Fetching bibliography My Bibliography Add to Bibliography. Generate a file for use with external citation management software. Create File. Bull Math Biol. Wang Y 1. Abstract The hierarchical structures of biological systems are the typical complex hierarchical dynamical structures in the physical world, the effective investigations on which could not be performed with the existing formal grammar systems. What these theories have in common is that they regard syntactic structure as the decisive factor for determining the control relationship.
However, there is a substantial body of evidence that suggests strongly the importance of semantic and pragmatic factors in the determination of control relations. A comparison of sentences 9 and 10 , which look alike structurally, invites the conclusion that their differing control properties are caused by the meanings of the verbs persuade and promise , respectively. To persuade somebody to do something means that the addressee of an act of persuasion is led to believe that he or she should do something.
This prospective action is expressed in the infinitival complement clause. Since in an active sentence such as 9 the addressee is the grammatical object of the main clause, it is not surprising that this constituent functions as controller of the empty subject of the subordinate clause.
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In contrast, a promise involves a commitment of the speaker to a future course of action. The most complete account that acknowledges the importance of the meaning of control verbs is probably Sag and Pollard's control theory. Since the mids, the insight has grown that, in addition to the meaning of control verbs, the context in which a sentence is uttered and world knowledge about the participants' status play a significant role in assigning the coreferential links between controller and controllee e.
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These additional pragmatic factors are illustrated by the following German sentences adapted from Wegener :. The most plausible interpretation for both 13 and 14 is that the prisoner will be released from jail. A promise implies a promiser who is committed to a future action, and a promisee who benefits from the action of the promiser. This semantic—pragmatic scenario can be applied to the interpretation of sentences 13 and 14 and the most plausible controller can be inferred cf.
In 13 the lawyer is the promiser; hence the lawyer is committed to some future action. However, the complement clause does not express an action explicitly. A step toward a reasonable interpretation is to assume that the complement clause expresses the result of an action performed by the promiser. The action itself has to be inferred. Furthermore, the result of the action is beneficial to the prisoner.
For 14 , a coherent interpretation results if it is assumed that the prisoner can behave in such a way that he causes his release from jail. Again, the complement clause is interpreted as the result of an action—an action carried out by the prisoner to the effect that he will be released from prison. His wife can be regarded as the beneficiary of this action. The interpretations sketched above are not the only ones possible. Similar observations have been made for Chinese by Huang , p. To summarize, the interpretation of control sentences relies not only on syntactic and semantic information but also, to a substantial degree, on world knowledge and contextual clues about the utterance situation.
The theoretical status of grammatical relations or functions such as subject, object, and indirect object, and the question of whether or not they — the subject in particular — are universal relational categories have also been contentious perennial issues in syntax.
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The earlier version of the structural definitions holds subject to be an NP immediately dominated by S and object to be an NP immediately dominated by VP Chomsky, Structurally-based definitions like these and those based on the more recent X-bar version of PS rules, where subject is defined as a Specifier of XP, however, assume that all languages having these grammatical relations have configurational structures similar to English cf the earlier discussion on non-configurational languages.
While the strict Chomskyan generative tradition holds grammatical relations to be derived notions definable in structural terms, other approaches such as Relational Grammar Perlmutter, and Lexical Functional Grammar Bresnan, regard them to be universal theoretical primitives necessary in capturing universal properties of syntactic rules e. The position that grammatical relations are language universals has posed a serious challenge in identifying subject and other grammatical relations in two groups of languages, namely so-called ergative languages, where what, on morphological grounds, appear to be the subject of a transitive sentence corresponds to a direct object of languages like English, and Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, where what appears to be a subject is not always aligned with an agentive NP even in what seem to be basic structures.
The problem of identifying grammatical relations in different types of language even prompted a checklist approach, such as the one proposed by Keenan , which lays out a set of subject properties that would help us identify a subject in any given language.
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Much more empirically-minded typologists adopt a phenomenon-driven approach to grammatical relations, which recognizes grammatical relations only insofar as a phenomenon demands them Dryer, ; Haspelmath, The following examples show the syntactic grouping of S and A arguments with regard to the distribution of pronominal case forms and the agreement pattern.
