[Corpora-List] RE : Annotation layers: missing reference

[John F. Sowa]

On 11/21/2010 7:55 AM, Yorick Wilks wrote:
> I dont think the dating of "corpora and grammar" so early is right.

I doubt that you can find a clear "birthday" for any significant idea,
theory, methodology, or movement.

YW:
> Alex Krotov found that if you induced the PS grammar rules from the PTB,
> in a pretty straightforward way from the trees, then the number of rules
> was enormous and, most significantly, I thought, still rising linearly
> at the end of the PTB corpus, which didnt prove anything but made one
> wonder about all the claims of finite grammar and infinite language
> that we had all been indoctrinated with.

That is a Chomskyan claim that never had any empirical justification. 
As a linguist who wrote grammars for actual languages, Sapir (1921)
had a much deeper understanding of the nature of grammar:

ES:
> The fact of grammar, a universal trait of language, is simply
> a generalized expression of the feeling that analogous concepts and
> relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms. Were
> a language ever completely "grammatical," it would be a perfect engine
> of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is
> tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

I believe that Sapir's second adverb "luckily" is more appropriate.
For examples of tyrannical languages, see Orwell's Newspeak or the
efforts by Frege, Russell, Carnap, and the Vienna Circlers.

John Sowa

Note:  I found the quotation from Sapir in Linguist List:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-85.html




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