Research

If you use Kataja in your research, either as an analysis tool or to present your analysis, you should consider referring to the thesis that describes your instrument:

Purma, J. (2016) Kataja - Visualising biolinguistics.

This page will collect references to research that uses or acknowledges Kataja. Please notify me if you want a reference to be added to this list.

Since Kataja is free, references and recognition is what motivates its further development.

My theoretical position

Kataja is created to ease some general problems of biolinguistics. It is widely recognised that generative theory should build bridges to neurosciences by proposing computational primitives required for syntactic processing: low level computation. Much of the syntacticians work is done few step higher, in highest level possible to explain some syntactical generalisation. As I see it, many syntacticians have their own low level assumptions, but putting them to test is either lot of handiwork or requires writing a computer model (e.g. work by Sandiway Fong, Jason Ginsberg and Edward Stabler). Kataja encourages sketching cyclic operations and writing more of these models, and helps to communicate the work to audience that expects complexity marred with visual storytelling, be they partners in multidisciplinary inquiry or students of syntax.

Suggest improvements

Theories that are most suitable for Kataja’s visualisation features are lexicalist minimalist theories: there are much syntactic activity to show there. Also nanosyntactic approaches should benefit from automation. Current anti-lexicalist approaches provide a puzzle, I am open for ideas on how Kataja could help them.

Any suggestions on improving Kataja are welcomed, though extending Kataja outside generative theory is not in my interests or skills.

Join development

If you want to improve and fix Kataja code or write a plugin to be included with each Kataja installation, clone the project in GitHub and send a pull request for your changes. Many developers are better than one. We can write also write papers together!

You can also publish Kataja plugins (e.g. grammatical models or parsers) in your own repository, note me if you want to list them here.