The Construction of Local Grammars

Our programme is to use the model of W. Woods 1970 to attempt a full scale analysis of the language. It could be viewed as an attempt to revive the Markovian model, but this would be wrong, because previous Markovian models were aimed at giving a global description of a language, whereas the model we advocate, and which we call it finite-state for short, is of a strictly local nature. In this perspective, the global nature of language results from the interaction of a multiplicity of local finite-state schemes which we call finite-state local automata. To start with, we give elementary examples where the finite constraints can be exhaustively described in a local way, that is, without interferences from the rest of the grammar.