Re: Throwing out the tree-structured grammar (SF Xenolinguistics FAQ)?

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:19:02 -0400, Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
wrote:

> Okay, I'm curious; on this site
> (http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/lingo.html), about
> midway through, the author of this FAQ says this:
>
>> Architecture: seriously alien grammars may throw
>> out the whole terrestrial "tree-structure" scheme,
>> replacing it with some bizarre kind of "stack"
>> or "hash", but I feel no urge to attempt to
>> describe such horrors.
>
> How would one do that?
I cannot see that it is possible to have anything recognisable as language
that is not reducible (or morphable, or pick-your-verb-able) to some kind
of tree. The universe of perception is things happening to objects,
relationships between objects, and relationships between events. That's
pretty irremovable from a tree-able structure, isn't it?






Paul

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