[B-Greek] B-Greek syntax trees and phrase structure rules
James Tauber
jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat Aug 12 00:44:03 EDT 2006
On 11/08/2006, at 10:29 PM, Jason Hare wrote:
> Does anyone have any information about Koiné phrase structure rules
> that
> they could share? I am just beginning to study syntax trees and
> transformational grammar on my own, and I would be interested in
> any help I
> can get. (Also, if you know, even relating to English, of some online
> resources about syntax trees and relative pronouns, I would be
> interested in
> URLs.)
A couple of things come to mind:
Palmer, Micheal W, "Levels of Constituent Structure in New Testament
Greek", Peter Lang.
Black and Marlett (1996), "On Generating the Greek Noun Phrase", SIL
UND Work Papers, Volume 40, pp. 89--105.
There's also Daryl Schmidt's dissertation "Hellenistic Greek Grammar
and Noam Chomsky: Nominalizing Transformations" but I haven't read it.
When you use the term "transformational grammar" are you meaning it
in the sense of Chomskyan linguistics in the last 25 years (GB, P&P,
Minimalism) or the 25 years before that (Syntactic Structures,
Aspects)? One thing to note with the Chomskyan programme is that the
focus is on what languages tell us about language not what language
tells us about languages and so the application of Chomskyan models
to understanding of specific texts is dubious, even to to Chomskyans.
Of course, there are many linguists who don't even think Chomskyan
models tell us much about language either (but that's off topic :-)
Also, there is a big difference between studying Koine phrase
structure rules and studying transformational grammar. If you are
interested in language-specific phrase structure rules, you generally
won't find them studied in transformational grammar (except maybe 40
years ago).You are better off looking at something like Tree-
Adjoining Grammars. Most linguistic frameworks eschew lists of phrase
structure rules. Some computationally-focused work still uses them
(or similar dependency-based rules), although for scalability
reasons, much practical natural language processing is now
statistical rather than rule-based.
As a side note, one of my secondary research interests is in the
inference of syntactic rules from existing analyzed corpora like
OpenText.org. By using existing bracketing, a lot of ambiguities that
typically arise in syntactic parsing by machine are eliminated. And
rule-based approaches still make sense because the corpus is just way
too small for statistical NLP to really be helpful (although I've
never formally run the numbers)
James Tauber
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