---
title: "Using Descriptions of Trees in a Tree Adjoining Grammar (1992)"
description: "In the traditional view, a Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) builds structures by combining elementary… 24 references, cited by 24 papers here."
authors: ["K Vijay-Shanker"]
year: 1992
venue: "Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/J92-4004/"
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licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
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canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/shanker-1992-descriptions-trees-tree-adjoining-grammar/"
---
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# Using Descriptions of Trees in a Tree Adjoining Grammar

**Authors:** [K Vijay-Shanker](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/k-vijay-shanker/) · **Year:** 1992 · **Venue:** [Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/) ([Computational Linguistics 1992](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/1992/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J92-4004/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J92-4004.pdf)

**Citations:** 24 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
In the traditional view, a Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) builds structures by combining elementary trees through adjoining and substitution. Adjoining, however, fails to keep the structural relations stated in the input trees, so TAG does not fit cleanly into declarative, constraint-based unification frameworks such as FUG, LFG, GPSG or HPSG. Vijay-Shanker solves this by changing what a TAG is taken to operate on. Instead of trees, the grammar combines partial descriptions of trees. Following D-theory, these descriptions state immediate dominance and also allow dominance to be left partly unspecified. Their graphical form is called quasi-trees. Seen this way, combining structures only adds information. The trees the grammar actually produces are the minimal readings of the finished descriptions. The approach gives a principled basis for feature-structure-based TAG (FTAG) and refines it. It also lets adjoining constraints follow from feature statements instead of hand-listed sets. A logical formulation with its own semantics keeps grammar descriptions separate from the structures that satisfy them. The paper is purely formal and reports no corpus or experimental results.

## Key points
- Introduces **quasi-trees**, partial tree descriptions adapted from D-theory (Marcus, Hindle, and Fleck 1983). Under this view, adjoining keeps the dominance relations stated in the combined structures.
- Gives a principled justification for **FTAG**, first defined in Vijay-Shanker (1987) and Vijay-Shanker and Joshi (1988), and refines it.
- Handles **Selective (SA), Null (NA) and Obligatory (OA) adjoining constraints** through feature-structure statements rather than stipulated lists. This also removes some redundant structural specifications.
- Provides a **logical formulation of FTAG** modeled on Rounds and Manaster-Ramer's (1987) treatment of Functional Unification Grammar, together with a semantics for it.
- Raises open questions:
  - whether adjoining, and multi-component adjoining, can be reduced to substitution;
  - whether the split between initial and auxiliary structures is needed.
- The work was supported by NSF grant IRI-9016591, and its figures were drawn with the XTAG workbench.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: K Vijay-Shanker. 1992. Using Descriptions of Trees in a Tree Adjoining Grammar. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{vijayshanker1992using,
  title = {{Using Descriptions of Trees in a Tree Adjoining Grammar}},
  author = {K Vijay-Shanker},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1992},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J92-4004/}
}
```

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## References

24 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Abeille, A.; Bishop, K.; Cote, Sharon; and Schabes, Y. (1990). "A lexicalized tree adjoining grammar for English." Technical report MS-CIS-90-24, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Abeille%2C+A%2E%3B+Bishop%2C+K%2E%3B+Cote%2C+Sharon%3B+and+Schabes%2C+Y%2E+%281990%29%2E+%22A+lexicalized+tree+adjoining+grammar+for+English%2E%22+Technical+report+MS%2DCIS%2D90%2D24%2C+Department+of+Computer+and+Information+Science%2C+Univer)
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*Updated 30 October 2026*