Second year graduate student Vincent Czarnecki co-taught a course at this winter’s Virtual NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies (V-NYI#8).
The course, Introduction to Mathematical Linguistics, was co-taught with Scott Nelson of Stony Brook University.
Here is a brief overview of the course:
This course will give a brief overview of the field of Mathematical Linguistics. We will give a description of its overall nature, its goals, and its role in the more general space of theoretical linguistics and cognitive science. Following this, we will discuss some of the tools used in the field. This will start by covering sets, relations, functions, automata, and logic. We will then focus on different ways that these tools can be applied to linguistic phenomenon using ideas from formal language theory and finite model theory. The course will end by tying all of these things together and showing where the field is now, and where it may be headed. (Examples will mostly be drawn from phonology and syntax.)