A basic idea of the transformational tradition is that constituents move. More recently, there has been a trend towards the view that all features are lexical features. And in recent "minimalist" grammars, structure building operations are assumed to be feature driven. A simple grammar formalism with these properties is presented here and briefly explored. Grammars in this formalism can define languages that are not in the "mildly context sensitive" class defined by Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1994).

. We provide first-order axioms for the theories of finite trees with bounded branching and finite trees with arbitrary (finite) branching. The signature is chosen to express, in a natural way, those properties of trees most relevant to linguistic theories. These axioms provide a foundation for results in linguistics that are based on reasoning formally about such properties. We include some observations on the expressive power of these theories relative to traditional language complexity classes. Key words: Trees, First-Order Theories, Axiomatizations, Natural Language Syntax, EhrenfeuchtFra iss'e Games 1. INTRODUCTION There has been, over the last ten or fifteen years, a growing body of research in generative and computational linguistics that depends to a great extent on reasoning formally about trees. For example, there are a number of grammatical formalisms that have been proposed that manipulate logical descriptions of the trees representing the syntactic structure of strings r...

Contents 1 Language Complexity in Generative Grammar 3 Part I The Descriptive Complexity of Strongly Context-Free Languages 11 2 Introduction to Part I 13 3 Trees as Elementary Structures 15 4 L 2 K;P and SnS 25 5 Definability and Non-Definability in L 2 K;P 35 6 Conclusion of Part I 57 DRAFT 2 / Contents Part II The Generative Capacity of GB Theories 59 7 Introduction to Part II 61 8 The Fundamental Structures of GB Theories 69 9 GB and Non-definability in L 2 K;P 79 10 Formalizing X-Bar Theory 93 11 The Lexicon, Subcategorization, Theta-theory, and Case Theory 111 12 Binding and Control 119 13 Chains 131 14 Reconstruction 157 15 Limitations of the Interpretation 173 16 Conclusion of Part II 179 A Index of Definitions 183 Bibliography DRAFT 1<

The research of the last four decades suggests strongly that abstract laws of significant generality underlie much of the superficial complexity of human language. Evidence in favor of this conjecture comes from two different types of facts. First, there are cross-linguistic facts. Investigation of unfamiliar and typologically diverse languages is regularly illuminated by what we already know about other

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n of X( and ZP, XP. This XP is called the Projection of X( (the top XP node is called Segment). Descriptively, spec-head agreement still exists, in the sense that a subject agrees with AgrS (which in turn agrees with the verb, cf. Chomsky 1993). Therefore, the XP Projection must have access to the features of X( that are relevant in the agreement relation (in our example, the AgrSP Projection must have access to the N-features of AgrS). Languages may differ in whether X( is accessible to its Projection or not. The following is proposed: (3) 1. A functional head . is [accessible] 2. A [-accessible] functional head . is made [+accessible] by removing the V-features of . So if AgrS is [+accessible], the N-features of AgrS

this paper both Lex and Far finite. Given a gr ammar that is for malized in this way, we will consider 2 Keenan and Stabler (1996) define languages this way in or]6 to consider for example, whatr4:j6 ons a r pr]j24" by automor phisms of L that fix F,justasas in semantics we can consider the similar question: what is pr eser ved by automor - phisms of E that fix E,(2, #) . But in this paper , languages ar e defined as closur es justfor simplicity. 302 / Edward Stabler . What is the expr]j0 ve power of gr]:0HN that der ve the ver al complexes? (what sets ar definable) . What is the str:064" complexity of thever]H complexes in these gre mar: . Since str uctur e building is dr iven by lexical featur es, is ther e a usefulrful4:6[6j4 on ofder vations as gr]]H of featur checking r4H2H ons? Exprj:[ ve power is familiar but expr[06 on complexity isper haps not so familiar , so we quicklyr eview the ideas we will use. What is the size of a sentence like the following? every student criticized some teacher When compar ng sentences, one possible measur is simply the count of the charj4"H0 the length of the sequence. In this case, we have 37 char4"] (counting the spaces between wor4]2 To get a slightly moruniver04 measur0 it is common to consider how many binar choices a rr:N2 r ed to specify each element of the sequence. In the ASCII coding scheme, eachchar acter is specified by 7binar y choices, 7 bits. So in the ASCII coding scheme, the sequence isrj:4"]HH with 359 bits. 3 When we have a gr[HH0 that includes the sentence, we make available another way of specifying the sentence. The sentence can be specified by specifying its shor4[j der vation. Let's see how this wor s. Suppose we have the followinggr][0H G =#Lex,F#,with 8 lexical items consisting of str in...

. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

this article.