Zach with alums at SCiL 2018

Zach Stone gives a poster at the first meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, a group founded in part by Marylanders Naomi Feldman and Tim Hunter.

January 4, Zach Stone gives a poster at the first meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, a group founded in part by Marylanders Naomi Feldman and Tim Hunter. SCiL will meet alongside the LSA, which this year is in Salt Lake City, Utah. * 'A structural theory of syntactic derivations,' Zach Stone.

We describe a category of structured sets and show how to use it to model syntactic derivations. Its objects are (derived) trees (as partial orders) connected by order-preserving maps. This generalization allows for feature-sharing (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007; Frampton & Gutmann 2000) and feature geometry (Harley and Ritter 2002; Bye & Svenonius 2011). This category induces good definitions for isomorphisms (which keep track of the dependency structure of each derived object, and relations between the dependency structures between steps) and substructures (describing constituency). The category admits many "good" constructions such as products and coproducts. We then give applications of these constructions for formalizing grammatical operations as pushouts (Ehrig et al. 1973; Ehrig et al. 1997; Van den Broek 1991), including showing consequences for feature-sharing models of agreement.