Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Formal Grammar, FG 2019, held in Riga, Latvia, in August 2019, in conjunction with the 31st European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, ESSLI 2019. The 7 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 11 submissions. They present new and original research on formal grammar, mathematical linguistics, and the application of formal and mathematical methods to the study of natural language and focus on topics such as formal and computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics; logical aspects of linguistic structure; constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar; learnability of formal grammar; integration of stochastic and symbolic models of grammar; foundational, methodological, and architectural issues in grammar and linguistics; and mathematical foundations of statistical approaches to linguistic analysis.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Formal Grammar 2009, held in Bordeaux, France, in July 2009. The 13 revised full papers presented, including two invited talks, were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. These articles in this book give an overview of new and original research on formal grammar, mathematical linguistics and the application of formal and mathematical methods to the study of natural language.
The second volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science series, this collection presents recent work in the fields of phonology, morphology, semantics, and neurolinguistics. Its overall theme is the relationship between the contents of grammatical formalisms and their real-time realizations in machine or biological systems. Individual essays address such topics as learnability, implementability, computational issues, parameter setting, and neurolinguistic issues. Contributors include Janet Dean Fodor, Richard T. Oehrle, Bob Carpenter, Edward P. Stabler, Elan Dresher, Arnold Zwicky, Mary-Louis Kean, and Lewis P. Shapiro.
The contributions making up this volume in honor of Eloise Jelinek are written from a formalist perspective that deals with stereotypically functionalist questions about language. Jelinek's pioneering work in formalist syntax has shown that autonomous syntax need not exist in a vacuum. Her work has highlighted the importance of incorporating the effects of discourse and information structure on the syntactic representation. This book aims to invoke Jelinek's work either in substance or spirit. The focus is on Jelinek's influential Pronominal Argument Hypothesis as an "non-configurational" language; the influence of discourse-related interface phenomena on syntactic structure; the syntactic analysis of the grammaticalization; interactions between morphology, phonology and phonetics; and foundational issues about the link between formal grammar and function of language, as well as the methodological issues underlying the different approaches to linguistics.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th and 18th International Conference on Formal Grammar 2012 and 2013, collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information in August 2012/2013. The 18 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 27 submissions. The focus of papers are as follows: formal and computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics; model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics; logical aspects of linguistic structure; constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar; learnability of formal grammar; integration of stochastic and symbolic models of grammar; foundational, methodological and architectural issues in grammar and linguistics, and mathematical foundations of statistical approaches to linguistic analysis.
This volume draws together fourteen previously published papers which explore the nature of mental grammar through a formal, generative approach. The book begins by outlining the development of formal grammar in the last fifty years, with a particular focus on the work of Noam Chomsky, and moves into an examination of a diverse set of phenomena in various languages that shed light on theory and model construction. Many of the papers focus on comparisons between English and Norwegian, highlighting the importance of comparative approaches to the study of language. With a comprehensive collection of papers that demonstrate the richness of formal approaches, this volume is key reading for students and scholars interested in the study of grammar.
Almost four decades have passed since "Formal Grammars "first appeared in 1974. At that time it was still possible to rather comprehensively review for (psycho)linguists the relevant literature on the theory of formal languages and automata, on their applications in linguistic theory and in the psychology of language. That is no longer feasible. In all three areas developments have been substantial, if not breathtaking. Nowadays, an interested linguist or psycholinguist opening any text on formal languages can no longer see the wood for the trees, as it is by no means evident which formal, mathematical tools are really required for natural language applications. An historical perspective can be helpful here. There are paths through the wood that have been beaten since decades; they can still provide useful orientation. The origins of these paths can be traced in the three volumes of "Formal Grammars," brought together in the present re-edition. In a newly added postscript the author has sketched what has become, after all these years, of formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics, or at least some of the core developments. This chapter may provide further motivation for the reader to make a trip back to some of the historical sources.
The organization of the lexicon, and especially the relations between groups of lexemes is a strongly debated topic in linguistics. Some authors have insisted on the lack of any structure of the lexicon. In this vein, Di Sciullo & Williams (1987: 3) claim that “[t]he lexicon is like a prison – it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in commonis lawlessness”. In the alternative view, the lexicon is assumed to have a rich structure that captures all regularities and partial regularities that exist between lexical entries.Two very different schools of linguistics have insisted on the organization of the lexicon. On the one hand, for theories like HPSG (Pollard & Sag 1994), but also some versions of construction grammar (Fillmore & Kay 1995), the lexicon is assumed to have a very rich structure which captures common grammatical properties between its members. In this approach, a type hierarchy organizes the lexicon according to common properties between items. For example, Koenig (1999: 4, among others), working from an HPSG perspective, claims that the lexicon “provides a unified model for partial regularties, medium-size generalizations, and truly productive processes”. On the other hand, from the perspective of usage-based linguistics, several authors have drawn attention to the fact that lexemes which share morphological or syntactic properties, tend to be organized in clusters of surface (phonological or semantic) similarity (Bybee & Slobin 1982; Skousen 1989; Eddington 1996). This approach, often called analogical, has developed highly accurate computational and non-computational models that can predict the classes to which lexemes belong. Like the organization of lexemes in type hierarchies, analogical relations between items help speakers to make sense of intricate systems, and reduce apparent complexity (Köpcke & Zubin 1984). Despite this core commonality, and despite the fact that most linguists seem to agree that analogy plays an important role in language, there has been remarkably little work on bringing together these two approaches. Formal grammar traditions have been very successful in capturing grammatical behaviour, but, in the process, have downplayed the role analogy plays in linguistics (Anderson 2015). In this work, I aim to change this state of affairs. First, by providing an explicit formalization of how analogy interacts with grammar, and second, by showing that analogical effects and relations closely mirror the structures in the lexicon. I will show that both formal grammar approaches, and usage-based analogical models, capture mutually compatible relations in the lexicon.
This book studies the syntax of switch-reference and its implications for the theory of grammar. Switch-reference, found in many genetically and geographically diverse languages, is a phenomenon whereby referential identity between subjects of hierarchically adjacent clauses is encoded by the presence of a morpheme, usually suffixed to the verb of the subordinate clause. This book argues that switch-reference should be analysed as a syntactic rather than a purely pragmatic or functional feature of language.
The study of formal languages and of related families of automata has long been at the core of theoretical computer science. Until recently, the main reasons for this centrality were connected with the specification and analy sis of programming languages, which led naturally to the following ques tions. How might a grammar be written for such a language? How could we check whether a text were or were not a well-formed program generated by that grammar? How could we parse a program to provide the structural analysis needed by a compiler? How could we check for ambiguity to en sure that a program has a unique analysis to be passed to the computer? This focus on programming languages has now been broadened by the in creasing concern of computer scientists with designing interfaces which allow humans to communicate with computers in a natural language, at least concerning problems in some well-delimited domain of discourse. The necessary work in computational linguistics draws on studies both within linguistics (the analysis of human languages) and within artificial intelligence. The present volume is the first textbook to combine the topics of formal language theory traditionally taught in the context of program ming languages with an introduction to issues in computational linguistics. It is one of a series, The AKM Series in Theoretical Computer Science, designed to make key mathematical developments in computer science readily accessible to undergraduate and beginning graduate students.
