Re: "Difficult" clauses

On May 15, 2007, at 9:04 AM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> David G. Durand writes:
>> ...
>> I suspect I make a better computer scientist than I would have a
>> linguist, but I never got over my disgust with grammatical theories
>> that reach Turing-completeness and _still_ need features added to
>> them to fix the elegance of their analysis.
>> ...
>
> HPSG?  It showed me that I probably make a better computer scientist
> than I would have a linguist.
>
> **Henrik
No, HPSG would have saved me. I wanted a model that supported parsing
algorithms and traditional TG does not -- Many years later I had the
privilege of taking an NLP (natural language processing) course in
graduate school with Joyce Friedman -- who helped put a nail in
"Aspects" by actually building a parser, and proving some theorems
about its runtime -- Brown linguistics in those days met the need for
linguists to understand Chomsky and the language of TG by teaching a
straight syntax course with no mention of other approaches. I dropped
out, but 2 years later ran into an acquaintance who didn't. She
saidthe next course (literally) started with the sentence "this
semester we're going to learn why what we did last semester is
totally wrong." But I was already gone.

   -- David

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