O. PRELIMINARY REMARKS Initial drafts of the papers in this collection
were presented in a con- ference entitled 'Views on Phrase Structure',
held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in March, 1989. Eleven
of the twenty-three partici- pants in the conference were able to
contribute to this volume. The purpose of the conference was to explore
theories of phrase structure in their relation to other subsystems of
grammar and/or systems of nonlinguistic knowledge. Some of the
grammatical subsystems which the authors consider are theta-theory,
movement, Case, and binding; a number of papers address how the
conceptual system and/or aspects of language use may interact. Unifying
the various approaches and perspectives is an attempt to furnish
hypotheses concerning prin- ciples of phrase structure with some sort of
independent justification. 1. PHRASE STRUCTURE THEORY: A BRIEF HISTORY A
basic outline for a theory of phrase structure theory is accepted by all
of the authors here; it is known as 'X-bar theory'. The concepts of
X-bar theory are expressed in some form by a number of pre-generative
linguists. For example, Bloomfield (1933) contrasted endocentric struc-
tures such as noun phrases and verb phrases with those he considered
exocentric, e. g. prepositional phrases and clauses. Jespersen (1933),
while presenting a functional system of description (in terms of
'ranks', where rank one is 'nominal', for example), clarified the
relations among the head of a phrase, its modifier, and a phrase which
modifies the modifier.