Re: X-Bar Theory

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Christopher Wright wrote:

> Julien Eychenne sekalge:
> >2) Human beings can produce an infinite number of
> >sentences with a finite number of elements.
>
> Then you end up with sentences of infinite length, and these would be
> endlessly repetitive in the end. Think of reading a dictionary, except
> without order, definitions, or end. No human *could* make an infinitely
> long sentence.
That's because of issues entirely unrelated to our language abilities.
Take a sentence like:

He is fat.

Append to that the string "John said that " to get

John said that he is fat.

Keep prefixing "X said that", replacing X by a new name each time. There
is no linguistically interesting limit to how many times you can repeat
that process, meaning that the language mechanism can generate an infinite
number of sentence.

The reason we can't actually produce an infinitely long sentence has more
to do with our need to eat, sleep, and remember what was already said.

> >1 ) language has a an abstract structure which has the rigor of
> mathematics.
>
> Hmm... not sure exactly what you mean by that. Is it a direct Chomsky
> quote? If so, I'll have to take it up with him directly. Do you mean that
> the structure of language is as complex as mathematics?
It means that we can give a mathematically rigorous algorythm for the
production and comprehension of Human Language. Any individual human
languages is just a specific instance of the abstract mathematical
structure inherent in the portion of human cognition that deals with
language.

Marcus

Reply