Talk:Recursive categorical syntax

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 This article may be too technical for most readers to understand, and needs attention from an expert on its subject. Please expand it to make it accessible to non-experts, without removing the technical details.
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2007)
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[edit] ToDo

  • Need to add explanation of how up and down arrows are used. For example, link grammar only uses two arrow types (left, right), so why are more arrow types needed?
  • Provide discussion of relationship to dependency grammar and link grammar. At the current level of this article, I can't tell how these theories differ, or why.
  • Correction: I think the correct wikilink is magma (algebra) not groupoid. In fact, since the thing has identities and division, the correct name for the mathematical structure is quasigroup or loop (algebra), right? The problem here is that the word "groupoid" is applied to a lot of different things; mathematical terminology has changed over the last few decades, and what used to be called groupoids are now more strictly classified as monoids, magmas or quasigroups.
  • Downplay the groupoid/magma aspect of the theory ... It would seem to me that any dependency grammar would be a magma... So what? The thing that makes the theory useful for linguistics is the set of lex orders that are equivalent to the element S (the sentence), right? Do we get extra benefit from knowing its a magma or quasigroup? (if, for example, it had been a monoid, then the connection to finite state machines would have been extremely significant... but here, I see no such significant correspondence...)
  • Use recursion to show that a lexicon can generate an infinite grammar and currying to deal with lexes that take multiple complements. (Why? Isn't this obvious and implicit already, from the mathematical definition?)

Thanks. linas (talk) 16:29, 24 March 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Comments

Please don't dumb down this page; it is not too technical. I know nothing about this, yet it's intuitive from the example, how the VP-> cancels with the <-VP, etc. It resembles a kind of organic chemistry whereby the elements have certain "valences" and "react" with other elements to synthesize molecules. Very neat.