Hi Jim, When referring to free word order languages, no one is using the term "free" in an absolute sense but rather in a relative sense. In addition, no one is using the word "free" to indicate that there are no rules or contraints governing the word order. From my review of your comments along with a quick, cursory review of what I could find by googling, my conclusion for the time being is that it would be a good idea to use a an approach that has been adapted for languages with a relatively high degree of freedom in word order.
Your approach may very well prove productive if you carry it out, I just think there might be more efficient ways of proceeding. If you do proceed with this, I'll be interested in seeing what the results are. Eric -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Christian Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 2:48 AM To: [email protected] Cc: b-hebrew Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Generation grammar and b-hebrew Hi Eric, in my honest opinion there is no such thing as a free word order language. Yes. It is true that when we compare English word order with that of Koine Greek then the Koine Greek does exhibit more 'freedom' in its word order. But just what exactly do we mean by 'freedom'. Were the composers of Koine Greek documents just randomly throwing out declined noun phrases? Hardly! There are clearly patterns which are more dominant and patterns which are less dominant and guided decisions were made when these documents were generated. We even see similar phenomenon in English, a language we consider to not have free word order. Consider the following: 1) Mary went to school 2) To school went Mary 3) To school did Mary go 4) To school Mary went Sentence 1 is clearly the variant we would most likely encounter and yet there are contexts were 2, 3 and 4 could be naturally produced. However, this is certainly not a random pattern. There are clear reasons described by patterns which dictate when form 4 would be preferred over form 1. In any case, I cannot emphasize to you enough. Don't worry about the number of rules. This is not necessarily a bad thing. What you should be worrying about is whether your rule set over or under generates. Once you've got a rule set which doesn't over or under generate *then* is the time to start worrying if you could achieve the same thing with a more compact representation. However, I promise you this. If you give this experiment a go you will soon see that being in such an ground breaking position is far greater a problem than it may seem. I would rather have 1 million well defined rules that neither over nor under generate than 1 all embracing rule that produces every conceivable permutation of words both acceptable and unacceptable. 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
