Grammar 1 (cont.)

In the process of developing a grammar for a language we encounter a number of organizational, pragmatic, and stylistic options whose moment to moment choices decide the ongoing direction of the work in progress and the impacts of whose evaluation work in tandem to determine the shape of the grammar turned out in the end.  Most salient among the critical issues are three described in the following way.

• The degree of intermediate organization in a grammar.
• The distinction between empty and significant strings, and thus the distinction between empty and significant types of strings.
• The principle of intermediate significance, a constraint on the grammar which arises from considering the interaction of the first two issues.

In responding to the collective issues, it is advisable at first to proceed in a stepwise fashion, all the better to accommodate the chances of pursuing a series of parallel developments in the grammar, to allow for the possibility of reversing many steps in its development, indeed, to take into account the almost certain inevitability of having to revisit, revise, and reverse many prior decisions about how to proceed toward an optimal description or a satisfactory grammar for the language.  Doing all that means exploring the effects of various alterations and innovations as independently from each other as possible.

Resources

• Cactus Language • Syntax
• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs
• Survey of Theme One Program

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science