Systemic Functional Linguistics

source: http://www.isfla.org/Systemics/

Systemics & Computation

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SFL has been prominent in computational linguistics, especially in Natural Language Generation (NLG). Penman, an NLG system started at Information Sciences Institute in 1980, is one of the three main such systems, and has influenced much of the work in the field. John Bateman (currently in Bremen, Germany) has extended this system into a multilingual text generator, KPML. Robin Fawcett in Cardiff have developed another systemic generator, called Genesys. Mick O'Donnell has developed yet another system, called WAG. Numerous other systems have been built using Systemic grammar, either in whole or in part.

Macquarie U in Sydney is a center for SFL, and at PACLIC I met Trevor Johnston who helped develop the Australian Sign Bank. Dick Hudson's Word Grammar is considered a spin-off that is based on dependency grammar. Geoffrey Huddleston, co-author of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language with Geoffrey Pullum, has worked in that tradition. CGEL was cited by Culicover and Jackendoff as the right level of analysis for their Simpler Syntax approach (which addresses the syntactic part of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture framework).

links - logic - Fefferman on Tarskian semantics

"Tarski’s Conceptual Analysis of Semantical Notions"

http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/conceptanalysis.pdf

Expanded text of a lecture for the Colloque, “Sémantique et épistémologie”, Casablanca, April 24-26, 2002. 

27 pp.

T's notions of

• truth for formal languages and the allied notions of 
• satisfaction, 
• definability, and 
• logical consequence
  

two questions are of interest. 

1.  what motivated Tarski to make these analyses, and 
2.  what led to their particular form?

Turing's concept of computability

• how? the general notion of a computing machine
• why? a precise notion of computability was needed to show that certain problems (and specifically the Entscheidungsproblem in logic) are uncomputable

Tarski's concept of truth

• how? his definition of truth is given in general set-theoretical terms
• why? no similarly compelling logical reason for Tarski’s work on the concept of truth, and will suggest instead a combination of 
1. psychological and
   
2. programmatic reasons
   

The main puzzle to be dealt with has to do with the relations between the notions of 

• truth in a structure and
  
• absolute truth