Phonology and Computation

Abstract

Descriptive linguistic theories have been greatly influenced by computational linguistics. In computational linguistics, a fundamental distinction is made between the declarative and procedural aspect of a computational model of linguistic description. The primary concern of computational linguistics is with the declarative aspect, with formal, computationally interpretable representations of linguistic descriptions. The procedural aspect, the computational processing of the model in terms of an algorithm, is considered to be a separate issue. The influence of computational linguistics has been most obvious in the area of syntax and semantics where the search for a computationally interpretable grammar formalism has led to the introduction of unification-based grammars which in turn have led to new syntactic and semantic theories. This approach is primarily declarative in that structures are characterised by partial information and mutually independent constraints on well-formedness and is procedurally neutral in that no reference is made as to how the constraints should be applied. The trend in computational linguistics is therefore to design a declarative, processor-independent, monotonic grammar formalism which makes no commitment to a particular procedural interpretation with respect to analysis or generation. A declarative linguistic description allows for many different processing models and is not committed from the outstart to any particular one.KeywordsPhonological TheoryInput StringEmpirical AdequacyAdequacy CriterionPhonological RuleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.