Syntax
Syntax is the study of the structure of sentences, the principles, both universal and
language specific, that govern how words are assembled to yield grammatical
sentences.
At Penn, most syntactic research is conducted within one or another
variant of transformational grammar or within the mathematically defined formalism
known as Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG).
Research in TAG is lead by TAG's creator, ,
and . Current research in TAG focuses on
new extensions of TAG called Multi-Component TAG, the creation
of a metagrammar for wide-coverage grammars of natural languages,
and the formal properties of the new extensions to TAG. TAG research
also includes investigations into how the scopal properties of quantifiers
and other phenomena can be encoded in TAG, lead by .
Corpus linguistics has been a focus at Penn ever since and others created the first syntactically parsed corpus of
English, the Penn
Treebank in 1992. Since then, and have participated in the development of historical
corpora of English, resulting in the Penn-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Middle English and the Penn-Helsinki
Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. These have been instrumental
in learning about syntactic changes that have occurred over the past
millennium, such as the loss of verb-second syntax in English, and
for the understanding of grammar competition, adovcated by .
has been investigating the syntax-morphology
interface primarily under the framework of Distributed Morphology,
which claims that the same combinatory framework at work at the level
of syntax applies down to the level of the morpheme as well. Such
an approach has been useful for reframing the notion of blocking
at the level of syntactic constituents, as well as understanding
mismatches between surface and structural positions of morphemes.
, who now is focusing on game-theoretic
approaches to semantics, completes the picture of syntax offered above
by introducing his students to Categorial Grammar, an important
alternative approach to syntax advanced by former Penn professor Mark
Steedman.