Cover not available
Article published In:
Constructions and Frames
Vol. 9:1 (2017) ► pp.139–173

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and Fluid Construction Grammar

Commonalities and differences

 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Van Trijp (2013, 2014) claims that Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) are fundamentally different from Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). He claims that the former approaches are generative ones while the latter is a cognitive-functional one. I argue that it is not legitimate to draw these distinctions on the basis of what is done in FCG. Van Trijp claims that there are differences in the scientific model, the linguistic approach, formalization, the way constructions are seen, and in terms of processing. This paper discusses all these alleged differences. Van Trijp also claims that his cognitive-functional approach is superior in terms of completeness, explanatory adequacy, and theoretical parsimony. In order to facilitate a discussion and comparison, I introduce the reader to basic assumptions made in FCG and the analyses suggested by Van Trijp: I first deal with the representations that are used in FCG, talk about argument structure constructions, the combination operations fusion and merging that are used in FCG, I than discuss the analysis of nonlocal dependencies and show that the suggested FCG analysis is not explanatorily adequate since it is not descriptively adequate and that a full formalization of approaches with discontinuous constituents is not more parsimonious than existing HPSG analyses either. After the discussion of specific analyses, I then provide a detailed comparison of FCG and SBCG/HPSG and discuss questions like the competence/performance distinction, mathematical formalization vs. computer implementation, fuzziness and fluidity in grammars, and permissiveness of theories. I conclude that HPSG, SBCG, and FCG belong to the same family of theories and that all claims to the contrary are unjustified.
Keywords: Construction Grammar, Fluid Construction Grammar, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, nonlocal dependencies, competence/performance distinction, discontinuous constituents, scope, linearization, argument structure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.General remarks on the representational format
  • 3.Argument structure constructions: phrasal vs. lexical
    • 3.1Fusion, matching, and merging
  • 4.Long-distance dependencies
    • 4.1Sketch of the analyses
    • 4.2Information structure in FCG and HPSG/SBCG
    • 4.3 Do support
    • 4.4Scope
    • 4.5Extraction path marking
    • 4.6Coordination
    • 4.7Empirical adequacy: discontinuous constituents and performance models
    • 4.8Parsimony: discontinuity vs. subject-head and head-filler schema
    • 4.9Empirical adequacy and parsimony: restricting discontinuity
    • 4.10Summary
  • 5.Competence/performance distinction
  • 6.Theoretical framework vs. implementation platform
    • 6.1Mathematical formalization vs. implementation
    • 6.2Static constraints vs. dynamic mappings and signature + grammar vs. open-endedness
    • 6.3A note on engineering
  • 7.Overall approach: theoretical physics vs. Darwinian evolutionary theory
  • 8.Permissiveness of the theories
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 20 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.9.1.05mul
References (94)
References
Bildhauer, F. (2008). Representing information structure in an HPSG grammar of Spanish. Unpublished dissertation, Universität Bremen.Google Scholar
Bildhauer, F. & Cook, P. H. (2010). German multiple fronting and expected topichood. In S. Müller (Ed.), Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Université Paris Diderot (pp. 68–79). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bird, S. & Klein, E. (1994). Phonological analysis in typed feature systems. Computational Linguistics 20(3), 455–491.Google Scholar
Boas, H. C. (2003). A constructional approach to resultatives. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
(2014). Lexical approaches to argument structure: Two sides of the same coin. Theoretical Linguistics 40(1–2), 89–112.Google Scholar
Bouma, G., Malouf, R., & Sag, I. A. (2001). Satisfying constraints on extraction and adjunction. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19(1), 1–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bresnan, J. (2001). Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford, UK/Cambridge, USA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Brew, C. (1995). Stochastic HPSG. In S. P. Abney & E. W. Hinrichs (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 83–89). Dublin: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Briscoe, T. J., & Copestake, A. (1999). Lexical rules in constraint-based gram- mar. Computational Linguistics 25(4), 487–526.Google Scholar
Cappelle, B. (2006). Particle placement and the case for “allostructions”. Constructions online 1(7), 1–28.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
(2008). On phases. In R. Freidin, C. P. Otero, & M. L. Zubizarreta (Eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Jean-Roger Vergnaud (pp. 133–166). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Copestake, A. (2002). Implementing typed feature structure grammars. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
