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Long-distance dependencies belong to the most controversial challenges in linguistics. These patterns seem to contain constituents that have left their original position in a sentence and that have landed in a different place. A typical example is the relative clause the person I have talked to yesterday, in which the direct object (the person) is not situated in an argument position following the verb, but instead is located at the beginning of the utterance. Upon closer inspection, however, all problems related to long-distance dependencies can be reduced to the limits of phrase structural analyses. A phrase structure tree is a rigid data structure in which information is shared between local nodes. These analyses therefore need to resort to more complex formal machinery in order to overcome this locality constraint, such as using transformations or positing filler-gap constructions. However, there exists a more intuitive alternative within the tradition of cognitive-functional linguistics in which long-distance dependencies do not require special treatment. Instead, these patterns are simply the side effect of how grammatical constructions combine with each other in order to satisfy the communicative needs of language users. Through a computational implementation in Fluid Construction Grammar, this article demonstrates that it is perfectly feasible to formalize this alternative in a model that is capable of both formulating and comprehending utterances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction Grammar has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Recently, there have been exciting developments to cater for this demand, most notably in Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). Unfortunately, like playing a music instrument, the formalisms used by SBCG and FCG take time and effort to master, and linguists who are unfamiliar with them may not always appreciate the far-reaching theoretical consequences of adopting this or that approach. This paper undresses SBCG and FCG to their bare essentials, and offers a linguist-friendly comparison that looks at how both approaches define constructions, linguistic knowledge and language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chomsky's highly influential Syntactic Structures ( SS) has been much praised its originality, explicitness, and relevance for subsequent cognitive science. Such claims are greatly overstated. SS contains no proof that English is beyond the power of finite state description (it is not clear that Chomsky ever gave a sound mathematical argument for that claim). The approach advocated by SS springs directly out of the work of the mathematical logician Emil Post on formalizing proof, but few linguists are aware of this, because Post's papers are not cited. Chomsky's extensions to Post's systems are not clearly defined, and the arguments for their necessity are weak. Linguists have also overlooked Post's proofs of the first two theorems about effects of rule format restrictions on generative capacity, published more than ten years before SS was published. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]