Recent Approaches to Unbounded Dependencies

Abstract

We mentioned briefly in the first chapter that the possibility of writing linguistically adequate grammars that do not employ transformations is currently being explored by several linguists. In this chapter. We will first present some data on unbounded dependencies in Swedish illustrating the type of constructions we are focussing on in this study. We will then look at three non-transformational approaches which have been proposed for English and investigate how readily they can be extended to handle the Swedish data. One interesting point turns out to be what type of semantics is required in order to interpret directly generated surface structures, in particular structures involving unbounded dependencies. After a brief look at how unbounded dependencies are handled in one current version of transformational grammar, the Government- Binding framework, we summarize the reasons behind our choice of a framework for this study.