MATERIAL OF LOGIC

PRESENTATION

SUBMITTED TO: MADAM FAZIA

 LANGUAGE IN LOGIC

Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a language
that is spoken, written, or signed (visually or tactilely) by humans for general-purpose
communication, as distinguished from such constructs as computer-programming
languages or the "languages" used in the study of formal logic, especially mathematical
logic.

Natural language processing (NLP), which is computerised support for natural-language

style input (as opposed to the highly artificial syntax normally seen in computer
languages) is a major sub-field of artificial intelligence and linguistics. Natural language
issues are particularly salient in the areas of text mining, search engines, automatic
summarisation, information retrieval, speech synthesis, and algorithms employed to
determine the content of text streams in computational linguistics (e.g. viterbi algorithm).

Defining natural language

Though the exact definition is debatable, natural language is often contrasted with
artificial or constructed languages such as Esperanto.

Linguists have an incomplete understanding of all aspects of the rules underlying natural
languages, and they are therefore objects of study. The understanding of natural
languages reveals much about not only how language works (in terms of syntax,
semantics, phonetics, phonology, etc), but also about how the human mind and the
human brain function. In linguistic terms, 'natural language' only applies to a language
that has evolved naturally, and the study of natural language primarily involves native
(first language) speakers.

The theory of universal grammar proposes that all natural languages have certain
underlying rules which constrain the structure of the specific grammar for any given
language. Most constructed languages do not obey these constraints, and thus can be
clearly distinguished.

While grammarians, writers of dictionaries, and language policy-makers all have a

certain influence on the evolution of language, their ability to influence what people think

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they 'ought' to say is distinct from what people actually say. Natural language applies to
the latter, and is thus a 'descriptive' rather than a 'prescriptive' term. Thus non-standard
language varieties (such as African American Vernacular English) are as natural as
standard language varieties (such as Standard American English).

International auxiliary languages

It might be suggested that international auxiliary languages such as Interlingua, which
have native speakers[1], can be considered natural languages for that reason. A more
substantive basis for this designation is that the vocabulary, grammar, and orthography of
Interlingua are natural; they have been standardized and presented by a linguistic research
body but they predated it and are not themselves considered a product of human
invention. Most linguists, however, consider Interlingua to be naturalistic rather than
natural. A second naturalistic auxiliary language, Latino Sine Flexione, is also natural in
content but has a very small speaking population.

Controlled languages
Controlled natural languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and
dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and
complexity. The purpose behind the development and implementation of a controlled
natural language typically is to aid non-native speakers of a natural language in
understanding it, or to ease computer processing of a natural language. An example of a
widely used controlled natural language is Simplified English, which was originally
developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals.

Constructed languages
Besides ethnic languages, constructed languages such as Esperanto that have evolved to
the point of having native speakers are by some also considered natural languages.
However, for linguistic purposes, Esperanto and other constructed languages, while they
are clearly languages, are not considered natural languages. The possible exception to this
are true native speakers of such languages. (Proponents contend that there are 200-2000
native speakers of Esperanto.)

Written languages
Written language should be distinguished from natural language. Until recently in the
developed world, it was common for many people to be fluent in spoken or signed
languages and yet remain illiterate; this is still the case in poor countries today.
Furthermore, natural language acquisition during childhood is largely spontaneous, while
literacy must usually be intentionally acquired.

Computer science

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Natural languages are deemed to be unsuitable for programming languages simply
because they have a vast (essentially infinite) vocabulary, complex grammatical rules,
and many ambiguities. English and French, for example, take many years to completely
master, and this would have been a waste of time when dealing with computing - learning
a simple yet efficient embedded language is deemed much easier. Also, any natural
language is by its very nature able to express any and all meaning (though it may take a
lot of words in some situations), whereas computer languages operate within a much
more limited scope.

Various attempts to bring elements of natural language grammar into computer

programming have produced programming languages such as HyperTalk, Lingo,
AppleScript, SQL and Inform. A program written in these languages resembles
pseudocode to some extent, and may roughly be understood by a person without
knowledge about the language. However, this approach does not necessarily make editing
of the programs easier. The machine interpreters have just as low tolerance to alternative
sentence structure, synonyms, etc, as in conventional programming languages.

References
• ter Meulen, Alice, 2001, "Logic and Natural Language," in Goble, Lou, ed., The
Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic. Blackwell.

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Formal language
In logic formal language is a language that is defined by precise mathematical or machine
processable formulas. A formal language is typically characterized as a set of finite-
length sequences of elements drawn from a specified finite set of symbols.
Mathematically, it is an unordered pair . Among the more common
options that are found in applications, a formal language may be viewed as being
analogous to

• a collection of words

or

• a collection of sentences

In the first case, the set is called the alphabet of , and the elements of are called
words. In the second, the set is called the lexicon or the vocabulary of , while the
elements of are then called sentences. The mathematical theory that treats formal
languages in general is known as formal language theory.

As an example of formal language, an alphabet might be , and a string over that

alphabet might be .

A typical language over that alphabet, containing that string, would be the set of all
strings which contain the same number of symbols and b.

The empty word (that is, length-zero string) is allowed and is often denoted by , or .
While the alphabet is a finite set and every string has finite length, a language may very
well have infinitely many member strings (because the length of words belonging to it
may be unbounded).

A question often asked about formal languages is "how difficult is it to decide whether a
given word belongs to a particular language?" This is the domain of computability theory
and complexity theory.

Examples
Some examples of formal languages:

• the set of all words over

• the set , where is a natural number and means repeated times
• Finite languages, such as or
• the set of syntactically correct programs in a given programming language; or

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 • the set of inputs upon which a certain Turing machine halts.

Specification
A formal language can be specified in a great variety of ways, such as:

• Strings produced by some formal grammar (see Chomsky hierarchy);

• Strings described or matched by a regular expression;
• Strings accepted by some automaton, such as a Turing machine or finite state
automaton;
• Strings indicated by a decision procedure (a set of related YES/NO questions)
where the answer is YES.

Operations
Several operations can be used to produce new languages from given ones. Suppose
and are languages over some common alphabet.

• The concatenation consists of all strings of the form where is a string

from and is a string from .
• The intersection of and consists of all strings which are
contained in and also in .
• The union of and consists of all strings which are contained in
or in .
• The complement of the language consists of all strings over the alphabet
which are not contained in .
• The right quotient of by consists of all strings for which there
exists a string in such that is in .
• The Kleene star consists of all strings which can be written in the form
with strings in and . Note that this includes the empty
string because is allowed. Note that is a free monoid, with the
multiplicative operation of the monoid is just string concatenation.
• The reverse contains the reversed versions of all the strings in .
• The shuffle of and consists of all strings which can be written in the form
where and are strings such that the
concatenation is in and are strings such that
is in .

Additional operations on strings and languages are defined in the article on string
functions.