In her The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from 5 to 10, Carol Chomsky observed that certain syntactic constructions such as subject control with promise type verbs are acquired surprisingly late. She argued that initially children strictly adhere to Rosenbaum’s 1967 Minimal Distance Principle, barring subject control, and exceptions to the principle are acquired at later points in developmen...

We prove a Chomsky-Schützenberger representation theorem for weighted multiple context-free languages.

This article addresses the syntax of the notorious tough(-movement) construction (TC) in English. TCs exhibit a range of apparently contradictory empirical properties suggesting that their derivation involves the application of both A-movement and A-movement operations. Given that within previous Principles and Parameters models TCs have remained “unexplained and in principle unexplainable” (Ho...

The mainstream of syntax analysis has been discussing the question of mathematical complexity of natural language parsingmostly in relation to the well-known Chomsky-hierarchy. There are however other grammar models with different complexity-hierarchies that are worth looking at. This paper presents a grammar for ai! that parses with linear complexity in a non-PSGformalism, while a PSG for this...