[Corpora-List] Is a complete grammar possible (beyond the corpus itself)?

[Oliver Mason]

I've given up on the idea of a complete grammar of a language, as I
now view language as an individual phenomenon.  We all have our own
grammars, which overlap to a large degree, but are nevertheless
distinct. This is because your language experience is different from
mine.  So all you can hope for is a rough approximation (an average of
several grammars used to produce the corpus), or possibly a grammar
based on a particular corpus.  But the grammar derived from the next
corpus will be different again.

However, it will be very interesting to investigate those differences.

Oliver

On 05/09/07, Rob Freeman <lists at chaoticlanguage.com> wrote:
> Hi Diana,
>
> In the "Chomsky and computational linguistics" thread you wrote:
>
>
> > I am not sure ... that anyone is looking for a complete grammar - or the
> most compact description of a corpus (this last one seems to me VERY
> suspicious, if a corpus is a sample).
>
> Why don't you think anyone is looking for a complete grammar (any more)?
>
> Is this the result of corpora telling us something fundamental about
> language?
>
> Is there anyone on the list looking for a complete grammar who would like to
> contradict this?
>
> -Rob
>
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