The History of the Phrase
As a notion in linguistic
Part I
The Phrase
 Today phrases are an essential and undeniable truth
 Hornstein, Nunes and Grohmann:
 F4: Words are composed into units with hierarchical structure
i.e. phrases.
 Given this, they should have been discovered a long time ago
 So when did linguists start referring to phrases?
Brief Overview of the History of
Linguistics
 The history of linguistic investigation goes back more than
2500 years:
 Before 600 BCE Indian linguistics
 only ‘discovered’ in Europe many centuries later
 Socrates (469-399 BCE),
 one of the first to write on Greek linguistics
 only through secondary sources (e.g. Plato 428-348)
 Study of Latin, Arabic and Hebrew after Greek
 Other European languages only in late Middle Ages
Indian Linguistics
 Started as a way of preserving an understanding and correct
pronunciation of Vedic Sanskrit
 Changed over the centuries (as languages do)
 Was the language of the scriptures and of religious rituals
 Wanted to maintaine an understanding and correct
pronunciation of Vedic for religious purposes
 So they started to write grammars
Panini
 One of the most important of the Indian Linguists
 Not because he was one of the earliest
 His grammar was written sometime between 500 and 300 BCE
 But because it is the most extensive
 Contains nearly 4000 rules
 And because of it’s remarkable advanced nature
 It contained notions not found in western linguistics until the 20th century
 The phoneme
 Null phonemes
 Formal rules
 Rule ordering
The Nature of Sanskrit
 Sanskrit was a highly inflecting language
 A lot of Case and agreement morphology
 Word order was much freer than in languages like English
 Raamah pustakam pathati
Ram books
reads
 Raamah pathati pustakam
 Pustakam Raamah pathati
 Pustakam pathati Raamah
 Pathati Raamah pustakam
 Pathati pustakam Raamah
What did Panini say?
 Not surprising that most of the grammar is about phonology
and morphology
 Had very little to say about syntax
Phrase Structure Rules?
 According to Kiparsky Panini’s grammar contained rules
like:
 A  AA /C _ D
 ‘A’ becomes ‘AA’ in the context of a preceding ‘C’ and a following ‘D’
 This looks very similar to a phrase structure rule:
 S  NP VP
 ‘S’ is made up of an ‘NP’ followed by a ‘VP’
 But
 This is not Panini’s representation of this rule – it’s Kiparsky’s
 It isn’t a phrase structure rule, but a morphological one
 It is a reduplication rule
 A is reduplicated (AA) in a certain context
Why Panini didn’t discover the phrase
 Although very advanced, it understandably concentrated on
the most obvious aspects
 Morphology – because there are many forms of many words
 Phonlogy – because the written system had a phonetic base
(unlike Chinese)
 Because of the free word order, syntax was not so obvious
 Because Indian grammarians studied no other languages
 didn’t compare Sanskrit to other systems and so couldn’t notice
patterns in syntactic phenomena
Greek
 Ancient Greek was a written language over 1400 BCE
 Mycenaeans - Linear B
 Based on the Minoan syllabic system
 Wasn’t ideal for Greek and we still can’t work out how this early version of
Greek sounded
 The first written system was forgotten until about 900 BCE
 Then a new written system was developed




Based on Phoenician script
Phonetic representation – more suited to Greek pronunciation
Developed over the years
Now is the basis of most European written systems
 We can therefore assume that the Greeks were interested in their
language (at least phonetic aspects of it) from about this time
Greek Language Philosophers
 Socrates (469-399 BCE)
 No written records of anything that Socrates said
 We have the reports of other Greek philosophers (e.g. Plato)
 Unclear whether these accurately portray Socrates' ideas or whether they
portray Plato’s ideas
 Plato (428-348) also had things of his own to say about
language
 Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) furthered these ideas
 The Stoics (310 – 50 BCE) probably gave the most thorough
treatment
What the Greeks had to say
 Greek linguistics was bound up in Greek philosophy
 Mathematics; Physics; Astronomy; Biology; Ethics;
 Logic (study of ‘valid arguments’); Rhetoric (the study of
persuasive speaking); Epistemology (the study of
understanding)
 E.g. whether words derive in nature or are man made?
