Note: This on-campus 600-level course is a
special one-time event/opportunity.
Administrivia
Instructor
Sandiway Fong
Location
Social Sciences Rm 307
Time
Mondays 2:30 pm - 5 pm
Office Hours
By appointment
Office
Douglass 311
Although advanced, this course designed to be accessible to both
linguists and those computation folk with a strong interest in
syntax. (No programming experience is required
for this course.) It has two tracks:
Syntax: The Strong Minimalist Thesis
(SMT): Chomsky’s always-fascinating ideas on syntactic theory
from recent years (2019, 2021 onwards). Also, we will cover some
recent theoretical developments based on Chomsky's framework.
Computation: The SMT Parser. A computer
implementation of the SMT. Runs on a laptop. Supported platforms:
macOS, Windows 11 and Linux.
A sample parser for English and Spanish will be made available.
I’ll provide a gentle introduction to the framework, some history,
concepts and terminology. Handouts and papers/chapters will be
provided. Also, as an aid to understanding the framework, we’ll play
with the SMT Parser. It’s an implementation of Chomsky’s ideas that
you can run on your laptop.
Software
Your laptop needs to have a Browser (e.g. Safari, Chrome or
Firefox), Python (python.org) and SWI Prolog
(swi-prolog.org) installed.
The SMT parser software will be provided to students.
Everything is free.
Students are expected to have their own laptops. And possess
sufficient privileges (i.e. adminstrator-level) to install packages
on their machines.
Platforms Windows 11, Linux and MacOS will be supported.
Syllabus
See lecture 1 slides (to come).
Deliverables
A term paper and/or computational experiments or implementation. For
example, one
possibility could be to add another language, another would be to
extend the theory or discuss its shortcomings.
Readings
Required readings will be provided in PDF form.
A Tutorial and Reference Manual (PDF) for the parser
will be made available.
Lecture Notes
Available in both Adobe PDF and Microsoft Powerpoint formats.
