Phrase Structure Paradoxa in Natural Language

Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship J 1975 Phrase Structure Paradoxa in natural language Winfried LECHNER 09.10.2000 Phrase Structure paradoxa, which present an intriguing group of problems for the syntactic and semantic analysis of natural language, arise when different diagnostics for syntactic structure indicate that a single string is assigned more than a single parse. Existing theories such as the analyses of Pesetsky (1995) and Philips (1996) can be shown to be both descriptively inadequate (leading to overgeneration) and not general enough in their empirical scope (resulting in undergeneration). It is suggested to investigate Phrase Structure paradoxa on the assumption of the working hypothesis that structure building operations (Merge; Chomsky 1995) can - in a limited set of contexts - be undone much in the same way that movement can be undone in the case of reconstruction.