For many, maybe most, of us, graphs are simply visual representationsof data involving two axes and various points connected by lines. Manydefinitions of graph bear this out, as they are highlydescriptive. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, on-line,gives the following definition: “a kind of symbolic diagram (used inChemistry, Mathematics, etc.) in which a system ofconnections is expressed by spots or circles, some pairs of which arecolligated by one or more lines”, and the New Oxford AmericanDictionary, on-line, defines graph in these terms: “a diagramshowing the relation between variable quantities, typically of twovariables, each measured along one of a pair of axes at right angles”.Some characterizations of graph that one can find border on thevague, e.g. the Wikipedia definition from discrete mathematics of “astructure amounting to a set of objects in which some pairs of theobjects are in some sense ‘related’ ”. But this Wikipedia definitionactually moves us in a different direction, namely one in which graphsare not just a practical visualization aid, but rather are also a highlytechnical entity, one that serves as the basis for a branch ofmathematics known as graph theory, which,
It is this last sense of graph that is most relevant forlinguists, for graph theory is also a basis for a theoretical approachto the analysis of syntactic structures in language, and it is withinsuch a graph theory approach that the present volume for theEmpirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory (EALT) series, Syntax on the Edge: A Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Sentence Structure,takes its place. In this work, author Diego Gabriel Krivochen clearlysatisfies the theoretical imperative of the series by justifying the useof graph theory for linguistic purposes while at the same timesatisfying the series’ empirical imperative by analyzing a wide range ofsyntactic phenomena, mostly from English but from Spanish as well. Inthe pages that follow, accordingly, we see analyses of “Raising” and“Equi” (i.e., “control”) structures, of binding effects, of WH-questions, of coordination, of passivization, and of dativeshift, all in English, but Dr. Krivochen adds in an examination ofclitic climbing in Spanish as well. Especially regarding the Englishstructures, this collection represents a veritable who’s who ofconstructions that are interesting in their own right but which havealso played a key role in the development of syntactic theories over theyears. These analyses thus shed new light on the structures in questionwhile also demonstrating the utility of a graph-theoretic approach tosyntactic analysis and in this way advance the theory. Author Krivochenis not the first linguistic scholar to adopt such a framework, but thisvolume represents perhaps the most ambitious application of theprinciples of this theory to syntactic phenomena.
As series editor, I am pleased to be in a position to allow such aempirically rich and theoretically insightful work as this one to have aplace among the volumes in EALT.
Brian D. Joseph
EALT Series Managing Editor
Columbus, Ohio USA, 25 July 2023