Exocentric (bahuvrīhi) Compounds in Classical Sanskrit

Constituency grammars originated with Leonard Bloomfield (1933) and were developed during the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties by a number of American structuralist linguists, including Harris (1946) and Wells (1947) — to mention just two. In the late nineteen fifties, Chomsky (1957) suggested that constituency grammars could be formalized as context free grammars. It is now clear that context free grammars fall short of properly formalizing the constituency grammars of the American Structuralists (Manaster-Ramer and Kac 1990). Indeed, in the nineteen sixties, Chomsky himself formalized a number of other important aspects of constituency grammars, introducing more complexity to the labels, both terminal and non-terminal, and permitting the use of null elements.