Language in action (Q1177646)

The author gives detailed arguments to some valuable ideas which we briefly outline here: Logic has reached such a state of ``inter- translatability'', that almost all known variant logics can be embedded into each other, via suitable translations. Thus all systems of dynamic interpretation or inference proposed so far admit a direct embedding into an ordinary `static' predicate logic having explicit transition predicates. The author emphasizes that the issue is not \(whether\) the new systems of information structure or processing are more `expressive' than the traditional logical systems (since they are not), but rather \(which\) interesting phenomena and questions will be put into the right focus for them. In this context, the paper makes some interesting concrete proposals for information-oriented or dynamic semantics: from a Gentzen- type ``Lambek calculus'' in the context of Categorial Grammar and extended to families of languages (\(L\)-models), to modal logic-based models or relational algebras (\(R\)-models). What matters is an increased sensitivity to configurations of dynamic logics, e.g., the author's categorial hierarchy of calculi in Categorial Grammar, an (ascending) family of logics whose interconnections reveal intra-linguistic, or cross-linguistic, comparisons of complexity between syntactic phenomena. Finally, the new framework (of natural language as a programming language), because of its differences from standard logic, arise a lot of new kinds of questions when regarding propositions as programs: program synthesis, determinism, quering.