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From: bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Clay M Bond)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Syntactical *definition* of English
Message-ID: <14075@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 20 Oct 88 10:09:37 GMT
References: <726@wsccs.UUCP> <6946@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Reply-To: bondc@iuvax.UUCP (Clay M Bond)
Organization: Indiana University CSCI, Bloomington
Lines: 48

Tim Budd:

>You may remember that Context Free Languages were discovered by a
>Linguist, Noam Chomsky, not a computer scientist.  

No, I don't, actually.  I'm not quite sure what you mean here.
They certainly weren't "discovered" though if this is supposed
to mean that Nim first proposed that natural language could be
generated with a CFG then it makes more sense (though that, too
is wrong.  Harris, not Nim.)


>1950's), there was great hope that a CFL, or at worst a CSL (context
>sensitive language) could be found that would describe English, and

You mean CF/SG, don't you?  If language X can be generated by a CFG,
then language X is a CFL; a CFL is not going to describe English.


>Such efforts more or less met with utter and complete defeat in the late 
>50's and 60's.  

No argument.


>Indeed so much so that some people working in understanding
>English (such at the folks at Yale), almost totally abandoned any
>notion of syntax, and proceeded with just a semantic analysis of
>utterances.

I fail to see what the difference is, assuming the semantic analyses
used are mathematical possible-worlds models which have nothing to
do with reality, much less language.  You're manipulating symbols.
How is manipulating semantic symbols different from manipulating
syntactic ones, save that the former is more challenging since it's
more obvious that symbol systems don't work.

What?  This construction doesn't fit the rule?  Write another
rule/feature, of course!

The plight of the semanticist is no less futile than the syntactician.



-- 
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<<  Clay Bond, IU Department of Leather er uh, Linguistics               >>
<<  ARPA:  bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu  AKA: Le Nouveau Marquis de Sade   >>
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