Layman's Summary

The job of linguists is not just to describe the patterns that they find in natural language, but also to formalize those patterns in an explicit way. Mathematical models of language have been very useful over the years in allowing linguists to formalize and test their hypotheses about how language works. In my senior thesis, I explored the relationship between these models and the linguistic patterns that they try to capture in the context of one particular system for modeling language, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). I was especially interested in how HPSG, which has mostly been used to describe sentence structure, can be used to describe sound patterns as well.

Summary

My undergraduate honors thesis at UNC Chapel Hill was an investigation of how to represent phonological entities and constraints in attribute-value matrices, the formal language of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). I attempted to answer two questions:

1. What is the best way to represent phonological intuitions such as phonemes and syllable structure?
2. What are the implicit rules that linguists follow when they use formal languages to express phonological generalizations? Given these practices, what constraints must we impose on a system that attempts to generate phonological generalizations in these formal languages directly from phonetic facts?

Downloadable Stuff

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Undergraduate Honors Thesis
2005 Interpreting and generating formal grammars: A study of HPSG phonology.