A. The Core Language, L

In this section we present an elementary formal language L, called the core language, whose associated semantics is rich enough to illustrate the major innovations we propose. Syntactically the language L is intended to represent the basic predicate-argument structure of (first order) English. The English categories represented in L are: Common Noun Phrase (man, student, etc.), Full Noun Phrase (John, every man, etc., a category which includes Proper Noun Phrase as a subcategory), Determiner (every, some, etc.), One Place Predicate (sleep, walk, etc.), Two Place Predicate (hug, kiss, etc.), and Sentence (sometimes referred to a Formula or as Zero Place Predicate). Essentially all categories of L are boolean in that complex members can be recursively formed from simpler ones by taking combination with and, or, and not all derived expressions are directly interpreted as a function of the interpretation of their immediate constituents.