From Word Form Surfaces to Communication

The starting point of this paper is the external surface of a word form, for example the agent-external acoustic perturbations constituting a language sign in speech or the dots on paper in the case of written language. The external surfaces are modality-dependent tokens which the hearer recognizes by means of (i) pattern-matching and (ii) a mapping into modality-independent types, and which the speaker produces by an inverse mapping from modality-independent types into tokens synthesized in a modality of choice. The types are provided by a lexicon stored in the agent's memory. They include not only the necessary1 properties of the surface shape, but also the associated morphosyntactic properties and the meaning. The question addressed by this paper is how to design cal analysis of word form types as a data structure (abstract data type), suitable for the purpose of Database Semantics (DBS), i.e., for a computational model of natural language communication.2 After discussing the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: EJC
• Authors: Roland Hausser
• Keywords: EJC 2009, External Surfaces, Information Technology, Modality-independent Types, Word Form