 the nature of objects themselves are the origin of words
 man gave names to objects randomly
 Obviously these sorts of questions are not likely to reveal
much about syntactic structure
Specific Greek Ideas on Language
 Phonetics, but only to the extent that it involved the written
system
 No written system is purely phonetic and so what they had to say on
the subject was not particularly interesting
 Semantics, but more as a part of logic
 Distinguished subject and predicate from a semantic point of view,
but didn’t realise that this had any realisation in the sentence
 Plato was first to split sentence into two major elements:
 onoma (noun)  subject
 rhema (verb)  predicate


Words, not phrases
identified morphologically
 They were interested in words and their ontology
 led to questions of categories
Specific Greek Ideas on Language
 They were interested in sentences and their functions
 declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives
 Not so much in their forms
 They were interested in morphology
 created paradigms of all the different forms of types of word
 And terms for these forms
The Nature of Greek
 It is not surprising that the Greeks were not so interested in
syntax
 Greek, like Sanskrit, was highly inflectional and had free word
order
 The obvious aspects of the language were morphological and not syntactic
 Studied just one language (Greek)
 Their philosophical interests lead them in a different direction
On Subordination
 Plato identified two basic elements (words) of the sentence
 Greeks also knew other words were subordinate to these
 Is this the beginning of the phrase?
 Today subordination = something is part of something
 Greek notion more like ranks in the Army
 Captains are subordinate to Generals
 Doesn’t mean that captains are part of generals
 Hierarchy – but not constituent structure
Dependency
 X is subordinate to Y = X depends on Y
 Dependency marked morphologically (i.e. By agreement)
 Not semantically – meaning was the domain of logic, not linguistics
 Free word order meant that there was no compulsion to see this
relationship in terms of phrase structure
Latin
 The Romans impressed by Greek intellectualism
 encouraged the Greeks to continue their studies
 Study of Latin very much influence by Greek linguistics
 Most attempted to make what the Greeks said fit Latin
 Latin similar to Greek
 But not the same as Greek
 categories and terms did not fit perfectly
 This dependency on Greek linguistics meant that the Romans
did not produce much innovation
Priscian
 Priscian (500 CE): one of the most influential grammars of Latin
 basis of the study of Latin even after the fall of the empire
 Almost entirely based on Thrax’s (170 – 90 BCE) Greek grammar
 Thrax’s grammar did not even mention syntax
 Priscian had 2 volumes on it
 Nothing of interest in these chapters
 contained rather dubious philosophical arguments
o Latin is basically S V because existence precedes actions
 He did mention the notion of a subordinate clause
 But again, the use of subordination was that of the Greeks rather than the
modern linguistic one
The Middle Ages
 The middle ages starts with the fall of the Roman Empire and
ends with the start of the Renaissance
 From a linguistic point of view we can split it into two parts
 Scholasticism
 Not particularly interesting – mostly based on Priscian grammar
 Speculative Grammar
 More innovative – the start of the study of other languages
Scolasticism
 The main idea to bring all knowledge under one (Christian)
framework
 It strongly rejected ‘pagan’ Greek learning
 Latin became a lingua franca
 Most linguistic work = producing Lain grammars for teaching
 Ironically this maintained Greek influence
 based on Priscian grammar, which itself was based on Thrax
Speculative Grammar
 Interests in other languages than Latin started to gather
strength
 Through influence of Arabic linguistics from Moors in Spain
 (influenced by Aristotelian ideas)
 Through influence of Hebrew linguistics from Biblical studies
 Perhaps because of this, more emphasis was put on syntax
 Speculative grammarians first to unify syntactic and semantic
notions of subject and predicate
Thomas of Erfurt (1310)
 Socrates albus currit benne
Socrates white runs well
“white Socrates runs well”
 ‘albus’ is dependent on ‘Socrates’ and ‘benne’ is dependent on
‘currit’
 Does this mean subject made up of ‘Socrates albus’ and a predicate
made up of ‘currit benne’?
 i.e. phrase structure analysis?
 But he took the meaning of dependency to be the traditional one
 “one part of a construction stands to another either as depending on it
or satisfying its dependency”
Thomas of Erfurt (1310)
 Also took Greek idea that dependency is based on
morphology
 verb agrees with subject, so verb is dependent on subject
 Therefore the subject is the main element of the sentence
 Socrates
albus currit
benne
 Very different analysis to modern phrase structure based one
 There is no evidence here of the notion of a phrase
The Renaissance (starting 14th C)
 The Renaissance was both forward and backward looking
 Revived interest in classical studies (Greek)
 Rejected current wisdom
 Rise of the idea of nation  more emphasis placed on
national languages and less on the lingua franca
 Surprisingly not much innovative thinking from a linguistic
point of view
 Most attempted to force the analysis of national languages into
the framework of Priscian
 who had already tried to force the analysis of Latin into the framework of
Thrax!
