Unification-based grammars and linguistic description II
This course builds on `Unification-based grammars and linguistic description I' by providing a more detailed picture of linguistic theorizing rooted in the unification/constraint-based grammar framework.
After brief presentations of GPSG and CUG, most of the time will be spent on HPSG: its formalism and solutions to a choice of linguistic phenomena, including those present in Slavic languages and Czech: agreement, valency, complement/adjunct distinction (if any), unbounded dependencies, inflection and derivation, word order, topic/focus articulation, semantic interpretation.
Interested students will be encouraged to implement and test a toy HPSG grammar of their own in one of the available grammar-writing environments: ALE, ConTroll, LKB.
Syllabus:
- 1.
- Introduction: the merits of constraint-based grammar formalisms for theoretical linguistics and natural language processing, an overview of assumptions
- 2.
- A comparison of constraint-based linguistic theories: GPSG, LFG, CUG, HPSG
- 3.
- Formalisms for HPSG and their possibilities
- 4.
- Solutions proposed within HPSG to some linguistic phenomena: valence, agreement, modification by adjuncts, function words, syntactic control, unbounded dependencies, inflection and derivation, word order, topic-focus articulation, binding, semantic interpretation; comparison to solutions proposed within alternative theories
- 5.
- Methods of implementation, grammar writing in systems Attribute-Logic Engine (ALE),
ConTroll,
LKB,
Grammar Writer's Workbench