Some Remarks On J. L. Mey's Paper (Preprint No. 20)

Mey's criticism of the functional approac~ to gene-rative description concerns (1) the formal properties of the system proposed by Sgall et el. (its weak gene-rative power, recursivit$~), and (2) some itl~or!~al questions connected with the mentioned approach. (1) From the formal point of view, Mey's paper contains many quite unclear points and errors, which make his cl~Jms unfounded. Some of those may be due to a mere unpreciseness and carelessness Jn formulations (cf. for instance P.7, where he speaks ~,bout "e language that is not CF, or may be not even regular", w!ich is as if one says "This mineral is not found in Europe, not even in whole Switzerland") but others hsve a more consequential bearing on his further argumentation. He confuses (p.3) the trsnsl~tion by the means of s push-down store transducer in Evey's sense (henceforth pdt) with the question of CF-preservation in the sense of Ginsburg (and Rose); he dose not seem to realize fully (pp.3-4) that Sgall et al use only the notion of pdt in the sense of Evey and not in that of Ginsburg. Ginsburg and Rose's theorem is not identical with Evey's theorem 2.6.6, which is based on a different definition of pdt, connected with notions of input and output languages defined by the means of the notion of computation. Although the theorem of Ginsburg and Rose, partly inspi