Port Royal Grammarians
 One group of Renaissance linguists did have some interesting ideas
about syntax
 Connect syntax to meaning unfortunately
 rather than the traditional (Greek) view that morphology was its basis
 the start of the ‘notional definition’ of categories (a noun is a name,
etc.)
 More interestingly, developed a new view of subordination
 Subordination is a superficial representation of independent
constructs:
 The invisible God created the visible world 
 God is invisible. God created the world. The world is visible.
 This view necessarily precludes the idea of phrases
 the complex sentence is not made up of connected elements, but of
independent simple ideas.
Comparative Linguistics
 During the Renaissance more languages than ever before
came to be studied
 But not much thought about possible connections between
languages
 Assumed system devised by the Greeks was applicable to other
languages, it was
 Not assumed that other languages had developed from Greek
 There had been several theories, from Biblical sources, that
held that European languages all descended from a single
parent language
Scythian Hypothesis
 According to the Bible, God made everyone speak different
languages after the tower of Babel incident
 But, then the flood killed everyone, except for Noah and his
family
 Legend has it that Noah’s son, Japheth, was the father of
Europe
 he spoke a language from which all European languages have
descended
 This language, apparently, was called Scythian (Goropoius
1569)
 Scythian died out a long time ago
Confirming the Scythian Hypothesis
 Once enough attention had been turned to European languages, it
started to be noted that there were similarities between them
 Furthermore, regularities in the differences between languages
could be noted
 These mainly concerned the forms of words:
 Latin
pisces
pede
pater
pinna
pugnam
English
fish
foot
father
feather
fight
 So it seemed that the Scythian Hypothesis could be correct.
Throughout the 17th century it gained popularity
Indian linguistics comes to Europe
 The Indian linguistic tradition had been known about in Europe
since the 1500s
 Walter (1733) added Sanskrit to Scythian family
 real interest in the Indian tradition started
 Comparative Linguistics virtually swept all other linguistic
interests away
 The notion of the Indo European language family really took off
 On a scientific basis more than a religious one
 It had been thought that Hungarian was not an Indo European
language since the early 18th Century,
 1770 Sajnovics - Hungarian and Lapp are related and
 1799 Gyármathi - Hungarian and Finnish are from the same family
Neogrammarians
 Towards the end of the 1800s a group of particularly
aggressive young linguists in Germany dominated linguistics
 They criticised previous comparative linguistics for being too
wishy-washy
 Believed that sound laws should be inviolable
 laws that govern how languages change over time and hence can
be related to common ancestors
 if there were exceptions to these laws, they cannot have been
stated right
Why Comparative Linguistics did not
discover the phrase
 The main focus of the comparativists was on the lexicon
 easy to collect and compare vocabularies of languages to
discover similarities and patterns in differences
 not easy to do the same with syntactic phenomena
 Some languages have free word order, others have more fixed orders
 Some languages have basic SVO organisation, others VSO or SOV
 These things don’t seem to have much of a connection
 Therefore, not much attention was paid to syntactic
phenomena,
 no surprise that no new discoveries were made in the area for
the nearly 200 years that comparative linguistics dominated the
study of language
European Structuralists
 The dominance of comparative linguistics was finally broken
 Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘A course in general linguistics’
published 1916
 three year after his death
 This ushered in a period known as Structuralism
 A hopeful title, from our perspective
What Structuralists Believe
 The elements that make up a language form a system which
can only be understood in terms of each other
 The elements are signs
 An arbitrary link between form and meaning
 The meaning of the signs is dependent on the meaning of other
signs in the system
 The 8.25 to Paris
Did the Structuralists discover phrase
structure?
