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

[Rob Freeman]

Yorick,

In the absence of your specific arguments it is difficult to tell, but isn't
it true you actually assume a complete grammar of some kind? I don't see how
it could be otherwise. Since it is well known that general computability is
not decidable, if you based your model on general computability it is
difficult to see how you could have proven it to be decidable.

I could not find your paper, but there is indeed a lot about this on the
Web, e.g.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar

"Undecidable problems

Although some operations on context-free grammars are decidable due to their
limited power
... CFGs do have interesting undecidable problems..."

You must assume a complete grammar of the kind required.

In fact if you can provide links to _any_ generative work which does not
assume a (complete) generative grammar I would be most interested to see it.

I repeat, to the best of my knowledge, the issue of grammatical completeness
(as opposed to the decidability of one or other limitation on some assumed
grammar?) has simply not been addressed.

Take the opposite point of view. Assume only that language is generally
computable. Then it may be undecidable.

Has anyone looked at this possibility?

-Rob

On 9/7/07, Rob Freeman <lists at chaoticlanguage.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Yorick,
>
> Can you give a freely downloadable link for that paper? The only copies I
> can find are subscription services.
>
> If that is not possible could you give a brief synopsis of the argument?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rob
>
> On 9/7/07, Yorick Wilks <yorick at dcs.shef.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Well, the topic, of completeness/decidability and grammars, has been
> > thought about and long, long ago; if modesty didnt forbid I would mention"Decidability
> > and Natural Language" in Mind, 1971, easily downloadable from the web. A
> > crappy paper by Mind standards, but in the target zone.
> > Yorick Wilks
> >
>
>
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