Abstract

The most fundamental idea behind generative linguistics - as evident from the very beginning (see Chomsky (1957)) - is closely connected with the basic property of natural languages that longer sequences of linguistic elements can behave like shorter sequences, or, in actuality, like a single element. This is trivially expressed in the form of production rules of generative grammars. Rule 'A à B C' reflects that the linguistic behaviour of a sequence of elements (words) representable as 'B C' is similar to the behaviour of a single element represented as 'A'. In other words, 'B C' can be substituted for 'A'. Thus the key idea behind generative linguistics is SUBSTITUTION.

Nevertheless, there is another property of NLs which, we propose, seems to be equally important. It is related to the capacity of NLs to express correlations of linguistic elements and to encode information through such correlations. We refer to this capacity as AGREEMENT, and to such linguistic correlations as agreement relations. The notion of agreement lends itself naturally not only to conjugation or inflection paradigms but - we believe - many phenomena in linguistics -syntax, phonology , or morphology - can be interpreted in terms of it. Our approach does not hinge on 'classical' notions of generative grammars, thus non-regular or non-context-free cases such as e.g. cross-serial dependencies (Shieber, 1985), Bambara vocabulary (Culy, 1985), vowel harmonies, or phenomena in Arabic morphology can be accounted for by using the same framework. Our model incorporates a reconstruction mechanism to handle unidentified input.

In this paper we give a formal definition of our mapping system and relate it to such notions as perception-production, competence-performance, learning, implementation, parsing, grammaticality judgements, openness of language. To demonstrate the usability of the model, we apply it to the problematic cases named above.