Reading · Summer 2026 Reading from MIT
Science & engineering
Syntax: A Cognitive Approach
By Edward A. F. Gibson, professor of brain and cognitive sciences
MIT Press · 2025
This book lays out the grammar of a language from the perspective of a cognitive scientist, outlining the components of language structure and the model of syntax that Gibson advocates: dependency grammar, in which a word is connected to another word via a dependency arc to form a larger compositional meaning. This formalism can explain numerous aspects of word order universals across languages.
From Summer 2026 recommended reading from MIT (MIT News).
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