Prof. Peter M. Scharf, President, The Sanskrit Library gave a talk on Non-linear syntax – Insights from Indian linguistic traditions for developing language-neutral syntactic representation on 18 April.
Formal and computational linguistics developed primarily in the environment of analytic European languages. To develop universally adequate linguistic theory demands investigating sophisticated linguistic theories, structures, and procedures developed to describe languages of a very different character from English. India developed an extraordinarily rich linguistic tradition over more than three millennia that could contribute useful insights to contemporary formal linguistics, and Indian linguistic theories could be formalized and implemented computationally.
The Indian cognitive linguists of the 17th and 18th centuries described the cognition that arises from speech forms from whole sentences down to the level of morphemes. Their analysis reveals a dependency structure of semantic objects which may be projected onto the corresponding speech forms to provide an extremely precise and detailed analysis of verbal relations. By projecting the complex multi-dimensional relations in the realm of thought onto the relatively simple single dimension of speech, theory is able to more efficiently characterize syntactic relations in highly inflected languages with freer word order. An automation of the generation of speech forms in accordance with Pāṇinian rules can generate Sanskrit speech forms with internal dependency relations intact and with external dependency relations in the form of expectancies. This information would be highly useful in developing a Sanskrit parser and refining existing Sanskrit parsers.
Scharf earned his B.A. in philosophy at Wesleyan University and his doctorate in Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he taught Sanskrit and Indian literature at Brown University for 19 years where he was promoted to senior lecturer and served as concentration advisor and chair of the South Asian Studies Committee. Since 2011, he held several visiting professorships: Visiting Professor at the Maharishi University of Management Research Institute, Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the University of Paris Diderot, Visiting Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Sanskrit Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also director of the Sanskrit Library which he founded in 2002. While his research focuses on the linguistic traditions of India, Vedic Sanskrit, and Indian philosophy, he has devoted considerable attention over the past several years to Sanskrit computational linguistics and building a digital Sanskrit library whose projects provide internet access to Indic lexical resources, texts, and manuscripts. His current research brings the linguistic traditions of India face to face with contemporary formal linguistics. He is developing computational implementations of Pāṇinian grammar, a morphologically and syntactically tagged corpus of Sanskrit texts and is investigating the use of Pāṇinian models of verbal cognition in computational syntax.