) Icelandic subject control constructions (cf. Andrews : )
a. Hana vantar peninga.
her. lack. money.
‘She lacks money.’
b. Hún/*hana vonast til að vanta ekki peninga.
she./*her. hope. toward not lack money.
‘She hopes not to lack money.’
The intuition that the subject of a control verb merely identifies the reference
of its complement’s subject is expressed by the entry in Figure ., in which the
index values of the two  values are identified (i.e. structure-shared). The fact
 ⟨ [ ]⟩ 
 1  3
 ⟨ [ ⟨[ ]⟩]
 
 2   3 
 
 ⟨ ⟩ 
vanast: - 1, 2

Figure .: Lexical constraints on subject control verb

that index but not case values are shared in this entry allows the subject of vonast
to select a nominative subject and control a complement that selects an accusative
subject in Figure .. Exactly the same formal components determine the anal-
yses in Figures . and .; there is no analogue to distinct ‘raising’ and ‘equi’
transformations or to distinct PRO and ‘trace’ elements in the subordinate subject
positions. Instead it is solely the locus of structure sharing that distinguishes these
subconstructions.

... Lexical rules

The treatment of argument structure in terms of a list-valued - feature also
provides the formal basis for a lexical analysis of valence alternations in HPSG. Lex-
ical rules can apply to an entry and modify the - list in various ways, by adding,
deleting, permuting or reassociating elements. The new entries that are defined by
these types of rules will then have dierent combinatory and interpretive proper-
ties, due to the cross-referencing of - elements with valence features and with
semantic representations. For example, dierent versions of passive lexical rules
are proposed in Pollard and Sag (: ) and Manning and Sag (), and a
number of other valence-changing lexical rules are proposed in the HPSG literature
(see, e.g., Wechsler and Noh () and Müller ()). However, the study of
valence alternations has been less a primary focus of research within HPSG than in,
say, LFG (see the discussion of Lexical Mapping Theory in chapter ).
There is more to say about Icelandic raising constructions and the mechanisms that allow quirky
‘lexical’ case to take priority over default ‘structural’ case. See Andrews (, ) for some discussion.


 [ ]
 . ⟨ ⟩
 ⟨ ⟩

  
 3rd  ⟨ ⟩
 
3 sg 

  
1

1 
  fem   ⟨ ⟩
 nom
 ⟨ ⟩   ⟨[ ]⟩
 1
 3
 ⟨ ⟩   
 
 2  2  acc 
hún  ⟨ ⟩  
- 1, 2  ⟨ ⟩

vonast til að vanta ekki peninga

Figure .: Subject ‘control’ as index feature sharing

... The architecture of signs

Figures . and . illustrate the tree-based diagrams that are often used to exhibit
HPSG analyses. These representations show the usefulness of tree-based diagrams
for isolating particular aspects of an analysis, in the present case the role of valence
features and structure sharing. However, the familiarity of this representational for-
mat comes at a cost, as it slightly misrepresents the - nature of HPSG.
In GPSG, feature structures are labels that annotate the nodes of a phrase struc-
ture tree. But HPSG inverts this conception and incorporates constituent structure
links within general data structures termed . Within the version of HPSG ex-
pounded in Pollard and Sag (), a head-complement sign has the general struc-
ture in Figure .. There are two innovative aspects of this analysis. The first is that
syntactic and semantic features are consolidated into a single type of data structure,
termed a synsem. The second is that constituent structure is represented by 
(‘daughters’) attributes that take signs or lists of signs as values. Hence the VP from
Figure . above is represented, albeit somewhat less perspicuously, by the sign in
Figure . below.
Even the fairly rich analysis in Figure . suppresses syntactic detail (not to
mention all of the semantic properties incorporated within synsem objects). Al-
though the highly explicit nature of the HPSG formalism may seem somewhat im-
posing, the formal character of the formalism is designed with the dual goals of
broad-coverage theoretical description and large-scale practical implementation in
mind. For students (and general linguists) who mainly want to understand the
See also Orgun () for a sign-based model of morphology compatible with HPSG assumptions.
Repositories of information, publications and materials related to current HPSG implementations
can be found at http://lingo.stanford.edu/, http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/Projects/core.html, and


