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, Aravind Joshi, and Anthony Kroch. 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 Maribel Romero.

Corpus linguistics has been a focus at Penn ever since Mitch Marcus and others created the first syntactically parsed corpus of English, the Penn Treebank in 1992. Since then, Anthony Kroch and Beatrice Santorini 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 Anthony Kroch.

David Embick 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.

Robin Clark, 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.