The
General Linearisation Model: A Mereological Description of the Natural Language Utterance
Ciprian Gerstenberger
Coping with word order in free
word-order languages is thought to be a challenge. In this
talk, we present a mereological description of the natural
language utterance which is adequate to the task of
linearisation in NLG. The linearisation model we
propose employes only a single type of entities to describe
various linguistic structures in a uniform way: the Linear Order
Part (LOP). Reflecting solely linguistic phenomena observable on
the surface of an utterance, hence interpersonally verifiable, the concept
of Linear Order Part is not only best suited for the
description of the utterance in any natural language, it is
also neutral with respect to syntactic theories.