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A Language Theoretic Approach to Syntactic Structure

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The Mathematics of Language (MOL 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6878))

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Abstract

We consider the idea of defining syntactic structure relative to a language, rather than to a grammar for a language. This allows us to define a notion of hierarchical structure that is independent of the particular grammar, and that depends rather on the properties of various algebraic structures canonically associated with a language. Our goal is not necessarily to recover the traditional ideas of syntactic structure invented by linguists, but rather to come up with an objective notion of syntactic structure that can be used for semantic interpretation. The role of syntactic structure is to bring together words and constituents that are apart on the surface, so they can be combined appropriately. The approach is based on identifying concatenation operations which are non-trivial and using these to constrain the allowable local trees in a structural description.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, United Kingdom

    Alexander Clark

Authors
  1. Alexander Clark
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Makoto Kanazawa

  2. Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Acadamy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    András Kornai

  3. Fakultät Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Marcus Kracht

  4. Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate School of Information Science, Japan

    Hiroyuki Seki

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Clark, A. (2011). A Language Theoretic Approach to Syntactic Structure. In: Kanazawa, M., Kornai, A., Kracht, M., Seki, H. (eds) The Mathematics of Language. MOL 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6878. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23211-4_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23211-4_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23210-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23211-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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