Pied-piping in cognition

Abstract

The paper offers an analysis of pied-piping within the theoretical framework of Word Grammar. This framework combines cognitive linguistics with dependency grammar, so it assumes that the full power of domain-general cognition is available for syntax, and that syntactic structure can be conceived as a network of relations between individual words. In this network, words are related by at least two kinds of link: dependencies and ‘landmark’ links that determine word order. To handle the special characteristics of pied-piping, the analysis also includes a single special relation, ‘pipee’, which links the ‘piper’ (the wh-type word) to the word which replaces it in the landmark structure. The analysis is applied in detail to English, and then compared with previous analyses and extended to accommodate both the pied-piping with inversion found in Meso-American languages, and the boundary markers found in other languages.