Network Grammar

Network Grammar’s principles are enough to account for much of English syntax, exploding the myths of orthodox theory. The principles of Network Grammar are:

• a mental network holds knowledge, innate and acquired
• each node in the network is the locus of a unique concept
• a concept is realised by progression along the paths fanning out from the node
• a proposition comprises three concepts
• language knowledge is held as special types of proposition – words and rules
• words and rules are connected by category nodes, of which there are probably thousands to enable a many-to-many relationship between phonological words and meanings, and to allow common words also to have idiomatic meanings
• a junction of two not-necessarily-adjacent words creates a proposition consisting of the two meanings joined by a syntactic/semantic relation
• the words in a sentence are processed in left to right sequence, with junctions being identified by scanning backwards (right to left) from each word
• each junction has one word as parent, the other as dependent
• an incoming word brings activation the one-and-only time in the sentence it forms a dependent; a word may also act zero, one or more times as a parent in the sentence
• a junction may form more than one incomplete proposition (therefore not immediately delivered to cognition), allowing completion as a result of a later junction in the left-to-right processing of the sentence; this is important for the correct allocation of words to argument roles
• there is the possibility of a word’s category changing because of its participation in a proposition, thereby affecting the possibilities for its participation in later propositions; important for the correct allocation of words to adjunct roles.