This book presents a unified formal approach to various contemporary linguistic formalisms such as Government & Binding, Minimalism or Tree Adjoining Grammar. Through a careful introduction of mathematical techniques from logic, automata theory and universal algebra, the book aims at graduate students and researchers who want to learn more about tightly constrained logical approaches to natural language syntax. Therefore it features a complete and well illustrated introduction to the connection between declarative approaches formalized in monadic second-order logic (MSO) and generative ones formalized in various forms of automata as well as of tree grammars. Since MSO logic (on trees) yields only context-free languages, and at least the last two of the formalisms mentioned above clearly belong to the class of mildly context-sensitive formalisms, it becomes necessary to deal with the problem of the descriptive complexity of the formalisms involved in another way. The proposed genuinely new two-step approach overcomes this limitation of MSO logic while still retaining the desired tightly controlled formal properties. From the ContentsI Introduction 1 Overview 2 Technical preliminariesII The Classical Approach - Using MSO Logic as a Description Language for Natural Language Syntax 3 Model-theoretic syntax and monadic second-order logic 4 Finite-state devices 5 Decidability and definability 6 Applications 7 Intermediate conclusionIII Two Steps Are Better Than One - Extending the Use of MSO Logic to Non-Context-Free Linguistic Formalisms 8 Overview of the two-step approach 9 Non-context-freeness of natural language 10 The first step: Lifting 11 The second step: ReconstructionIV Conclusion and OutlookV AppendixSign up for our free electronic newsletter at www.degruyter.de/newsletter To order, please contact SFG-Servicecenter-Fachverlage GmbHPostfach 434372774 Reutlingen, GermanyFax: +49 (0)7071 - 93 53 - 33E-mail: deGruyter@s-f-g.com For USA, Canada and Mexico:Walter de Gruyter, Inc.200 Saw Mill River RoadHawthorne, NY 10532, USAFax: +1 (914) 747-1326E-mail: cs@degruyterny.comPlease visit our website for other publications by Mouton de Gruyter: http://www.mouton-publishers.com