WiSe 20/21: Constraint-based Analysis

This course will take place online via ZOOM.

The course provides an accelerated introduction to Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). HPSG is strongly surface-oriented, which means that it avoids postulating invisible syntactic and morphological objects as much as possible. For the same reason, it disallows derivations where syntactic or morphological units are deformed by structure-changing operations such as movement or deletion. Instead, HPSG views grammars as systems of constraints, whose interactions yield the linguistically significant generalizations that we find in the world’s languages. Typically, there are constraints on the argument structure of words, on the way in which words can be combined with their valents, and on the kinds of long-distance dependencies that expressions may enter. Likewise, there will be constraints on the relationship between syntactic and semantic structures and on the composition of semantic parts which all the well formed logical forms of an expression have to fulfill.

At the end of the course, the participants will be acquainted with HPSG analyses of central structures of English. They will be aware of the typical constraint-based argumentation of HPSG and the basic architecture of an HPSG grammar. Moreover, they will know how to formulate precise grammatical constraints to capture linguistic generalizations they are interested in.