Dependency syntax as the simplest theory of grammar (opens in new tab)

The syntax of human languages has long been argued to be complex and even unlearnable from the input alone. However, the success of large language models (LLMs) has challenged this idea. I argue for a simple view of syntax, where the syntax of a language is just the set of dependency rules, with no phrase structure or transformation rules—constructs central to Chomsky’s transformational grammar. This approach accounts for diverse phenomena in human language processing and explains crosslingui...