Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: A Challenge to the Minimalist Community |
| Submitter: | Paul Kiparsky |
| Description: | In response to Asudeh, Goldsmith remarks that parsers might not need
to be able to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. That's not quite right. There is not universal agreement to the position that the ability to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences is an important function to be able to model directly, whether we are looking at humans or at software. There are certainly various serious parsing systems whose goal is to be able to parse, as best they can, any linguistic material that is given to them -- and arguably, that is what we speakers do too. I think of Microsoft Research's NLPWin parser as an example of such a system. But isn't detection of ungrammaticality necessary for correct disambiguation? For example, if a parser can't recognize the ungrammaticality of Chomsky's (2), how can it recognize that (3) has just one reading, the one corresponding to (1)? (1) Which violins are these sonatas easy to play on? (2) *Which sonatas are these violins easy to play on? (3) What are they easy to play on? |
| Date Posted: | 09-May-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Syntax Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.1454 |
| Posted: | 09-May-2005 |
