Aspects Of The Grammar And Lexica Of Artificial Languages

This book treats various areas of the phonetics, orthography, morphology, syntax, and lexica of artificial languages in an effort to determine what features such languages have in common, and how they differ. Among the topics dealt with are affricates, digraphs, stress, plural formation, demonstratives, prepositional case assignment, color terms, terms for beverages, and terms for meteorological phenomena. Data from many artificial languages, gathered from both primary and secondary sources, are presented in an attempt to give a picture of tendencies among them. The comparative examination of the languages considered in this book demonstrates that artificial languages are relatively uniform in some phonological aspects (e.g. nasals and affricates) while they show a considerable degree of variation in relation to some morphological categories (e.g. demonstratives and plurals). With regard to vocabulary from various lexical fields, in addition to the expected differences among a priori languages, different degrees of uniformity were found among a posteriori and mixed languages with respect to lexemes with particular meanings.

presupposition fails, we now give a short introduction into Unification Grammar. Since all implementations discussed in this volume use PROLOG (with the exception of BlockjHaugeneder), we felt that it would also be useful to explain the difference between unification in PROLOG and in UG. After the introduction to UG we briefly summarize the main arguments for using linguistic theories in natural language processing. We conclude with a short summary of the contributions to this volume. UNIFICATION GRAMMAR 3 Feature Structures or Complex Categories. Unification Grammar was developed by Martin Kay (Kay 1979). Martin Kay wanted to give a precise defmition (and implementation) of the notion of 'feature'. Linguists use features at nearly all levels of linguistic description. In phonetics, for instance, the phoneme b is usually described with the features 'bilabial', 'voiced' and 'nasal'. In the case of b the first two features get the value +, the third (nasal) gets the value -. Feature value pairs in phonology are normally represented as a matrix. bilabial: + voiced: + I nasal: - [Feature matrix for b.] In syntax features are used, for example, to distinguish different noun classes. The Latin noun 'murus' would be characterized by the following feature-value pairs: gender: masculin, number: singular, case: nominative, pred: murus. Besides a matrix representation one frequently fmds a graph representation for feature value pairs. The edges of the graph are labelled by features. The leaves denote the value of a feature.

The book shares interesting information about languages created and used in films or literature. The author provides vocabulary, grammatical features, background information about the language and its inventor, and fascinating facts. Plus he's got an easy tutorial that shows you how to build your own make-up language - everything from building vocabulary to creating grammar.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LACL 2011, held in Montpellier, France, in June/July 2011. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers address a wide range of logical and formal methods in computational linguistics such as type-theoretic grammars, dependency grammars, formal language theory, grammatical inference, minimalism, generation, and lexical and formal semantics.

This is the first comprehensive presentation of Functional Discourse Grammar. The authors set out its nature and origins and show how it relates to contemporary linguistic theory. They demonstrate and test its explanatory power and descriptive utility against linguistic facts from over 150 languages across a full range of linguistic families.

Ever since Chomsky laid the framework for a mathematically formal theory of syntax, two classes of formal models have held wide appeal. The finite state model offered simplicity. At the opposite extreme numerous very powerful models, most notable transformational grammar, offered generality. As soon as this mathematical framework was laid, devastating arguments were given by Chomsky and others indicating that the finite state model was woefully inadequate for the syntax of natural language. In response, the completely general transformational grammar model was advanced as a suitable vehicle for capturing the description of natural language syntax. While transformational grammar seems likely to be adequate to the task, many researchers have advanced the argument that it is "too adequate. " A now classic result of Peters and Ritchie shows that the model of transformational grammar given in Chomsky's Aspects [IJ is powerful indeed. So powerful as to allow it to describe any recursively enumerable set. In other words it can describe the syntax of any language that is describable by any algorithmic process whatsoever. This situation led many researchers to reasses the claim that natural languages are included in the class of transformational grammar languages. The conclu sion that many reached is that the claim is void of content, since, in their view, it says little more than that natural language syntax is doable algo rithmically and, in the framework of modern linguistics, psychology or neuroscience, that is axiomatic.

The goal of this book is to integrate the research being carried out in the field of lexical semantics in linguistics with the work on knowledge representation and lexicon design in computational linguistics. Rarely do these two camps meet and discuss the demands and concerns of each other's fields. Therefore, this book is interesting in that it provides a stimulating and unique discussion between the computational perspective of lexical meaning and the concerns of the linguist for the semantic description of lexical items in the context of syntactic descriptions. This book grew out of the papers presented at a workshop held at Brandeis University in April, 1988, funded by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The entire workshop as well as the discussion periods accom panying each talk were recorded. Once complete copies of each paper were available, they were distributed to participants, who were asked to provide written comments on the texts for review purposes. VII JAMES PUSTEJOVSKY 1. INTRODUCTION There is currently a growing interest in the content of lexical entries from a theoretical perspective as well as a growing need to understand the organization of the lexicon from a computational view. This volume attempts to define the directions that need to be taken in order to achieve the goal of a coherent theory of lexical organization.

The central task of future-oriented computational linguistics is the development of cognitive machines which humans can freely speak to in their natural language. This will involve the development of a functional theory of language, an objective method of verification, and a wide range of practical applications. Natural communication requires not only verbal processing, but also non-verbal perception and action. Therefore, the content of this book is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots with a focus on the mechanics of natural language communication in both the listener and the speaker.