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Towards a Procedural Model of Natural-Language Interpretation Crossover: A Case Study

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Logic, Language and Reasoning

Part of the book series: Trends in Logic ((TREN,volume 5))

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Abstract

This paper describes preliminary work on a model of natural language in which the dichotomy between syntactic and semantic algebras (assumed by linguists since Lewis [39]) is replaced by a system which defines inference over the pair of semantic and syntactic information expressed as label and formula. In this system, the left-right projection of on-line language interpretation provides the sole concept of structure defined for natural-language strings; and syntactic structure is defined as a proof structure through which interpretation is progressively built up. The logic assumed is a labelled deductive system in which syntactic, semantic and control devices are defined together (cf. Gabbay [15]). The motivation underpinning this approach to natural language is the aim of modelling the process whereby given a sequence of words, a hearer incrementally combines syntactic/semantic/pragmatic information to yield an overall interpretation of a string relative to the particular context in which it is intended to be interpreted. Context-dependent aspects of interpretation are modelled as abductive run-time choices from input specifications which constrain but do not fully determine the assigned interpretation. The overall process of interpretation is then defined to be sensitive not merely to lexically encoded bottom-up syntactic/semantic information but also to the way in which interpretation is built up on a left-right basis.1 The model is introduced on a case-study basis. I take a linguistic phenomenon assumed to be a syntactic phenomenon and currently granted to be a mystery (Postal [52]), and show how the mystery dissolves, looked at from the perspective of the model being developed. The approach is then tested against its ability to provide cross-language explanations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK

    Ruth Kempson

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  1. Ruth Kempson
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College, London, UK

    Hans Jürgen Ohlbach

  2. University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Uwe Reyle

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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Kempson, R. (1999). Towards a Procedural Model of Natural-Language Interpretation Crossover: A Case Study. In: Ohlbach, H.J., Reyle, U. (eds) Logic, Language and Reasoning. Trends in Logic, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4574-9_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4574-9_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5936-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4574-9

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