Assessing functional grammar for knowledge representation

Abstract

Under a linguistic perspective on information systems the primary goal of such systems is to support communication and coordination in organizational contexts. The formalized communication is supposed to be grounded in an informal natural language discourse. This suggests a convergence of natural language semantics and knowledge representation. We give an overview of the theory of Functional Grammar and assess its value for knowledge representation and information systems by comparing its formalism with some influential theories of knowledge representation and lexical semantics. © 1992.