Talk:Antisymmetry

Question
When defining c-command in the first section, the article says that AP does not exclude BP, but, from the definition of exclusion higher up it seems that AP should exclude BP. Will someone explain this to me?--SurrealWarrior 11:11, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Scientific context requested
Is this theory considered mainstream, experimental, kooky, or what? -- Beland 19:04, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

It depends on who you ask. There are certainly a lot of people assume Antisymmetry, but there are more who don't. It has a large enough following to be taken seriously, even if it's not the commonly accepted doctrine on linearization. Note, though, that there still isn't really a generally agreed upon theory of linear order. 66.183.97.133 (talk) 08:17, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I know a lot about linguistics but this article is completely incomprehensible to me, as are many other linguistics-related articles. I think it needs to be rewritten somewhat so that at least amateur linguists like me can understand it. You can't just jump into ever-more-obscure terms continuously without ever explaining at least what their basic idea is. I don't want to have to click every single concept. Vegfarandi (talk) 17:39, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Too technical, not enough context
I think this article needs to give more context. Why do syntacticians care about this? What motivates looking at language in this way? The article could also benefit from a less-technical introduction to the idea, so that non-syntacticians can make sense of it. That's not to say that the technical part should be "dumbed down", just that they should be presented in an intuitive non-technical sense first, to convey the general idea, then given in more detail for someone who wants to know more. Not trying to complain, just pointing out some improvements that I think would bring this to a wider audience, with fewer headaches. (If they want headaches, they can go get the original paper). joo-yoon (talk) 04:51, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

First draft of a rewrite to the intro
--Okay, I tried to come up with a more accessible introduction. Comments welcome!

Antisymmetry is an approach to formal syntax that proposes that the order of elements in a phrase (e.g., sentence) is directly related to their hierarchical relationships in a syntactic structure. The idea was proposed in formal detail in Kayne (1994).

In the study of formal syntax, it had been long since assumed that the differences in word order between a language like English (which is subject-verb-object) and Japanese (which is subject-object-verb) was due to a fundamental difference in the order in which elements appeared in their structures.

For example, in the English phrase "John loves Mary", the verb "loves" comes before the direct object "Mary". In Japanese, however, the (canonical) form would be "John Mary loves".

This can be represented in a tree diagram as follows.

(tree)

Assume that "loves" and "Mary" join together to form a larger element, and that element joins with "John" to be an even larger element. One might say that the difference between the English and Japanese representations is simply that the order of the two "higher-level" elements is switched.

Kayne claims, however, that a simple sort of re-ordering is not enough to account for word order. Notice that there is nothing about the structure that allows it to be flattened into a particular word order, other than a simple stipulation that the order matches the order in the trees. While there is a hierarchical relationship between "John" and both "loves" and "Mary", there is no such relationship between "loves" and "Mary". Their relationship is symmetric. So, Kayne claims, the process that converts the structure into a string of words ("linearization") can not tell which order to put "loves" and "Mary" in. So the structure is ill-formed.

What Kayne proposes is that the structure actually needs to be elaborated such that all elements are in a non-symmetric (asymmetric), hierarchical relationship. The linearization process then "reads" this asymmetry and generates the appropriate output word order.

One consequence of Kayne's proposal is that the "default" word order of language is SVO, and that any other word orders reflect structures which have been obtained through transformations upon a basic SVO structure. -- Not finished ... comments welcome! joo-yoon (talk) 05:09, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

C-command
The section is underdefined.

- What is the significance of P (in AP, BP, etc.)

- What does dominate mean?

- The article stated "A category excludes all categories not dominated by both its segments." Assuming that "dominate" means "ancestor of", AP does exclude BP, because AP2 is not an ancestor of BP although the text said AP does not exclude BP. Lfstevens (talk) 20:14, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Definitions needed

 * Simplex structure
 * Adjunct/Adjunction
 * Movement
 * Nonterminal category
 * Total ordering
 * SpecCP

Word count
How can I get the word count of the article without being logged in? 98.97.36.1 (talk) 02:54, 15 October 2023 (UTC)