Expressing generalisations

Observations and generalisations over them are expressed either in ordinary language or in formal languages, which only express specified relations between specified things. The kinds of language used for this purpose may be summarised as follows:

1. Ordinary language, from informal to very systematic.
2. Symbolisms which are highly systematic but not formalised.
3. Practical representation languages (including programming languages) which are well-defined and consistently used.
4. Algebras and logics, which are fully formalised.

These languages are used to express aspects, or models, of what we experience. For morphology, we will be using a language called DATR which was first specified by Evans & Gazdar (cf. [11]), and whose development has also been contributed to by myself and others over the past seven years.