"Grammarless" Phrase Structure Grammar  

Oleh:

Rogers, James

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Linguistics and Philosophy=> ada di SpringerLink 1997(vol.1) - Mutakhir; JSTOR vol. 20 no. 6 (Dec. 1997), page 721-746.
Fulltext: 25001689.pdf (2.84MB)

Isi artikel

We sketch an axiomatic reformalization of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) - a definition purely within the language of mathematical logic of the theory GPSG embodies. While this treatment raises a number of theoretical issues for GPSG, our focus is not the reformalization itself but rather the method we employ. The model theoretic approach it exemplifies can be seen as a natural step in the evolution of constraint based theories from their grammar-based antecedents. One goal of this paper is to introduce this approach to a broader audience and to demonstrate its application to an existing theory. As such, it joins a growing literature of similar studies. Prior studies, however, have had a number of weaknesses - they generally offer little in the way of concrete examples of the advantages the approach has to offer, they typically ignore significant portions of the theories they address, and, by fully abstracting away from the notion of grammar mechanism, they largely abandon the possibility of establishing meaningful complexity results. The second goal of the paper is to address these issues. Our thrust is to sketch the reformalization sufficiently to illustrate the way in which it captures Feature Specification Defaults (FSDs) and the Exhaustive Constant Partial Ordering (ECPO) property. Our definition of FSDs is considerably simplified relative to the original formalization and is free of the procedural flavor that has led some to assume that FSDs are inherently dynamic. Our treatment of ECPO uncovers a gap in its definition in the context of partial categories that has heretofore gone unnoticed. We offer these as a demonstration of the kind of insight that a model theoretic reinterpretation can bring to an existing theory. Further, since these are the types of properties that prior studies in this genre have failed to address, FSDs and ECPO provide a means for us to explore the limitations of these approaches and to offer ways of overcoming them. Finally, the logical framework we employ has a well defined generative capacity - definability in this framework characterizes strong context-freeness in a particular sense. Thus, despite being more abstract than its constraint-based predecessors, the model-theoretic approach, as exemplified here, can offer stronger complexity results than are typically available in the constraint-based framework.

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