Generative grammar

Generative Grammar is the label of the most influential research program in linguistics and related fields in the second half of the 20. century. Initiated by a short book, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), it became one of the driving forces among the disciplines jointly called the cognitive sciences. The term generative grammar refers to an explicit, formal characterization of the (largely implicit) knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior. The program had a strong mentalist orientation right from the beginning, documented e.g. in a fundamental critique of Skinner's Verbal behavior (1957) by Chomsky (1959), arguing that behaviorist stimulus-response-theories could in no way account for the complexities of ordinary language use. The "Generative Enterprise", as the program was called in 1982, went through a number of stages, each of which was accompanied by discussions of specific problems and consequences within the narrower domain of linguistics as well as the wider range of related fields, such as ontogenetic development, psychology of language use, or biological evolution. Four stages of the Generative Enterprise can be marked off for expository purposes

A Graph Rewriting Approach for Transformational Design of Digital Systems

Transformational design integrates design and verification. It combines “correctness by construction” and design creativity by the use of pre-proven behaviour preserving transformations as design steps. The formal aspects of this methodology are hidden in the transformations. A constraint is the availability of a design representation with a compositional formal semantics. Graph representations are useful design representations because of their visualisation of design information. In this paper graph rewriting theory, as developed in the last twenty years in mathematics, is shown to be a useful basis for a formal framework for transformational design. The semantic aspects of graphs which are no part of graph rewriting theory are included by the use of attributed graphs. The used attribute algebra, table algebra, is a relation algebra derived from database theory. The combination of graph rewriting, table algebra and transformational design is new

Linguistics and some aspects of its underlying dynamics

In recent years, central components of a new approach to linguistics, the Minimalist Program (MP) have come closer to physics. Features of the Minimalist Program, such as the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of the Labeling Algorithm that only operates at the interface of Narrow Syntax with the Conceptual-Intentional and the Sensory-Motor interfaces, the difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a sentence and the build-up of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation of sentence structures, are directly accessible to representation in terms of algebraic formalism. Although in our scheme linguistic structures are classical ones, we find that an interesting and productive isomorphism can be established between the MP structure, algebraic structures and many-body field theory opening new avenues of inquiry on the dynamics underlying some central aspects of linguistics.Comment: 17 page

Design synthesis and shape generation

If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to innovation in business and society, we need to build a better understanding of the evolving skill-sets that designers will need and the contexts within which design might operate. This demands more discourse between those involved in cutting edge practice, the researchers who help to uncover principles, codify knowledge and create theories and the educators who are nurturing future design talent. This book promotes such a discourse by reporting on the work of twenty research teams who explored different facets of future design activity as part of Phase 2 of the UK's research council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative. Each of these contributions describes the origins of the project, the research team and their project aims, the research methods used and the new knowledge and understanding generated. Editor and Initiative Director, Professor Tom Inns, provides an introductory chapter that suggests ways the reader might navigate these viewpoints. This chapter concludes with an overview of the key lessons that might be learnt from this collection of design research activity

Towards an implementable dependency grammar

The aim of this paper is to define a dependency grammar framework which is both linguistically motivated and computationally parsable. See the demo at http://www.conexor.fi/analysers.html#testingComment: 10 page

Phrase structure grammars as indicative of uniquely human thoughts

I argue that the ability to compute phrase structure grammars is indicative of a particular kind of thought. This type of thought that is only available to cognitive systems that have access to the computations that allow the generation and interpretation of the structural descriptions of phrase structure grammars. The study of phrase structure grammars, and formal language theory in general, is thus indispensable to studies of human cognition, for it makes explicit both the unique type of human thought and the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which this thought is made possible