Parsing as Dynamic

In this chapter we develop a new approach to parsing through the re-cursive, model-theoretic interpretation of expressions representing linguistic knowledge. We argue that in particular the dynamic variant of model-theoretic semantics can be useful, which approaches interpretation in a constructive way. On the theoretical side, we develop this approach by integrating feature structures in an existing formal logical language, deened and implemented for computational semantic purposes. The resulting language, called GEL, allows us to represent semantic as well as syntactic knowledge. In particular , we can represent grammatical rules as well as the phrase structures that they generate. Whereas a phrase-structure rule is traditionally viewed procedurally, as a recipe for phrase building, and a rule in the parsing-as-deduction approach is viewed declaratively, as a proposition which is true when the conditions for building the phrase are satissed, a rule in GEL is best viewed as a proposition in dynamic semantics: it can be evaluated recursively, not to true or false, but to the minimal changes in the model, needed to make the proposition true. The viability of this idea has been demonstrated by an implementation of DPSG chart parsing and an emulation of HPSG parsing.