Syntax

By David Adger. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2014

1,019 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Syntax is the cognitive capacity of human beings that allows us to connect linguistic meaning with linguistic form. The study of syntax is a huge field that has generated a great deal of empirical and theoretical work over the decades. This article outlines why understanding our syntactic capacity is important to cognitive science in general and why the data of syntactic research is to be taken seriously. It then provides an overview of a number of broad findings about the character of the syntax of human language, including evidence for abstract constituent structure, core properties of constituents, the importance of functional categories, the link between syntactic structure and meaning, and the range of types of syntactic dependencies, including dependencies of form, dependencies of position, and dependencies that create new meanings. WIREs Cogn Sci 2015, 6:131–147. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1332

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33849f548c94f51dcb865ac9af1e6f07da571293

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Language and Linguistics

Citations in the corpus

Which-hunting and the Standard English relative clause (2015, background): “Ever since the emergence of which as a relativizer in the Late Middle English period (Fischer 1992:296), which and that have held these converse stylistic connotations, paralleled by the differences in their relative frequencies in ‘conceptually written vs. oral’ (Koch & Oesterreicher 1985) texts…”
A Learning-Based Dependency to Constituency Conversion Algorithm for the Turkish Language (2022, background): “Although these two syntactic representations appear very distinct b¨uy¨uk bir okul servisi at ﬁrst sight (refer to (Matthews, 1981) for a thorough discussion), they share enough features that they can be combined (Sag et al., 2003), or even converted into one another (Kong et al., 2015).”
Parallel Trees: a novel resource with aligned dependency and constituency syntactic representations (2025, unknown): “Despite a lack of consensus on formal aspects of the correspondence between D-SRP and C-SRP, linguists often still look at them as notational variants (Nefdt & Baggio, 2023) or weakly equivalent (Matthews, 1981) (because establishing a one-to-one correspondence between them is not always feasible).”