Now you all have nerd sniped me. The question of whether a sentence be grammatical equivales the existence of a parse tree which, when linearised, yields the o

Now you all have nerd sniped me. The question of whether a sentence be grammatical equivales the existence of a parse tree which, when linearised, yields the original sentence. Because the sentence is finite, it has a finite number of components, and hence a finite number of possible parse trees, so we could enumerate them all until we find one that works. Exercise: what is the maximum number of parse trees a sentence of length N might have? However (being an english speaker and using wetware as an oracle) a suitable witness can be found by inspection: and ├─can buy │ ├─Money │ └─of │ ├─if not │ │ ├─if not │ │ │ ├─many │ │ │ └─most │ │ └─all │ └─that │ ├─the things │ └─make │ ├─people │ └─happy └─if/then ├─doesn't [buy] │ ├─it │ └─[them] └─is ├─the fault └─ours QEF