An Integrated Language Theory

• The outlines of an INTEGRATED LANGUAGE THEORY are drawn, with granmmr, semantics and text-theory as components. Problems of machine retrieva! and machine translation are discussed on the basi~f the outlined theory. At present it is unanimously agreed that no computational linguistics • can be developed without an (before hand constructed) eXact language theory. (The computer handling of such an exact4theory is in no way a transparent problem). The aim of the present paper is to outline such an exact integrated language theory. The most promising basis for such a theory is the generative view on language. Unfortunately the generative theory of language is at present unsatisfactorily developed. First, this is true for generative grammars. But all other language theory constructions rely heavily on grammar (Katz & Fodor, Katz & Postal, Abraham & Kiefer). At present generative grammar consists of two components : a phrase structure compgnent and a transformational one (I do not touch upon the problems of the phonemic and morphophonemic levels). In Chomaky's formulatfon the phrase structure component necessarily contains context-restricted rules. But this has the unpleasant consequence that the most important decision problems are unsolvable (in this component). Besides this, no satisfactory solution is formulated for the generation of discontinous structures. Chomsky's last formulation of this component has even some more inconveniences. The transformational component has no exact formulation as the transformational rules are unsatisfactorily defined. The problem of analysis is also not satisfactorily solved. For these reasons I propose a generative grammar also of two components : a matrix component and a transformational component. The matrix component consists of a regular elementary matrix ~rammar, containing only (ordered) elementary context free rules , with Solvable main decision problems, and which generates in a natural way discontinous structures. Within the transformational component the notion of transformational rule is exactly defined. The problem of an adequate analysis (of the generated sentences), the main problem of generative language theory, is s~isfactoril M solved