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From: djh@beach.cis.ufl.edu (David J. Hutches)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai
Subject: Re: Langendoen and Postal (posted by: Berke)
Message-ID: <8643@ufcsv.cis.ufl.EDU>
Date: Tue, 3-Nov-87 09:56:16 EST
Article-I.D.: ufcsv.8643
Posted: Tue Nov  3 09:56:16 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Nov-87 10:39:37 EST
References: <8941@shemp.UCLA.EDU> <9445@ut-sally.UUCP>
Sender: news@ufcsv.cis.ufl.EDU
Reply-To: djh@beach.cis.ufl.edu (David J. Hutches)
Organization: University of Florida, CIS Dept
Lines: 33
Summary: difference between producable and understandable
Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1649 comp.ai:1058

In article <9445@ut-sally.UUCP> turpin@ut-sally.UUCP (Russell Turpin) writes:
>In article <8941@shemp.UCLA.EDU>, berke@CS.UCLA.EDU writes:
>> ... That is,
>> they maintain that (1) Sentences cannot be excluded from being of any,
>> even transfinite size, by the laws of a grammar, and (2) Collections of
>> these sentences are bigger than even the continuum.  They are the size
>> of the collection of all sets:  too big to be sets.
>
>... I would
>think a minimum requirement for a sentence in a natural language
>is that some person who knows the language can read and
>understand the sentence in a finite amount of time. This would
>exclude any infinitely long sentences.
>
>Russell

Because of the processing capabilities of human beings (actually, on a
person-by-person basis), sentences of greater and greater length (and
complexity) are more and more difficult to understand.  Past a certain
point, a human being will go into cognitive overload when asked to
process a sentence which his or her capacities (short-term memory, stack
space, whatever you want to call it) are not designed to handle.  What
the human being can, in practice, process and what is *possible* in a
language are two different things.  I think that it is the case that
some theories of language/grammar explain the production of sentences
which are grammatical by use of a generative model.  In such a model, it
is possible to generate sentences of potentially infinite length, even
though it would not be possible for a human being to understand them.

== David J. Hutches                                           CIS Department ==
==                                                     University of Florida ==
== Internet:  djh@beach.cis.ufl.edu                   Gainesville, FL  32611 ==
== UUCP:  ...{ihnp4,rutgers}!codas!ufcsv!ufcsg!djh            (904) 335-8049 ==