Mixed computation: Grammar up and down the Chomsky Hierarchy
Diego Krivochen
January 2021 

Proof-theoretic models of grammar are based on the view that an explicit characterization of a language comes in the form of the recursive enumeration of strings in that language. That recursive enumeration is carried out by a procedure which strongly generates a set of structural descriptions Σ and weakly generates a set of strings S; a grammar is thus a function that pairs an element of Σ with elements of S. Structural descriptions are obtained by means of Context-Free phrase structure rules (e.g., X-bar theory) or via recursive combinatorics (Merge) and structure is assumed to be uniform: binary branching trees all the way down. In this work we will analyse natural language constructions for which such a rigid conception of phrase structure results descriptively inadequate, and propose a solution for the problem of phrase structure grammars assigning too much or too little structure to nat-ural language strings: we propose that the grammar can oscillate between levels of computational complexity in local domains, which correspond to elementary trees in a lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005676 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Ms. Comments welcome.
keywords:	syntax; derivations; mixed computation; tree adjoining grammars; compositionality, semantics, syntax
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