What is it about?
The paper addresses the question of syntagmatic complexity in spoken language, and shows that overwhelmingly structures in grammar and prosody (intonation, tone) are 'flat', that is, can be described with right branching recursion or, equivalently, finite state machines.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The unique contribution of this paper is that it describes the 'flat grammar' of language at more ranks, from discourse through utterance, sentence and word to phoneme, than previous studies, which have tended to concentrate on only one of these ranks.
Perspectives
This publication brings together a number of different but related publications on the flatness of language from each decade since the mid 1980s. It has been a pleasure to cooperate closely with my co-author Sascha Griffiths on this paper.
Dafydd Gibbon
Universitat Bielefeld
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Multilinear Grammar: Ranks and Interpretations, Open Linguistics, September 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/opli-2017-0014.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
