Teaching Materials
Here you'll find teaching materials from some of my courses. Feel free to use or adapt them for your own classes, and contact me with any questions.
Course 1: Modelling Syntax
Course 2: Syntax, Semantics, and Processing
Embedded Files
Course 1:
Modelling Syntax: Introduction to Lexical-Functional Grammar
Syllabus: click here
This course was first taught at the Summer School of The NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies in July 2025.
Topic overview:
(1) Introduction
(2) F-structure and Grammatical Functions
(3) C-structure and C-to-F-structure Mapping
(4) Control Theory
(5) Long-Distance Dependencies
(6) Computational Implementation: Treebanks and Grammar Engineering
LFG 1_CFLam_Google.pdfLesson 1: Introduction
Lesson 1: Introduction
This lesson introduces the preliminaries of LFG, setting the background for the next 5 lessons.
Slides available for download: click here
LFG2_CFLam_Google.pdfLesson 2: F-structure and Grammatical Functions
Lesson 2: F-structure and Grammatical Functions
This lesson focuses on the functional structure (f-structure) and the different grammatical functions in LFG from a cross-linguistic perspective.
Slides available for download: click here
LFG3_CFLamLawrence_Google.pdfLesson 3: C-structure and C-to-F-structure Mapping
Lesson 3: C-structure and C-to-F-structure Mapping
This lesson focuses on the constituent structure (c-structure) as well as the mapping between c- and f-structures using cross-linguistic data from English and Latin.
Slides available for download: click here
LFG4_CFLamLawrence_Google.pdfLesson 4: Control Theory
Lesson 4: Control Theory
This lesson focuses on control theory. Two important control mechanisms, namely functional and anaphoric control, are discussed with reference to data from English and Icelandic.
Slides available for download: click here
LFG5_CFLamLawrence_Google.pdfLesson 5: Long-distance Dependencies
Lesson 5: Long-distance Dependencies
This lesson focuses on long-distance dependencies, particularly constituent questions, with reference to data from English, Japanese, and Hungarian.
Slides available for download: click here
LFG6_CFLamLawrence_Google.pdfLesson 6: Computational Implementation: Treebanks and Grammar Engineering
Lesson 6: Computational Implementation: Treebanks and Grammar Engineering
This lesson focuses on the computational implementation of LFG analysis, introducing the applications of computational grammars, treebanks, and techniques of grammar engineering using Xerox Linguistic Environment.
Slides available for download: click here
Course 2:
Syntax, Semantics, and Processing: A Constraint-Based Theory
Syllabus: click here
This course was first taught at the Summer School of The NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies in July 2026.
Lesson 1_CFLamLawrence_2026.pdfLesson 1: Syntax (Part I)
Lesson 1: Syntax (Part I)
This lesson introduces the parallel architecture of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a constraint-based theory of grammar. It begins by examining functional structure (f-structure), which represents grammatical functions and abstract syntactic relations independently of word order. Students will learn how f-structures capture the common grammatical properties shared across languages and why they provide a useful foundation for understanding syntax.
Lesson 2_CFLamLawrence_2026.pdfLesson 2: Syntax (Part II)
Lesson 2: Syntax (Part II)
Building on the previous lesson, this lesson turns to constituent structure (c-structure) and its correspondence with functional structure. It explores how phrase structure is represented in LFG, how constituent structures vary across languages while functional structures remain comparable, and how annotated phrase structure rules and lexical entries connect the two representations. The lesson concludes with an application to the syntax of relative clauses.
Lesson 3_CFLamLawrence_2026.pdfLesson 3: Semantics (Part I)
Lesson 3: Semantics (Part I)
Having established the syntactic architecture of LFG, the lesson next examines how sentences are assigned meaning. This lesson introduces glue semantics, a compositional semantic framework that combines predicate logic and linear logic to derive sentence meanings directly from syntactic representations. Students will learn how semantic composition works through meaning constructors and proofs, and how the framework accounts for phenomena such as quantification.
Lesson 4_CFLamLawrence_2026.pdfLesson 4: Semantics (Part II) and Processing (Part I)
Lesson 4: Semantics (Part II) and Processing (Part I)
This lesson extends the semantic analysis to relative clauses and introduces the relationship between grammatical representations and language processing. It introduces pronominal resumption as a case study that connects syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistic evidence, before introducing an LFG-based model of incremental language processing that integrates grammatical knowledge with real-time processing.
Lesson 5_CFLamLawrence_2026.pdfLesson 5: Processing (Part II)
Lesson 5: Processing (Part II)
The final lesson explores how language is produced incrementally within a constraint-based framework. It discusses psycholinguistic studies on incremental production, the distinction between locally and globally well-formed structures, fragment-based production, and the role of message planning in language generation. Together, these topics illustrate how grammatical knowledge can support efficient, real-time language use and provide a unified perspective that connects processing issues to a grammatical theory.
Page last updated: 17 July 2026
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse