Acrisio PiresAssistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
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- Research and Teaching Interests
- Teaching
- Resources for Students
- Downloadable Papers
- Abridged CV
- Contact Information
Research and Teaching Interests
Syntax: Principles & Parameters, Minimalism, comparative syntax (Romance
and Germanic languages), interfaces syntax–morphology and
syntax-semantics.
Historical linguistics: theories of language change and their connection to
language learnability and acquisition.
Computational linguistics: parsers; computational models of language;
evaluation of stochastic versus symbolic approaches to computational
linguistics; multilingual applications: machine translation and information
extraction/retrieval; corpus-based applications.
Psycholinguistics: syntactic processing and parsing models.
Resources for Students
Reference citation in assignments and papers
Teaching
LING315 - Introduction to Syntax.
(Link
to course syllabus in PDF format)
This course investigates the syntax (sentence
structure properties) of human language. First, it takes into account the need
for a scientific model to explain human knowledge of language that also makes
predictions about its representation in the mind. Second, it explores in detail
the fact that different languages, even those that clearly do not share a
common recent past, share many structural properties.
LING 316 - Aspects of Meaning.
(Link
to course syllabus in PDF format)
This course focuses on the core aspects of
the representation of meaning in human language. It adopts a compositional
approach to meaning: how humans combine basic linguistic units (e.g. words or
lexical items) into complex linguistic expressions that allow them to represent
the complex aspects of reality and thought in natural language. More
specifically, the course focuses on the connection between the structure of
linguistic expressions (i.e. their syntax) and the construction of meaning
(semantics). It adopts a simple but precise and powerful approach to meaning,
focusing on the conditions under which complex linguistic expressions are true
or not true. The students will become familiar with various tools that are
relevant for a theory of meaning in human language, including set theory,
propositional and predicate logic, (generalized) quantifier theory, scope and
polarity.
LING 515 - Generative Syntax.
In the Generative framework, syntactic
structure is generated by a formal rule system and by applying constraints to
its output. Some of these rules and constraints are hypothesized to be innate,
or "unlearned" (perhaps a species specific system). That is supported
by how human language acquisition or grammar growth takes place, and by the
observation of striking structural similarities across different human
languages. Other aspects of our linguistic knowledge appear
"learned", i.e. determined by an interaction of human biology and
particular linguistic inputs, motivating different aspects of variation among
human languages. This class introduces this so-called "Principles and
Parameters" approach to the analysis of human syntactic knowledge,
focusing on how the various postulated ("simple") rules and constraints
interact to generate ("complex") structures, characteristic of
natural language sentences (such as the one you are now reading, and
understanding).
LING615/815 - Advanced Syntax/Seminar:
Syntactic Theory.
(Link
to course syllabus in PDF format)
This course introduces students to
innovations in syntactic theory that have been proposed within the last decade.
Students will move beyond the introductory-text level and extend their
knowledge of Principles & Parameters approaches to syntax through
discussion of the goals of Minimalist Syntax and its hypotheses about design
aspects of the human faculty of language. The course explores in detail how
postulated minimalist primitives and operations interact to generate the
(complex) structures that are characteristic of natural language sentences.
LING 394 - Topics in Linguistics: Language, Mind and Human Experience
This
course explores different aspects of
language structure and interpretation and how they relate to human language
acquisition, language processing, language change and innovation. One focus is
on linguistics as a branch of cognitive science. The questions we consider
include: What aspects of language cognition and linguistic experience allow children
to learn at an amazing speed the many complex aspects of their language? (e.g.
by age three children have mastered most of the core properties of their native
language). What do we do in order to understand so successfully what we hear or
read, to the point that we can be misled by our own processing choices
(something humor often explores: “I shot an elephant in my pajamas…
How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know”)? How does one account
for variation across languages, regarding the representation of structure and
meaning (a sentence like ‘Bill saw us’ requires that both Bill
and us be pronounced in English, different from many languages of the
world in which either or both nouns can be absent)? How does this sort of variation arise, and
how does human linguistic knowledge yield language change, that is, gives rise
to innovating grammars by new generations? In the absence of linguistic input
from native speakers, can children create a natural language from scratch?
LING 211 - Introduction to Language.
Human beings have always been curious about
the uniquely human possession, human language-about its structure, its
diversity, its use and its effects on others. This course explores the human
capacity for language. We begin with the discussion of the uniqueness of human
language and then review major properties of language structure including sound
systems, word and sentence structure, meaning and their use. We explore how
these properties relate to language acquisition, processing/computation,
conversation and writing. The course also considers the rich variation of
language in terms of language change, dialects, and identity.
LING 212 - The symbolic analysis of
language.
(Link to
course syllabus in PDF format)
This course is an introduction to
mathematical concepts and techniques used in semantic theory. The main focus of
the course is teaching how to construct models of natural language with these
mathematical tools and to evaluate to which extent these models succeed in
approximating natural language. I start defining the scope and goals of formal
semantic theory and introducing the notion of compositionality. After covering
the basics of set theory, statement/propositional logic (first-order) predicate
logic, their contribution and limitations, I discuss the theory of Generalized
Quantifiers, properties of determiners and polarity items, the derivation of
scope ambiguities and anaphora, and the basics of model theory. Finally, I
address the interaction between languages, grammars and automata. The course is
also directed to students interested in issues related to computational
linguistics/Natural Language Processing.
LING 492/792 - Comparative syntax: Variation
and Change in the Romance Languages.
