Speaker: Isabella Senturia (Yale)
Title: On the Spectra of Syntactic Structures
Time: Tuesday, April 23rd, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: This talk explores the application of spectral graph theory to the problem of characterizing linguistically significant classes of tree structures. As a case study, we focus on three classes of trees, binary, X-bar, and asymmetric c-command extensional, as well as different types of syntactic movement, and show that the spectral properties of different matrix representations of these classes of trees provide insight into the properties that characterize these classes. More generally, our goal is to provide another route to understanding the structure of natural language, one that does not come from extensive definitions and rules taken by extrapolating from the syntactic structure, but instead is extracted directly from computation on the syntactically-defined graphical structures. We also discuss implications of this work for generative capacity and for the Minimalist program.