Date: March 27, 2012, 11 AM

Location: Research Institute for Linguistics, HAS, Budapest. VI., Benczúr u. 33, auditorium, ground floor

Richard Hudson (professor emeritus, University College, London)

Word Grammar and its analysis of word order

The lecture will challenge the orthodox view that phrase structure is a good theoretical basis for understanding word order by presenting the case for an enriched version of the traditional dependency structure (which is taught in Hungarian schools). Dependency structure is a more plausible cognitive model of syntactic structure than phrase structure, and it also allows a plausible analysis of word order based on the more general ordering principles developed in Cognitive Grammar in terms of 'landmarks', in which each word acts as a landmark for its dependent words. The lecture will show how this approach applies to some difficult syntactic structures such as extraction, pied-piping and the 'lowering' found in German partial-VP fronting.