Compositional Semantics for Unification-based Linguistic Formalisms
			    Shuly Wintner

Contemporary linguistic formalisms have become so rigorous that it is
now possible to view them as very high level declarative programming
languages.  Consequently, {\em grammars\/} for natural languages can
be viewed as {\em programs}; this view enables the application of
various methods and techniques that were proved useful for programming
languages to the study of natural languages.  This paper adapts the
notion of {\em program composition}, well developed in the context of
logic programming languages, to the domain of linguistic
formalisms. We study alternative definitions for the semantics of such
formalisms, suggesting a denotational semantics that we show to be
compositional and fully-abstract. This facilitates a clear,
mathematically sound way for defining grammar modularity.