Syllabus
1. Formal description of natural languages – what are we up to?
2. Overview of frameworks to be discussed Formalization of linguistic features - focus on syntax: - Syntactic trees, dependency vs. constituency - Form vs meaning of the sentence - Levels in the sentence description: surface-syntactic vs deep-syntactic representation - Relationships between surface and depth: synonymy, homonymy, deletions - - Verb as the core of the sentence structure; valency - Referencing within the sentence and beyond, coreference - Information structure of the sentence
3. Functional Generative Description - Multi-level approach to language - Valency: arguments vs. adjuncts, valency frame - Surface-syntactic and deep-syntactic trees, non-dependency relations
4. Paninian framework - Dependency-based approach - Karaka relations
5. Meaning-Text Theory - Levels of language system description - Meaning-to-text approach - Lexical functions: syntagmatic vs paradigmatic
6. Generative Linguistics – The Chomskyan approach - Language description in the generative perspective: competence vs performance, language faculty - Generation of sentences, transformations - Lexicalist Hypothesis, Government & Binding, Minimalism
7. Distributed Morphology - A unified approach to syntax and morphology - Vocabulary items, Encyclopedia, Late Insertion, Underspecification, etc.
8. Case Grammar & Frame Semantics (Charles Fillmore) - Case Grammar - Frame Semantics - FrameNet database
9. Construction Grammar - Construction as a form-meaning pairing - Types of constructions - Constructions as means for a full-fledged description of language
10. Some more approaches - Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) - Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA), etc.
Annotation
The course explains the principles of the formal description of natural languages and presents selected formal- linguistic approaches. The focus in on the description of sentence structure.
After an introductory discussion of formalization of linguistic phenomena, the course compares selected dependency-based approaches (Functional Generative Description, Meaning-Text Theory, etc.) with generative approaches (e.g. Distributed Morphology) and other frameworks (Frame Semantics, Construction Grammar, etc.).
Related treebanks and other data sources (FrameNet, etc.) are presented too.