Minimalist Parsing

This book is the first dedicated to linguistic parsing - the processing of natural language according to the rules of a formal grammar - in the Minimalist Program. While Minimalism has been at the forefront of generative grammar for several decades, it often remains inaccessible to computer scientists and others in adjacent fields. This volume makes connections with standard computational architectures, provides efficient implementations of some fundamental minimalist accounts of syntax, explores implementations of recent theoretical proposals, and explores correlations between posited structures and measures of neural activity during human language comprehension. These studies will appeal to graduate students and researchers in formal syntax, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science.

Robert C. Berwick is Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books and many articles in the area of human language and cognition, including texts on language acquisition, complexity theory and human language, and the biology and evolution of language, and is co-editor, with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, of Rich Languages from Poor Inputs (OUP, 2012; paperback 2015). Edward P. Stabler is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UCLA and a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Nuance Communications, specializing in mathematical and computational linguistics, learnability theory, and the philosophy of language and logic. He is the author of The Logical Approach to Syntax (MIT Press, 1992), Bare Grammar (with Edward L. Keenan; CSLI, 2003), and An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory (with Dominique Sportiche and Hilda Koopman; Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).