Nominal Structures and Structural Recursion

It is possible within Tree Adjoining Grammar to reproduce many of the syntactic analyses originally formulated by linguists in transformational terms. To the extent that these analyses are well-motivated empirically, this fact makes TAG interesting for use in developing computational learning and processing models (Joshi 1990, Frank 1992, Rambow 1994), since the use of other non-transformational formalisms sometimes forces choices of linguistic description different from those ordinarily made by descriptive syntacticians. Thus, using TAG, one can take advantage in the construction of parsers and learners of the computational tractability of a mathematically restrictive formalism without having to reinvent empirical syntax in order to do so. At the same time, TAG analyses are not identical in every detail to their transformational counterparts; and it is interesting to compare them where they diverge. The differences arise because of a fundamental difference in the way that syntactic re..