(Link
to course syllabus in PDF format)
This course discusses recent Principles &
Parameters approaches to syntactic phenomena common to the Romance languages,
compared to each other and to different languages: English and other Germanic
languages and, to a lesser extent, Arabic, Celtic, Chinese, Greek and Japanese.
The course focused on the interaction between functional categories, features
(Case, agreement, tense), thematic properties and movement in grammatical
theory, in order to account for the cross linguistic variation with respect to
verb movement and argument licensing, null arguments, negation, non-finite
complementation, control, argument/adjunct distinctions, and cliticization. The
course also explored some of these phenomena from the perspective of theories
or language change and acquisition.
LING 492.003 - Introduction to computational linguistics and natural language processing.
This course has two components: i) it covers
NLP research in the areas of morphology, syntax, semantics and the lexicon; ii)
it provides a short introduction to programming, with assignments directed to
NLP. Some topics the students will become familiar with are finite state
automata and regular expressions, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, context-free
grammars, tools for sentence parsing, semantic analysis and unification. The
course also introduces natural language applications in information
extraction/retrieval and machine translation. This can be taken as a beginning
course in the field, but it is also useful for students who want to be able to
use computers to manipulate human language as their object of study in
different fields.
Ling 792.004 - Formal and stochastic
methods in linguistics research.
This course presents and discusses
rule-based/symbolic and statistical/stochastic approaches to linguistics and
computational linguistics, evaluating some of their individual contributions to
the field and how they can be combined with different purposes in natural
language processing (NLP). I will spend some time covering basic
concepts/techniques necessary for students to understand the more advanced
material. Some of the topics covered will be lexical analysis, corpora tagging,
morphological and syntactic parsing/analysis, semantic analysis and a couple of
NLP applications, including information extraction/retrieval, machine
translation and, to a lesser extent, language recognition/generation.
Publications and manuscripts
(click on title to download some of the papers in PDF format)
Pires, Acrisio. 2006. Book:
The Minimalist
Syntax of Defective Domains: Gerunds and Infinitives.
Pires,
Acrisio. In press. 2007a. The Derivation of
Clausal Gerunds. Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical,
Experimental and Interdisciplinary Research 10.2. 64p.
Pires,
Acrisio. 2007b. The subject, it is here! The Varying
Structural Positions of Preverbal Subjects.
In Festschrift in honor of Lucia Lobato, ed. C. Rodrigues and A. P.
Scher, thematic issue submitted to DELTA/Documentation
of Studies in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. 24p.
Pires,
Acrisio and Heather L. Taylor. 2007. The Syntax of Wh-in-situ and Common Ground. Submitted to Romance Languages:
Structure, interfaces, and microparametric variation: Proceedings of the 37th LSRL/ Linguistic Symposium on
Romance Languages.
Pires,
Acrisio and Sarah G. Thomason. To appear. How Much
Syntactic Reconstruction is Possible? In Principles of Syntactic
Reconstruction, ed. G. Ferraresi and M. Goldbach.
Pires,
Acrisio. 2005. Verb movement and clitics: Variation and change in Portuguese.
In Grammaticalization and
Parametric Change, ed. M. Batllori, M. L. Hernanz, C. Picallo and F. Roca.
Ouali,
Hamid and Acrisio Pires. 2005. Complex
tenses, Agreement and Wh-Extraction. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the
Epstein, Samuel D., Acrisio
Pires and T. Daniel Seely. 2005. EPP in T: More Controversial Subjects.
2005. Syntax: A Journal of Theoretical, Experimental and
Interdisciplinary Research 8: 165-80.
Pires,
Acrisio. 2004a. Constituency Test. In Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ed. P.
Strazny.
Pires,
Acrisio. 2004b. Review: Diachronic Syntax: Models and Mechanisms, ed.
Susan Pintzuk, George Tsoulas, and Anthony Warner. 2000. Diachronica
21.2: 431-42.
Pires,
Acrisio. 2004c. Review: Portuguese Syntax: new comparative studies,
ed. Joćo Costa.
Kim,
Hee-Soo and Acrisio Pires. 2003. Ambiguity in the Korean Morphological
Causative/ Passive. In Japanese/ Korean Linguistics 12, ed.
W. McClure. Stanford: Center for the
Study of Language and Information/CSLI, p. 255-66.
Letsholo, R. and A. Pires. 2003. Morphology as a reflex of syntactic dependencies: The case of A'-movement
in Ikalanga. Paper presented at the 26th GLOW Colloquium/Generative
Linguistics in the Old World,
Pires,
Acrisio. 2002. Cue based change: Inflection and subjects in the history of
Portuguese infinitives. In Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change,
ed. D. Lightfoot.
Pires,
Acrisio. 2001a. Clausal and TP–Defective Gerunds: Control without
Tense. In Proceedings of NELS 31, 386-406. GLSA,
Pires,
Acrisio. 2001b. PRO, movement and Binding in Portuguese. In Romance
Syntax, Semantics and their L2 Acquisition. Selected Papers from the 30th
Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, ed. J. Camps and C. Wiltshire.
Pires, Acrisio
2001b. PRO,
Movement and Binding in Portuguese. In Romance Syntax, Semantics
and their L2 Acquisition. Selected Papers from the 30th Linguistic Symposium on
Romance Languages, ed. J. Camps and C. Wiltshire.
Pires, Acrisio 2001. Clausal
and TP-Defective Gerunds: Control without Tense. In Proceedings
of NELS 31, GLSA,
Contact Information
|
Acrisio Pires 458 Lorch Hall, 611 Tappan St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220 734.6472156 |