Categorial Grammar
Spring 2007 | Instructor: Jason Baldridge | Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-3pm | CBA 4.340
This seminar-style course addresses syntactic theory from the perspective of categorial grammar, with a primary focus on Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Categorial grammar offers a radically lexicalist, semantically-transparent alternative to phrase-structure grammars.
The course focuses on syntactic analysis with categorial grammar from the ground up, considering phenomena such as extraction, control, coordination, gapping, scrambling, and others. It also covers lexical and compositional semantics in categorial grammar, including quantifier scope ambiguities. Feature structures play an important role in many formalisms, and their use in categorial grammar and implementations of categorial grammar are discussed. Finally, the course considers questions of the computational power and formal adequacy of formalisms for syntactic analysis, and the implications for theories and implementations.
The course has a small applied component: students will design and implement a grammar using the OpenCCG parsing system.