Hi, Andres; First pointer: You're right about your intuition that language/s is/are context-dependent (you can google up "Chomsky hierarchy" and go from there). Less so English than, say, Spanish, with freer word order due to morphological richness. It has also been argued that language is NP-complete in computational complexity. These are two important hypothesis that should guide your efforts.
Another pointer: I suggest "marrying" an already existent grammatical theory after at least exploring them for a while. There is no point in reinventing the wheel and although language sounds "easy" to model at first, it's definitely not so (we've been trying to crack the code formally for at least 100 years!). There are several theories of syntax: some new and crazy (like Chomsky's minimalist program) and some well-researched and established, like Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars (http://hpsg.stanford.edu/), Lexical Functional Grammars (http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/LFG/), Tree-Adjoining grammars (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~xtag/home.html), among many others. Many of the foundational papers for each of them are on the web, and I suggest visiting the following links: Edward Stabler at UCLA (for minimalist grammars) (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/stabler/epspub.htm ), particularly this paper: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/stabler/eps-lacl.pd f Aravind Joshi (for tree-adjoining grammars), for which I suggest consulting citeseer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs) for the name. A bunch of papers are going to come up. The one that seems more complete is http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/12172/http:zSzzSzwww.cis.upe nn.eduzSz~joshizSz.zSzmichigan-state99-2.pdf/joshi97treeadjoining.pdf. This is just an infinitesimal part of (only) the tip of the iceberg but I hope it's somewhat useful. Leo --- Leo Ferres, PhD Human-Oriented Technology Lab _______________________________________________ Grammatica-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grammatica-users
