Effect-driven interpretation: Functors for natural language composition
Dylan Bumford, Simon Charlow
March 2025 

Computer programs are often factored into pure components -- simple, total functions from inputs to outputs -- and components that may have side effects -- errors, changes to memory, parallel threads, abortion of the current loop, etc. We make the case that human languages are similarly organized around the give and pull of pure values and impure processes, and we'll aim to show how denotational techniques from computer science can be leveraged to support elegant and illuminating analyses of natural language composition.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008912 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted to Cambridge University Press Elements in Semantics
keywords:	semantics, composition, parsing, functors, monads, scope, semantics
Downloaded:	233 times

 

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