This course covers fundamental concepts in syntactic analysis such as part of speech types, constituent structure, the syntax-semantics interface, and phenomena such as complementation, raising, control, passive and long-distance dependencies. We will emphasize formally precise encoding of linguistic hypotheses and the design of grammars that can scale up to ever larger fragments of a language such as is required in practical applications. Through the course, we will progressively build up a consistent grammar for a fragment of English. Problem sets will introduce data and phenomena from other languages.
By the end of this course students will be able to:
Note: To request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact Disabled Student Services, 448 Schmitz, 206-543-8924 (V/TTY). If you have a letter from Disabled Student Services indicating that you have a disability which requires academic accommodations, please present the letter to the instructor so we can discuss the accommodations you might need in this class.
Note: All homework and exams should be turned online via CollectIt as pdf files (only). Absolutely no .doc, .docx, .txt etc.
I would like to be able to post the answer keys to homeworks immediately after you turn them in, so that you can compare your answers while the issues are still fresh in your mind. However, if there are students who haven't yet turned in their homework, I can't do that. Accordingly, I have adopted the following late-homework policy:
All homework must be turned in electronically, via CollectIt, as pdf files only. (If you are writing the trees/feature structures in your homework by hand, you'll need to scan them to pdf, or if no other option is available, take photos.) All prose answers should be typed. Each assignment should be turned in as as single pdf file. (The sole exception here is turning in partial assignments on time and the rest late for partial credit; under those circumstances, we expect separate pdfs for the part turned in on time and that turned in late. Note that you may not split a problem across your 'on time' and 'late' files.)
Be sure that your name appears in the pdf file --- it is not sufficient to rely on the uplaod software to track whose paper is whose.
In order to make it possible for us to grade your homework in a timely fashion, please keep all information for a given answer together and preferably in order (you may put a big tree from part B on the next page and let part C precede it, but do not put the tree to the end of the file or some other random place). When we ask for feature structures on the nodes of trees, they should be shown as part of the tree (not separately, especially not on a different page). If the tree is too big to fit on one page, you may break it into meaningful parts (bigger constituents), so long as your answer makes it clear how they fit together. When the assignment asks for feature structures or constraints, these should be shown as feature structures and not as lists of independent statements.
Lectures will assume that students have completed the assigned reading first.
First attempts at a theory of grammar
|10/2||HW 0 due|
Why NL aren't CF
Headed Rules, Trees
|10/9||HW 1 due (Ch 2, 3)|
|10/13||Valence, Agreement||Ch 4|
|10/16||HW 2 due (Ch 4,5)|
|10/20||How the Grammar Works (.ppt slides)||Ch 6|
|10/23||HW 3 due (Ch 6)|
|10/29||Lexical Types||Ch 8:8.1-8.4|
|10/30||HW 4 due (Ch 6,7,8)|
|11/3||Lexical Rules||Ch 8:8.5-8.8|
|11/5||Grammar and Processing||Ch 9|
|11/6||HW 5 due (Ch 8);|
|11/12||Existentials, Extraposition, Idioms||Ch 11|
|11/13||Midterm due (Ch 1-10)|
|11/17||Raising, Control||Ch 12|| |
|11/19||Auxiliary verbs||Ch 13:13.1-13.4|
|11/20||HW 6 due (Ch 11,12)|
|11/24||Auxiliary verbs: NICE properties||Ch 13:13.5-13.8|
|11/26||No class: Thanksgiving Holiday|
|12/1||Catch up, review|| |
|12/3||Long-distance dependencies||Ch 14|
|12/4||HW 7 due (Ch 12,13)|
|12/8||Syntax and sociolinguistic variation
|12/10||Construction-based grammar||Ch 16||Final exam posted|
|12/11||HW 8 due (Ch 14)|
|12/17 11:45pm||Final exam due|
No late finals accepted.