Table Of Content
Chapters of
Dependency Grammar
A historical survey
from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by
András Imrényi
Nicolas Mazziotta
Chapters of Dependency Grammar
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Volume 212
Chapters of Dependency Grammar
A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by András Imrényi and Nicolas Mazziotta
Chapters of
Dependency Grammar
A historical survey
from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by
András Imrényi
Eszterházy Károly University, Eger
Nicolas Mazziotta
University of Liège
John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Table of contents
Aspects of the theory and history of dependency grammar 1
Nicolas Mazziotta and András Imrényi
Chapter 1
Syntactic relations in ancient and medieval grammatical theory 23
Anneli Luhtala
Chapter 2
The notion of dependency in Latin grammar in the Renaissance
and the 17th century 59
Bernard Colombat
Chapter 3
How dependency syntax appeared in the French Encyclopedia:
From Buffier (1709) to Beauzée (1765) 85
Sylvain Kahane
Chapter 4
Dependency in early sentence diagrams: Stephen W. Clark 133
Nicolas Mazziotta
Chapter 5
Sámuel Brassai in the history of dependency grammar 163
András Imrényi and Zsuzsa Vladár
Chapter 6
Franz Kern: An early dependency grammarian 189
Timothy Osborne
Chapter 7
Some aspects of dependency in Otto Jespersen’s structural syntax 215
Lorenzo Cigana
Chapter 8
The Russian trail: Dmitrievsky, the little drama metaphor
and dependency grammar 253
Patrick Sériot
Index nominum 277
Index rerum 279
Aspects of the theory and history
of dependency grammar
Nicolas Mazziotta and András Imrényi
Dependency and constituency are alternative frameworks for syntactic analysis.
They provide conceptual and formal tools to describe how words combine to form
utterances. Modern syntactic theories are grounded on one logic or the other.
Constituency is the core concept of phrase structure grammars (henceforth “PSG”).
These focus on how words are grouped together to form larger constructions that,
in turn, can be grouped with other constructions. The resulting diagram shows
part/whole (mereological) relations, and foregrounds unit types (e.g. N, V, NP, VP).
As a first approximation, dependency analysis can be regarded as a description of
pairwise hierarchical relations between words. In this approach, the focus is on
specific relations that can be classified into different types (Kahane & Mazziotta, 2015;
see Chapter 4, Section 4 for a more detailed comparison). The family of theories
taking the latter perspective is called “dependency grammar” (henceforth “DG”).
The difference between the two approaches appears clearly when analyses are en-
coded in diagrams (Figure 1).
S
VP
lovesV
MaryN NP subject object
N
lovesV MaryN cars
modifier
redAdj carsN Adj
red
(a) Constituency tree (b) Dependency tree
Figure 1. Constituency tree (a) vs. Dependency tree (b)
Chomsky’s Syntactic structures (1957) marked the beginning of decades dominated
by PSG frameworks, particularly in theoretical linguistics, so much so that DG
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.212.01maz
© 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Nicolas Mazziotta and András Imrényi
has been shunned for years by many scholars.1 Consequently, many studies that
make use of DG constantly have had to explain what dependency is (e.g. Osborne,
2006, Section 5), and justify its usefulness, sometimes through criticizing PSG (e.g.
Maxwell, 2013). However, interest in dependency grammar is growing, mainly
through the development of large treebanks and through the results achieved by
natural language processing, up to the point that
due to the acceptance and spread of dependency in computational linguistics,
[…] overlooking DG is becoming more difficult. In fact a critical mass may be
reached at some point, in which case extensive awareness of the dependency vs.
constituency distinction could extend from computational linguistics to theoretical
linguistics, and from theoretical linguistics to pedagogical applications.
