Citation
Shieber, S. (1986). A simple reconstruction of GPSG. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Abstract
Like most linguistic theories, the theory of generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) has described language axiomatically, that is, as a set of universal and language-specific constraints on the well-formedness of linguistic elements of some sort. The coverage and detailed analysis of English grammar and the ambitious recent volume by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum and Sag, entitled Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar are impressive, in part, because of the complexity of the axiomatic system developed by the authors. In this paper, we examine the possibility that simpler descriptions of the same theory can be achieved through a slightly different, albeit still axiomatic, method. Rather than characterize the well formed trees directly, we progress in two stages by procedurally characterizing the wellformedness, axioms them selves, which in turn characterizes the trees.
