Hi all, I don't how familiar everybody is with theories of generation grammar. In a nutshell theories of generation grammar can be summarised as follows. There is a set of words and rules which describe any given natural language. Given a correctly defined set of words and rules the generation grammar will accept all grammatically correct utterances of that language and reject ill formed utterances.
Attempts to form a generation grammar for any given language generally suffer from problems of over generation and under generation. Over generation is when the grammar is poorly defined and, as such, accepts ill formed utterances as well formed utterances. Under generation is when the grammar rejects utterances which are known to be well formed. Testing of generation grammars consists of having two different test sets. One test set of well formed utterances and the other of ill formed utterances. The goal is that the grammar we define will accept the utterances known to be well formed and reject the utterances known to be poorly formed. If we were to extend this method to b-hebrew we already have a corpus of utterances we can consider to be well formed. Defining a corpus of ill formed phrases is a little more difficult as informants are lacking. I was toying with the idea of encouraging fans of b-hebrew to put their theoretical knowledge into practice by playing with building a generation grammar of b-hebrew using a simple linguist friendly Prolog driven interface. I just wanted to get a quick idea of numbers of who may be interested in participating in such an experiment. Please let your students etc. know about the prospect and get them to write to me either on or off list so that I can get an idea of whether it would be worth putting this together. James Christian _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
