Re: OT: THEORY Fusion Grammar

On 7/14/06, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:>
> Hypothesis: For any natural language, related elements
> are always immediately adjacent and there exists a
> complete fusion grammar for that language.
>
> Comments? Counterexamples?
>
To the extent that a language lacks constituency, it will be a
counterexample; the extreme examples of nonconfigurationality
(Warlpiri, etc.) would lead to nearly insurmountable problems.  (In
Warlpiri you could, for example, put "dog" and the beginning and "old"
at the end and "ugly" in the middle.)

If the hypothesis were weakened quite a bit, it would perhaps be
interesting to test.  For example, "For any natural language, given a
sentence containing three constituents x y z where x and y are more
closely related than x and z, x and y will tend to be closer
(linearly? hierarchically?) than x and z."  You could then do an
analysis of sentences in (say) Warlpiri and see if related elements
are statistically more *likely* to be close than unrelated elements
(even though they needn't be).

About "Fusion Grammar" in general: Aside from the issues above, some
modification may be needed to prevent circularity.  (Or I'm just
misreading things, in which case I apologize in advance.)  In order to
parse the sentence above, it appears you already have to *know* its
meaning.  Take "Mary's ugly dog".  You have to know "ugly" is related
to "dog" (rather than Mary) in order to "fuse" them.  But this is
knowledge you would only have if you've already parsed the sequence.
(This is how it appeared to me from reading it, but on subsequent
readings it appears that it's nonsemantic information that's guiding
the fusion and that you're just not giving the details so as not to
bore us with grammatical rules we already know.  If that's the case,
ignore the above.)

Roughly, though, the way you're building up the phrase structure isn't
so different from the sort of Bare Phrase Structure that's popular in
the Minimalist program.

-- Pat

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