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

[Michael Maxwell]

Rob Freeman wrote:
> If you've got another 50 years to waste there are!

Well, I wouldn't call what has been learned about language in the last 50
years by formal linguists a waste; I would say we know a *lot* more as a
result.  But your mileage may vary :-).

> I'm just saying we should at least explore
> the possibility formal grammars are "necessarily incomplete"
> descriptions of corpora

I don't think most generativists would disagree about the possibility of
completely describing *corpora* by a grammar; but that would be because
they (I'm including myself) regard corpora as inherently errorful, and
it's silly to expect a formal grammar to generate all (and maybe only) the
attested errors (in addition to all and maybe only the attested
non-errorful parts).

(Well, you can describe all the errors by listing them, but that's hardly
insightful.  What might be an insightful treatment of errors would be
trying to come up with generalizations for classes of errors, like slips
of the tongue.  But these generalizations are not going to be part of the
*grammar*; rather, they're going to be things like processing limitations,
or interference by the first language in production in the second
language, or noise in the telephone system, or some such.)

Of course that's precisely why most generativists focus on (the elusive)
competence, rather than performance.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD


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