English

The Combinatorics of \textit{Salva Veritate} Principles

Computation and Language 2022-01-17 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

Various concepts of grammatical compositionality arise in many theories of both natural and artificial languages, and often play a key role in accounts of the syntax-semantics interface. We propose that many instances of compositionality should entail non-trivial combinatorial claims about the expressive power of languages which satisfy these compositional properties. As an example, we present a formal analysis demonstrating that a particular class of languages which admit salva vertitate substitutions - a property which we claim to be a particularly strong example of compositional principle - must also satisfy a very natural combinatorial constraint identified in this paper.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.05173,
  title  = {The Combinatorics of \textit{Salva Veritate} Principles},
  author = {Norman E. Trushaev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.05173},
  year   = {2022}
}