Constraint-based syntax

The class teaches constraint-based syntax which has proved useful for a wide variety of languages, as well as computational linguistics and psycholinguistics, focusing on Head-driven Phrase structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag 1994, Müller et al 2021). It presents feature structures and type hierarchies, for words and syntactic structures. It discusses lexicalism (words as basic syntactic units) and constructions (non-compositional syntax-semantic pairings). It presents crosslinguistic generalizations about categories, functions and positions and shows how to write grammar fragments for various languages with explicit formal constraints.

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:                   

• Analyze the major syntactic phenomena of English and unrelated languages (valence, valence alternation, agreement, subordination, long-distance dependencies, anaphora, coordination)
• Distinguish categories, functions, positions and semantic roles
• Draw syntactic trees and graph representations (attribute value matrix)
• Write grammar fragments for unknown languages
• Use a type hierarchy for syntax and semantics

An introduction to syntax and/or language typology is not required but will be helpful