(2007). Applying robust semantics. In Proceedings of the 10th Conference of the Pacific Assocation for Computational Linguistics (PACLING) (pp. 1–12).Google Scholar
Crysmann, B. (2002). Constraint-based co-analysis: Portuguese cliticisation and morphology-syntax interaction in HPSG. Saarbrücken: Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz und Universität des Saarlandes.Google Scholar
(2013). On the locality of complement clause and relative clause extraposition. In G. Webelhuth, M. Sailer, & H. Walker (Eds.), Rightward movement in a comparative perspective (pp. 369–396). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Kuthy, K. (2002). Discontinuous NPs in German. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Demberg, V., & Keller, F. (2008). A psycholinguistically motivated version of TAG. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms TAG+9 (pp. 25–32). Tübingen.Google Scholar
Dowty, D. R. (1989). On the semantic content of the notion ‘thematic role’. In G. Chierchia, B. H. Partee, & R. Turner (Eds.), Properties, types and meaning (pp. 69–130). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Engdahl, E., & Vallduví, E. (1996). Information packaging in HPSG. In C. Grover & E. Vallduví (Eds.), Edinburgh working papers in cognitive science, Vol. 12: Studies in HPSG, Chapter 11 (pp. 1–32). Edinburgh: Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Flickinger, D. P. (1987). Lexical rules in the hierarchical lexicon. Unpublished dissertation. Stanford University.Google Scholar
Gazdar, G. (1981). Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure. Linguistic Inquiry 121, 155–184.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
(2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
(2014). Fitting a slim dime between the verb template and argument structure construction approaches. Theoretical Linguistics 40(1–2), 113–135.Google Scholar
Günther, C., Maienborn, C., & Schopp, A. (1999). The processing of information structure. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives (pp. 18–42). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Originally presented at a conference held in 1994, Schloss Wolfsbrunnen, Germany.Google Scholar
Guzmán Naranjo, M. (2015). Unifying everything: Integrating quantitative effects into formal models of grammar. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics (pp. 301–306).Google Scholar
Haider, H. (2000). OV is more basic than VO. In P. Svenonius (Ed.), The derivation of VO and OV (pp. 45–67). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2016). On predicting resultative adjective constructions. Unpublished manuscript. Universität Salzburg.Google Scholar
Höhle, T. N. (1999). An architecture for phonology. In R. D. Borsley & A. Przepiórkowski (Eds.), Slavic in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (pp. 61–90). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications,.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, R. S. (2011). What is the human language faculty? Two views. Language 87(3), 586–624. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kathol, A. (2000). Linear syntax. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kathol, A., & Pollard, C. J. (1995). Extraposition via complex domain formation. In H. Uszkoreit (Ed.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 174–180). Cambridge, MA: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kayne, R. S. (1994). The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Keller, F. (1995). Towards an account of extraposition in HPSG. In S. P. Abney & E. W. Hinrichs (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 301–306). Dublin: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiefer, B., Krieger, H.-U., & Nederhof, M.-J. (2000). Efficient and robust parsing of word hypotheses graphs. In W. Wahlster (Ed.), Verbmobil: Foundations of speech-to-speech translation (pp. 280–295). Berlin: Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koenig, J.-P., & Michelson, K. (2010). Argument structure of Oneida kinship terms. International Journal of American Linguistics 76(2), 169–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Konieczny, L. (1996). Human sentence processing: A semantics-oriented parsing approach. Unpublished dissertation. Universität Freiburg, iIG-Berichte 3/96.Google Scholar
Kuhn, J. (1995). Information packaging in German: Some motivation from HPSG-based translation. Unpublished manuscript. Universität Stuttgert.Google Scholar
(1996). An underspecified HPSG representation for information structure. In J. Tsuji (Ed.), Proceedings of COLING-96. 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 670–675). Copenhagen, Denmark: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labelle, M. (2007). Biolinguistics, the minimalist program, and psycholinguistic reality. Snippets 141, 6–7.Google Scholar
