Linearization Grammars

Type: Advanced course

Section: Language & Computation

Lecturers: Detmar Meurers and Stefan Müller

Description:

The syntactic analysis of freer word order languages such as German has made significant advances in terms of the empirical coverage and generalizations expressed by current linguistic frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). A prominent line of research permits discontinuous constituents to arise for certain phenomena, and the Babel system as one of the largest implemented grammar fragment for German is based on this paradigm.

After introducing the basic machinery for the analysis of complex utterances in the HPSG framework, the first part of the course focuses on central word order phenomena and their analysis. In the second part of the course, we turn to the computational aspects by showing how parsing algorithms can be adopted to efficiently process grammars licensing discontinuous constituencies. Interestingly, the two treebanks available for German (NEGRA, VERBMOBIL) also heavily rely on discontinuous constituents in their syntactic annotation, and we end the course with a comparison of these data-driven representations with the theory-driven ones.

Prerequisites: Some knowledge of phrase structure grammar.

Course material: (version of March 28, 2004):

• Slides (in pdf-Format for viewing, 1.8M)
• Handouts (pdf-Format 4up for printing, 944K)

Further Reading:

• Books
  • An HPSG grammar for English and the key concepts of HPSG in general are described in:
    • Pollard, Carl J. and Ivan A. Sag, 1987. Information-Based Syntax and Semantics Volume 1 Fundamentals. No. 13 in CSLI Lecture Notes, Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
    • Pollard, Carl J. and Ivan A. Sag, 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
  
  
• Literature about HPSG in general can be found at:
  • http://www.cl.uni-bremen.de/HPSG-Bib/
  
  
• Linearization aspects are discussed in:
  • Kathol, Andreas, 2000. Linear Syntax. Oxford University Press
  • Müller, Stefan, 1999. Deutsche Syntax deklarativ. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar für das Deutsche. Linguistische Arbeiten, Nr. 394, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
  • Müller, Stefan, 2000. Continuous or Discontinuous Constituents? In Hinrichs, Erhard, Detmar Meurers und Shuly Wintner (Eds). 2000.: Proceedings of the ESSLLI-2000 Workshop on Linguistic Theory and Grammar Implementation, Birmingham, p. 133-152.
  • Reape, Mike, 1990. Getting Things in Order, In Bunt, Harry and Arthur van Horck (Eds): Discontinuous Constituency. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 209-253, Appeared 1996.
  • Reape, Mike, 1994. Domain Union and Word Order Variation in German, In Nerbonne, John, Klaus Netter, and Carl J. Pollard (Eds): German in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. No. 46 in CSLI Lecture Notes, Stanford: CSLI, p. 151-198.