Non-configurational language

In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages characterized by a flat phrase structure, which allows syntactically discontinuous expressions, and a relatively free word order. The concept of non-configurationality was developed by grammarians working within Noam Chomsky's generative framework. Some of these linguists observed that the Syntactic Universals proposed by Chomsky and which required a rigid phrase structure was challenged by the syntax of some of the world's languages that had a much less rigid syntax than that of the languages on which Chomsky had based his studies. The concept was invented by Ken Hale who described the syntax of Warlpiri as being non-configurational. However, the first to publish a description of non-configurationality was Chomsky himself in his 1981 lectures on Government and Binding, in which he referred to an unpublished paper by Hale. Chomsky made it a goal of the Government and Binding framework to accommodate languages such as Japanese and Warlpiri that apparently did not conform to his proposed language universal of Move α. Hale later published his own description of non-configurationality in Warlpiri. Non-configurational languages contrast to configurational languages, where the subject of a sentence is outside the finite verb phrase (VP) (directly under S below) but the object is inside it. Since there is no VP constituent in non-configurational languages, there is no structural difference between subject and object. The distinction — configurational versus non-configurational — can exist in phrase structure grammars only. In a dependency-based grammar, the distinction is meaningless because dependency-based structures do not acknowledge a finite VP constituent. The following trees illustrate the distinction: Non-configurational languages have a seemingly 'flat' constituent structure, as illustrated above. The presence of the VP constituent in the configurational tree on the left allows one to define the syntactic relations (subject vs.

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Binding (linguistics)

In linguistics, binding is the phenomenon in which anaphoric elements such as pronouns are grammatically associated with their antecedents. For instance in the English sentence "Mary saw herself", the anaphor "herself" is bound by its antecedent "Mary". Binding can be licensed or blocked in certain contexts or syntactic configurations, e.g. the pronoun "her" cannot be bound by "Mary" in the English sentence "Mary saw her". While all languages have binding, restrictions on it vary even among closely related languages.

Principles and parameters

Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages (i.

Lexical functional grammar

Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits two separate levels of syntactic structure, a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, and a representation of grammatical functions such as subject and object, similar to dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the theory of transformational grammar which was current in the late 1970s.

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