Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew

b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: dwashbur AT nyx.net
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew
  • Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:58:00 -0700



On 21 Jun 2010 at 8:20, James Christian wrote:

>
> Ok. Any ideas how you would implement this such that the grammar
> would not over generate?
> Have you made any implementations of your scheme? James Christian

As I said, the constraints you are talking about are in the semantic
component. We can
take a phrase like Chris Rice's famous song "Smell the Color Nine" and see
that it's
syntactically well-formed, but semantic nonsense. My dad used to jokingly
use the phrase
"Is you speaking to I?" This one is a little more problematic, but in a
sense is still
syntactically well-formed at a deep grammar level. It includes a subject,
verb and
preposition with object. But there are agreement and case problems,
obviously. As I see it,
those are surface level aspects, i.e. the clause becomes badly formed by
filling the slots
with deliberate mismatches: "You" in English takes a different form of the
verb, and "I" in
English is used exclusively as a nominative. Where such distinctions exist,
they may or
may not be part of the actual syntactic component of grammar; I haven't
really thought that
through yet.

Dave Washburn

http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page