course title
Developing a head-driven phrase structure grammar of Hindi
dates and location
Thursdays 1100-1300,
New location: II.14.0.26 (Golm campus, Haus 14, Room 0.26
what this course is about
Our goal in this course is to understand the major syntactic phenomena
in Hindi, and to implement (on paper) a small but comprehensive HPSG grammar fragment of
the language that covers the major phenomena.
office hours
I am available any time to students in this course; just make an appointment with me. Just check
my calendar
to decide on a time.
grading
Grading will be based on participation in the class discussions, and regular submissions of homework assignments.
Final
scores will be based on the following mapping described in the
Studienordnung: 95-100%=1,0 (A);90-94=1,3 (A-);85-89=1,7
(B+);80-84=2,0 (B);75-79=2,3 (B-);70-74=2,7 (C+);65-69=3,0
(C);60-64=3,3 (C-);55-59=3,7 (D+);50-54=4,0 (D);45-49=5,0 (F). If a
student's score falls between the cracks, it will be treated as
falling in the higher bin. Also, if a student is in a higher semester
than 1st, I will adjust their scores so that 1st semesters are not at a
disadvantage (this holds only if the advanced students outperform the
1st semesters).
Here is an excerpt from the Studienordnung on what these major
categories are supposed to mean:
1 = sehr gut (eine hervorragende Leistung)
2 = gut (eine Leistung, die erheblich ueber den
durchschnittlichen Anforderungen liegt)
3 = befriedigend (eine Leistung, die durchschnittlichen Anforderungen entspricht)
4 = ausreichend (eine Leistung, die trotz ihrer Maengel noch den Anforderungen genuegt)
5 = nicht ausreichend (eine Leistung, die wegen erheblicher Maengel den Anforderungen nicht genuegt)
Students are expected to attend class regularly. If a student misses a
class, the student is responsible for finding out what the
assignment was, what readings were assigned, and what material was
covered.
conduct in the classroom
Please do not engage in private conversations during class.
All cell phones must be switched off (except by permission from me).
Please do not walk into class after it starts (11:15 is the deadline to be ready for class).
Questions to me during class are actively encouraged.
evaluation of the instructor
Anonymous feedback (especially complaints about the course) is welcome:
Click here for form
schedule
We will begin by reviewing the grammar formalism HPSG. We will use the textbook: Sag, I. A., Wasow, T., and Bender, E. M. (2003).
Syntactic theory. A formal introduction (2nd ed.). Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications. How fast we can do this depends largely on the students.
We will incrementally develop an HPSG grammar of Hindi as we learn more and more about how to implement (on paper) grammars in HPSG. The idea is to incrementally learn how one particular class of phenomena are modeled (e.g. agreement) and then apply that knowledge to the Hindi facts (which I will introduce to the class).
The topics covered will be:
Agreement
Binding
Complex predicates
Relative clauses
Syntactic information structure marking: left-dislocated
topicalization and clefting
Partial wh-movement
Passives and causatives