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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Language issues    (WAS Re: Consistency & incompleteness)
In-Reply-To: ikastan@sol.uucp's message of 26 Jul 1996 12:51:52 GMT
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Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 21:38:35 GMT
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In article <4taf18$en@nuke.csu.net> ikastan@sol.uucp (ilias kastanas 08-14-90)
writes:

>Is English a CFL (context-free language)?

[BIG snip]

>The answer is supposed to be "No".  But is there a good argument for it ... in
>spite of some inevitable vagueness surrounding the matter?

Reaching back into the hazy parts of the memory (I do Indo-European historical
linguistics, not mathematical syntax, as a rule):

See Noam Chomsky's *early* work (including, if I remember correctly, his 1955
dissertation) for discussion of the context-free/context-sensitive nature of
English grammar.  Much of the work in natural-language syntax in the last 40
years has been based thereon.  (I'd provide citations, but Netscape is not
starting up for some reason, so I can't hit Amazon.com or Alta Vista.  Sorry.)

You can also get some good grounding on the question in Gross, _Mathematical
Models in Linguistics_, which covers not only things like CFGs but also Markov
chains and the like.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
