Re: Hypersimple & Dreadfully Unnatural Grammars

>Edward Heil wrote:
>> You can't go more than five levels deep in the language as I've figured
>> it out at this point.
>
Suppose it were declared that no "functional" word may have more than two
arguments?  The trivalent verbs would be seperated into two "functional"
words.  The justification for this is the fact that in certain instances
"John gave a book." is complete as it stands.  (In answer to the question
"what did John give Mary?" for example.)

Under this rule the statement "John gave Mary a book" would be constructed
like this:

"A-book John gave..."  Here "gave" collects two arguments off the stack and
returns the single "concept" of (John gave a book).  With this result as the
current argument on the stack, a second argument "Mary" is placed on the
stack and these two arguments are then bound together with the functional
word "to":

"A-book John gave Mary to."

By keeping the stack of pending concepts to a maximum of two it becomes
easier to parse the sentence on the fly in your head as you hear it uttered.

Are their instances where this approach fails?

--Gary.