Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is a formalism for defining the inventory of lexical and grammatical conventions that language processing requires and the operations with which this inventory is used to parse and produce sentences. This chapter introduces some of the key ideas and basic design principles behind the development of Fluid Construction Grammar.

German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments that reconstruct and compare attest...

Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) is an open-source computational grammar formalism that is becoming increasingly popular for studying the history and evolution of language. This demonstration shows how FCG can be used to operationalise the cultural processes and cognitive mechanisms that underly language evolution and change.

We present a theory of object-orientation on the basis of the re-nement calculus. This theory allows for specifying the behaviour of objects and provides a calculus for the proof of relationships between classes such as reenement. Given two similar, but not identical classes, we present an algorithm to construct a common superclass which is reened by both classes, and an algorithm to construct ...

This paper describes how object-oriented software construction principles allow to develop extensible and reusable building blocks for the development of data flow based visual languages. First we’ll present the data flow visual language ProtoHyperflow whose object-oriented realization is discussed in the second part of the paper.