![]() Subjacency requires that not more than one ‘barrier’ intervene between a moved constituent and its trace, but the definition of the relevant barriers has been, and remains, an issue of considerable controversy. It is a standard assumption of government-binding theory that the relationship between a constituent displaced by the transformational rule schema Move α and its trace is subject to the locality condition known as subjacency, the central principle of the subtheory of universal grammar known as bounding theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1982, 1986). Finally, we reconstruct X-bar theory in a way that makes no reference to the notion of bar-level but instead makes the notion 'head of the central one. We show that, as constraints on phrase-structure rule systems, the X-bar conditions have hardly any effect on the descriptive power of grammars, and that the principles with the most chance of making some descriptive difference are the least adhered to in practice. We then consider recent proposals to 'eliminate' base components from transformational grammars and to reinterpret X-bar theory as a set of universal constraints holding for all languages at D-structure, arguing that this strategy fails. We state and discuss six conditions that encapsulate the claims of X-bar theory: LEXICALITY-each nonterminal is a projection of a preterminal SUCCESSION-each Xn + 1 dominates an Xn for all n ≥ 0 UNIFORMITY-all maximal projections have the same bar-level MAXIMALITY-all nonheads are maximal projections CENTRALITY-the start symbol is a maximal projection and OPTIONALITY-all and only nonheads are optional. In this paper we will demonstrate that a formalization of its content reveals very little substance in its claims. X-bar theory is widely regarded as a substantive theory of phrase structure properties in natural languages. My purpose in this contribution is to consider some recent proposals about the syntax of subject” nod, to try to place those proposals in a broader theoretical and historical perspective, and to evaluate their plausibility at least in a tentative way. This theoretical eccentricity may turn out to have been foolish or wise, but it is certainly grounded in some of the deeper methodological instincts of generative grammar. What we have seen, in a sense, is a progressive deconstruction of the traditional category “subject” so that the properties which are supposed to define it are distributed across a range of distinct (but derivationally linked) syntactic entities and positions. Not only is “subject” not a primitive term in these theories, but in their most recent instantiations it is not even clear that there is any derived or defined notion which captures the traditional intuition of what a subject is (as there was, for instance, in the theory of Chomsky 1965). However, in the tradition which extends from the “Standard Theory” through the “Extended Standard Theory” to “Principles and Parameters Theory” and then to the “Minimalist Program”, the notion of subject plays no formal role at all. ![]() The notion of “subject” is fundamental in Aristotelian logic and in almost all Western traditions of thinking about philology and grammar.* It is also fundamental to certain strands of thought within the broad tradition of generative grammar – notably Relational Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. It is proposed that there is an inverse relationship between Control and Syntagmatization. The differences in vocabulary properties correlate with two other factors, the well-known dimension of Control (deliberate, social activities of building and maintaining vocabularies), and Syntagmatization, which is less known and describes vocabulary items’ varying formal preparedness to exit the thesaurus/lexicon, enter into linear syntactic constructions and, finally, acquire communicative functionality. A set of vocabulary requirements which defines the more concrete characteristics of vocabulary items in the two contexts can be derived from this framework: lexicon items have to be learnable, complex, transparent etc., whereas thesaurus terms must be effective, current and relevant, searchable etc. These different areas of knowledge have different restrictions on use of vocabulary thesauri are used only in information search and retrieval contexts, whereas lexicons are mental systems and generally applicable in all domains of life. This paper explores the relationships between natural language lexicons in lexical semantics and thesauri in information retrieval research.
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