Funding source: National Science Foundation
Award Identifier / Grant number: BCS-1845344
Research funding
The work reported in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1845344.
Appendix: TSL over trees without trees
This appendix illustrates that subregular classes like SL and TSL represent very abstract concepts that can be specified in numerous ways. In particular, it is even possible to have a tree-less view of TSL over trees. This addresses the remark of Brody (p. 199f) that “Graf talks here about daughter strings of a given node, and this way of talking contains the concept of ‘string’. But it crucially presupposes the tree structure: a node with a set of daughters.” It also illustrates that subregular linguistics does not put any restrictions on formalisms or metalanguages because it is the complexity of the underlying computation that matters, not how that computation is specified.
TSL over trees can be regarded as a system that associates every node in a dependency tree with one or more strings of other nodes in the tree. We visualize this process as the projection of tree tiers, and on each one of those tiers we then check that each node has a licit string of daughters. But mathematically this is only a convenient metaphor for associating a node with a string of other nodes. Each tier corresponds to a specific association between nodes and strings of nodes (in the case where a node is not projected onto the tier, it is associated with the empty string, whereas a node that is projected on the tier but has no tier daughters is associated with the special string
| Node-string associations visualized via tiers |
|
| Node-string associations as a table | ||
| Node | nom-string | wh-string |
| did[C, wh+] | ε | which[D, wh−] |
| ε[T, nom+] | John[D, nom−] might[T, nom+] | ε |
| ε[v] | ε | ε |
| John[D, nom−] |
|
ε |
| complain[V] | ε | ε |
| that[C] | ε | ε |
| might[T, nom+] | Mary[D, nom−] | ε |
| ε[v] | ε | ε |
| Mary[D, nom−] |
|
ε |
| buy[V] | ε | ε |
| which[D, wh−] | ε |
|
| car[N] | ε | ε |
Suppose then that we have a function parse that assigns every string a dependency tree with tree tiers, and a function stringify that takes as its input a dependency tree with tiers and converts it to a table of the form above. Given a string s, the output of stringify(parse(s)) is a table that encodes associations between each lexical item and some other lexical items in the sentence, and these associations are then checked by the grammar in the same manner that we employed over tiers. The mathematical core of TSL over trees then is not the projection of tiers, but rather how tier projection allows us to associate nodes in a dependency tree, which are just lexical items, with strings of other nodes, i.e. strings of other lexical items.
This might seem like a pointless mathematical exercise because we are still invoking tree structure in order to get our function stringify to work. But given two functions f and g, it is always possible to compose those two functions into a single function
We linguists have not figured out yet what this mystery function is or how we could define it without invoking tree structure at some point, and as a result this tree-free perspective on TSL over trees is not very useful. It may also be completely different from how TSL computations are actually represented in the human mind, either because they are stated over trees after all, or because the human mind uses yet another specification that subregular researchers have not discovered yet. Be that as it may, this alternative view of TSL establishes that there are many different ways of thinking of the formal class TSL, some of which do not invoke trees at all.
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