Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

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