We consider the structural descriptions produced by various grammatical formalisms in ~ of the complexity of the paths and the relationship between paths in the sets of structural descriptions that each system can generate. In considering the relationship between formalisms, we show that it is useful to abstract away from the details of the formalism, and examine the nature of their derivation process as reflected by properties of their deriva:ion trees. We find that several of the formalisms considered can be seen as being closely related since they have derivation tree sets with the same structure as those produced.
