Monotonic C-Command: A New Perspective on Tree Adjoining Grammar.

In this paper we argue for a reconceptualization of the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism, in which the elementary structures are collections of c-command relations, and the combinatory operation is substitution. We show how the formalism we sketch resolves a number of problems for TAG that have been identified in the literature. Additionally, we demonstrate that our proposal is preferable to other previously proposed extensions to TAG, for example D-tree grammars (Rambow et al., 1995), in that it preserves many of the linguistically desirable aspects of TAG's restrictiveness, specifically concerning the derivation of locality constraints on unbounded dependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]