Basic Understanding.....

The Minimalist Program (MP) is a program of minimal theory, a search for simplicity, which tries to arrive at the minimal set of language specific rules including principles and parameters. The two most salient features of this system are its derivational character and the role that Economy conditions play in regulating possible derived structures. Structures that do not pass the Economy conditions are simply not generated. It has no D-structure or S-structure but only LF and PF interface. The LF interaction takes place after lexical items are chosen from the lexicon and the computational system starts building representations. Each lexical item has three features, namely, Semantics, Phonological, and Syntactic. The two major grammatical operations in MP are Merge and Move, used as devices of feature checking. Features are the morphological features of Case, Tense and Agreement (phi features of person, gender and number) that have to be checked. Checking is satisfied when a category needing a feature is in construction with some other element that can supply that feature in the sentence (which is called ‘licensing’). For example verbs are assumed to be inflected for tense and agreement features in the lexicon and are inserted into derivation in bare form. The features carried by the verb are checked against corresponding features encoded in the inflectional categories. In case of verb, AGRS, AGRO and T are the features to be checked that can take place at any stage in derivation. In MP Merge operations are only licensed if they allow feature checking to occur.

In the proposed research of mine, I intend to investigate the internal structure of Determiner Phrases (DP) in Assamese within the framework of Minimalism and want to apply this analysis into an NLP application. Initially my idea was to use the results of linguistic analysis in building a syntactic parser for Assamese with specific reference to DP. The immediate by-product pertaining to DP analysis could be a shallow parser (e.g., a DP Chunker in Assamese) which is of immense use in various NLP applications. But now, trying to look at it from a different perspective, what I want to address is the underlying structure of DPs in Classifier languages (Assamese, of course still the reference point) as compared to Class languages like Hindi and how can it help in processing and generation of source and target languages from the point of view of Machine Translation. It sounds quite ambitious and even more tough when we talk about "drawing an analogy with the inherent Human faculties of Perception, Learning & Reasoning". At this pont of time, honestly I have no idea how to do it! After much self brooding over this topic, I feel lets do the linguistic analysis first, forget about NLP. So, what does Minimalism say? There are two levels of syntactic representations: LF and PF. LF interfaces with Conceptual-intentional (CI) system and PF interfaces with Articulatory perceptual (AP) system. (If I am not wrong it should correspond to "the faculty of Understanding" and "the faculty of Sensibility/Perception" in terms of "Perception, Learning & Reasoning"). If that's the case then what does an Assamese speaker concieve of when s/he sees any object or any kind of reference to an object in the discourse of Assamese? What are the features of the noun that are concieved and how that conception is translated into the language?

While addressing these questions with specific reference to DPs in Assamese, what would of considerable interest is to identify the DP internal agreements, if any. Considering the linguistic aspects the language, the important issue to be focused is the syntactic and semantic status of classifiers in Assamese within the feature composition of nouns. Assamese has an extensive system of classifiers which are defined as morphemes (Enclitic Definitives as in Kakoti, 1941) that categorize the referent of a noun in terms of its animacy, shape, size and other inherent properties. Classifiers in Assamese operate in two ways: (a) specific classifiers that agree with the noun in terms of semantic features and (b) the generic classifiers which can occur with any noun regardless of its semantic features. Another important question is whether the language has plural morphemes or not? Whether the nouns are count or mass? What is the behavior of number morphology? What are the other modificational elements in the language? (Adjectives, Quantifiers, Demonstratives etc), which means the first step of "faculty of understanding"---- extraction of data or specific features of data.

OK.... too tired now.... will listen to the mp3 recording of the Classifier class by Prof Veneeta Dayal and try to understand the crosslinguistic typology....