Course Information

Welcome to the webpage of theoretical computational linguistics for the winter semester of 2022!

Grades

The grades for this module are based on a series of smallish projects (Portfolio), assigned and completed throughout the course of the semester.

Course plan

We will focus on two logically indpendent topics:

1. learning (to use) a linguistic grammar formalism
2. understanding the expressive power of grammar formalisms

Both topics will be linked together by means of the same grammar formalism, minimalist grammars, which is a formalisation of Chomsky’s minimalist syntax.

At the end of the course, you should understand

1. how to write analyses using minimalist grammars
2. the minimum expressivity needed to describe the string-sets of natural language

We will proceed through several syntactic restrictions of the underlying formalism, passing through what are known as:

1. regular languages
2. context-free languages
3. mildly context-sensitive languages

At each step, we will ask whether the string sets of natural languages can plausibly thought to be describable by these means.