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

[John F. Sowa]

Rob,

Montague made a claim in 1970 that NLs were indeed formal systems.
That point might have been tenable in 1970, but nobody seriously
believes it today.

Some people, who would admit that full NLs are not formalizable,
are formalizing artificial languages that just happen to use a
subset of NL syntax and vocabulary.  There are many good reasons
for defining such languages, *provided that* one makes it clear
that they are *not* true NLs -- they are "syntactic sugar" for
a version of formal logic.

 > I submit an argument that, perhaps, it is impossible to describe
 > natural language as a formal system...

I was not complaining about the conclusion, but about the argument.
You were getting into issues of completeness and decidability, which
only apply to formal languages.  Since NLs are not formal, you can't
apply those notions to NLs.

John





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