MiniJudge: Software for minimalist experimental syntax

MiniJudge: Software for Small-Scale Experimental Syntax

MiniJudge is free online open-source software to help theoretical syntacticians collect and analyze native-speaker acceptability judgments in a way that combines the speed and ease of traditional introspective methods with the power and statistical validity afforded by rigorous experimental protocols. This paper shows why MiniJudge is useful, what it feels like to use it, and how it works.

An Experiment in Minimalist Experimental Syntax

The Scribble Reader An Alternative to S-expressions for Textual Content

For decades, S-expressions have been one of the fundamental advantages of languages in the Lisp family — a major factor in shaping these languages as an ideal platform for symbolic computations, from macros and meta-programming to symbolic data exchange and much more. As convenient as this minimalist syntax has proven to be, it is unfitting for dealing with textual content. In this paper we des...

Morphological Agreement in Minimalist Grammars

Minimalist Grammars provide a useful tool for modeling natural language syntax by defining grammar fragments in a very precise way. As a formalization of the Minimalist Program, they can accommodate linguistic analyses from the field of generative syntax. However, they have no machinery for encoding agreement; while morphology can be simulated by multiplying lexical items, there is no systemati...

Basic concepts and tools for the Toki Pona minimalist and constructed language: Wordnet synsets; analysis of the vocabulary; synthesis and syntax highlighting of texts

A minimalist constructed language (conlang) is useful for experiments and comfortable for making tools. The Toki Pona (TP) conlang is minimalist both in the vocabulary (with only 14 letters and 124 words) and in the ≈ 10 syntax rules. The language is useful for being a used and somewhat established minimalist conlang with at least hundreds of fluent speakers. In this article, we describe curren...