Extending pregroup grammars for inflected languages

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Abstract

Within the compositional distributional model of meaning developed by (Coecke et al., 2010), the model of grammar used is based on pregroup grammars, which have the feature that word order is important. In inflected languages, word order may become less important, and therefore pregroups may not be the best model of grammar. The project would involve extending the pregroup grammar to allow for different grammatical cases and to allow for more flexibility in word order. The model developed might simplify the approach taken in (Casadio and Lambek, 2005), which still uses the fundamentally ordered structure of pregroups as a basis for the grammar.

Prerequisites: either category theory or quantum computer science would do

References:
Casadio, Claudia, and Jim Lambek. "A computational algebraic approach to Latin grammar." Research on Language and Computation 3.1 (2005): 45-60.
Coecke, B., M. Sadrzadeh, and S. Clark. "Mathematical Foundations for Distributed Compositional Model of Meaning. Lambek Festschrift." Linguistic Analysis 36 (2010): 345-384.