Total Lexicalism and GASGrammars: A Direct Way to Semantics

Abstract

Abstract. A new sort of generative grammar (Sec2) will be demonstrated which is more radically "lexicalist" than any earlier one (Sec1). It is a modified Unification Categorial Grammar [1][2][3][4] from which even the principal syntactic "weapon" of CGs, Function Application, has been omitted. What has remained is lexical sign and the mere technique of unification as the engine of combining signs. The computation thus requires no usual linguistic technique (e.g. Move, Merge, traces [5], Function Application [6]); which promises a straightforward implementation of GASG in Prolog. Our parser decides whether a Hungarian sentence is grammatical and creates its (practically English) DRS (Sec3). DRT, UCG and Total LexicalismA "totally lexicalist" generative grammar will be demonstrated in this paper. The first motivation of the enterprise was the stubborn problem of compositionality in DRT (Discourse Representation Theory; e.g. [7], [4]).DRT is a successful attempt to extend the sentence-level Montagovian modeltheoretic semantics to the discourse level. Its crucial proposal is that a level of discourse representation must be inserted in between the language to be interpreted and the world model serving as the context of interpretation. The insertion of this level, however, has given rise to a double problem of compositionality (language → DRS, DRS → world model), at least according to the very strict sense of the Fregean principle of compositionality introduced by Montague [8]. As for the DRS → world model transition Zeevat [2] has provided a compositional solution, which could successfully be built in the new version of DRT [4]. As for the language → DRS transition, however, the authors admit (p195) that no (properly) compositional solution could be found in the last two decades.The failure of elaborating a properly compositional solution to the language → DRS transition arises from the fundamental incompatibility of the strictly hierarchically organized generative syntactic phrase structures (PS; e.g. [9], [5]) with the basically unordered DRSs. Nowadays [2], [4] some kind of Categorial Grammar (CG) is held to promise the best chance for capturing the language → DRS transition in a properly compositional manner. The reason lies in the fact that, in a CG system, language-specific information (about how words can combine to form constituents, and then sentences), stored in PS rules in the

The Implemented Human Interpreter as a Database

“…The words and their default morphology and parts of their syntax and semantics are stored in the core lexicon. This is basically the same as stated in (Alberti et al, 2003) and (Alberti-Kilián, 2010) but each feature (POS, type of morpheme etc.) is described by a different fact.…”

Contralog: a Prolog conform forward-chaining environment and its application for dynamic programming and natural language parsing

“…• Total lexicality: each kind of lingual information is stored in the lexicon (in the vocabulary) [5]. Lexical items basically follow the feature structured method, whereas each item may demand certain other lingual context, and it also may offer certain services.…”

“…The stream of words is parsed by a morphological parser. Although ReALIS also has a solution for morphology [5], for convenience we propose to use a commercial solution. The result of morphological parsing is a Contralog sequence of facts.…”