Levine, R. D. & Meurers, W. D. (2006). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: Linguistic approach, formal foundations, and computational realization. In K. Brown (Ed.), The encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 237–252). Oxford: Elsevier Science Publisher B. V. (North-Holland), second edition. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, W. (1975). Sentence perception as an interactive parallel process. Science 189(4198), 226–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meurers, W. D. (2001). On expressing lexical generalizations in HPSG. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 24(2), 161–217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meurers, W. D., Penn, G., & Richter, F. (2002). A web-based instructional platform for constraint-based grammar formalisms and parsing. In D. Radev & C. Brew (Eds.), Effective tools and methodologies for teaching NLP and CL (pp. 18–25). Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Müller, S. (1996). The Babel-system, An HPSG fragment for German, a parser, and a dialogue component. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the practical application of prolog (pp. 263–277). London.Google Scholar
(1999a). Deutsche Syntax deklarativ: Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar für das Deutsche. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1999b). Parsing of an HPSG grammar for German: Word order domains and discontinuous constituents. In J. Gippert & P. Olivier (Eds.), Multilinguale Corpora: Codierung, Strukturierung, Analyse. 11. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Linguistische Datenverarbeitung (pp. 292–303). Prague: enigma corporation.Google Scholar
(2002). Complex predicates: Verbal complexes, resultative constructions, and particle verbs in German. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
(2005b). Zur Analyse der scheinbar mehrfachen Vorfeldbesetzung. Lin- guistische Berichte 2031, 297–330.Google Scholar
(2006). Phrasal or lexical constructions? Language 82(4), 850–883. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2007). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.Google Scholar
(2013a). The CoreGram project: A brief overview and motivation. In Duchier & Y. Parmentier (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on High-level methodologies for grammar engineering (HMGE 2013), Düsseldorf (pp. 93–104).Google Scholar
(2013b). Grammatiktheorie. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, second edition.Google Scholar
(2015a). The CoreGram project: Theoretical linguistics, theory development and verification. Journal of Language Modelling 3(1), 21–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(submitted). German sentence structure: An analysis with special consideration of so-called multiple fronting. Berlin: Language Science Press.
(2016). Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller, S., & Kasper, W. (2000). HPSG analysis of German. In W. Wahlster (Ed.), Verbmobil: Foundations of speech-to-speech translation (pp. 238–253). Berlin: Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller, S., & Wechsler, S. M. (2014a). Lexical approaches to argument atructure. Theoretical Linguistics 40(1–2), 1–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014b). Two sides of the same slim boojum: Further arguments for a lexical approach to argument atructure. Theoretical Linguistics 40(1–2), 187–224.Google Scholar
Orgun, C. O. (1996). Sign-based morphology and phonology. Unpublished dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Paggio, P. (2005). Representing information structure in a formal grammar of Danish. In T. Washio, A. Sakurai, K. Nakajima, H. Takeda, S. Tojo, & M. Yokoo (Eds.), New frontiers in artificial intelligence: Post-proceedings (pp. 93–102). Berlin: Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Penn, G. (2004). Balancing clarity and efficiency in typed feature logic through delaying. In D. Scott (Ed.), Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’04), Main Volume (pp. 239–246).Google Scholar
Phillips, C. (2003). Linear order and constituency. Linguistic Inquiry 34(1), 37–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pollard, C. J., & Sag, I. A. (1987). Information-based syntax and semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
(1994). Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Pullum, G. K., & Scholz, B. C. (2001). On the distinction between generative-enumerative and model-theoretic syntactic frameworks. In P. de Groote, G. Morrill, & C. Retor (Eds.), Logical aspects of computational linguistics: 4th International Conference (pp. 17–43). Berlin: Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reape, M. (1991). Word order variation in Germanic and parsing. DYANA Report Deliverable R1.1.C, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
(1994). Domain union and word order variation in German. In J. Nerbonne, K. Netter, & C. J. Pollard (Eds.), German in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (pp. 151–198). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
(2000). Formalisation and abstraction in linguistic theory II: Toward a radical linearisation theory of German. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Richter, F. (2004). A mathematical formalism for linguistic theories with an application in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Tübingen: Eberhard-Karls-Universität.Google Scholar
(2006). A web-based course in grammar formalisms and parsing. URL: [URL], Retrieved on 24 November 2011.
Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph. D.thesis, MIT, reproduced by the Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Sag, I. A. (1997). English relative clause constructions. Journal of Linguistics 33(2), 431–484. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012). Sign-Based Construction Grammar: An informal synopsis. In C. Boas & I. A. Sag (Eds.), Sign-Based Construction Grammar (pp. 69–202). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Sag, I. A., & Wasow, T. (2011). Performance-compatible competence grammar. In R. D. Borsley & K. Börjars (Eds.), Non-transformational syntax: Formal and explicit models of grammar: A guide to current models (pp. 359–377). Oxford, UK/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sag, I. A., Wasow, T., & Bender, E. M. (2003). Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, second edition.Google Scholar
Schabes, Y., Abeillé, A., & Joshi, A. K. (1988). Parsing strategies with ‘lexicalized’ grammars: Application to Tree Adjoining Grammars. Technical Report MS-CIS-88-65., University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shieber, S. M., & Johnson, M. (1993). Variations on incremental interpretation. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 22(2), 287–318.Google Scholar
Steels, L. (Ed.) (2011). Design patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2013). Fluid Construction Grammar. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 153–167). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Steels, L., & De Beule, J. (2006). A (very) brief introduction to Fluid Construction Grammar. Paper presented at the Third International Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding (ScaNaLU 2006) June 8, 2006, New York City. DOI logo
Steels, L., & van Trijp, R. (2011). How to make construction grammars fluid and robust. In L. Steels (Ed.), Design patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar (pp. 301–330). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science 268(5217), 1632–1634. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1996). Using eye movements to study spoken language comprehension: Evidence for visually mediated incremental interpretation. In T. Inui & J. L. McClelland (Eds.), Information integration in perception and communication (pp. 457–478). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
van Trijp, R. (2011). A design pattern for argument structure constructions. In L. Steels (Ed.), Design patterns in Fluid Construction Grammar (pp. 115–145). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2013). A comparison between Fluid Construction Grammar and Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Constructions and Frames 5(1), 88–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014). Long-distance dependencies without filler-gaps: A cognitive-functional alternative in Fluid Construction Grammar. Language and Cognition 6(2), 242–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walther, M. (1999). Deklarative prosodische Morphologie: Constraint-basierte Analysen und Computermodelle zum Finnischen und Tigrinya. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wellens, P., van Trijp, R., Beuls, K., & Steels, L. (2013). Fluid Construction Grammar for historical and evolutionary linguistics. In M. Butt & S. Hussain (Eds.), Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (System Demonstrations) (pp. 127–132). Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wetta, A. C. (2011). A construction-based cross-linguistic analysis of V2 word order. In S. Müller (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, University of Washington (pp. 248–268). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Wilcock, G. (2005). Information structure and minimal recursion semantics. In A. Arppe, L. Carlson, K. Lindén, J. Piitulainen, M. Suominen, M. Vainio, H. Westerlund, & A. Yli-Jyrä (Eds.), Inquiries into words, constraints and contexts: for Kimmo Koskenniemi on his 60th birthday (pp. 268–277). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Winkler, S. (1997). Focus and secondary predication. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Chaves, Rui P. & Michael T. Putnam
2022. Islands, expressiveness, and the theory/formalism confusion. Theoretical Linguistics 48:3-4 ► pp. 219 ff. DOI logo
van Trijp, Remi, Katrien Beuls, Paul Van Eecke & Andrew Kehler
2022. The FCG Editor: An innovative environment for engineering computational construction grammars. PLOS ONE 17:6 ► pp. e0269708 ff. DOI logo
Lieb, Hans-Heinrich
2018. Chapter 5. Describing linguistic objects in a realist way. In Essays on Linguistic Realism [Studies in Language Companion Series, 196], ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.