A Descriptive Characterization of Tree-Adjoining Languages (Project Note)

13 years 5 months ago

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Since the early Sixties and Seventies it has been known that the regular and context-free languages arc characterized by definability in the monadic second-order theory of certain structures. More recently, these descriptive characterizations have been used to obtain complexity results for constraint- and principle-based theories of syntax and to provide a uniform model-theoretic framework for exploring the relationship between theories expressed in disparate formal terms. These results have been limited, to an extent, t)y the lack of descriptive characterizations of language (:lasses beyond the context-h'ee. Recently, we have shown I;hat tree-adjoining languages (in a mildly generalized form) can be characterized by recognition by automata operating on three-dimensional tree maniiblds, a three-dimensional analog of trees. In this paper, we exploit these automatatheoretic results to obtain a characterization of the tree-adjoining languages by definability in the monadic second-or...

James Rogers

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