 Unfortunately not
 Like the comparativists, the structuralists were concerned more
with words
 Their pronunciation (the Prague school)
 Their meaning
 Saussure had virtually nothing to say about syntax as we
conceive of it today
Conclusion
 From the beginnings of the study of language
 Prior to 600 BCE
 To the Structuralist period in Europe
 Until after the 2nd World War
 No one came up with the notion of a phrase
 Reasons
 The languages which were studied initially did not make syntactic
discoveries easy
 The later study of other languages were concerned with applying old
ideas to new situations, rather than being innovative
 The interests of the times (philosophical issues, language families,
languages as systems) were more easily satisfied through looking at
words
The History of the Phrase
As a notion in linguistics
Part II
Linguistics in the USA before 19th C
 Specifically American linguistics is a relatively new thing
 Previously American linguists were doing European linguistics
(especially Indo-European based Comparative linguistics)
 America has a wealth of its own languages (Amerindian)
 But until the late 1800s there was little intellectual interest in
these cultures
 Americans were interested in expanding their own European based
culture and the native populations were a hindrance
 The European attitude towards native peoples of the Americas had been
one of cultural imperialism from the start
 So linguistic efforts were always geared to teaching the natives
European languages rather than learning theirs
Boas: the father of American linguistics
 Franz Boas (1858-1942) was a German anthropologist
 He started as a physicist and geographer
 became deeply interested in Amerindian culture on an
expedition to Canada
 Moved to America in 1887
 He saw the study of Amerindian cultures and languages as
urgent as they were fast disappearing
 many had already died out
 Devised ‘field methods’ to train linguistic students so they
could rapidly form grammatical descriptions without having
to learn the language
Discovery Procedures
 Boas’ discovery procedures were a set of tools linguists could
apply to discover the grammar of a language
 The best known of these are based on the notion of distribution
 The minimal pair test
 If two sounds appearing in the same context produce different words then
they are distinct sounds (= phonemes)
 [khæt] – [phæt]
[kh] and [ph] are distinctive
 [phæt] – *[pæt]
[ph] and [p] are not
 In cases where sounds are in complementary distribution, they are nondistinctive
 [spæt] – *[sphæt]
 This is different to the case where a sound is not part of a language
 *[Xæt], *[sXæt],
Boas’ Philosophical Assumptions
 Boas was a believer in cultural relativity
 Against the idea that cultures pass through stages of
development with Western culture as the highest
 Cultures cannot be evaluated against one another as higher or
lower
 Cultures develop their own ideas from which they view the
world and thus cannot be compared on any external measure
 To understand a culture you need to study it from its own
position
Linguistic Relativity
 Humboldt (1767-1835)
 Inner form of a language
 Languages don’t necessarily differ in the concepts they can express
 They differ in how they combine concepts in order to view the world
 Boas combined Humboldt’s inner form with cultural relativity in
‘linguistic relativity’
 The belief that we cannot make generalisations about a language based
on what we learn of another language
 Goes against European linguistic tradition since the Greeks
 Linguists must study a language in its own terms
 Hence discovery procedures
 Implies that languages can vary without limit
 Supported by the fact that Amerindian languages seemed very different from
European langauges
Boas Reprieve
 Linguistic Relativity
 Languages can only be studied in their own terms
 Discovery Procedures
 There are methods we can apply to discover the units that
languages make use of
 However, Boas did not discover the phrase
Bloomfield
 Leonard Bloomfield (1988-1949) was the founder of
American Structuralism
 But he wasn’t always a structuralist
 He trained in Germany under the Neogrammarians
 He became very impressed by the Wilhelm Wundt (18321920)
 Wundt is said to be the father of experimental psychology
 His aim was to make psychology scientific
 He used introspection
 Bloomfield wanted to make Linguistics more scientific
Bloomfield and Boas
 Bloomfield was also influenced by Boas
 Particularly in terms of linguistic relativity and the use of
discovery procedures
Bloomfield 1914
 His influences from Boas and Wundt were brought together
in his short book An Introduction to the Study of Language
(1914)
 This became a popular course book for linguistics in America
 It contained chapters on all aspects of linguistics, including
syntax
 It contained the word ‘phrase’ twice
 Both times referring to what we would call an idiom
 Clearly at this time he did not know about phrases
Bloomfield and Structuralism
 In the1910s, Wundt became heavily criticised for his methods
 Introspection was not really scientific
 Bloomfield needed something else to base his linguistic
science on
 In 1923 he published a seemingly positive review of
Saussure’s work
 This book still had no mention of the phrase
 But even then, it was apparent that he had replaced Wundt
with Behaviourism
