By Roger Martin, Román Orús, Juan Uriagereka
Matrix syntax is a model of syntactic relations in language, which grew out of a desire to understand chains. The purpose of this paper is to explain its basic ideas to a linguistics audience, without entering into too many formal details (for which cf. Orús et al. 2017). The resulting mathematical structure resembles some aspects of quantum mechanics and is well-suited to describe linguistic chains. In particular, sentences are naturally modeled as vectors in a Hilbert space with a tensor product structure, built from 2×2 matrices belonging to some specific group. Curiously, the matrices the system employs are simple extensions of customary representations of the major parts of speech, as [±N, ±V] objects.