Abstract

"The 'principles and parameters' framework of modern transformational grammar employs a modular set of axiomatic principles, defined in terms of a number of representations, including phrase structure and chains. This has led to the postulation of a modular model of human sentence processing which consists of several modules, each responsible for recovering its own representation with respect to a subset of the grammar. In this paper we describe a logical implementation of this model, wherein each module is implemented as a specialised meta-interpreter, which proves representations as theorems of the grammar. In addition, we illustrate how the meta-interpreters can be 'coroutined' using the goal freezing strategy of constraint logic programming."