Immediate Precedence in GPSG
Arnold M. Zwicky, Joel Ashmore Nevis · The Knowledge Bank (The Ohio State University) · 1986
Precedence and immediate precedence.The ID/LP (immediate dominance/linear precedence) fonnat of generalized phrase structure granooar• (GPSG) separates the principles expr•essing conditions on branching from those expressing conditions on the relative order of sister constituents.An LP principle is of the fono X < Y, where X and Y are (possibly complex) category names; such a principle requires that categor y X precede category Y whenever the two are sisters.1 Precedence in this sense need not be inonediate.Thus the LP condi ti ou in (1), while excluding the orderings of sister constituents V, NP, and PP in (2), penoits all of the orderings in (3)--iucludiug V PP NP, in which V and NP are not i1runediately adjacent to one another.However, in a language with considerable hierarchical (rather• than flat) constituent structure, mere precedence (symbolized by the simple sign ' <') and iJ1UDediate pr•ecedence (which we will symbolize by the double symbol ' << ') will often amount to the same thing.Thus the LP principle (4) holds in English, wher•e it has the effect of requiring (5), giveu tha t Det and Nom have no further sisters under NP.In this particular case i n Euglish, a simple precedence condition would suffice.(4) Det < Nom (5) Del « Norn 2 .Positioning adverbs in Finnish.Now consider a language with flatter coustituent structures and freer word order than English.Consider, for exrunple, Finnish, where word order within a clause is free (except that NPs have coutiuuous, strictly ordered parts) and also where the words (again, except those in NPs) are inuoediately dominated by S. Finnish permits all six orderings of the constituents iu a sentence composed of a subject, a direct object, and a finite V, as in (6):( 6) a.