Behaviourism
 Behaviourist Psychology took an extreme empiricist stance
 To account for human behaviour all one needed was to directly
connect
 The environment (stimuli)
 The subsequent behaviour (response)
 There is no need to refer to unobservable things like ‘mind’
 Behaviourism in Linguistics is a bit tricky
 There is plenty of stuff that we cannot directly observe
 Bloomfield thought it was possible
 If every abstract level was ultimately based on what is
observable – sound
 Phonetics  phonology  morphology  syntax
Bloomfield’s Linguistics
 In 1933 Bloomfield rewrote his earlier textbook in a much
enlarged version Language
 In this book the chapter on Syntax concerns itself with constituent
structure
 The term phrase is used to mean a constituent
 Therefore we know that the notion of the phrase was introduced
at some point between 1914 and 1933, probably in the 1920s
 The origins are a combination of:
 Bloomfield’s empiricism
 His application of discovery procedures
 Phone  phoneme  morpheme  word  phrase  sentence
Bloomfield on Phrases
 The chapter on syntax is not very long
 It is rather superficial
 Containing a few not very detailed examples
 Poor John
 And no attempt at representation
 Some discussion of the notion ‘head’ of phrase
 Head is defined distributionally
 A head is a word which has the same distribution as the phrase
 Endocentric phrases have heads
 Poor John  John
 Exocentric phrases don’t have heads
 In the park; if John ran away
 But the man doesn’t have a head by this definition
 the man has the same distribution as poor John, so they are of the same category
 So the head does not determine the category of the phrase – unlike current view
Open, closed and partially closed
phrases
 An open phrase is something that can be added to and still be the
same type of phrase:
 students – interesting students – these interesting students
 A closed phrase cannot be added to without changing into another
phrase
 these interesting students – * polite these interesting students – saw
these interesting students
 A partially closed phrase can be added to, but not by everything
that could be added to an open phrase
 black dogs – big black dogs – the big black dogs
 big dogs – * black big dogs
 This is not very illuminating
 Just gives names to phenomena without explaining it
Neo-Bloomfieldians
 After Bloomfield’s death (1949) his students carried on his
work
 Zellig Harris (1909-1992), Charles Hockett (1916-2000)
 Hockett gave more detail to the Immediate Constituent
Analysis
 Harris formalised the system to a greater extent
Hockett
 Hockett’s A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958) contains 3
detailed chapters on the Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis
 It is interesting to go into detail about these ideas as they
show that Hockett’s view of the phrase is not the same as
today’s
 Like Bloomfield, he used distributional devices to define
syntactic notions such as ‘head’
 With the same problems
 He did try to represent structure
 Though he said this was not important in itself – just useful for
linguists
Chinese Box representation
 Hockett represented structure like this
 This representation allows things that is not allowed in
current phrase structure diagrams (trees)
 Disappearance of elements
 Markers – add no meaning
 Discontinuous Constituents
 Constituents split by material which is
not part of them
The Start of Modern Phrases
 Chomsky (1928- ) was a student of Harris during the 1950s
 1957 Syntactic Structures
 A small book for computer science students
 Contained his own version of the Structuralist IC analysis
 Phrase Structure Grammar
 This was a ‘straw man’
 Designed to show what Chomsky thought was wrong with the IC analysis
Phrase Structure Grammar
 Made up of rewrite rules, e.g.
 S  NP VP
 VP V NP
 These produce phrase structures, represenatable as a tree

 This is now how we conceive of a phrase
 Phrases have positions inside other structures
 Phrases have structures of their own
How do phrases differ from ICs
 It is impossible to have discontinuous constituents in a phrase
structure grammar
 Rewrite rules concern mothers, daughters and sisters
 S  NP VP
 S is the mother of NP and VP
 NP and VP are daughters of S
 NP and VP are sisters
 Mothers and daughters stand in a dominance relation
 Sisters stand in a precedence relation
Discontinuous constituents and
crossing branches
 A structure with discontinuous constituents must contain
crossing branches
 This involves a precedence relation between Aux and NP
 These are not sisters
 NP is the great aunt of Aux
 Phrase structure rules do not refer to grandmothers, aunts,
great aunts, etc. and so cannot produce these structures
Why is there a difference?
 The structuralists did not adopt a restrictive theory of
phrases
 The Chinese box representation placed very few limitations on
what could be represented
 Even if there were things that were difficult to represent, this
would not have mattered
 Representations were not important – only tools for the convenience of
the linguist
 Chomsky’s PSGs are restrictive theories of phrase structure
 There are clearly things that they cannot do (restricted)
 The representations come directly from the theory (rules) and
so are important for making the restrictions obvious
Was Chomsky right to criticise ICs?
