Functional Generative Description, Restarting Automata and Analysis by Reduction

Functional Generative Description (FGD is a dependency based system for Czech, whose beginnings date back to the 1960s (see esp. Sgall et al. 1969, Sgall et al. 1986). FGD may be of some interest for the description of most Slavic languages, since it is adapted to treat a high degree of free word order. It not only specifies surface structures of the given sentences, but also translates them into their underlying representations. These representations (called tectogrammatical representations, denoted TRs) are intended as an appropriate input for a procedure of semantico-pragmatic interpretation in the sense of intensional semantics (see Hajičová et al. 1998). Since TRs are, at least in principle, disambiguated, it is possible to understand them as rendering linguistic (literal) meaning (whereas figurative meaning, specification of reference and other aspects belong to individual steps of the interpretation). FGD has been implemented as a generative procedure by a sequential composition of pushdown automata (see Sgall et al. 1969, Plátek et al. 1978). Lately, as documented e.g. in Petkevič (1995), we have been interested in the formalization of FGD designed in a declarative way. In the present paper we want to formulate a formal framework for the procedure of checking the appropriateness and completeness of a description of a language in the context of FGD. The first step in this direction was introduced in Plátek (1982), where the formalization by a sequence of translation schemes is interpreted as an analytical system, and as a generative system as well. Moreover, requirements for a formal system describing a natural language L have been formulated – such a system should capture the following issues: – The set of correct sentences of the language L, denoted by LC. – The formal language LM representing all possible tectogrammatical representations (TRs) of sentences in L. – The relation SH between LC and LM describing the ambiguity and the synonymy of L.