| Some common constructions such as wh-questions and coordinated constructions seem to allow lexical elements to play multiple grammatical roles typically associated with distinct positions. For example, in What did Emmy eat?, what is usually assumed to function as the object of eat even though it appears sentence initially rather than in the canonical object position. In Joe bakes and Sam sells cookies, a single noun phrase, cookies, satisfies both verbs' need for an object. Traditionally, this apparent "multiple-linking" is attributed to co-indexing distinct elements filling multiple positions, only one of which is pronounced. Alternatively, a multiply-linked element can be conceptualized as an element immediately dominated by multiple parent nodes. Under such a multi-dominance approach, trees no longer suffice for representing the immediate dominance relation. Rather, the set of syntactic structures is expanded to include non-tree graphs.; This dissertation examines how such multi-dominance structures are generated and how their terminals are linearized. The generation question is answered by adopting the node-contraction operation, originally introduced into the Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) formalism to allow for coordination. This work takes node-contraction to be a general mechanism in the TAG system: node-contraction is involved not only in generating coordination, but also cases traditionally dealt with via movement. The existence of island effects that prohibit movement from certain domains indicates that we must also specify when multi-dominance cannot occur. This work also shows that by placing certain locality restrictions on node contraction at the derivational level, a number of these island effects can be derived.; The linearization question is answered by taking the primitive relations in syntactic structures to be immediate dominance and sister-precedence, an ordering between two siblings, and using a modification of the Non-Tangling Condition on trees to derive ordering among terminals. However, the proposed process for deriving ordering information does not guarantee a linearization of terminals for every graph. A graph may be unlinearizable due to either lack of ordering information or conflicting ordering information. This work also explores formal and linguistic consequences in a multi-dominance system that result from taking linearizability to be a property of well-formed syntactic structures. |
