A Constructive Mathematic approach for Natural Language formal grammars

A mathematical description of natural language grammars has been proposed first by Leibniz. After the definition given by Frege of unsaturated expression and the foundation of a logical grammar by Husserl, the application of logic to treat natural language grammars in a computational way raised the interest of linguists, for example applying Lambek's categorial calculus. In recent years, the most consolidated formal grammars (e.g., Minimalism, HPSG, TAG, CCG, Dependency Grammars) began to show an interest in giving a strong psychological interpretation to the formalism and hence to natural language data on which they are applied. Nevertheless, no one seems to have paid much attention to cognitive linguistics, a branch of linguistics that actively uses concepts and results from cognitive sciences. Apparently unrelated, the study of computational concepts and formalisms has developed in pair with constructive formal systems, especially in the branch of logic called proof theory, see, e.g., the Curry-Howard isomorphism and the typed functional languages. In this paper, we want to bridge these worlds and thus present our natural language formalism, called Adpositional Grammars (AdGrams), that is founded over both cognitive linguistics and constructive mathematics

Constructive Conversation Analysis in psychotherapy: cognitive relevance of actants in terms of linguistic constructions

Pychotherapists produce pseudo-structured discourse with their clients that can be analysed with linguistics and pragmatics. Conversation Analysis is often qualitative, non-sistematic. The Therapeutic Cycles Model (TCM) uses ad-hoc software to perform textual analysis of psychoterapeutic transcripts, in order to elicit significant elements in the therapeutic interaction, but it does not consider linguistic constructions as units of analysis. Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) are the ground for the Conversation Analysis so to fill the gap left by the TCM

The Minimal Levels of Abstraction in the History of Modern Computing

From the advent of general-purpose, Turing-complete machines, the relation between operators, programmers, and users with computers can be seen in terms of interconnected informational organisms (inforgs) henceforth analysed with the method of levels of abstraction (LoAs), risen within the Philosophy of Informa- tion (PI). In this paper, the epistemological levellism proposed by L. Floridi in the PI to deal with LoAs will be formalised in constructive terms using category the- ory, so that information itself is treated as structure-preserving functions instead of Cartesian products. The milestones in the history of modern computing are then analysed via constructive levellism to show how the growth of system complexity lead to more and more information hiding

Alan Turing creator of Artificial Languages

Bilingual article. (En / Eo) In this paper an evaluation of the contribution to philosophical investigation by Alan Turing is provided in terms of creation of Artificial Languages (ALs). After a discussion of the term AL in the literature, and in particular within the theoretical model offered by Lyons, the legacy of Turing is presented with a special attention to what remains after a century by his birth and what is still to be investigated in this area