 PSGs were a straw man – meant to be knocked down
 PSG and IC analysis were clearly not exactly the same
 But the structuralists had no theory
 So they were immune from criticism
 But at the same time, they made no real claims
 In order to see the problems with the IC analysis, Chomsky
was forced to invent the theory
 One of his points was that the lack of formal theories of
language is one of the weaknesses of linguistic investigation
since the classical period
 With the exception of Panini
Conclusion
 The notion of a phrase first came into being in the 1920s
 If the history of the study of Language were put into 1 hour, the phrase
would have been discovered less than 15 seconds ago
 It probably developed out of two ideas
 Radical empiricism
 Discovery procedures
 Everything must be based on what is observable and can be discovered by observing
the distribution of elements at various linguistic levels
 Bloomfield didn’t really develop the notion much beyond the basics
 Hockett went into more detail and tried to represent it
 Chomsky introduced the current view in the 1950s
 Differs from the original view
 Based on phrase structure rules
 More restrictive
The History of the Phrase
As a notion in linguistics
Part III
Are phrases a linguistic fact?
 Today, most syntacticians assume the existence of the phrase
 A lot of them think of this as unquestionable
 It has been demonstrated beyond doubt
 It is so obvious
 But in empirical science, nothing should be beyond doubt
 All facts are theory dependent
 Proof is impossible
 In order to see how viable the assumption of phrases is we
must review evidence for and against them
Evidence for the existence of phrases
 There are three types of argument that have been put
forward to support the assumption of the phrase
 Arguments that descriptions based on non-(phrase)structural
grounds are inadequate
 Theoretical arguments that phrases are necessary
 Empirical evidence for the existence of phrases
Arguments against non-phrase based
descriptions
 Chomsky (1957) demonstrated that a grammar that did not
assume phrases could not account for syntactic phenomena
 Finite State Grammar
 Represents a network of ‘states’ connected to each other
 The grammar travels from one state to another as it parses a
sentence
 The sentence is grammatical if the grammar enters the final
state at the same time as parsing the last word of the sentence
 Two things allow the grammar to move from one state to
another
 Conditions on the state
 The word of the sentence currently being parsed
An example of a FSG

 SI is the initial state, SF is the final state
 From SI the grammar can move to S1 or S2
 If the first word is a determiner, it moves to S1
 If the first word is a proper noun, it moves to S2
 From S1, it can move to S1 (if the next word is an adjective =
recursion) or S2 (if it is a noun)
 From S2 it can move to SF if the next word is a verb
Sentences this FSG can parse
 John left
 The boy left
 The old man left
 The old confused man left
 Etc.
What a FSG can’t do
 Embedding
 Sentences can be part of sentences
 The man [who John met] left
 Two ways to account for this
 After the noun we add a further set of states which allows
another sentence to be parsed
 We allow the network to recurs back to the initial state
Including sentence networks inside
sentence networks

 But this reduplicates exactly the same network
 There can be an infinite number of embedded sentence, so
the grammar would have to be infinitely big
Recursing to SI

 This uses the same network again, so it is better than the
other idea
 But it won’t work as the final state will be arrived at too soon
 The man who John met (end of sentence)
 How can we get the final verb?
Conclusion on Finite State Grammars
 This is just one problem faced by a Finite State Grammar
 There are many others
 They are not adequate models for parsing human languages
Arguments for the necessity of phrases
 Chomsky has argued that phrases are necessary because all
syntactic processes are dependent on phrase structure
 E.g. Auxiliary inversion
 The man is being watched  is the man being watched
 Take the first auxiliary and move it in front of the subject
 But
 The man who is tall is being watched 
 * is the man who tall is being watched
 The reason this doesn’t work is that the auxiliary that moves
must be the one of the main clause, not any embedded clause
 Thus the process is sensitive to the structure of the sentence
Empirical Arguments for Phrases
 Boas’ discovery procedures are still in common use as a way
to determine phrase structure (distribution tests,
pronominalisation test, coordination test, etc)
 The tests may be turned round and used as evidence for the
existence of phrases
 If there were no phrases, why do the tests work?
 John ran up the hill
John ran up a bill
 John ran there
* John ran there
 Up the hill, John ran
* Up a bill, John ran
 John ran up the hill and
* John ran up a bill and
down the road
up a debt
How good are these arguments?
