LINGUIST List 3.154

Wed 19 Feb 1992

Disc: Parsing challenges

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Stan C. Kwasny, Re: 3.147 Parsing Challenges
2. "Barbara.Abbott", 3.147 Parsing Challenges
3. BORKOVSA, and and and in Russian
4. William Dowling, repeated words: " ... had had ..." etc.
5. , RE: 3.147 Parsing Challenges
6. , Re: 3.132 Is, is; But; Parsing challenge

Message 1: Re: 3.147 Parsing Challenges

Try this one:

Will will will Will's will, will Will?

A bit ungrammatical, but interesting just the same.

Stan C. Kwasny
Center for Intelligent Computer Systems
Department of Computer Science
Washington University

I came in late to the 'many tokens of the same type word in a row'
discussion, but I do know that the "had" example ("John, where Jack
had had "had", had had...") appears as an exercise in Hans Reichenbach's
_Elements of Symbolic Logic_, Macmillan, 1947, p. 405.

>>The painter, painting the sign over the bar had left no space
>>between dog and "and" and "and" and duck.
.
Using the same construct for Russian you can get long sequences
of the same LETTER:
.
Begin with:
 Vo imja Devy Marii i Iisusa
 (in the name of virgin Mary and Jesus)
.
Then think also of the St.Ija:
 Vo imja Devy Marii, i Ii i Iisusa
.
And than take care of the spaces:
 Nuzhno ostavit' probely mezdy slovami
 "Marii" i "i", "i" i "Ii", "Ii" i "i" i "i" i "Iisusa"
 (One should put spaces between the words ...)
.
Arkady Borkovsky
Dialog Information Services
(415)858-3744

Re: "John, where Mary had had "had" ..." I learned this from my grandfather
in the mid sixties. My impression was that he had learned it "in school,"
which would put its origin at least before 1920.

The Dutch wax and German flies are nice, but my favorite is still the Latin:
Malo malo malo malo. (I'd rather be in an apple tree than an evil man in
adversity.) No, I'm not claiming it's natural...

Will Dowling (willfranklin.com)

Message 5: RE: 3.147 Parsing Challenges

For parsing opaqueness, nothing in the 7 or less familiar word range, with
limited recursion can touch "The player kicked the ball kicked him." I find
this is a good example to use in my pyscholinguistics classes, not only to
illustrate some aspects of syntax and parsing, but also as a test of supposedly
"psychologically real" parsing models. The point is that these models DO
parse this without a glitch yet humans almost NEVER do. There's some discussion
in:Limber, J. (1976). Syntax and sentence interpretation.
In R. Wales (Ed.), Walker, E. C. T. (pp. ). Amsterdam: North Holland.

Message 6: Re: 3.132 Is, is; But; Parsing challenge

'Eer was was was, was was is'
I think that's parsable but i find the following easier:
'Eer was was was was was is is' or
'Eer was was was was was is was' or
(in these one was is a contraction of wat is, it should be written wa's, i
 guess)
Annie