Course Description

This course will offer hands-on experience to linguists interested in the formalization of linguistic knowledge in constraint-based grammar formalisms. The course will be taught in an interactive fashion in a computer laboratory and will combine background lectures with practical exercises on how to specify grammars in ConTroll, a processing system for constraint-based grammars (particularly for HPSG) that has been developed at the University of Tübingen. The background lectures will introduce the relevant mathematical and computational background of the ConTroll system and will focus on the main ingredients of constraint based grammars: highly structured lexical representations, constituent structures, and the encoding of well-formedness constraints on grammatical representations. In the lab, students will be given the opportunity to undertake individualized grammar projects for modeling theoretically and empirically significant syntactic constructions of their native language.
 

Syllabus

1. August 23
   • Course
     • Introduction: course goals, syllabus, practical matters.
     • Grammar: lexical entries.
     • Background: three languages (descriptions, AVMs, DAGs).
2. August 24
   • Tutorial: Working with ConTroll under Unix
   • Lab
     • ConTroll: starting and compiling a grammar.
     • Querying for grammatical words.
3. August 25
   • Course
     • Grammar: ID Schemata.
     • Background: types and the idea behind signatures.
   • Lab (Exercise sheet 1)
     • ConTroll: interaction with the signature.
     • Grammar: add transitive verbs to the grammar.
4. August 26
   • Course
     • Discussion of exercises
     • Background: minimizing representations (unfilling).
     • ConTroll: different list notations, special lexicon syntax.
   • Lab (Exercise sheet 2)
     • ConTroll: change the grammar to the special lexicon syntax.
     • Grammar: extend the grammar with 1. person singular personal pronouns and ditransitive verbs.
     • ConTroll: find errors in list syntax.
5. August 27
   • Course
     • Discussion of exercises.
     • Grammar: universal principles.
     • ConTroll: inspecting the compilation log and using the debugger.
   • Lab (Exercise sheet 3)
     • ConTroll: grammar debugging.
     • Grammar: NP Syntax exercise.
6. August 30
   • Course
     • Discussion of exercises.
     • Background: checking grammaticality (laziness and delays).
   • Lab (Exercise sheet 4)
     • Grammar: extending the grammar with sentential complements.
7. August 31
   • Course
     • Discussion of exercises.
     • Grammar/Background: combining the sentence grammar with the NP syntax. The use of relations for combining phonological strings.
     • Background: delaying relations
   • Lab (Exercise sheet 5)
     • Background: define the relations reverse, permute, and select.
     • Grammar: combine the NP with the sentence grammar (following the model in the course).
8. September 1
   • Course
     • Discussion of exercises.
     • Grammar: flat German word order grammar (using permute and subcat principle).
     • Grammar: different headed-constructions in HPSG.
   • Lab (Exercise sheet 6)
     • Grammar: extend English NP grammar with plural nouns and adjectives.
9. September 2
   • Course
     • Discussion of exercises.
     • Background: abbreviations and generalizations over the lexicon.
     • The overall picture: ConTroll and other systems.
   • Lab
     • Individual projects & wrap Up
10. September 3
    • Course
      • The overall picture: ConTroll and other systems.