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Abstract:

The interaction between theoretical and computational linguistics, while not often acknowledged, undoubtedly had some influence in the relative failure of the previous incarnations of Hudson's Word Grammar (also known as Dependency Grammar and Daughter-Dependency Grammar) to capture the imagination in the same way that the context-free phrase structure grammars of the 1980s did. Who needed nice theories of syntax that had relationships between words expressed with pretty drawings when one could have the infinitely more computable phrase structure rules? But Hudson was undeterred, and perhaps in the vein of the mountain coming to Mohammed, he has valiantly attempted in this volume to bring his theory of Word Grammar (WG) closer to computational linguistics and AI. This is no mean feat for someone whose background is firmly in theoretical linguistics, and a lack of familiarity with computational matters is sometimes painfully clean From the perspective of a computational linguist, some of the explanations and definitions are rather unnecessary, but it must be assumed that the book was primarily written with the theoretical linguist in mind. The theory of WG originally set out to rival phrase-structure theories of gram-

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