General Information

Instructor(s) Pascal Amsili (main) ; Benjamin Spector
Place, time Tuesdays, 9:30-12:30 am. Starting Sept. 22. Site Saints-Pères, salle De Broglie D.
Code LING 102
Credits 4 ECTS
Major Linguistics
Prerequisites Introduction to linguistics (but talk with the instructor(s))
Course taught in English
Teaching format On-site teaching. Students who need to follow the class 100% online should contact the instructor as soon as possible. 100% online. We will be using Zoom (links on the schoology page).
Links Schoology
Cogmaster, syllabus, schedule,
Previous classes 2019-2020

Contrôles (assessment)

Modalités There will be four homework assignments (worth 60% of the final grade) and a final exam (worth 40% of the final grade).
Homeworks can be handed in in class (paper) or on schoology (pdf format). On schoology the deadline is 23:59.
Homework #1 (10-06) grammars (due October, 20) ; answers
Homework #2 (10-20) automata (due November, 10); answers
Homework #3 prop. logic (due November, 24); answers on Schoology
Homework #4 pred. logic (due December, 15)
Final Exam The final exam will take place online, during the last slot. Students will be asked to connect on Zoom (link on schoology) and to turn on their camera, so that their identity can be checked.
Students will also be asked to send to the instructor a declaration of honour to accompany their submission.
The exam will be cut into three phases. In each phase, after the text of the exam is put on line (on schoology), students will compose, in front of the camera, preferably on paper. While any document can be freely consulted, communication between students is not allowed. After the time limit, students will be asked to scan their work and to send it by mail to the instructor (or drop on schoology).
Use of specific scanning applications like Simple Scanner is encouraged, to obtain low-weight, high-contrast images of handwritten pages.
The three planned phases bear on :
  1. Finite state automata (30 minutes)
  2. Context-Free Grammars (30 minutes)
  3. Montague's program (use of λ-calulus to compute compositionaly semantic representations) (60 minutes)
The first two phases will consist of short exercises similar to the ones given for homeworks, while the third one will be more like a progressive (guided) elaboration of a fragment similar to the ones bult up in class.
Marks marks (instructions)

Schedule (tentative)

2020-09-22 Formal Language Theory slides
2020-09-29 Formal Language Theory summary, exercises + (partial) answers, slides
2020-10-06 Formal Language Theory exercises, + answers, slides
2020-10-13 Formal Complexity of Natural Language
Syntactic Formalisms
Lambda-calculus 		in addition to my slides, (NEW VERSION HERE) you may find interesting the more concise version (in French) proposed by Timothée Bernard (U. Paris).
2020-10-20 Syntactic Formalisms slides gratefully inspired by Markus Dickinson's material for his Alternative Syntactic Theories class.
2020-10-27 No class
2020-11-03 Propositional Logic (class taught by Benjamin Spector) hand-out
2020-11-10 Propositional and Predicate Logic (B. Spector) (class cancelled)
2020-11-17 Predicate Logic hand-out, exercises
2020-11-24 No class (« journée des débouchés »)
2020-12-01 Predicate Logic (cont'd) exercises
2020-12-08 Compositionality and λ-calculus slides
TableauNoir traces: ex Donkey 1, ex Donkey 2, fragment
2020-12-15 Towards a NL fragment TableauNoir trace: fragment, slides (about generalized quantifiers)
2020-12-22 No class (winter break)
2020-12-29 No class (winter break
2021-01-05 Towards a NL fragment (cont'd)
Compositional treatment of quantification		 TableauNoir trace: partial fragment, last part.
slides.
2021-01-12 final exam

Pointers (references, bibliography, online resources)