The LFG 02 Proceedings (from Athens) is now available on-line. This is the first LFG conference I've missed, and I am eager to read the papers. Here is a small sampling of titles:
Ash AsudehRens Bod, Jennifer Hay, and Stephanie Jannedy have been editing a book Probabilistic Linguistics, which should be issued this winter by The MIT Press. You can find information about the book at Rens Bod's website. There you will also find information about the LSA-2003 Symposium "Probability Theory in Linguistics II: Integrated Frameworks"
The Syntax of Preverbal Particles and Adjunction in Irish
Anette Frank
A (Discourse) Functional Analysis of Asymmetric Coordination
Tibor Laczkó
Control and Complex Event Nominals in Hungarian
Helge Lødrup
Infinitival Complements and the Form-Function Relation
Bjarne Ørsnes
Case Marking and Subject Extraction in Danish
Gerhard Jaeger has made his EvolOT software--an implementation of the iterated Bidirectional Gradual Learning Algorithm for simulating language evolution--available for download.
Not to be missed: Gerhard Jaeger's "Learning constraint sub-hierarchies. The Bidirectional Gradual Learning Algorithm". This brilliant paper has just been posted to the ROA. Here's the abstract:
The paper proposes a variant of Boersma's Gradual Learning Algorithm for Stochastic Optimality Theory. While in the original version the learner is always (or tries to become) a speaker, I assume that the learner is both speaker and hearer. This learning theory is applied to the OT system from Aissen (2000), which was developed to explain the typology of differential case marking. It can be shown that the constraint sub-hierarchies that Aissen assumes to be universal follow from the statistical patterns of language use that have been uncovered in several corpus studies, if one adopts the bidirectional learning approach. The paper finally reports some tentative considerations on the repercussions of this learning theory for typology and
diachrony.
I've only just now gotten around to reading Nigel Vincent's authoritative "LFG as Model of Syntactic Change", in Time over Matter. Diachronic Perspectives on Morphosyntax, edited by Miriam Butt and Tracy King. Nigel's essay should not be missed for its insightful overview of the comparaitive advantages of the LFG and Minimalist architectures in the domain of historical change. This is an exceptionally and deeply well-informed essay.I've also just read Cynthia Allen's impressive "The Development of a New Passive in English" in the same volume. Reading Cindy's work is like following the masterful detective work in a classic mystery novel. With devastating concision and clarity she dispatches rival hypotheses based on false clues. Her work is a lesson in historical scholarship which is really fun to read.
This has been the stochastic year.
The stochastic generalization across categorical and variable syntactic data was a theme of the course on Optimality Theory and Typology that I co-taught with Judith Aissen in the Special Linguistics Program on Formal and Functional Linguistics in Duesseldorf from July 1 - August 3. It was also the theme of my five lectures in the first NASSLLI (North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, in June.
upcoming events:
QITL (Workshop on Quantitative Investigation in Theoretical Linguistics). October 3-5, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck.In connection with quantitative theoretical linguistics and new ways of analyzing variation, John Paolillo's new book Analyzing Linguistic Variation: Statistical Models and Methods has just been published by CSLI/Chicago (2002). This book provides a good how-to for doing quantitative research on grammar, and it also explains the mathematical connections between the statistical models standardly used in sociolinguistic analyses of variation and recent formal theories like stochastic OT. John's website provides more information about the book and other useful resources: htp://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~paolillo/alv/.NWAV 31, October 10 - 13., Stanford University. Among other talks of interest there will be a workshop on stochastic Optimality Theory and syntactic variation (by myself and Chris Manning)
Gradedness conference (? - ?? -??? - *?), Potsdam, October 21 - 23. The deadline for abstract submissions is Sept. 1.
