Pick a language that you are interested in working on.
For your language, collect the following information:
Note that you'll want to keep the vocabulary small, and only collect the minimum necessary to illustrate the grammatical contrasts discussed below. In this lab, we won't be covering morphology, so you'll have to make a full form lexicon (one entry for each relevant form of each word). In some languages, the number of entries required expands quickly...
Determine the basic word order (if any) of simple matrix declarative clauses in your language. Some possibilities:
If your language instantiates one of the last two patterns or a further pattern not listed above, I'd appreciate it if you would email me (ebender at u dot washington dot edu) or post to the bulletin board.
Now create a small test suite of sentences illustrating the possible word orders in your language as well as contrasting ungrammatical examples illustrating ill-formed orders. In addition, you should include examples with illicit numbers various constituents (two determiners before a noun, intransitive verb with two arguments). Be sure to stick to the vocabulary you collected above, but do include both transitive and intransitive verbs. You should have roughly 3-4 times as many ungrammatical examples as grammatical ones. The test suite should be a plain text file, with ungrammatical examples preceded by asterisks:
The cat slept. *Slept the cat. *The the cat slept. *The cat slept the dog. The cat chased the dog. *Chased the cat the dog. The dog the cat chased. *The cat chased. *The cat slept chased. ...
If you are working with a language that is unfamiliar to you, you may wish to include glosses in your test suite. These can appear on lines which are "commented out" (preceded by a semicolon).
;;; Basic word order facts Le chat dormait. ;The-m cat sleep-imperfective ;The cat slept ...
The software will ignore any line which begins with a colon (as well as blank lines), but such lines can be useful for notes for human consumption.
Determine the relative order of nouns and their dependents (determiners, adjectives). Note whether determiners are optional, obligatory, or impossible with the nouns that you have. (In this lab we won't be going into the distribution of determiner optionality, but you may wish to illustrate it in your test suite.)
Add relevant grammatical and ungrammatical examples to your test suite illustrating possible word orders of nouns and dependents. We'll only be treating complete sentences in this lab, so be sure to include verbs in both the grammatical and ungrammatical examples.
Determine whether your language has a case or case-like system (and in particular, one that is expressed on the nouns that you have chosen for your vocabulary; cf English which only shows case contrasts on pronouns).
Determine whether case markers appear to be:
If your language has a case or case-like system which does not fit into one of the above, please email me (ebender at u dot washington dot edu) or post to the bulletin board.
Determine the case required on each argument of the verbs you have included (when they are used as the head of matrix clauses).
Add grammatical and ungrammatical examples to your test suite illustrating the required case patterns.
Determine whether your language shows any kind of agreement. Possible agreement relationships include:
Possible features subject to agreement include:
Note that in some cases the only morphological mark of a feature may be on an element which is not the primary locus of the information. For example, one may find a case system where NPs are assigned case (and in the HPSG analysis, this information is thus a property of the head noun), but case is in fact only 'visible' morphologically on determiners and/or adjectives.
Add grammatical and ungrammatical examples to your test suite illustrating the agreement facts of your language.
Determine how sentential (NB: not constituent) negation is expressed in your language. Some possibilities include:
If sentential negation is expressed in some other way in your language, please email me (ebender at u dot washington dot edu) or post to the bulletin board.
Add grammatical and ungrammatical examples to your test suite illustrating sentential negation. Grammatical examples should include both transitive and intransitive verbs. The appropriate kind of ungrammatical examples depends on the pattern that your language uses. For example, if your language uses inflection on finite verbs, you'll want to include ungrammatical examples where the inflection is on non-finite verbs. If your language expresses sentential negation with an adverb, your ungrammatical examples might illustrate positions in which the adverb cannot show up.
If your language has neither case nor agreement and you would like to substitute something else in your grammar fragment, please email me (ebender at u dot washington dot edu) to consult about appropriate topics, or post to the bulletin board. You can also peruse the web page for my quarter long grammar engineering class for ideas of what kinds of topics might be approachable.