Phrase Structure Trees Bear More Fruit than You Would Have Thought

Abstract

In this paper we will present several results concerning phrase structure trees. These results show that phrase structure trees, when viewed in certain ways, have much more descriptive power than one would have thought. We have given a brief account of local constraints on structural descriptions and an intuitive proof of a theorem about local constraints. We have compared the local constraints approach to some aspects of Gazdar's framework and that of Peters and Ritchie and of Karttunen. We have also presented some results on skeletons (phrase structure trees without labels) which show that phrase structure trees, even when deprived of the labels, retain in a certain sense all the structural information. This result has implications for grammatical inference procedures.