$12,199
Malgorzata Cavar
Eastern Michigan University
Michigan
Unknown
Linguistics
This award provides support for the 19th Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) Conference, to be held July 17-19, 2014 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A central goal of the LFG framework is to create a model of grammar which is sufficiently sophisticated for theoretical linguists to formulate a model of natural language, but which can also be used in theoretical and applied areas of computational linguistics and natural language processing. Because of its formal rigor, LFG has been used as the theoretical basis of various machine translation tools, for example, AppTek's TranSphere, and the Julietta Research Group's Lekta. The annual conference is the largest annual LFG meeting, offering a venue for the exchange of ideas, and fostering cooperation for theoretical and computational linguists. It has a truly international outreach, with participants coming from Europe, Asia, Australia, and America. This will be the first LFG conference held in the USA since 2007. The leitmotif of the 2014 conference is "Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory." It will provide a platform for the discussion of the role of linguistic theories (LFG and other generative models, e.g. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and the Minimalist Program) in language documentation and descriptive linguistic research. The possibility of using theoretically motivated computational environments (e.g. Finite State Morphologies or syntactic parsers) for ongoing efforts in the domain of under-resourced and endangered languages research is highly relevant in the context of many projects seeking to document and maintain endangered languages. The conference will be followed by a one-day ParGram workshop, and a one-day workshop on unbounded dependencies in LFG.