Harmonic Grammar (HG) originally referred to a fusion of connectionism and generative grammar developed by Legendre, Miyata and Smolensky 1990 (at CU Boulder). It can now be taken to refer more broadly to any model of grammar that uses weighted constraints, and in fact we won’t be talking directly about connectionist models at all in this course (see Matt Goldrick’s course), or about the related general topic of weighted constraints and sub-categorical phenomena (see e.g. Flemming 2001).
Here the various models of HG are grouped into 4 categories – click on the page links to the left to get a broad description of the work in each category and references. These categories are not mutually exclusive – models sometimes appear under more than one category, and they often have many shared attributes. We’ll be working through the models in the order that they appear in this list.