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Lowe, John J. and Lovestrand, Joseph (2020) 'Minimal phrase structure: A new formalized theory of phrase structure.' Journal of Language Modelling, 8 (1). pp. 1-52.

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Abstract

X' theory was a major milestone in the history of the development of generative grammar. It enabled important insights to be made into the phrase structure of human language, but it had a number of weaknesses, and has been essentially replaced in mainstream generativism by Bare Phrase Structure (BPS), which assumes fewer theoretical primitives than X′ theory, and also avoids several of the latter’s weaknesses. However, Bare Phrase Structure has not been widely adopted outside the Minimalist Program (MP), rather, X′ theory remains widespread. In this paper, we develop a new, fully formalized approach to phrase structure which incorporates insights and advances from BPS, but does not require the Minimalist-specific assumptions that come with BPS. We formulate our proposal within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), providing an empirically and theoretically superior model for phrase structure compared with standard versions of X′ theory current in LFG.

Item Type: Journal Article
Keywords: phrase structure, X' theory, Bare Phrase Structure, Lexical-Functional Grammar
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics > Department of Linguistics
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
ISSN: 2299856X
Copyright Statement: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.15398/jlm.v8i1.247
Date Deposited: 17 Feb 2020 11:37
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/32392
Related URLs: http://jlm.ipip ... l/index.php/JLM

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