new work:
You can download the slides and handouts from the Aissen-Bresnan FFL 2002 course. Our lectures will be the basis for a book we are coauthoring. This work covers new empirical domains as well as the theoretical generalization of Aissen's theory of harmonic alignment to stochastic OT.Gerhard Jaeger has new work "Stochastic OT and Bidirectionality", first presented at the Trento ESSLLI workshop on radical pragmatics,. This work integrates stochastic OT with bidirectional optimization, in order to solve some problems with Zeevat and Jaeger's very promising ideas:
Henk Zeevat nad Gerhard Jaeger. 2001. A reinterpretation of syntactic alignment. in D. de Jongh, H. Zeevat and M. Nilsenova (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd and 4th International Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation , ILLC, Amsterdam.The Z&J paper can be downloaded from Gerhard Jaeger's website, but the new paper is still be in the works, and you must contact Gerhard to get the Trento slides
This summer I read Anette Rosenbach's (ar at phil-fak dot uni-duesseldorf dot de*) book manuscript Genitive Variation in English. Conceptual Factors in Synchronic and Diachronic Studies, which is soon to appear with Mouton de Gruyter. This is an insightful and beautifully written work which establishes very clearly that variation in the 's and of constrructions for expressing genitive relations is sensitive to hierarchies of topicality, animacy, and the prototypicality of the possessive relation. I have learned much from reading this work and discussing it with Anette, and Judith Aissen and I have drawn heavily on it in our development of stochastic OT syntax. A closely related paper of Anette's can be found on our FFL course website:
Rosenbach, Anette (to appear). Aspects of iconicity and economy in the choice between the s-genetive and the of-genetive in English.
Will Lewis' doctoral dissertation is now finished: A Distributional and Theoretic Study of P2 Clitic Cluster Changes in South Slavic (University of Arizona, 2002). This fascinating and very clearly written work makes original use of a "harvester"--software Will wrote to gather linguistic data from webpages--and provides a stochastic OT analysis of the evidence for clitic change that he found. Will has taken up a position as Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics at California State University at Fresno this fall, and you can reach him at wlewis at csufresno dot edu.*Another very interesting new Ph.D. dissertation is Guido Seiler's Praepositionale Dativmarkierung im Oberdeustchen (University of Zurich, 2002). In this work Guido presents beautiful evidence of syntactic variation in case marking in Upper German, which involves the innovation of prepositional case markers. The work provides a very fine dialectological description of the distribution of syntactic patterns, and also draws on current theoretical frameworks such as LFG. In several subsequent papers Guido Seiler considers the implications of his results for theories of change and variation. One of these papers is available on the FFL Summerschool website. Other even more recent work, you will have to obtain by contacting Guido directly: gseiler at ds dot unizh dot ch.*
Hanjung Lee has an important new paper "Parallel Optimization in Case Systems", which brings together corpus research on Korean differential subject and object marking with an illuminating discussion of current OT theories of case, and a clearly developed theory of her own building on Jonas Kuhn's faithfulness architecture for OT-LFG. Also check her website for other recent OT work. Rather interesting is the handout with David Beaver, which gives a typology of theories of bidirectional optimization and the problems that they (fail to) solve: "Input-Output Mismatches in OT," handout presented at the Workshop on Optimality Theory and Pragmatics, ZAS Berlin, June 8-10, 2002
Andrew Koontz-Garboden has a very interesting analysis of morphosyntactic variation in the expression of Spanish aspect. This work argues that not all variation can be attributed to insufficiently fine discrimination of contextual information. He uses contact phenomena as evidence, providing an explicit theory within stochastic OT. Highly recommended!
Reinhard Blutner (who has now moved to Amsterdam) has very nice new downloads on nonmonotonic logic and neural networks at his website. An interesting idea he proposes---given in his NASSLLI 2002 lecture in the Cognition Workshop--- is a theoretical explanation for differences between automatic and controlled psychological processes as an emergent effect of the underlying neural computations.
Paul Smolensky also gave a presentation at the same workshop--a too-brief synopsis of his forthcoming book (co-authored with Geraldine Legendre) The Harmonic Mind. One small point that stayed with me was a cute demonstration of why cumulativity is not desirable in the OT optimization function.
earlier events
This is the first year that I've missed the LFG conference, held in Athens this year. I've heard from multiple sources that it was excellent, and look forward to the on-line proceedings, which usually appear in October, to get caught up. I've also heard that LFG '03 will be in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York and LFG '04 in Canterbury, New Zealand. Though I missed LFG '02, I was an invited speaker at the TAG+6 Workshop in Venice in May, where I enjoyed the inside-Venice views provided by Rodolfo Delmonte. I even took some photos.
*To avoid spam I am not citing email addresses in their normal format.
Links up to August 2002 are now on a separate page.
Links up to September 2001 are now on a separate page.
Links up to October 2000 are now on a separate page.
Links up to August 1999 are on a separate page.
Links up to August 1998 are on a separate page.
Yes, there are some official links, too: start with Essex LFG and Stanford LFG, to find more internet-accessible information about current research, publications, people, and events.