Categorial grammar and phrase structure grammar

an excursion on the syntax-semantics frontier

Carl J. Pollard

pp. 391-415

in: Richard T. Oehrle, Emmon Bach, Deirdre Wheeler (eds), Categorial grammars and natural language structures, Berlin, Springer, 1988

Abstract

The notion of a phrase structure grammar first came to the attention of the linguistic community with the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures, wherein Noam Chomsky asserted that phrase structure grammars were inadequate for linguistic description. He went on to argue for a model of linguistic structure in which the constituent structure trees produced by a phrase structure grammar were subsequently subjected to operations called transformations that added, deleted, or moved constituents. Successive versions of Chomsky's transformational grammar came to be accepted as the standard framework for syntactic theory.

Cited authors

Chomsky Noam