A dynamic syntax-semantics interface.pdf

A Dynamic Syntax-Semantics Interface Tsutomu Fujinami Abstract The relation between syntax and semantics of natural language can be regarded as a constraint. With the ideas from Channel Theory (Barwise 1993, Barwise and Seligman 1994), the way that an utter- ance represents a situation can be captured as a linguistic channel. To study the operational aspects of such a channel, we construct it as a system of communicating processes by turning to the -calculus (Mil- ner et al. 1992). We show how a concurrent bottom-up chart parser can be encoded in the calculus and how a semantic object similar to those employed in Situation Theoretic Discourse Representation The- ory (Cooper 1993) can be created as the result of interactions between processes encoding the parser. 1 Introduction The syntax-semantics interface is a relation between syntactic information and semantic information of natural language. The most familiar approach to specifying the interface may be to assume a one-to-one correspondence between syntax and semantics as is taken in Montague grammar. In this tradition, each syntactic element is assigned its counterpart in semantics. Another approach is to provide a set of rules by which items of syntactic information are converted into those of semantic information. Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993), for example, employs a set of construction rules to transform syntactic structures into Discourse Representation Structures. The other approach, to which we are more sym- pathetic, is to regard the relation as a constraint. The trouble we recognise in the rst approach is that it is not exible enough to capture the context dependency between syntax and semantics because the relation is hard-coded by the strict one-to-one correspondence. In the second approach, we may specify context-dependent relations by ex- tending the antecedent of rules, but we are still left wondering what the ontological status of these rules might be. In Situation Semant