ESSLLI2000 (= European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information)
A five-session course July 14-18 2000, at ESSLLI2000 in Birmingham.
Course summary and reading
Dick Hudson, UCL (mailto:dick@ling.ucl.ac.uk)
The draft handouts for the five sessions can be downloaded (in zipped .rtf format).
1. Monday 14th August, 17.00-18.30: Overview
Dependency grammar (DG) contrasted with phrase structure grammar; a very brief history; the main theories in the 'dependency' family; the ambiguity of categorial grammar; is DG 'just a notational variant' of PSG? Some notations. Word Grammar: a monostratal enriched DG.
2. Tuesday 15th August: Pros and cons of dependency structure (compared with phrase structure)
Pros: essential endocentricity; free word order; simplicity of structures; easy treatment of valency (= subcategorisation plus government); generation as constraint-satisfaction; dependencies as constructions; measurement of memory load.
Challenges: 1a) coordination; 1b) apparent cases where non-terminals ('clause' or 'NP') are needed (e.g. that-clauses, gerunds, DP); 2a) discontinuous phrases; 2b) lack of 'structural templates' (e.g. German clause structure); lack of c-command.
3. Wednesday 16th August: Solutions 1
1a) Coordination as phrase structure; 1b) the redundance of 'clause' and 'NP': that-clauses, gerunds, DPs as NPs.
4. Thursday 17th August: Solutions 2
2a) Discontinuous phrases and multiple dependency; the No-tangling Principle and Adjacency Concord; raising; extraction; extraposition. 2b) lack of structural templates: problems with 'verb raising'. The continuing challenge of German 'clause-final' and post-VP positioning.
5. Friday 18th August: Semantics
Sense, reference and grammatical type; the similarity between semantic and syntactic structures; semantic phrasing; binding and coreference without c-command.
For further reading, see the accompanying bibliographies of DG and WG and specific references in the daily handouts.
Revised 20/06/00