Course in relation to the programs:

The course is intended as a graduate elective in Computer Engineering, Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Philosophy.

It is a core elective in Linguistics track of CogSci, and a depth course in CS.

CCG is a theory that has its roots in combinatory logic, automata theory and formal languages. Its substantive component has its roots in Philosophy of Language (such as that of Husserl, Frege, Russell, Chomsky and Curry).

The course is interdisciplinary in nature; it aims to bring together research on natural language syntax and semantics from the perspective of Computing, Linguistics, Cognition and Logic.

Course Objectives:

CCG's main claim is that linguistic expressions are type-dependent, and that co-dependence of semantic and syntactic types can be captured in a lexicalised grammar so that the universal component simply projects them onto phrasal derivations. Computation (from lexicon to PF and LF) is transparent because the lexical types materialise under the guidance of UG to begin with.

This is a radical departure from Chomskyan thought which claims that if you get your syntax right, you get semantics for free, with a helping hand from extraneous mechanisms such as transformations or checking operations. CCG says you cannot get the semantics right unless your syntactical categories are semantically well-motivated, and then you get phrasal semantics for free with no extra help.

(If you've read this far, thank you for your patience; please read on. None of the above is supposed to make sense at the beginning.)

The aim of the course is to flesh out these ideas from the perspective of language and computation.

At the end of the course, students are expected to understand the basic philosophy of lexicalising a grammar, and the computational reasons for doing so; they are expected to formulate their hypotheses explicitly in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and test them out on computational tools developed for CCG.

They are expected to understand the kind of mental computations CCG claims to be taking place when people put their linguistic competence to use. They are also expected to understand the differences with other theories in terms of computation.

Course Outline: