10
votes
Accepted
Intuitive English example of why linguists think natural language grammar is stronger than CFL?
I don't personally believe that CFL are insufficient, but among linguists who care about weak generative capacity (probably most don't care about the issue), the consensus seems to be that they are. ...
- 12.3k
6
votes
Accepted
What is the most comprehensive context-free grammar for English?
The treatment of English worked out in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar by Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, & Sag is a CFG (with sets of rules given in highly abbreviated form) and is comprehensive in ...
- 12.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Functionalism vs Formalism?
It's hard to nail down a scientific difference between functionalist and formalist approaches, because the goals and domains of investigation are usually disjoint. If you want some opposite ends of ...
- 66.6k
4
votes
Is language a formal system?
No, natural language is not a formal system. Some rather interesting theories about natural langages are formal systems. But to confuse a theory with the phenomena that it is a theory of is ...
- 12.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Is language a formal system?
The author has mistaken language and grammar, and that criticism isn't valid for any period of generative phonology. Grammar is a cognitive ability which can be modeled as a particular kind of formal ...
- 66.6k
3
votes
What is terminology for the difference between, for instance, "see" and "sees"?
There's no terminology that generically describes all such differences, but the most likely kind of difference, what I suppose you have in mind, relates to the idea of a "verb form" – under ...
- 66.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Is there a paradigmatic formalism for dependency grammars?
Some remarks are necessary before answering such a question. CFGs have been an important step in the history of formal grammars, but it is not exactly the example we want to follow in DG and in ...
3
votes
Is there a paradigmatic formalism for dependency grammars?
The formalizations of dependency theory exist. In fact I have a colleague who specializes in mathematical formalizations of principles of syntax, and he is more a DG guy (dependency grammar) than a ...
- 5,280
3
votes
How does a dependency grammar generate strings?
The context free rewrite rules - as associated most with early Chomskyan syntax - can easily be reworked in terms of dependency: G = (T, R), where T is the set of terminals and R is the set of rewrite ...
- 5,280
2
votes
Is a formal grammar of a formal language a formal language?
Your question is confused. You confuse a grammar (an entity) with its expression (a language). So by very definition, the grammar of any language (formal or informal) is expressed in a metalanguage.
...
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2
votes
Accepted
How to diagram a sentence containing a sentence adverb?
Simplified Tree Diagram of Supplementary Adjunct:
- 780
2
votes
Are all grammar formalisms either dependency or constituency grammars?
In a manner of speaking, yes. The analysis of phrases into immediate constituents is not really a matter of theory, but more a matter of fact, which any grammatical theory must provide for. So, in ...
- 12.3k
2
votes
Accepted
All the strings X2Y where X and Y are composed of 0s and 1s, X ≠ Y
If you generate (or parse, same thing in reverse) both of the strings at the same time, one token at a time, your grammar can only be in a limited number of states (strings are (still) the same, ...
- 196
2
votes
Can anyone explain me the structure of the FCFG grammar
The NLTK book, chapter 10, which provides some theoretical background to the implementation, references NLTK ch. 9, where the feature grammar is introduced. Have you read these articles?
Ch. 9 ...
- 6,120
2
votes
Accepted
"in relation to which" - what type of subordinated clause and is this conjunction somehow distinct?
It is a relative clause. A plot of land is acting as the lexical head of the RC, and in relation to was 'moved' to before the relative pronoun (not conjunction) which through the process of pied ...
- 3,341
2
votes
Combinatory categorial grammar for English
Are you aware of CCGbank (Hockenmaier, 2003)? This is the largest-scale corpus of English text annotated with CCG categories, consisting of ~1 million tokens of text, and is derived semi-automatically ...
- 4,270
2
votes
Is English modeled as a deterministic CFL or a CFL?
No natural language is deterministic. What book mentions LR parsers for English?
There might be some “controlled languages” based on English that are deterministic, but a broad-coverage parser is ...
- 2,469
2
votes
Is there any connection between formalism and generativism
By "generativism", I assume you mean "the theory of Generative Grammar". This is a theory promulgated by Chomsky starting, in one form, in 1951. It came to be known as "...
- 66.6k
1
vote
Accepted
Does simple type theory distinguish between those common nouns that are used as arguments and those that are used as predicates?
For general use as an argument: You need EITHER a silent determiner (or another head) that converts <e,t> to either <<e,t>,t> or e OR a theory of coercion that performs its function ...
- 171
1
vote
All the strings X2Y where X and Y are composed of 0s and 1s, X ≠ Y
Agnes has already explained the intuition why the language is context-free. Here are three more concrete tips that may be helpful:
- 3,078
1
vote
Can we build semantic mappings for CFG same as we do in CCG?
If you can get from CG (Categorial Grammar) to the semantic mappings you want, I can show you a way to get from CFG (Context Free Phrase Structure Grammar) to CG. So the answer to your question might ...
- 12.3k
1
vote
Intuitive English example of why linguists think natural language grammar is stronger than CFL?
One example is generating relative clauses parses with an intuitive structure. In a CFG, we'd need to define new rules to deal with the syntax of the relative clause in the following sentence, since "...
- 161
1
vote
How can PSG describe the vertical dimension of sentence structure?
Substitution versus Replacement
Hans Reichenbach in his classic Elements of Symbolic Logic distinguishes between substitution for a variable and replacement of an expression. Substitution is uniform,...
- 12.3k
1
vote
Syntax presupposed by Heim and Kratzer
Context free grammar (cfg) satisfies your requirements, in a certain sense, when interpreted in a certain way.
(1) Among transformational theories, it is Minimal, since it has no transformations.
(2)...
- 12.3k
1
vote
Analogs of Lambek grammar that can encode structural ambiguity?
Yes, in the Combinatory Categorial Grammar, type-raising X->T/(T\X) yields trivially ambiguous derivations such as:
X Y\X
---------------<
Y
vs
X Y\X
------->T
Y/(Y\X)...
- 4,270
1
vote
Accepted
Analogs of Lambek grammar that can encode structural ambiguity?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "basic" Lambek/categorial grammar, or by "basic objects". But you can certainly have multiple trees for the same string, at least in a bidirectional categorial ...
- 156
1
vote
Is there any phrase where common syntax fails?
If ambiguity is what the question is most concerned with, I think the short answer to the question is no: distinct structural analyses of an utterance almost always point to distinct meanings.
There ...
- 5,280
1
vote
Are Backus–Naur Form (BNF) and Extended Backus–Naur Form metalanguages or metasyntax?
According to the Wikipedia definition of a metalanguage, a metalanguage is a language used to make statements about statements in another language. That is, it is a language designed to describe the ...
- 1,016
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