On Representing Syntactic Structure
Edward Gammon · Language · 1963
In this paper I discuss some diagrammatic representations of syntactic structure. I introduce the concept of syntactic ‘distance’ as an aid to depict the ‘degree of grammatical relatedness’ and show that this concept leads to a kind of equivalence among several methods of representation. Though I sometimes speak only of relatedness, I assume that grammatical relatedness and degree of grammatical relatedness are the same thing. Suppose that the concept of relatedness is defined implicitly, at least to the extent that it is possible not only to make statements about which parts of sentences are related to other parts, but also to make judgments about the relative degree of relatedness. If A, B, and C are parts of a sentence we can say, for example, that A is more closely related to B than C is to B.