121 - 130 of 162 results for: LINGUIST

Word formation and the lexicon: empirical generalizations and theoretical approaches. Lexicalist and Distributed Morphology. How words are built and interpreted: constituency and headedness, morpheme order and scope, the mirror principle, bracketing paradoxes, the hierarchy of functional categories. Paradigms, blocking, gaps, periphrasis, syncretism. Locality, head movement vs. selection, constraints on allomorphy, incorporation, polysynthesis, cliticization and prosodic re-ordering phenomena.

Variationist, and psycholinguistic studies of how syntactic alternations (for example, the English dative, genitive, and passive) develop in time and space.

A systematic introduction to the formal analysis of English grammar using the framework of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). Topics: feature structure modeling, lexical and phrasal organization in terms of type hierarchies and constraint inheritance, clausal types, patterns of complementation, the auxiliary system, extraction dependencies, wh-constructions, and the syntax-semantics interface.

Focus is on grammatical analysis of individual languages. Builds directly on the theoretical foundations presented in 221A. Topics vary each year.

Introduces the basics of Minimalist architecture and structure-building operations, with attention to the communication of syntax with the phonological and semantic interfaces. Topics include phrase structure, locality and phases, phrasal and head movement, functional categories, and features. A previous graduate-level syntax course, or permission of the instructor required.

Presentation of a formal model of grammar designed to allow precise, computationally tractable descriptions of cross-linguistic variation in syntactic structure. Concentration on the formal properties of the model, its flexibility in teasing out language specific and possibly universal characteristics of natural languages and the place of syntax as a component within a larger linguistic architecture. Prerequisite: 120 or consent of instructor

To reason about textual information we rely extensively on extra-linguistic information but the syntactic structure and lexical items used also play a role in guiding us to conclusions. In by now traditional semantic practice the contributions of those are treated in model theoretic terms. But formulas of first or higher order logic do not come with effective procedures for the reasoning that is required to draw inferences or answer questions given some natural language input. Natural Reasoning is a cover term we use for a family of proof-theoretic formal approaches that are currently used by computational linguists. The course will give an overview of proof-theoretic logic as applied to natural language, discuss some of the computational systems that incorporate this view (Stanford's NatLog, Bar Ilan's Biutee, Parc's Bridge) and conclude with a critical view of the linguistic generalizations that underlie these approaches and means to improve them or mitigate their shortcomings. The examples of natural reasoning will mainly be in the domain of monotonicity reasoning and reasoning about the factuality of events.

Group research projects using quantitative syntactic data from texts, recordings, experiments, or historical records. Skills in extracting, graphically exploring, and analyzing naturalistic syntactic data, and in presenting results. May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: 229A, B, or D, or equivalent.

Critiques of the empirical foundations of syntax. The roles of introspective, usage-based, experimental, and typological evidence. Modern methods of data collection and analysis used in syntax. Hands-on, practical work with data sets. May be repeated for credit.