Edward Gibson: belief

Transcript context

…Can you talk to what is syntax and what is grammar? You wrote a book on syntax. I did. You were asking me before about how do I figure out what a dependency structure is? I’d say the dependency structures aren’t that hard generally, I think there’s a lot of agreement of what they are for almost any sentence in most languages. I think people will agree on a lot of that. There are other parameters in the mix, such that some people think there’s a more complicated grammar than just a dependency structure. Noam Chomsky, he’s the most famous linguist ever, and he is famous for proposing a slightly more complicated syntax. And so he invented phrase structure grammar. He’s well known for many, many things but in the 50s and early 60s but late 50s, he was basically figuring out what’s called formal language theory. And he figured out a framework for figuring out how complicated a certain type of language might be, so-called phrase structured grammars of language might be. And so his idea was that maybe we can think about the complexity of a language by how complicated the rules are. And the rules will look like this. They will have a left-hand side and it’ll have a right-hand side. Something on the left-hand side will expand to the thing on the right-hand side. Say, we’ll start with an S, which is the root, which is a sentence, and then we’re going to expand to things like a noun phrase and a verb phrase is what he would say, for instance, okay. An S goes to an NP and a VP, is a phrase structure rule. And then we figure out what an NP is. An NP is a determiner and a noun, for instance. And a verb phrase is something else, is a verb and another noun phrase and another NP, for instance. Those are the rules of a very simple phrase, structure. And so he proposed phrase structure grammar as a way to cover human languages. And then he actually figured out that, “Well, depending on the formals, that- “ … for human languages. And then he actually figured out that, well, depending on the formalization of those grammars, you might get more complicated or less complicated languages. He said, “Well, these are things called context-free languages that rule.” He thought human languages tend to be what he calls context-free languages. But there are simpler languages, which are so-called regular languages. And they have a more constrained form to the rules of the phrase structure of these particular rules. So he basically discovered and invented ways to describe the language. And those are phrase structure, a human language. And he was mostly interested in English initially in his work in the ’50s. So quick questions around all of this. So formal language theory is the big field of just studying language formally?…

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