Incremental Grammatical Encoding - An Outline of the Synphonics Formulator

This paper sketches the grammatical encoding component -the Formulator- of the Synphonics approach to the computational modeling of natural language production. The Synphonics Formulator takes its bearings from well-established results in psycholinguistics about the course of the human language production process, as well as by recent developments regarding the representation of linguistic knowledge in theoretical linguistics. The psycholinguistic base is reflected in the continual incrementality of the production process, as well as by the strict modularity of its extra-linguistic and linguistic components. The orientation towards theoretical linguistics leads to the use of a declarative grammatical knowledge base in the style of the lexicalist and principle-based framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, which is embedded in a psycholinguistically appropriate control structure. The synphonics system covers the incremental generation of utterances from pre-linguistic conceptual structures to the formation of semantic, syntactic, phonological and phonetic-articulatory structures, with an interface to a speech synthesis module.