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From: dr@tovna.co.il (Daniel Radzinski)
Subject: Re: Definiton for NL & NLP
Message-ID: <D1tMBK.2q3@tovna.co.il>
Organization: Tovna Translation Machines Ltd.
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Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 08:30:54 GMT
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Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) wrote:

: Important properties of human language include:
:   (1) learned to an almost uniform degree of mastery, through a uniform
: series of stages, by almost all humans regardless of general intelligence;
:   (2) spoken (with the human articulatory apparatus);
        

:   (3) duality of patterning (utterances are strings of units that have
: meaning, and each of those units is a string of units phonemes that do
: not have meanings);
:   (4) stimulus-independence (unlike animal communication, we can say
: things that are not directly derived from our most recent experiences);
:   (5) arbitrariness (there is no necessary connection between the form
: of a word and the thing it stands for);
:   (6) form, not substance (language is a set of rules for behavior, not
: merely a set of behaviors that have actually occurred);
:   (7) recursive syntax, with limits on stack depth;
:   (8) absence of some (formally simple) syntactic devices that you might
: expect; for example, no language in the world requires you to be able to
: reverse an arbitrarily long string of words;
:   (9) a semantics in which reference is mediated by sense (i.e., the vast
: majority of words do not stand for objects in the real world directly;
: rather, they stand for _types_ of objects, or properties of objects,
: and can then be used to refer to individual objects in particular situations);
:   (10) a specific (and rather elaborate) way of dealing with time;
:   (11) a singular-plural (or singular-dual-plural) distinction;



Now (2) above is clearly inaccurate, though perhaps statistically salient.
There is a wide consensus that sign languages, e.g. American Sign Language
(ASL), are full NLs. They have all the properties you mention, with the
exception of (2). A human language may thus be spoken or signed.
--
Daniel Radzinski
Tovna Translation Machines
Jerusalem, Israel
dr@tovna.co.il
