Pregroup Analysis of Persian Sentences
Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2007
We use Pregroups to provide an algebraic analysis of Persian sentences. Our analysis hints to some of the profound and subtle properties of the Persian grammar, e.g. similarity of its parsing patterns to Hindi (both descendants of of Sanskrit) and similarity in parsing patterns of its causal subordinate and relative sentences. These findings are facilitated by the use of reduction diagrams, a fragment of the ones used in Compact Closed Categories, and two quantitative degrees introduced on them. As our final examples show and interestingly enough, our analysis also lends itself to the Persian of Omar Khayyam and Hafiz, two well known Persian poets of 12th and 14th centuries A.D., respectively. The analysis of the Persian compound verb is left for future work. 1