LINGUIST 609: Formal Foundations of Linguistic Theory: Discrete Methods
Spring 2015
ILC 458, TTh 11.30-12.45
Background Texts
- Partee, Wall, and ter Meulen, Mathematical Methods in Linguistics, Kluwer
- Keenan & Moss 2005 Lecture Notes
- Magri Lecture Notes
Lectures
- [1-4]:
Alphabets, Strings, Languages and Infinity, January 20, 22, 29, February 3
Reading: Chs. 1-4 of
Partee et al.
Assignment 1 on Sets and Functions,
due on January 27
Assignment 2 on Infinities, problems 1-3 due on Thursday February 5, Problems 4-5 due on Tuesday February 10.
- [5-6]:
Trees and Linearization, February 5, 10
Reading: Ch. 16 of Partee et al.
Reading: Ch. 3 of Keenan and Moss
Assignment 3 on Trees
- [7-11]:
Lattices 1 and
Lattices 2, February 12, 19, 24, 26, and March 3
Reading: Ch. 11 of Partee et al.
Reading: Ch. 6 of Keenan and Moss
Reading: Ch. 1 of Szabolcsi et al.
Assignment 4 on Lattices
- [12-14]:
Generalized Quantifiers, Witness Sets and Principal Filters, March 5, 10, and 12
Reading: Ch. 14 of Partee et al.
Reading: Ch. 9 of Keenan and Moss
Reading: Ch. 1 of Szabolcsi et al.
Assignment 5 on Filters and Quantifiers
- [15-17]:
Regular Languages and arguments that natural languages are not regular, March
24, 26, 31
Reading: Ch. 17 of Partee et al.
Assignment 6 on Regular Expressions
- [18-21]:
Context Free Languages and CFGs, April 2, 7, 9, 14
Reading: Chs. 18 of Partee et al.
Reading:
Postal & Langendoen (1985)
,
Pullum (1985)
,
Langendoen & Postal (1985)
on the CF-ness of English
Reading: Shieber 1985
Reading: Joshi 1985
Reading: Stabler 2004 on
Crossing Dependencies
Assignment 7 on Context Free
Languages
- [22-25]:
Continuations, April 16, 21, 23, 28
Reading: Barker & Shan 2014
- [Formal Fest]: featuring Sakshi Bhatia on
Fox & Katzir's Alternative Generation, Mike Clauss on Gold's Theorem,
Jyoti Iyer on Inquisitive Semantics and Katya Vostrikova on PCDRT, May 8 (or 9), location TBA
Petr Kusliy will talk about aspects of PCDRT on April 28