Evidence Against the Context-Freeness of Natural Language

Abstract

In searching for universal constraints on the class of natural languages, linguists have investigated a number of formal properties, including that of context-freeness. Soon after Chomsky's categorization of languages into his well-known hierarchy [Chomsky, 1963], the common conception of the context-free class of languages as a tool for describing natural languages was that it was too restrictive a class-interpreted strongly (as a way of characterizing structure sets) and even weakly (as a way of characterizing string sets). The issue was brought back to the attention of linguists a few years ago, however, by Gerald Gazdar's arguments for a context- free phrase-structure theory of syntax [Gazdar, 1982]. Subsequently, Gazdar and Geoffrey K. Pullum [1982] chronicled common thinking on the issue, and argued compellingly against all previous published arguments maintaining the weak non-context- freeness of natural language. Since then, to the author's knowledge, no proof of the weak non-context-freeness of natural language has been forthcoming.

Open PDF

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 1984
Accession Number
ADA460998

Entities

People

  • Stuart M. Shieber

Organizations

  • SRI International

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Availability
  • Classification
  • Contracts
  • Hierarchies
  • Information Operations
  • Instructions
  • Language
  • Monitoring
  • Natural Languages
  • Nomenclature
  • Security
  • Standards
  • Words (Language)

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Mathematical Modeling and Probability Theory.
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.