Re: Throwing out the tree-structured grammar (SF Xenolinguistics FAQ)?
| From: | Patrick Littell <puchitao@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, June 10, 2005, 18:26 |
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To be needlessly picky about it, a stack language -- that is, one whose
underlying computational implementation is a stack -- is still a
tree-structured language. More precisely, it's the reverse Polish notation
(postfix traversal) of a tree. If it weren't, the stack would either
underrun or (eventually) overflow.
But the aliens might not "think tree" the way humans "think tree", so that's
probably what he means. The aliens would "think stack" instead, and only
their grammarians would be able to point out the underlying tree-ness of
their sentences.
A "register language" would basically fit the bill. The aliens have a
collection of "registers" in their head, and each word either puts something
new into a register, moves things between them, or asserts a relation
between their contents. Say there's one register for each semantic role, or
one for each gender... or it could be based on proximity, respect, or
what-have-you. (This could technically be *described* as a trivial sort of
tree or directed acyclic graph, but nothing in the language *depends* on
properties of these structures holding the way a stack language would.)
But when it comes down to it, a non-trivial alien tongue would probably
involve recursion of some sort, and so long as you have that you'll need at
least the power of a tree.
On 6/10/05, Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...> wrote:
>
> Steven Williams wrote:
>
> >> 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?
>
> Well, the stack thing's all already been done: take a look at Fith[1]
> for an example.
>
> K.
>
> [1]
http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm
>
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