IRCS Technical Reports Series
Document Type
Technical Report
Date of this Version
January 1999
Abstract
Contemporary linguistic formalisms have become so rigorous that it is now possible to view them as very high level declarative programming languages. Consequently, grammars for natural languages can be viewed as programs; this view enables the application of various methods and techniques that were proved useful for programming languages to the study of natural languages. This paper adapts the notion of program composition, well developed in the context of logic programming languages, to the domain of linguistic formalisms. We study alternative definitions for the semantics of such formalisms, suggesting a denotational semantics that we show to be compositional and fully-abstract. This facilitates a clear, mathematically sound way for defining grammar modularity.
Date Posted: 14 August 2006
Comments
University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-99-05.