Pomset Logic and Variants in Natural Languages 1 Variants in Natural Languages

We propose a uniform solution based on Pomset Logic to several diierent syntactic phenomena in Natural Languages, and in particular topicalization, relative clauses, interrogative clauses, extraposi-tion, discontinuous constituents and cliticization. We show that Pomset Logic is expressive enough to describe all the linguistic transformations due to these phenomena, in the sense that all transformations can be expressed by provable statements of the logic, on suitable types. Obviously, the speciic transformations of each language are part of its grammatical speciication. A Natural Language is a nite or innnite set of sentences belonging to a spoken language, everyone of nite length, generated by concatenation from a nite set of words. The Natural Languages exibility, in particular of spoken languages, reveals itself especially through the diierent variants of a certain sentence. These variants consist of movements of simple elements in a sentence comprising, with some abuse of terminology, discontinuous constituents. In particular, among the linguistics phenomena, which characterize sentence variants, there are: topicalization (ex. (1)), direct interrogative principal (ex. (2)), direct interrogative subordinate (ex. (3)), indirect interrogative (ex. (4)), direct relative (ex. (5)) and indirect relative (ex. (6)), discontinuous constituents (ex. (7)), negation (ex. (8)) and cliticization (ex. (9)). (1) a.\Piero ama Maria" b. \Maria, Piero ama" (2) b.\Mario fa che cosa" b. \Che cosa fa Mario" (3) a.\La radio dice che Mario fa che cosa" b. \Che cosa dice la radio che fa Mario?" (4) a.\So Mario fa che cosa" b. \So che cosa fa Mario" (5) a.\Il vaso Mario ha comprato che, e caduto" b. \Il vaso che Mario ha comprato , e caduto"