Jean-Marie Marandin

Polychrome tree grammars (PTGs): a formal presentation

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of polychrome tree grammars (PTGs). The motivation of PTGs is twofold: (1) to give an autonomous representation of the syntactic positions underlining NL utterances, and (2) to give a monostratal account of extraclausal constituents (ECs) on the syntactic level. PTGs are conceived as a purely syntactic formalism in an autolexical grammar. The chapter focuses on the syntactic level that is conceived as configurations of unlabelled positions. It gives mathematical definitions for polychrome trees, tree composition, and tree grammars. The chapter presents the way in which context-sensitivity (CS) is obtained without CS-rules or feature structures. The autolexical approach requires that the informational patterns of each dimension of NL utterances be exactly characterized by a generative grammar in the broad sense, that is, a grammar that is explicit and formal, and that makes clear and testable predictions. PTGs appear to be a sound formalism for characterizing the syntactic level.