Lecturers: Jonas Kuhn and Stefan Müller

Description:

This course is an introduction to Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). The key concepts of both approaches are motivated by linguistic analyses and both approaches are compared. Basic mechanisms to deal with phrase structure and valence are introduced and the following phenomena are studied: nonlocal dependencies, German clause structure, coordination, lexical alternation. The course consists of both a theoretical part and a practical one. The participants will implement some of the analyses during the sessions. Particular grammar development problems will be addressed also: corpus oriented development, test methodology, lexicon development, morphology, and ambiguity resolution. At the end of the course participants should be able to write a non-trivial grammar for a constraint-based parser.

Prerequisites: Some knowledge of phrase structure grammar.

LFG/XLE Lectures

• Introduction to LFG (.ps, .pdf)
• Grammar writing with XLE (.ps, .pdf)
• More means of expression in LFG (.ps, .pdf)
• Coordination (.ps, .pdf)
• Mini project (.ps, .pdf)

HPSG/LKB Lectures

• Slides (in pdf-Format for viewing 567K)
• Handouts (PostScript 4up for printing 370K)
• The Chapter 2 of Complex Predicates: Verbal Complexes, Resultative Constructions, and Particle Verbs in German contains a very brief overview about basic HPSG concepts.

Instructions on how to proceed once you have the files, can be found in instructions.html.

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.

  • An HPSG grammar for German is described in:
    • Müller, Stefan, 1999. Deutsche Syntax deklarativ. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar für das Deutsche. Linguistische Arbeiten, Nr. 394, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

  • Introductory books:
    • Borsley, Robert D., 1999. Syntactic Theory: A Unified Approach. second edition, London: Edward Arnold.
    • Sag, Ivan A. and Thomas Wasow, 1999. Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
    • Shieber, Stuart, 1986. An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to Grammar. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

  • Books about implementation issues:
    • Copestake, Ann, 2000. The (New) LKB System. Manuscript. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

• Literature about HPSG in general can be found at:
  • http://www.dfki.de/lt/HPSG/

• LFG literature:
  • Bresnan, Joan, 2000. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Textbooks in Linguistics. Blackwell.
  • Butt, M., T. King, M.-E. Niño, and F. Segond, 1999. A Grammar Writer's Cookbook. Number 95 in CSLI Lecture Notes. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
  • Dalrymple, M., R. M. Kaplan, J. T. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen (Eds.), 1995. Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Some Further Links

• LFG Website at Stanford
• LFG Website at Essex
• LFG Conferences (CSLI Online Proceedings)
• Xerox Grammar Writer's Workbench (Medley Lisp system available by ftp for noncommercial usage)

• HPSG Website at Stanford
• HPSG Conferences (CSLI Online Proceedings)
• The LKB System
• Online-Demo of an HPSG Grammar for German