WORD GRAMMAR
Contents:
Word Grammar is a theory of language structure which Richard (= Dick) Hudson
has been building since the early 1980's. (From now on, `I' = Dick Hudson.) It
is still changing in detail, but the main ideas are still the same. These ideas
themselves developed out of two other theories that I had tried: Systemic
Grammar (now known as Systemic Functional
Grammar), due to Michael Halliday, and then Daughter-Dependency Grammar, my
own invention. My first book was the first attempt to write a generative
(explicit) version of Systemic Grammar (`English Complex Sentences: An
introduction to Systemic Grammar', North Holland, 1971); and my second book was
about Daughter-Dependency Grammar (`Arguments for a Non- transformational
Grammar', Chicago UP, 1976). As the latter title indicates, Chomsky's
transformational grammar was very much `in the air', and both books accepted his
goal of generative grammar but offered other ideas about sentence structure as
alternatives to his mixture of function-free phrase structure plus
transformations. In the late 1970's I abandoned Daughter- Dependency Grammar (in
spite of a rave review by Paul Schachter in Language 54, 348-76!) partly because
of a preoccupation with sociolinguistics (which led to a textbook in 1980), and
partly in order to explore various general ideas that didn't come together into
a coherent `theory' until about 1982. This was Word Grammar, first described in
the 1984 book `Word Grammar'. Since then the details have been worked out much
better, and there is now a workable notation.
Here are the main ideas, together with an indication of where they came
from.
- It is monostratal - only one structure per sentence, no transformations.
(From Systemic Grammar)
- It uses word-word dependencies - e.g. a noun is the subject of a verb.
(From John Anderson and other users of Dependency Grammmar, via Daughter
Dependency Grammar; a reaction against Systemic Grammar where word-word
dependencies are mediated by the features of the mother phrase.)
- It does not use phrase structure - e.g. it does not recognise a noun
phrase as the subject of a clause, though these phrases are implicit in the
dependency structure. (This is the main difference between Daughter Dependency
Grammar and Word Grammar. I don't know where it came from.)
- It shows grammatical relations/functions by explicit labels - e.g.
`subject' and `object'. (From Systemic Grammar)
- It uses features only for inflectional contrasts - e.g. tense, number but
not transitivity. (A reaction against excessive use of features in both
Systemic Grammar and current Transformational Grammar.)
- It uses default inheritance, as a very general way of capturing the
contrast between `basic' or `underlying' patterns and `exceptions' or
`transformations' - e.g. by default, English words follow the word they depend
on, but exceptionally subjects precede it; particular cases `inherit' the
default pattern unless it is explicitly overridden by a contradictory rule.
(From Artificial Intelligence)
- It views concepts as prototypes rather than `classical' categories that
can be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. All characteristics
(i.e. all links in the network) have equal status, though some may for
pragmatic reasons be harder to override than others. (From Lakoff and early Cognitive Linguistics , supported by work
in sociolinguistics)
- It presents language as a network of knowledge, linking concepts about
words, their meanings, etc. - e.g. "dog" is linked to the meaning `dog', to
the form /dog/, to the word-class `noun', etc. (From Artificial Intelligence)
- In this network there are no clear boundaries between different areas of
knowledge - e.g. between `lexicon' and `grammar', or between `linguistic
meaning' and `encyclopedic knowledge'. (From early Cognitive Linguistics - and the facts!)
- In particular, there is no clear boundary between `internal' and
`external' facts about words, so a grammar should be able to incorporate
sociolinguistic facts - e.g. the speaker of "sidewalk" is an American. (From
sociolinguistics)
Introductory reading
All the books about the theory are by me (Dick Hudson):
Word Grammar (Blackwell, 1984)
- First attempt to think through the consequences of abandoning
phrase-structure in favour of dependency structure. A research monograph,
rather dated now.
English Word Grammar (Blackwell, 1990)
- A more ambitious attempt to integrate these ideas with ideas about default
inheritance and processing, and to build a wide-coverage grammar of English.
Considered pretty tough by students! 400+ pages, prohibitively expensive to
buy.
Word Meaning (Routledge, 1995)
- A very elementary introduction to lexical semantics for first-year
undergraduates, but it uses a lot of WG ideas (and notations).
Sociolinguistics (2nd edition; Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- An undergraduate textbook covering the whole of sociolinguistics, but from
a very WG perspective (which nobody seems to have noticed!).
English Grammar (Routledge, 1998)
- Another very elementary text in the same series as `Word Meaning'. It
takes students through
- all the basic structures of English, using WG ideas and notation but with
very little discussion
- of the theory itself. By the end of the one-term course, students can do a
partial syntactic
- analysis of virtually every word in any English text.
Perhaps the most accessible source of detailed information is the Encyclopedia of English
Grammar and Word Grammar, which is about 140 pages single-spaced including
diagrams and can be used in hypertext mode. It includes a sample analysed text
(the first 100 words from Stephen Pinker's `Language Instinct'), which
illustrates the analytical system described in the encyclopedia. I can supply a
free paper copy just of the diagrams if these won't print on your system.
Another fairly accessible site is the set of handouts for a course
on Dependency Grammar (especially WG) that I gave in August 2000 at a summer
school for research students (ESSLLI). Somewhat longer but at a lower level are
the handouts
for my most recent (spring 2001) undergraduate course on WG.
The following are short introductory articles about WG.
- Hudson, R. and Van Langendonck, W. (1991) Word Grammar. In F Droste and J
E Joseph (eds.) Linguistic Theory and Grammatical Description. Benjamins,
307-336.
- Hudson, R. (1994) Word Grammar. In R. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics, Pergamon Press, 4990-3. (With a 1997 postscript)
This can be downloaded by ftp in either Word Perfect
5.1 or Postscript
format. In both cases it is zipped.
- Hudson, R (1998) Word Grammar (draft, 30 pages). forthcoming in Agel et al
(eds) Dependency and Valency. An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research. Again available for downloading either in Word Perfect
6.0 or Postscript
format.
- Hudson, R (2000) Word Grammar. Draft of a very short article for the
second edition of the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
Available in Word for
Windows 97 or .pdf format
(For .pdf you need an Acrobat reader, which you can download free from the
Acrobat site http://www.adobe.com/acrobat.)
Full WG bibliography
Most of the other publications are research articles. Those by me can be
found via my home
page, including some recent ones that are available by ftp. There is a full
bibliography which can be downloaded.
The WG list and discussion group
We have a collective email existence: wordgrammar@ucl.ac.uk. To subscribe to
this list, send a message saying just 'subscribe wordgrammar [your name]' to mailto:mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk; . If
you have problems mail either me or And
Rosta Sometimes the debate seems almost non-stop - if this worries you, be
assured that it will die down eventually, and meanwhile you're very welcome to
join in. A small group of staff and students at UCL meets from time to time to
discuss things to do with WG - for more information on current activities contact Dick Hudson.
Alternative theories and web sites
There are a dozen or so theories of language in general, and of grammar in
particular (and even more particularly, of syntax with or without semantics). As
explained in the outline of the main ideas, most of the ideas in WG can be found
in other theories, though no other theory offers this particular combination.
For those who want to explore alternatives, here is a list of what I see as the
main alternatives to WG. Where the theory concerned has a web site I supply a
cross-link. (Please tell me of any
web-sites that I've omitted.)
Last updated 11th April 2001
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