Continuations in Natural Language

Fourth ACM-SIGPLAN Continuation Workshop

[Extended Abstract]

PID  :  83408

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

Computer scientists, logicians and functional programmers have studied continuations in laboratory settings for years. As a result of that work, continuations are now accepted as an indispensable tool for reasoning about control, order of evaluation, classical versus intuitionistic proof, and more. But all of the applications just mentioned concern artifi cial languages; what about natural languages, the languages spoken by humans in their daily life? Do natural languages get by without any of the marvelous control operators pro vided by continuations, or can we find continuations in the wild? This paper argues yes: that an adequate and com plete analysis of natural language must recognize and rely on continuations. In support of this claim, I identify four independent linguistic phenomena for which a simple CPS