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Description:
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This book is about "Predicate Driven Grammar" (PDG), a new type of
linguistic grammar. PDG is strongly influenced by the Sense-Text-Model and
by the writings of Zellig Harris and Maurice Gross. Unlike most other
grammars, PDG presupposes a language to be a relation over the Cartesian
product of a set of texts and a set of meanings. A PDG assigns to each text
the set of its meanings and to each meaning the set of its texts and,
therefore, relates each two texts that are paraphrases, no matter if they
are texts of the same or of different languages. In other words, a PDG is a
theory of intralingal and interlingual paraphrasing (also known as
translating). A PDG is supposed to achieve this by respecting certain
fundamental properties of language: ambiguity (the property of texts to
have several meanings), polymorphism (the property of meanings to have
several texts), predicate-basedness and non-modularity. The term
"predicate-basedness" is supposed to refer to that fact that each predicate
of a natural language comes with its very own set of syntax rules. The term
"non-modularity" is supposed to refer to the fact that each syntax rule of
a natural-language predicate comes with its very own semantics.
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