The P argument is distinguished from these in case form her as opposed to she and in not triggering agreement:. Case forms, however, are controlled by a different set of relations. Somewhat similar pattern emerges among Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, in which there are phenomena calling for both the subject relation defined as a union of S and A, as above and a distinct topic relation marked specially in some of these languages, as the ang -marking in Tagalog and the 'o -marking in the Tsou language of Taiwan.
Sasak, spoken in the Lombok Island in eastern Indonesia, presents one of the clearest cases of a language requiring both subject and topic relations. Sasak, like most Austronesian languages in Indonesia, has a two-way focus system, a remnant of the proto-Austronesian four-way focus system see below , whereby transitive clauses can be coded either in the Actor-focus AF construction, where the A argument is aligned with the topic relation, or in the Patient-focus PF construction, where the P argument is the topic, as in 21a and 21b :.
Cliticization operates according to the subject relation since S in 21d , the derived S of passive sentence 21c , and As in 21a. The topic in Sasak is not marked specially but appears sentence initially. There are several phenomena in which topics play a crucial role, including the controlling of a gap in coordinate constructions of the following type. Just as the properties of subjects differ across different languages, topic properties also differ from one language to another.
While topics of Western Malayo-Polynesian languages are involved in various syntactic phenomena, resembling subjects in European languages to a varying extent, topics in Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean are less relevant to those phenomena controlled by subjects in these and other languages.
Although the above survey shows that many languages, including controversial ergative and Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, may have a subject, the universality of this relational category must still be empirically established. Toward this end, future descriptive grammars must each demonstrate the need for positing grammatical relations of various sorts by the kind of procedure described above.
Of the varieties of textual semantic markup, one is peculiarly self-referential, the markup of textual structure, or schemas which represent the architectonics of text. A number of digital tagging schemas have emerged, which provide a functional account of the processes of containing, describing, managing and transacting text. They give a functional account of the world of textual content. Each tagging schema has its own functional purpose. A number of these tagging schemas have been created for the purpose of describing the structure of text, and to facilitate its rendering to alternative formats.
Created originally for technical documentation, DocBook structures book text for digital and print renderings. Although the primary purpose of each schema may be a particular form of rendering, this belies the rigorous separation of semantics and structure from presentation. Alternative stylesheet transformations could be applied to render the marked up text in a variety of ways on a variety of rendering devices.
These tagging schemas do almost everything conceivable in the world of the written word. They can describe text comprehensively, and they support the manufacture of variable renderings of text on the fly by means of stylesheet transformations.
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The typesetting and content capture schemas provide a systematic account of structure in written text, and through stylesheet transformations they can render text to paper, to electronic screens of all sizes and formats, or to synthesised audio. Tags, in other words, describe the meaning function of a unit of content.
These tags describe the peculiar meaning function of a piece of content. In this sense, a system of tags works like a functional grammar ; it marks up key features of the information architecture of a text. Tags delineate critical aspects of meaning function, and they do this explicitly by means of a relatively consistent and semantically unambiguous metalanguage.
This metalanguage acts as a kind of running commentary on meaning functions which are otherwise embedded, implicit or to be inferred from context. Meaning form follows mechanically from the delineation of meaning function, and this occurs in a separate stylesheet transformation space. Given the pervasiveness of structural markup, one might expect that an era of rapid and flexible transmission of content would quickly dawn. But this has not occurred, or at least not yet, and for two reasons.
The first is the fact that, although almost all content created over the past quarter of a century has been digitised, the formats are varied and incompatible. Digital content is everywhere, but most of it has been created, and continues to be created, using typographically oriented markup frameworks. I'd use the term morphology for that, as logicians do, except linguists have preempted the term morphology to mean something different -- an account of word structure.
I believe my use of the term grammar is completely in accord with McCawley's use, in The Syntactic Phenomena of English. But McCawley thinks grammar, in that sense, is not useful and is not interesting.