Mark Steedman: Combinators and Minimalism: Putting Syntax Back Together Again
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
In the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, theoretical linguists,
psycholinguists, and computational linguists were united in taking
the theory of Syntactic Structures and Aspects as a common core to all
three disciplines. Today, those disciplines have almost no
understanding of nor interest in each other's ideas.
The talk will argue that, in view of the common interest in minimizing
complexity and degrees of freedom in the theory, this narrowing of
vision is mistaken. It will explore some strong parallels between the
combinatory categorial grammars that are widely used in certain
computational applications and some recent developments within
linguistic approaches as diverse as Construction Grammars, Simpler
Syntax, and the Minimalist Program.
