Course Description
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based, lexicalist approach to syntax, semantics, and morphology. Intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this course will examine HPSG treatments of core syntactic and lexical phenomena, as well as more recent developments. We will examine topics including: argument structure, subcategorization, raising and control, agreement, anaphoric binding, clitics, unbounded dependencies, coordination, ellipsis, and underspecified semantic representations. Examples will be drawn from a range of languages. Along the way, students will become familiar with the formal devices employed in HPSG, including unification and feature logic, type hierarchies and inheritance, constraints, and underspecification. We will also note the influence of constraint-based lexicalism in large-scale computational grammar development, and implications of this view for psycholinguistics, particularly sentence processing.
Area Tags: Lexicon, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Frameworks
(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 1:30pm – 2:50pm
Location: ILC S405
Instructors: Jean-Pierre Koenig & Tony Davis
Jean-Pierre Koenig is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Affiliated Professor in the Psychology Department at the University at Buffalo (the State University of New York). His research interests pertain to the structure of the lexicon, morphology, the syntax/semantics interface (particularly, argument structure, aspect, and negation), semantics, and psycholinguistics. He is a co-editor of Head-driven Phrase Structure: the Handbook and he has worked on some aspects of the morphology, syntax, or semantics of several different languages. Together with Dr. Karin Michelson, he has published extensively on the morphology and syntax of Oneida (Northern Iroquoian).
Tony Davis’s research interests have centered on syntax and lexical semantics, mostly within the HPSG framework. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1996, he worked primarily in computational linguistics and knowledge representation. Two specific application areas he focused on are audio and video search and retrieval (at StreamSage and then Comcast) and computer-assisted medical coding (at CodeRyte and then 3M). In addition, he taught courses on computational linguistics and information retrieval at Georgetown University for 15 years, and currently teaches at Southern Oregon University, where he is an affiliate of the English Dept.