 FSGs are in adequate for modelling human language
 But FSGs are not the only non-phrase based grammar
 Other models do not suffer the same problems
 Structure based processes
 It is clear that syntactic phenomena are limited by something
that is not simply linear
 But that doesn’t mean they must be limited by phrase structure
 Empirical evidence
 Certainly shows something
 But if it can be accounted for without phrases, it isn’t an
argument for phrases
Against the phrase
 The phrase developed out of 2 structuralist ideas
 Radical empiricism
 Discovery procedures
 Chomsky has been severely critical the American Structuralist
movement
 The empiricist stance is not scientific
 Behaviourism involves after the fact explanations
 How do we know what any instance of human behaviour is a response to –
given a situation, a person in principle might say anything
 It cannot account for certain facts
 How can children learn language
 There is no reason to believe that there should be discovery
procedures
 There are no discovery procedures employed in any other science
 We get our data from wherever we can get it
The big question
 If Chomsky is dismissive of empiricism and discovery
procedures, why did he accept phrase structure which
followed from these?
Non-structure based theories
 Dependency Grammar
 Similar to traditional view of subordination
 Usually semantically based, not morphological
 Always one word which is not dependent
 All other words are dependent
 Not very good at accounting for
word order
 In principle any word order
would be possible
 No reason why branches shouldn’t cross
Absolute vs. Relative linearity
 A FSG organises sentences in an absolute linear way
 There is a first position followed by a second position, etc.
 But linear order can be relative
 A is in front of B
 C is in front of B
C D A B or C A D B or A C D B, etc
 D follows C
 As there are a choice of possible orders, we need some way
to choose which one of them is the best
 Optimality Theory is a way to determine the best of a set of
alternatives
Optimality Theory
 We start with an input
 We generate a number of possible candidate expressions
 We evaluated the candidates against set conditions
 Constraints
 Constraints are
 Conflicting (nothing can satisfy them all)
 Ranked (in the case of conflict the higher ranked one is adhered
to)
 The candidate which best satisfies the set of constraints is
optimal (grammatical)
How it works

Does this answer criticisms?
 Embedding
 Assuming that the input is a dependency arrangement
 Ordering of words done with respect to dependent words
 The man who John met left
 Left – man
 Man – the
 Man – met
 Met – John, who
 The same conditions will be relevant for both the main clause
and the embedded one, so there is no redundancy
 All words will find there position in the sentence with respect
to the words they are dependent on
Structure dependency of linguistic
processes
 Again, the dependency relations in the input are enough to
determine the relevant information without phrases
 The man who is tall is being watched
 Is – tall
 ...
 Tall – man
 ...
 Man – watched
 ...
 Is – watched
 this is the auxiliary that inverts
Empirical evidence
 Phrases
 Have distribution
 Can be pronominalised
 Can be coordinated
Distribution
 Words are ordered with respect to the words the are
dependent on
 the dependent word will appear wherever the superordinate
word appears:
 The man likes Mary
Man is subject – in front of verb
 Determiner is in front of noun
 Mary likes the man
 Man is object – behind verb
 Determiner is in front of noun

 Thus they will behave like a unit even if the grammar does not
define them as such
 The phrase is an epiphenomenon
Pronominalisation
 Pronouns stand instead of nouns
 They are positioned by the same constraints (as subjects, etc.)
 Pronouns cannot be modified, nouns can
 Therefore nouns can have more dependents
 The pronoun seems to replace more than the noun
 Phrases are epiphenomena
Coordination
 Words of the same type can be coordinated
 Some of these words will have dependents
 These dependents will be positioned with respect to them
 The coordinated words will be positioned with respect to the
coordination
 John and the tall woman
 And – John, woman
 Woman – the, tall
 This gives the appearance that what is being coordinated is
bigger than words
 Phrases are epiphenomena
Which is better:
a theory with phrases or without?
 Too soon to decide
 But the issue is in danger of not being addressed
 Too many linguists have dismissed phraseless theories
 They are not being investigated
 So we are not discovering what they are capable of
Conclusion
 The phrase is a relatively modern notion
 First introduced in the 1920s and developed in the 1950s
 Since its introduction syntacticians have enthusiastically
embraced it
 To the detriment of the opposite assumption
 Real linguistic theory started after the 1950s
 So phraseless theories have not really been explored
 Though the assumption that sentences are organised without phrases is a
much older idea
 Until such investigation takes place, we will never really
know whether phrases are a necessary part of human
languages