Author's Note

This is a preliminary web conversion of my unpublished MIT Syntax Generals paper. The original was (I think) from 1992, and was coded in LaTeX and had a bunch of hand-drawn trees, which prevented it from being readily disseminated electronically. In 2002 and 2003 I spent a bunch of time converting the paper to a TEI XML document type and then outputting an HTML-rendered version. From what I remember, I was supposed to be drastically shortening it for publication in WANI, but never got that far. I believe I may have made some small editorial changes in the process, but certainly nothing substantive. Of course, I set aside the project before it was finished. For instance, there are no trees at all anymore, but there are equivalent bracket-marked structures in their place. I know I was planning to convert most of those bracket notations into SVG-generated tree images, but never got around to it. This is a big deal because I think some of the larger bracket expressions are completely impenetrable and do not illustrate the points well. So for the time being you'll have to draw out the trees yourself if you care enough about figuring it out! The other problem I notice is that it looks like I never got the section refs to resolve right (so the number in a section reference is just blank). There are other formatting issues that never got resolved too, but all in all, it looks like the content came through relatively intact. Feel free to let me know if you find any other glaring problems.

So here is the paper in its current incarnation, last touched in February, 2003. Don't ask me how it should be cited, since I am not affiliated with any institution anymore. I will try to make sure that this URL, http://www.slaxicon.org/papers/miskdp/2003-02/ remains stable and always points to exactly this version; if I do make future updates, I will put the new version(s) in a different place and link to it here.

TMG, 7/19/2006