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Recursive generation of local adjunct languages

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Abstract

The local adjunct grammars and languages have been introduced by Joshi, Kosaraju, and Yamada in response to linguistic considerations. These grammars differ fundamentally from the Chomsky phrase-structure grammars, and they generate a distinct class of languages.

In this paper, it is shown that the local adjunct languages are actually closely related to the regular and context-free languages, despite the entirely different form of definition. The adjunct languages are obtained by closure of the finite set of strings under the set operations of union, product, and a new operation, “iterated adjunction.” This method of generating adjunct languages is of exactly the same form as that of the regular sets (closure under union, product, and Kleene star) and a more recent characterization of the CFL's derived independently by several authors. In fact, iterated adjunction is obtained by a natural modification of the “iterated substitution” operation used to generate the CFL's.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky, 40506, Lexington, Kentucky, USA

    Johnson M. Hart

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  1. Johnson M. Hart
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Additional information

The material in this paper has appeared in part in the author's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, August, 1972.

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Hart, J.M. Recursive generation of local adjunct languages. Math. Systems Theory 9, 315–326 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01715358

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01715358

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