The aim of this course is to present modern syntactic theories. The main three approaches covered are: Categorial Grammars (stemming from the work of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz), Dependency Grammars (originating in the work of Lucien Tesnière, but its modern and computationally-oriented version – Universal Dependencies – will be covered in some detail in the course) and Formal Grammars (usually associated with Noam Chomsky). Some emphasis will be put on modern constraint-based theories which build on these three general approaches, namely, on Lexical Functional Grammar (Joan Bresnan and Ron Kaplan) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag).
The aim of this course is to make students aware of the fundamental syntactic and morphosyntactic issues of natural languages. The empirical material of the course is mainly Polish – a morphologically rich and relatively free word order language. The emphasis is on the rigorous approach to inflection and the formal description of syntax, so the material and techniques covered during the course may be used in work on natural language processing, in psycholinguistics and in other interdisciplinary approaches to language.