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

[Michael Maxwell]

Rob Freeman wrote:
> Attempts to describe natural language as a formal system have been
> uniformly unsuccessful. One reaction has been to reject all
> formal analysis...
>
> My argument here has been that no-one has considered a third possibility

And of course the second possibility is to improve the formal grammars.

Actually, there are formal grammars which, for well-studied languages like
English, have a _reasonably_ good coverage.  (Well, I admit that what
counts for "reasonably good" depends on your perspective!)  At any rate,
when the formal grammar over-generates, there are at least three potential
explanations:

(1) The grammar is wrong;
(2) Some grammatical constraints which can plausibly be said to be
external to the grammar itself are missing (this is the approach John Ross
started back in the 60s, and which is still going today); or
(3) The over-generated forms are ruled out by something extrinsic to
grammar/ language itself (the 'colorless green ideas' explanation).

If the grammar under-generates, at least (1) and (2) could be explanations
(for (2), the explanation might be that the constraint is wrong, or just a
weak constraint).  It may also be a lexical problem, e.g. a word missing
from the lexicon (the "klatu verata nikto" problem).

In sum, there are, it seems to me, good reasons not to give up on the
formal grammar approach.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD


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