I have a question. My understanding is that such a grammar is for defining the set of sentences that can be considered to be valid Hebrew sentences. This would imply that any sentence is in one of two states: either a valid Hebrew sentence or not. My concern is that typically there are sentences which are technically valid but which would never or rarely be used in practice. In some cases this would be because the sentence makes no sense semantically. In other cases it would be because for whatever reason a different sentence would normally be preferred for expressing the given content. In other words, the question of whether or not a sentence is a valid Hebrew sentence sometimes is neither yes or no but rather more of a probability or set of probabilities of how likely the sentence is to be used in practice and/or considered valid.
Therefore I'm not sure how useful this kind of grammar is as a model of the language. It also seems that trying to build one would get bogged down in discussions of these gray areas. I think it would be better to use a model that had a way of taking into account these gray areas. What do you think? Eric Inman -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Christian Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2010 2:56 PM To: Pere Porta Cc: b-hebrew Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew Hi all, further to Pere's question I'll explain with an example of why I believe joint participation from list members on an experiment of this kind could make for good linguistic discussion on this list. Let's assume that in defining our grammar we want to start with high frequency phenomenon to increase our chances of developing a wide coverage grammar. Doing a simple word count on words that occur in the Tanakh we see that with the exception of Yhwh the most common words (as in most languages) are prepositions. This would suggest that prepositional phrases are high frequency linguistic chunks and a good place to start developing a wide coverage grammar. Following a theory of constituency it is pretty much standard to create high level definitions of prepositional phrases (PP) with DCG rules like the following (for English): PP --> P NP NP --> (Det) N Obviously, in practice such an over generic rule set is bound to over generate because of the lack of fine grained control on the rule set. In certain contexts certain pseudo-legal PP's are ungrammatical at some level of grammar that goes beyond simple constituent structure. This is perhaps a partial motivation of formalisms like LFG (lexical functional grammar) which add a functional structure to the generation grammar. In any case, the general idea is to get list members involved in an experiment of developing a generational grammar so that we can discover the finer nuances of b-hebrew together by experimenting with rule sets on real data. I predict that such a practical experience will be eye-opening to the intricacies of b-hebrew grammar and will stimulate many a linguistically based discussion (something we keep aiming at on b-hebrew but always seem to end up straying away from). The reason I suggested we do something like this using Prolog is simple. Prolog (IMO) is a shoddy programming language which is inefficient and I would never dream of using for a serious linguistic technology. However, it has inbuilt DCG support and so no programming skills required. If you can understand what PP --> P NP means then you can start working straight away with Prolog to build a generation grammar. It really is that simple. Totally linguist friendly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_clause_grammar In any case, I've already had some positive responses off list and I would welcome some more and would like as many to get involved as possible. Please keep writing to express interest if you haven't already done so. I've already decided the positive response was large enough to attempt to get something going. I'll go ahead and make a simple toy grammar to play with, experiment with, build on etc. Those who are interested in participating the best thing to do while waiting for me to post further information is to download and install Prolog and perhaps play around with it. If you're running Unix or Linux then you may already have it installed. If not there are plenty of distributions available. GNU Prolog is probably the most common standard. www.gprolog.org Obviously, GNU Prolog can be run in Windows using an emulator like Cygwin. I've been told there are other good Prolog distributions that run on windows but can't recommend any as I've never used them. If you can get Prolog running on your system and your installation can interpret DCG's then your ready to make a start. I'll let you all know when I've got a toy grammar ready to start playing with. It shouldn't take too long and I should be able to fit it in around other things going on. If no-one has any objections to discussing b-hebrew grammar via experimentation with a generational grammar on the b-hebrew list then I'll continue to communicate via the list. If not, then we can always take it off list amongst those who have expressed an interest. Again, thanks for your responses. Keep them coming. James Christian On 15 June 2010 12:01, Pere Porta <[email protected]> wrote: > (As a replying to James Christian's mail about his project on > generation grammar, which I mistakenly sent only to him and not to the > list) > > In this case, James, start, please. > Now, I do not know whether this can be done within b-hebrew list or > rather privately... > Dear b-hebrew Moderators, what is your mind and/or advice? Could > James's project or proposal be interesting for b-hebrew list members > in a general way? > > > Pere Porta > (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain) > > On 10 June 2010 09:55, James Christian <[email protected]> wrote: > >> 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 >> > > > _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
