From arosta@uclan.ac.uk Wed Aug 22 11:58:55 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: arosta@uclan.ac.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 22 Aug 2001 18:58:55 -0000 Received: (qmail 55098 invoked from network); 22 Aug 2001 18:52:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 22 Aug 2001 18:52:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO com1.uclan.ac.uk) (193.61.255.3) by mta3 with SMTP; 22 Aug 2001 18:52:37 -0000 Received: from gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk by com1.uclan.ac.uk with SMTP (Mailer); Wed, 22 Aug 2001 19:31:16 +0100 Received: from DI1-Message_Server by gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk with Novell_GroupWise; Wed, 22 Aug 2001 19:58:09 +0100 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.2 Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 19:58:00 +0100 To: lojban Subject: Re: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline From: And Rosta #>>> John Cowan 08/19/01 12:17am >>> #And Rosta scripsit: # #> But there is no requirement in the yacc/BNF system that phrases have #> heads. You can have rules of the form X -> Y Z, whereas endocentricity #> would restrict you to XP -> XP YP and XP -> X (YP). # #I guess I don't understand what a head is. If you mean that a noun #phrase must have a noun in it, where nouns and noun phrases are #capable o= f filling the same slot in a sentence, then I point to French, where #nouns cannot serve the purposes of noun phrases (a raw noun without #a determiner is ungrammatical). Can you spell this out a little more? Nowadays those French NPs would be analysed as DPs, determiner phrases. Any= way, it's not that there are no constructions in any labuage that are diffi= cult for endocentricity; it's rather that endocentricity is so overwhelming= prevalent and so much more restrictive than exocentricity that syntacticia= ns take endocentricity to be an essential feature of natlang syntax. --And.