(Osborne, 2015, p. 1043)
Osborne’s final remark suggests that the spread of DG in pedagogical applications
may be triggered by advances in theoretical linguistics. However, in many parts
of the world, traditional (pedagogical) grammar has long been more DG- than
PSG-oriented to begin with (cf. Mel’čuk, 1988, p. 3, see Section 1 below), and it is
hardly a coincidence that many of the grammarians whose work is reviewed in the
present volume had a strong pedagogical commitment. Overall, it seems fair to say
that DG has had a strong, and growing, status in syntactic analysis that is geared
toward practical application, in partial independence from the trends of theoretical
linguistics. As practical applicability is increasingly seen as a criterion for evaluating
the fruitfulness of grammatical research, the future of DG appears to be bright in
theoretical linguistics as well.
Since 2011, the International Conferences on Dependency Linguistics (Depling)2
have been held every two years (in Barcelona, Prague, Uppsala, Pisa and Paris),
which testifies to an ever growing community using DG models.3
1. Quotations such as the following are emblematic of stances that reject DG on an a priori basis:
“In fact, dependency trees smack more of semantics than of syntax, in that the value category of
each functor stands not so much for a well-defined set of syntactic properties as for a semantic
value in a model, whereby the highest value category S can be interpreted as a truth value in a
model. While this can be considered to have the advantage of integrating syntactic and semantic
description, it must at the same time be admitted that the formal syntactic part of the equation
is not entirely transparent.” (Seuren, 2015, p. 405). We will not discuss thoroughly the compared
validity of PSG and DG, but the sole existence of efficient formal DGs (→4.3) suffices to reject
such criticism.
2. See <http://www.depling.org/>.
3. Additionally, Timothy Osbone presented an unpublished poster at Depling 2013, demonstrat-
ing a growing interest in DG through the increasing number of hits on the pages of Wikipedia
devoted to dependency.
Aspects of the theory and history of dependency grammar 3
In this introduction we will first focus on the need for historical studies on
DG (→1). Section →2 offers a brief presentation of the eight chapters of this book
in order to introduce their primary topics. Each chapter contains cross-references
to other chapters. To complement this, Section →3 emphasizes some global char-
acteristics that may be used to define a common ground about what dependency
is. Section →4 briefly acknowledges some related topics that are out of the scope
of this book.
1. The need for studies on the history of dependency grammar
The popularity of DG has increased in the last decade, but little attention has been
paid so far to the historical precedents of DG-oriented theories. The most renowned
scholar in the history of dependency linguistics is Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954).
His seminal book, Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959), is often considered as
the birth certificate of dependency-based approaches. Tesnière’s key concept is
“connection” (Fr. connexion):4
[A] sentence of the type Alfred speaks is not composed of just the two elements,
Alfred and speaks, but rather of three elements, the first being Alfred, the second
speaks, and the third the connection that unites them – without which there would
be no sentence.
A connection is a hierarchical grammatical relation between words, where a gov-
ernor word (Fr. régissant) is connected to a subordinate word (Fr. subordonné)
(Tesnière 1966/2015, Chapter 2; Kahane & Osborne, 2015, p. xxxviii), that is to say,
it is a genuine syntactic dependency.
It was not until 2015 that Tesnière’s book (second edition, 1966) was finally
translated in English (Tesnière 1966/2015), whereas translations in other major
languages had been made available before: German (1980), Russian (1988), Spanish
(1994), Italian (2001). It seems that the longer the wait, the more focus Tesnière
drew in the DG community (Ágel et al., 2003, Part II, contains ten papers on Lucien
Tesnière’s life and works). However, “Tesnière is not the first inventor of depend-
ency grammars” (first sentence of the abstract of Chapter 8, by Patrick Seriot), and,
to quote Mel’čuk (1988, p. 3):
Dependencies as a formal means of representing the syntactic structure of sen-
tences have been the staple diet of traditional syntacticians for centuries, especially
4. A more precise term would be “structural connection”: Tesnière distinguishes between
structural connections (i.e. syntactic ones) and semantic connections (Tesnière 1966/2015,
Chapter 21).
