At 2011-06-01 02:23:08 -0700, manikuttyan...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> To build up an arbitrarily large sentence involving fish, I give you
> the following grammar:
>
> Sentence -> NX V [N_that_is_the_name_of_a_place] N
>
> NX -> N NX V | N N V
>
> Here, N = fish as a noun
> V = fish as a verb
> N_that_is_the_name_of_a_place = Fish, the town
> NX = a grammar construct that is used to simply create an arbitrarily large
> sentence.
>
> … That should take care of everything.
"Sentence" is fine:
Somethings (NX) fish (V) [Fish] (P) fish (N)
(Note that NX must be plural, because of the number of fish (V), but
let's ignore that altogether.) If NX is N N V, that gives us fish (N)
fish (N) fish (V). Substituting into Sentence, we get:
{fish (N) fish (N) fish (V)} fish (V) [Fish] (P) fish (N)
…which makes no sense, as far as I can tell. If you ask "Who fishes for
Fish fish?" or "What do fish (N) fish (N) fish for?", there are no good
answers. Nor does prepending a fish (N) and appending a fish (V) (the
other branch of NX) make any difference.
If the objective was to generate meaningless sentences containing only
fish, a much simpler production like "fish" *(" fish") would suffice.
> P.P.S. More here
> : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/433
P.S. "Message does not exist in indo-euro-americo-asian_list"
P.P.S. I'm in Kolkata right now, where the way to write a sentence
containing arbitrary repetitions of fish is "dinner".
-- ams
