Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Convergent Grammar

This course is an in-depth introduction to CONVERGENT GRAMMAR (CVG), a simple grammar framework that combines the advantages of HPSG (inutitive appeal to linguists, parallel design) and Categorial Grammar (simplicity of syntax-semantics interface, well-understood proof-theoretic foundations). Based on a detailed examination of a wide range of syntactic/semantic phenomena, we will argue that a PARALLEL DERIVATIONAL (PD) architecture of the kind that CVG embodies provides a simpler and more straightforward analysis of the phenomena than do existing frameworks such as Categorial Grammar (CG), the Minimalist Program (MP), or Head-Driven P?rase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The course is tentatively organized as follows: DAY ONE UNIT 1: ISSUES IN GRAMMAR ARCHITECTURE. Constraint-based vs. derivational; representational vs. proof-theoretic derivations; parallel vs. cascaded; strong vs. weak syntactocentrism; how to classify existing frameworks. UNIT 2: REVIEW OF TECHNICAL BACKGROUND. Typed lambda calculus; higher-order logic (Ty2); Gentzen-sequent-style natural deduction; structural rules and substructural logics; Curry-Howard proof terms; Moortgat's q-constructor. DAY TWO UNIT 3: CVG BASICS. Weakly syntactocentric architecture; the logic of syntactic derivations (a simple kind of CG); the logic of semantic derivations, RC (roughly, lambda calculus with tightly restricted abstraction); a simple transform from RC to Ty2; the syntax-semantics interface; correspondence between rules of CVG and rules of MP and HPSG. UNIT 4: "OVERT MOVEMENT". Survey of phenomena; review of Gazdar's Linking Schemata; a Gazdar-inspired type-constructor. Overt Topicalization; review of interrogative semantics; syntax and semantics of English embedded interrogatives. DAY THREE UNIT 5: "COVERT MOVEMENT". Informal review of Cooper storage; the standard CG reformulation of Cooper storage; a type-theoretic embodiment of Cooper storage that keeps the syntax simple. Focus constructions; in-situ Topicalization; quantifier scope ambiguity. UNIT 6. WH-IN-SITU. Constituent questions in Chinese; Multiple consituent questions in English; Baker ambiguities; pied piping. DAY FOUR UNIT 7. COMPARATIVES. Background on the semantics of degree and comparison; simple comparatives; comparative subdeletion. UNIT 8. SUPERLATIVES AND PHRASAL COMPARATIVES. Associates, remnants, and ellipsis; superlatives; phrasal comparatives without covert movement. DAY FIVE UNIT 9. ANAPHORA. Anaphora as lexically governed contraction; why anaphoric "binding" isn't really binding; what so-called "binding theory" is really about; Cooper storage meets DRT. UNIT 10. Catching up; summing up; discussion.