Class Rule

x.__init__(...) initializes x; see help(type(x)) for signature

Overrides: object.__init__

(inherited documentation)

*** This should be overridden by subclasses. *** Applies the rule to combine the categories in cat_list.

Note that the returned semantics should always be in beta-normal form.

Returns:

a list of the possible categories resulting from the application if the rule is valid for the given arguments, otherwise None.

str(x)

Overrides: object.__str__

(inherited documentation)

Performs the semantic processing involved in applying the rule to these arguments.

This doesn't do any checks on the syntactic type. If it's not used in a situation where you know that the syntactic part of the application will work, it could produce a non-sensical semantics or even raise errors. It's designed for speeding up applying a rule to many signs known to have the same syntactic type (so that the syntactic checks only need to be done once).

Depending on the formalism, this may not be any faster than calling apply_rule and getting the semantics from the results. In fact, this is the default behaviour. Any sensible formalism will provide a faster implementation of this method, though.

Returns:

list of the Semantics objects that would be the logical form parts of the results of the rule application.