Syntactic processing and functional sentence perspective

Abstract

This paper contains some ideas that nave occurred to me in the course of some preliminary work on the notion of reversible grammar. In order to make it possible to generate and analyze sentences with the same grammar, represented in the same way, I was led to consider restrictions on the expressive power of the formalism that would be acceptible only if the structures of sentences contained more information than American linguisits have usually been prepared to admit. I hope to convey to you some of my surprise and delight in finding that certain linguists of the Prague school argue for the representation of this same information on altogether different grounds.