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Chapters of Dependency Grammar: A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by András Imrényi and Nicolas Mazziotta
[Studies in Language Companion Series 212] 2020
► pp. 133–162

Chapter 4
Dependency in early sentence diagrams

Stephen W. Clark

| Université de Liège

American grammarians were the first to make a systematic use of diagrams to depict syntactic relations. Among the most elaborated early attempts to visualize syntactic relations, Stephen W. Clark’s Practical Grammar (1847) delivered many diagrams that merge constituency-based analyses, relying on the description of the relations between constructions and their parts, and a dependency-based approach, focusing on hierarchical relations between words. Clark used labeled bubbles to express his analyses. The same system was altered and derived numerous times during the early history of syntactic diagramming, thus resulting in the famous Reed & Kellogg’s system. By systematically evaluating Clark’s analyses with respect to five general characteristics of dependency-based descriptions, I show how much dependency-based Clark’s system is.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.From parsing to sentence analysis and diagrams
  • 3.Clark’s diagramming system: Basic rationales, and the notion of ‘reification’
  • 4.Diagrams and dependency trees compared
  • 5.Clark’s diagramming system and dependency
    • 5.1Connection-basedness
      • 5.1.1Absence of reified connections
      • 5.1.2Function words as connections
    • 5.2Binarity
    • 5.3Headedness
      • 5.3.1Adjuncts
      • 5.3.2Principal elements and verb centrality
    • 5.4Flatness and word-to-node mapping
      • 5.4.1Stratification without additional entities
      • 5.4.2Stratification with additional entities
  • 6.Legacy and similar systems
    • 6.1Genealogy of the diagramming systems
    • 6.2Other choices in reification
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.212.05maz
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