Syntax-semantics interface: an algebraic model
This work addresses theoretical linguistics and computational semantics by providing an algebraic model, but it is incremental as it builds on prior formulations.
The authors tackled the problem of modeling the syntax-semantics interface in linguistics by extending a Hopf algebra formulation of Merge and Minimalism, showing that methods from theoretical physics renormalization can describe meaning extraction from syntax and relating it to computational semantics and controversies about large language models in generative linguistics.
We extend our formulation of Merge and Minimalism in terms of Hopf algebras to an algebraic model of a syntactic-semantic interface. We show that methods adopted in the formulation of renormalization (extraction of meaningful physical values) in theoretical physics are relevant to describe the extraction of meaning from syntactic expressions. We show how this formulation relates to computational models of semantics and we answer some recent controversies about implications for generative linguistics of the current functioning of large language models.