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A formal system (also called a logical calculus, or a logical system) consists of a formal language together with a deductive apparatus (also called a deductive system). The deductive apparatus may consist of a set of transformation rules , which may be interpreted as valid rules of inference, or a set of axioms , or have both.
Rudolph Carnap defined the meaning of the adjective formal in 1934 as follows: "A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for example, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are ...
[2] [3] In this view, language is regarded as arising from a mathematical relationship between meaning and form. The formal description of language was further developed by linguists including J. R. Firth and Simon Dik, giving rise to modern grammatical frameworks such as systemic functional linguistics and functional discourse grammar.
In contrast, Context-free language says: "In formal language theory, a context-free language is a language generated by ..." Similarly, Kallmeyer says in your citation: "... mild context-sensitivity is introduced as a property of a set of languages...", (and I supplement:) while being context-free is a property of a single language).
A formal language can be defined with the alphabet = { ,}, and with a word being in if it begins with and is composed solely of the symbols and . A possible interpretation of W {\displaystyle {\mathcal {W}}} could assign the decimal digit '1' to {\displaystyle \triangle } and '0' to {\displaystyle \square } .
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language .
The Chomsky hierarchy in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a language's vocabulary (or alphabet) that are valid according to the language's syntax.
In an ideal formal language, the meaning of a logical form can be determined unambiguously from syntax alone. Logical forms are semantic, not syntactic constructs; therefore, there may be more than one string that represents the same logical form in a given language. [1] The logical form of an argument is called the argument form of the argument.