In this tutorial, we present grammar development environments for two linguistic formalisms with a strong deductive bias: type-logical grammar (Moortgat 1996) and minimalist grammars in the sense of Stabler's "derivational minimalism" (Stabler 1997). An attractive aspect of these formalisms, from a language engineering point of view, is that they do away with syntactic rules. A grammar specification is reduced to a set of type declarations in the lexicon; parsing, literally, is deduction over these type declarations viewed as logical formulas. In the first part of the tutorial, participants are introduced to the GRAIL environment (Moot 1999), a proof-net based parser/theorem prover for type-logical grammars. In the second part, we focus on the computational implementation of Stabler-style minimalist grammars.
[Moortgat 1996] Categorial type logics, in Van Benthem and
ter Meulen (eds.), Handbook of Logic and Language, Elsevier/MIT Press, 1996.
[Moot 1999] GRAIL: an interactive parser for categorial grammars, in Delmonte (ed.),
Proceedings VEXTAL '99, Venice, 1999.
[Stabler 1997] Derivational minimalism, in Lecomte (ed.), Proceedings
LACL97, Springer LNCS 1582, 1997.
Michael's slides
slides of Michael's exercises
Willemijn's slides