Towards a Formal Model for Functional Generative Description: Analysis by Reduction and Restarting Automata

Functional Generative Description (FGD) is a dependency based descriptive system, which has been in development since the 1960s, see esp. Sgall et al. (1969). FGD was originally implemented as a generative procedure, but lately we have been interested in a declarative representation. e object of the present paper concerns the foundations of a reduction system which is more complex than a reduction system for a (shallow) syntactic analyzer, since it provides not only the possibility of checking the wellformedness of the (surface) analysis of a sentence, but its underlying (tectogrammatical in terms of FGD) representation as well. Such a reduction system makes it possible to define formally the analysis as well as the synthesis of a sentence. We propose a new formal frame, namely a 4-level reduction system for FGD, which is based on the notion of simple restarting automata, see Messerschmidt et al. (2006). is new approach mirrors straightforwardly the so-called (multi-level) analysis by reduction, an implicit method used for linguistic research – analysis by reduction allows for obtaining (surface and/or deep) (in) dependencies by the reductions of Czech sentences as well as for describing properly the complex word order of a free word order language, see Lopatková, Plátek, and Kuboň (2005).