14
votes
Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?
In the realm of natural language, the "ideas a language can be used to express" are basically "any": all languages are capable of expressing any idea, so there's only one category of expressive type. ...
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11
votes
Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?
In computer science, one essential property of all Turing-complete languages is that they are able to describe, "in their own way", how they themselves work.
For example, you can use a Turing ...
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4
votes
How to 'correctly' measure the complexity of the grammar of a language?
Linguists have some methods to measure the complexities of the grammar of a language.
Methods to measure the complexities of different aspects, absolutely.
What are the best methods to measure the ...
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4
votes
How to 'correctly' measure the complexity of the grammar of a language?
I haven't the slightest idea what the answer to you question might be. I think you're wasting your time with such speculations. Basically, I guess, you think the difficulty of a language must be ...
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3
votes
Is there a linguistics equivalent to Turing completeness?
I have had the same thought before and this is what I have found.
There are two main concerns. Semantic completeness and grammatical completeness.
Semantics: A language needs a minimum set of ...
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3
votes
Split a sentence using nltk and python
If you are familiar with spacy, you can use the dependency of the words in the sentence:
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
doc = nlp("Apple is looking at buying U.K. ...
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3
votes
Complex Sentence
A complementizer converts some phrase (usually an S) into a complement. In the form of a phrase structure rule,
Complement -> Complementizer S
In your example, the complementizer "that" converts ...
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3
votes
How to find a given text's complexity?
Yes and no. There are a number of well-known algorithms for determining a text's complexity. There are several generations of these and most of them are tied to educational attainment such as years of ...
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2
votes
How to 'correctly' measure the complexity of the grammar of a language?
a) What you exemplify is an inductive argument, you have seen or heard of people who have a hard time learning the grammar, and you assume it were the grammars fault. Native speakers might think quite ...
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2
votes
Languages w/out dependent clauses
It seems Pirahã may qualify (my stress):
Since we do not find unambiguous relative clauses in the corpus, we
cannot use them to conclude that Pirahã has recursive embedding.
As Pirahã isn't a ...
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2
votes
Subordination. Chinese vs English
Just keep spamming 的-clauses. To use your example:
我认识一个[有狗的]人。
我认识一个[有[向猫吠的]狗的]人。
我认识一个[有[向[在屋子里的]猫吠的]狗的]人。
我认识一个[有[向[在[[...的]城市的]屋子里的]猫吠的]狗的]人。
My own judgement is that the longer sentences don'...
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1
vote
Linguistic analysis of ChatGPT's default style of writing
This is such a fantastic question, I’ve struggled to offer even a small, direct answer.
Let us begin in the simplest possible way, before hopefully attempting some generality.
The easiest thing you ...
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1
vote
How to 'correctly' measure the complexity of the grammar of a language?
[updated here] READ THIS ARTICLE: Entropy Rate Estimates for Natural Language—A New Extrapolation of Compressed Large-Scale Corpora
One can try to evaluate complexity of a written word by ...
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1
vote
Is it possible that whole relative clause refers/describes one word/phrase in the main clause (without anaphora)?
No, anaphora is always involved in a relative clause construction, because relative clauses have relative pronouns (not necessarily explicit), and relative pronouns are anaphoric. The "which" of your ...
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1
vote
Languages w/out dependent clauses
There are many kinds of dependent clause. The example you provided is a content clause and not a relative clause.
In Riffian, depending on the dependent clause used, this one can be introduced by a ...
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1
vote
Are there languages with discontinued subordinate clauses?
This sort of behavior certainly occurs in some languages. Here's an example from Meskwaki where a relative clause is interspersed with the matrix clause:
iiniyeeka [peeminehkawaatshiki ashaahaki ...
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1
vote
Help with constituency?
Yes, they are adjuncts, they are just topicalized. Alternative word order is orthogonal to what categories phrases have.
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1
vote
Help with constituency?
I have a reply for your third example, "Frankly, this whole paragraph needs work." "Frankly" here is a manner adverb which modifies a root sentence (which is a non-embedded sentence, in the sense of ...
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