  
 phonological representation
 
 syntactic and semantic features
 [ ]
 - single sign 
 
- <list of signs>

Figure .: Structure of head-complement signs

 
 <vantar peninga>
  ⟨ ⟩ 
 
 
1
 
 
  ⟨⟩ 
 
    
  <vantar> 
   ⟨ [ ]⟩ 

  ⟨
 ⟩
 
    1  acc 
-   ⟨ ⟩  

     
      
 
2
   
  ⟨ ⟩ 
  
- 
1 2
 
    
   <peninga> 

       
  ⟨   
⟩ 
    3rd 
 
- 2     
    plu  



   
     masc   
 acc

Figure .: Partial analysis of vantar peninga

basic intuitions and desiderata that underlie HPSG models, a more streamlined ver-
sion of the formalism is presented in Sag et al. ().

.. Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG)

In much the same way that initial models of HPSG drew on ideas from categorial
grammar and adapted techniques from AI and theoretical computer science, current
models of Sign-Based Construction Grammar integrate key empirical insights from
the Berkeley Construction Grammar tradition (Goldberg ; Kay and Filmore
). The conceptual unification of these traditions rests on the insight that the
rich construction inventories investigated in Construction Grammar can be mod-
elled by organizing individual constructions into inheritance networks. The formal
architecture required by this analysis is already fully present in standard models of
HPSG, in the form of the type hierarchies that cross-classify individual signs repre-
senting words, phrases and clauses. The main prerequisite for a construction-based
extension of HPSG is then a type of feature structure that represents constructions.
http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/∼stefan/Babel/. See also Müller (: f.).


 As noted in Sag (b, ), feature structure counterparts of the local trees
from GPSG provide suitable candidates. Individual constructions can be repre-
sented by feature structures exhibiting the organization in Figure ., where 
represents the mother sign and  a list of daughter signs. Many of the construction-
specific properties investigated in the modern Construction Grammar literature (typ-
ified by Kay and Filmore ()) can be integrated into these unified data structures.

 
construct
 
 sign0 
 <sign1 ,…,signn >

Figure .: General structure of a construct (Sag b: )

As in HPSG, the inheritance of properties within a construction inventory can be

modelled by type hierarchies. The partial hierarchy in Figure . represents natural
classes of constructions relevant to the analysis of extraction in English.
.
construct

phrasal-cxt lexical-cxt

… headed-cxt derivational-cxt inflectional-cxt …

… subject-head-cxt head-filler-cxt aux-initial-cxt

Figure .: Partial construction type hierarchy (Sag b: )

The detailed treatment of English relative and filler-gap clauses in Sag (,
a) presents a sustained argument for extending HPSG models to include a no-
tion of construction. At the same time, these studies make a case for reconceptu-
alizing grammatical constructions in the context of a constraint-based architecture,
rather than in the exemplar-based terms assumed in traditional grammars.
These studies also illustrate the ways that phrase structure models continue to
evolve, driven in part by the logic of their basic organizing principles, and in part
by their ability to incorporate and extend insights from other traditions. From their
origins in the string rewriting systems in Chomsky (), extended phrase struc-
ture models have assumed their modern form by successively integrating traditional
perspectives on grammatical features and units with more formal notions such as
inheritance hierarchies and constraint satisfaction. In addition to providing analy-
ses of a wide range of syntactic constructions, these models have clarified how ex-
plicit mechanisms for regulating the distribution of grammatical information within


a single syntactic representation can achieve any of the benefits that had, beginning
with the work of Harris (), been claimed to accrue to derivational analyses.

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