Speaker / Predavač:
Silvia Ghilezan, (University of Novi Sad)
Naslov / Title
Computational approach to conjugation
Sažetak / Abstract:
Lambek's production grammar is a simple computational method for generating conjugational forms (inflected forms) of simple tenses step by step. The mathematical structure involved is the "finitely generated partially ordered semi-group", also called "semi-Thue system" in mathematics, "rewriting system" in computer science and "production grammar" or Chomsky's Type zero language in linguistics [1].
We shall present a simple production grammar developed in [2] for generating 24 verb forms of Serbian and Croatian verb. In Serbian, as in Latin, each conjugational verb form can be regarded as one-word sentence. Hence, this production grammar is extended to sentence generation.
This method has been applied to English, French, Latin [3], Serbian and Croatian [2], Hebrew (Biblical), Turkish, Arabic, and Japanese, so far.
References
1. N. Chomsky: Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton (1957).
2. S. Ghilezan: Conjugation in SerboCroatian. Linguistic Analysis 24:142--150 (1994).
3. J. Lambek: A mathematician looks and Latin conjugation. Theoretical Linguistics 2/3:221--234 (1979).
The presented work was done within the project "Mathematical Linguistics" at McGill University, Canada.