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Representation of
utterances and meaning I will characterize a language as a relation between
`form' and `meaning'. In the case of spoken natural languages, the `form'
consists of `sound'. Understanding a language means to be able to assign
meaning to utterances from that language; speaking a language means to be
able to produce the appropriate utterances of that language for a given
meaning. In grammars, `form' and `meaning' need to be represented in some way
or other. A grammar represents the meaning and sound between which it defines
a relation, by some sort of representation. To represent natural language
utterances, a grammar may define phonological representations. The denotation
of these phonological representations are utterances. In current
computational linguistic practice, such representations often simply take the
form of a list of words, i.e. written language is used to represent spoken
language. Given that written language is so common in our culture no problem
arises here. If one is interested in spoken language, however, the relation
between written and spoken language should be defined as well (or rather the
relation between spoken language and the phonological representations). On the other hand, there is much less agreement as to
what the `meaning' of natural language utterances is, and how that meaning
should be represented. In a model theoretic view on meaning, the meaning of
utterances is represented by logical formulas. The interpretation of these
formulas then constitute (model-theoretic) meaning. However, what kind of
logic is needed to describe meanings of natural language is a matter of
debate. I will not take part in this debate, but abstract away from the
details of the choice of natural language semantics. The assumption I will
make is that such logical formulas (semantic representations) can be
described by feature structures. In order to provide for some
exemplification, I will use simple semantic structures, which are defined in
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