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> Which structural representations assumed by (say) GB theory are not implementable in a machine? Most of the individual constraints proposed in the myriad pap
by laretluval 10y ago
> Which structural representations assumed by (say) GB theory are not implementable in a machine?
Most of the individual constraints proposed in the myriad papers on GB and Minimalism are probably implementable by machine. But no one in Chomskyan generative syntax seems interested in explicitly spelling out the full set of principles that would underly a large-coverage grammar--except maybe Steedman's Minimalist Grammar formalism, which is ignored by most people who call themselves "syntacticians". In contrast, the HPSG and LFG communities have attempted to provide large-scale grammars and a lot of NLP work has used them in a serious way, but those communities are no longer very active.
Is there a work which lays out modern Minimalist generative syntax in full formal detail, and shows how this formal system handles a very large range of different syntactic phenomena? Such that it would be possible to produce a large hand-parsed corpus? It seems like this is what would be needed for generative syntax to have relevance outside linguistics departments. If it exists and I'm just unaware of it, I'd be glad to hear about it!
- foldr 10y agoI'm not sure why you're asking this about Minimalism specifically. There are already wide coverage parsers based on various generative frameworks (e.g. HPSG, LFG, CCG). It's also a bit odd to suggest that any framework for which there isn't a wide coverage parser lacks any relevance outside linguistics departments. I know of lots of examples of cross-disciplinary work involving generative linguistics, but most of it doesn't relate to parsing at all. I'd say that wide coverage parsers are actually a pretty niche interest, which is one reason why people don't tend to work on them much.