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It's more than just linguistic software. Our knowledge of linguistics itself is currently very limited; it's a nacent science and there's still a great deal of

by compay 16y ago

It's more than just linguistic software. Our knowledge of linguistics itself is currently very limited; it's a nacent science and there's still a great deal of debate about how to even approach the study of language. Even leaving aside the difficulties in just transcribing speech, linguists are still a long ways off from coming up with any formalism of human syntax that could help create software to syntactically parse normal human speech.

CWuestefeld 16y ago
...because most of our linguistic formalism is derived from written language, which is generally an artificial approximation of real language. Remember grade school, with parts of speech, Conjunction Junction, and diagramming sentences? Well, think back to the last (non-trivial) sentence you actually said out loud. I challenge you to try to diagram that sentence. Although there's quite a lot of research that's been done, surprisingly little of it deals with the way most of us really communicate.
- compay 16y ago
  Modern linguistic formalism is not derived from written language at all. I studied at MIT and UConn in the mid '90's and the separation between prescriptive grammar and linguistics is pretty clear. That's not to say that current approaches to linguistics are correct; I don't know enough to make that judgement. But I think the problem lies more in the complexity of the domain - not because modern linguists are so foolish as to base theory on written language.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    It's quite possible I'm behind the times. not because modern linguists are so foolish as to base theory on written language That was actually what I was trying to get at. While there are clearly some rules we follow when speaking, they are much more open than those governing our writing. It's odd, though, or at least counterintuitive, that our comprehensive of these less-structured spoken communications is higher than that of more-structured written ones.
woodson 16y ago
In fact, it has been shown that there are languages that have syntactic constructions which are context-sensitive (in a generative linguistic PoV. cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy). For example Swiss German variants (http://books.google.com/books?id=JOjoWrP4tnIC&lpg=PA165&ots=Dd9UlGjRYA&dq=swiss%20german%20context-free&pg=PA165#v=onepage&q=Swiss%20German%20context-free&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=JOjoWrP4tnIC&lpg=PA165&...)

by compay 16y ago

CWuestefeld 16y ago

...because most of our linguistic formalism is derived from written language, which is generally an artificial approximation of real language. Remember grade school, with parts of speech, Conjunction Junction, and diagramming sentences? Well, think back to the last (non-trivial) sentence you actually said out loud. I challenge you to try to diagram that sentence. Although there's quite a lot of research that's been done, surprisingly little of it deals with the way most of us really communicate.

compay 16y ago
Modern linguistic formalism is not derived from written language at all. I studied at MIT and UConn in the mid '90's and the separation between prescriptive grammar and linguistics is pretty clear. That's not to say that current approaches to linguistics are correct; I don't know enough to make that judgement. But I think the problem lies more in the complexity of the domain - not because modern linguists are so foolish as to base theory on written language.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  It's quite possible I'm behind the times. not because modern linguists are so foolish as to base theory on written language That was actually what I was trying to get at. While there are clearly some rules we follow when speaking, they are much more open than those governing our writing. It's odd, though, or at least counterintuitive, that our comprehensive of these less-structured spoken communications is higher than that of more-structured written ones.

woodson 16y ago

In fact, it has been shown that there are languages that have syntactic constructions which are context-sensitive (in a generative linguistic PoV. cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy). For example Swiss German variants (http://books.google.com/books?id=JOjoWrP4tnIC&lpg=PA165&ots=Dd9UlGjRYA&dq=swiss%20german%20context-free&pg=PA165#v=onepage&q=Swiss%20German%20context-free&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=JOjoWrP4tnIC&lpg=PA165&...)