ABSTRACT
Throughout the history of linguistics, theorists have developed algebraic systems to represent linguistic knowledge. They have used a variety of grammatical formalisms consisting of rules and conditions to capture the syntactic and semantic properties of natural language. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these formalisms. Transformational grammar consists of combinatorial operations to generate phrase structures, and movement to map these structures into permuted forms. In the Principles and Parameters and Minimalist versions of this approach the grammar of a particular language is derived from a schematic UG through the assignment of values to its parameters. The question of what sort of domain-specific bias is required for a DNN to acquire linguistic knowledge is closely connected with the long standing debate between nativists and empiricists on language learning.
