Phrase structure vs. dependency: The analysis of Welsh syntactic soft mutation

Abstract

Most familiar syntactic frameworks recognize the category ‘phrase’, and are built around phrase structure relationships. However, the Word Grammar dependency model does not acknowledge the category ‘phrase’ as a primitive in the grammar; instead, all relationships are word-based, with phrases having no syntactic status. Here, I investigate the theoretical validity of the notion ‘phrase’ by examining the phenomenon in Welsh known as syntactic soft mutation, contrasting a phrase-based account with a dependency account. I conclude that an empirically adequate analysis of syntactic soft mutation must make reference to phrases as a category, thus ruling out the dependency account. A further theoretical question concerns the role played in the grammar by syntactically present but phonetically unrealized elements, including empty categories such as wh-traces and unrealized material in ellipsis. Syntactic soft mutation proves an interesting testing ground in these contexts, but the data again fail to support the dependency account. The conclusion is that a phrase-based account of the mutation is better motivated and empirically more accurate than the alternative dependency account.

Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

“…Mutation has been analyzed extensively in the lin-guistic literature, e.g. Awbery (1973), Lieber (1983), Tallerman (1990), Kibre (1997), Pyatt (1997), Green (2006), Mittendorf & Sadler (2006), Wolf (2007), Stammers (2009), Tallerman (2009), Iosad (2010, Hammond (2011), Hannahs (2011), Hannahs (2013, Prys (2015), etc. The facts of this section are consistent with standard descriptive and pedagogical sources on Welsh, e.g.…”

Wh-Movement Pattern in the Spoken Discourse of Teachers: A Syntactic Analysis

“…The German grammar is carried out in parsing method. According to Tallerman (2009), for the recognition of phrase structure and its category, the syntactic framework is used.…”

Reaction to: “The myth of Language Universals and cognitive science”

“…Supporters of phrase structure will no doubt argue that the long history of research in phrase structure has shown a great many other properties of sentence structure that follow from configurations in phrase structure. The trouble with these arguments is that phrase structure is virtually always taken for granted, and alternative analyses in terms of dependency structure are rarely considered (though there are exceptions: Tallerman, 2009). One of the most productive areas of syntactic research has been the detailed analysis of extraction, where phrase structure has played a prominent part; but here too dependency structure provides a satisfactory basis for analysis, provided we allow sufficiently rich structures.…”