Syntactic Theories
Syntactic theories are the competing formal frameworks that aim to characterise the structure of sentences, differing in their primitives, mechanisms, and the division of labour among lexicon, structure, and constraints.
Definition
A syntactic theory is a formal framework specifying the primitives, representations, and operations or constraints by which the grammatical sentences of a language are characterised and assigned structure.
Scope
This area surveys the major contemporary frameworks of syntax: the transformational-generative tradition culminating in the Minimalist Program, the constraint-based and lexicalist frameworks of Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and the head-dependency frameworks of Dependency Grammar. It compares their assumptions rather than re-describing phrase structure or grammatical relations, which are treated in neighbouring areas.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What are the primitive units and operations of each syntactic framework?
- How do derivational and constraint-based theories differ in architecture?
- What role do the lexicon and feature structures play across frameworks?
- How do frameworks treat phenomena such as displacement and grammatical relations?
Key concepts
- derivational versus constraint-based grammar
- lexicalism
- feature structures
- constituency versus dependency
- Merge and Agree
- monostratal versus multistratal representation
Key theories
- Transformational-generative grammar
- The Chomskyan tradition that derives sentence structures through operations on phrase markers, culminating in the Minimalist Program's reduction of grammar to Merge, Agree, and economy principles.
- Constraint-based lexicalist grammar
- The family of non-derivational frameworks, including Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, that characterise well-formedness through simultaneous constraints over rich lexical and feature representations.
History
Generative syntax began with Chomsky's transformational grammar and passed through Government and Binding to the Minimalist Program (1995). Reacting to transformational machinery, lexicalist and constraint-based frameworks emerged: Lexical-Functional Grammar (Bresnan) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994). In parallel, the dependency tradition descending from Tesnière (1959) built syntax on head-dependent relations rather than constituency, and is influential in computational linguistics.
Debates
- Derivations versus constraints
- Whether syntactic structure is best modelled by step-by-step derivations, as in minimalism, or by simultaneous constraint satisfaction over declarative representations, as in HPSG and LFG.
- Constituency versus dependency
- Whether the fundamental syntactic relation is membership in hierarchical constituents or the asymmetric link between a head and its dependents.
Key figures
- Noam Chomsky
- Joan Bresnan
- Carl Pollard
- Ivan Sag
- Lucien Tesnière
Related topics
Seminal works
- tesniere1959
- pollardsag1994
- chomsky1995
- bresnan2001
Frequently asked questions
- Why are there so many syntactic theories?
- Frameworks differ in their foundational choices, such as whether grammar is derivational or constraint-based and whether structure rests on constituency or dependency. These choices lead to genuinely different theories that are evaluated by how well they describe and explain the data.
- Do these theories disagree about the data?
- They largely agree on the basic facts of grammaticality but differ in how they represent and explain them. Much debate concerns elegance, restrictiveness, and which framework best generalises across languages and phenomena.