The basic ingredients of a domain-specific modeling language (DSML) are its syntax and semantics. For defining the abstract syntax in terms of metamodels, MOF constitutes a standardized language. For specifying the behavioral semantics, however, no standardized language exists, which hampers the emergence of model execution facilities, such as debugging and simulation support. The contribution ...

Once we have formal operational semantics for a programming language, it is in theory possible to prove any valid statement about a program meeting its specification. However, in applications, a more abstract mechanism is desirable; an axiomatic style of reasoning. Perhaps the most well known axiomatic semantics is Hoare Logic[5]. Hoare Logic is both elegant and simple though the underlying pro...

In this paper we present JaTS, a language for specifying transformations for Java programs. The main feature of the language is the similarity of its syntax to the syntax of Java, decreasing the semantic gap between the transformation language and the language being transformed. This feature helps developers already used to the syntax of Java to quickly adapt to the syntax of JaTS. We begin by ...

In this paper, we examine two main approaches to the syntax and semantics of itclefts as in ‘It was Ohno who won’: an expletive approach where the cleft pronoun is an expletive and the cleft clause bears a direct syntactic or semantic relation to the clefted constituent, and a discontinuous constituent approach where the cleft pronoun has a semantic content and the cleft clause bears a direct s...

We introduce visual graphs as an intermediate representation between concrete visual syntax and abstract graph syntax. In a visual graph some nodes are shown as geometric figures, and some edges are represented by geometric relationships between these figures. By carefully designing visual graphs and corresponding mappings to abstract syntax graphs, semantics definitions can, at least partially...

We deene a speciication language called`timed CRL'. This language is designed to describe communicating processes employing data and time. Timed CRL is the successor of CRL 17]. It diiers in two main aspects. It is possible to make explicit reference to time using a newàt' operator; p,t is the process p where the rst action must take place at time t. Furthermore, a distinction has been made bet...

This paper presents a corpus-based study of the discourse connective in contrast. The corpus data are drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC) and are analyzed at the levels of syntax, discourse structure, and compositional semantics. Following Webber et al. (2003), the paper argues that in contrast crucially involves discourse anaphora and, thus, resembles other discourse adverbials such a...

In Chomskyan views of linguistics, syntax is a preeminent independent level whose knowledge is mainly innate. Semantics is then usually seen as a secondary structure deduced from the syntactic analysis. The Principle of Compositionality is, in this context, a precise way of specifying the passage from syntax to semantics. But from an emergence perspective, this conception is very awkward. As a ...

qasr or hasr (restriction) is one of the techniques of semantics that can be used in different ways. most of former thinkers believed that despite differences that exist in how these methods convey meaning to readers or audience, they function similarly. this research is a descriptive-analytical study of methods of qasr and tries to elaborate on the fundamental differences among these methods. ...