A Dependency Grammar of English

Book excerpt: Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the syntax of natural languages with a long and venerable tradition, yet awareness of its potential to serve as a basis for principled analyses of natural language syntax is minimal due to the predominance of phrase structure grammar (PSG). This book presents a DG of English with two main goals in mind. The first is to make the principles of dependency syntax accessible to a general audience so that the novice linguist as well as the seasoned syntactician becomes fully aware of what makes DG unique as an approach to the study of natural language syntax. The second is to present and develop a version of DG that then serves as a principled basis for the investigation of central areas of the syntax of English, such as long-distance dependencies, coordination, ellipsis, valency, etc. An overarching theme in all this is that DG is simple compared to PSG, yet despite this simplicity, it is quite effective at shedding light on the nature of syntactic phenomena.