The Logical Structure of English

Natural Language processing is one of the most buoyant areas of AI research as it is the cornerstone of automatic language translation. The book develops an underlying foundation for English syntax and semantics which includes a theory of properties and propositions, an account of presupposition and a preliminary account of various other necessary, assorted ontologies. It then carries out a semantic analysis of a not insignificant fragment of English within the devloped theoretical framework. Natural Language conveys information by encoding it in the syntatic structure and in the meanings of function words. Between them these two sources convey a picture of the way the world is organized. Some facets of our shared conceptual framework manifest themselves in the structure of our language. This book describes this global picture and shows how texts correspond to configurations of elements of the world. The book concentrates on a compositional approach, where it is assumed that texts are built by constructing groups of words, and then collected into larger groups until complete meaningful utterances are produced.
As well as being compositional the treatment is amenable to processing by computer.