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On some Formal Properties of Metarules

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The Formal Complexity of Natural Language

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 33))

Abstract

Grammars contain rules for generating sentences. Metarules are statements about these rules. They are metagrammatical devices that can be used to generate rules of the grammar or to encode certain relations among them, such as redundancies in their form.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant IST-8103550. A preliminary report on some of the results contained in this paper was at the 1982 LSA meeting in San Diego (Peters and Uszkoreit, 1982). We are grateful to William Marsh, Jane Robinson and Stuart Shieber for comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Due to the extended period of time during which the paper was in preparation, several relevant recent publications are not referred to. Among those is Gazdar et al. (1985) where an extensive account of a new version of GPSG is presented.

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© 1986 D. Reidel Publishing Company

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Uszkoreit, H., Peters, S. (1986). On some Formal Properties of Metarules. In: Savitch, W.J., Bach, E., Marsh, W., Safran-Naveh, G. (eds) The Formal Complexity of Natural Language. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3401-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3401-6_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-55608-047-0

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