Some Protolinguistic Transformations

Abstract

In several of the foregoing chapters there has been discussion of the system of protolinguistics, or of the protolinguistic source system, in which suitable logical forms or semantic structures for a great variety of sentences of a natural language may be exhibited. There seems to be no limit on this variety, at least none that would suggest that at some point the system would perforce break down and be incapable of extension to handle the erstwhile unmanageable sentences. Even so, there has been no discussion of how one goes from the logical form to the natural sentence or conversely. The matter has been left dangling and no attempt has been made so supply either rules or definitions leading from one to the other, neither rules for “generating” the natural sentence from the logical form nor rules for parsing or dissecting or analyzing the “meaning” of the natural sentence in explicit logical form.