Papers, manuscripts and references

(most of 'em anyway...)

Here is a growing collection of recent manuscripts dealing with Chomsky's Minimalist Program (follow links to abstracts).

The copy language paper is an exercise in using a version of Stabler's formalization of minimalist derivations. The representational minimalism paper examines chain-based approaches to minimalism, à la Brody, and argues for an approach to grammar which has both derivational and representational interpretations which are equivalent. This argument is taken up and developed further in the LACL paper. The type-logical perspective paper makes use of multimodal categorial deductive systems to implement minimalist derivations, and uses the "Curry-Howard Morphism" to connect deductive proofs using movement to static, chain-based representations, an idea which is developed at considerably greater length in the manuscript "A Calculus..."

• "Island Effects in Type Logical Approaches to the Minimalist Program" Proceedings of the Formal, Head-Driven and Categorial Grammar Conference (FHCG-98), Saarbrücken, August 1998.
• "Derivational and Representational Views of Minimalist Transformational Grammar" To appear in the Proceedings of LACL '97, Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
• "A Calculus of Categories and Transformations" Ms. in prep. A full length version of the Formal Grammar Talk (see below).
• "A Type-Logical Perspective on Minimalist Derivations" Proceedings of the Formal Grammar Conference, Aix-en-Provence, August 1997. (Page also contains links to the handout from the conference talk.)
• "Representational Minimalism" SFB 340 Technical Report #83, Univ. of Tübingen (1997). (Revised version to appear in Mönnich and Kolb, eds.)
• "A minimalist grammar for the copy language" SFB 340 Technical Report #79, Univ. of Tübingen (1996).

Here is a collection of papers on Tree Automata and MSO Tree Logics.

• "The Logic Automaton Connection in Linguistics." Frank Morawietz and --.
  To appear in the Proceedings of LACL '97, Springer, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.
• "Approximating Principles and Parameters Grammars with MSO Tree Logics" Frank Morawietz and --.
  (4 page abstract. Appears in the Proceedings of the LACL-Conference 1997, Nancy, France).
• "Representing Constraints with Automata." Frank Morawietz and --. Proceedings of the ACL/EACL Conference 1997, Madrid, Spain. (Follow link to abstract and paper.)
• "On the recognizability of relations over a tree definable in a monadic second order tree description language." Frank Morawietz and --. SFB 340 Technical Report #85, Univ. of Tübingen (1997). This differs from an earlier version which used to live in this space in that it now has a second chapter describing in some detail Morawietz's implementation of a formula-to-automaton compiler. The first chapter reviews the logical material on which the compiler is based, redoing the essential decidability proof for a monadic second order tree logic based on dominance and precedence by the "brute force" method of actually exhibiting the tree automata that recognize satisfying assignments to the atomic relations. [postscript] (rev. 19.11.96)

"Model Theoretic Syntax." -- and James Rogers. The Glot International State of the Article Book 1 (to appear). Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng and Rint Sybesma, eds. Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague. [A review article of work in the general area of tree-logics, both modal and classical, with long bibliography.] [gzipped postscript]

"On Determining the Consistency of Partial Descriptions of Trees." Ms., 1996, based on a paper of the same name which appeared in 32nd ACL Proceedings, 163-170 (1994). This version adds two appendices which push the original work forward a bit. [postscript]

"On the Relation between Representational and Processing Models of Asyntactic Comprehension." Brain and Language 50 304-324 (1995).

Gail Mauner , Victoria A. Fromkin , and -- . "Comprehension and Acceptability Judgments in Agrammatism: Disruptions in the Syntax of Referential Dependency." Brain and Language 45, 340-370 (1993).

Description Theory, Licensing Theory and Principle-Based Grammars and Parsers. UCLA Ph.D. thesis (1992). UCLA Dissertations in Linguistics Number 19.