TY - JOUR AU - Dalrymple, Mary AU - Kaplan, Ronald M. AU - King, Tracy Holloway PY - 2016/01/12 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Economy of Expression as a principle of syntax JF - Journal of Language Modelling JA - JLM VL - 3 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.15398/jlm.v3i2.82 UR - https://jlm.ipipan.waw.pl/index.php/JLM/article/view/82 SP - 377–412 AB - <p>The purpose of a grammatical theory is to specify the mechanisms and<br /> principles that can characterize the relations of acceptable<br /> sentences in particular languages to the meanings that they express.<br /> It is sometimes proposed that the simplest and most explanatory way<br /> of arranging the formal mechanisms of grammatical description is to<br /> allow them to produce unacceptable representations or derivations<br /> for some meanings and then to appeal to a global principle of<br /> economy to control this overgeneration. Thus there is an intuition<br /> common to many syntactic theories that a given meaning should be<br /> expressed in the most economical way, that smaller representations<br /> or shorter derivations should be chosen over larger ones.</p><p>In this paper we explore the conceptual and formal issues of Economy<br /> as it has been discussed within the theory of Lexical Functional<br /> Grammar. In LFG the metric of Economy is typically formulated in<br /> terms of the size of one component of syntactic representation -- the<br /> surface constituent structure tree -- but it is often left unstated<br /> which trees for a given meaning are to be compared and how they are<br /> to be measured. We present a framework within which alternative<br /> explicit definitions of Economy can be formulated, and examine some<br /> phenomena for which Economy has been offered as an explanation.<br /> However, we observe that descriptive devices already available and<br /> independently motivated within the traditional LFG formalism can<br /> also account for these phenomena directly, without relying on<br /> cross-derivational comparisons to compensate for<br /> overgeneration. This leads us to question whether Economy is<br /> necessary or even useful as a separate principle of grammatical<br /> explanation.</p> ER -