Some Particular Design Choices
for a Class of Formalisms

• Surface Based: providing a direct characterisation of the actual surface order of string elements in a sentence.
• Informational: associating with the strings information from some information domain
• Inductive: defining the association of strings and information elements recursively, with new pairings being derived by merging substrings according to prescribed string combining operations, and merging the associated informational elements according to prescribed information combining elements.
• Declarative: defining the association between strings and informational elements in terms of what associations are permissible, not how they are computed.