Computational Linguistics : A Principle Based Approach

This is an introduction to principle-based parsing, focussing primarily on computational work in transformational grammar.

Assuming no prior knowledge of parsing or programming, it aims to explore a range of key questions in accessible language. The organising principle of the book is to approach the theory of parsing first and foremost from the perspective of its relation with other theories of the language user and in particular the theory of grammar.

Chapter 1 is concerned with establishing the diverse nature of these relationships and the sorts of constraints (grammatical, psycholinguistic, computational, architectural) they impose on the theory of parsing.

Chapter 2 provides the reader with the basic computational concepts required to tackle chapters 3 to 5, which chart recent work in principle-based parsing against the background laid out in chapter 1.

Chapter 3 is a case study of the grammar-parser relation, focussing on the explanatory potential of Marcus's (1980) Determinism Hypothesis. Chapter 4 evaluates a number of GB-based parsers with respect to their faithfulness to the grammar and their ability to satisfy the psycholinguistic and computational properties of minimalist grammars and compares them with those exhibited by tree adjoining grammars.