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Culture Documents
A. Noam Chomsky
- Born December 7, 1928
- Currently Professor Emeritus of linguistics at MIT
- Created the theory of generative grammar
- Sparked the cognitive revolution in psychology
- From 1945, studied philosophy and linguistics at the
University of
Pennsylvania
- PhD in linguistics from University of Pennsylvania in
1955
- 1956, appointed full Professor at MIT, Department of
Linguistics and
Philosophy
- 1966, Ferrari P. Ward Chair; 1976, Institute Professor
Contributions:
Linguistics
Transformational grammars
Generative grammar
Language aquisition
Computer Science
Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky Normal Form
Context Free Grammars
Psychology
Cognitive Revolution (1959)
Universal grammar
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B. Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
- Born 1920, died 1996
- Mathematician, Doctor of Medicine
- Professor of the Faculty of Sciences, University of Paris
- Member of the Academy of Sciences
- First trained as a physician, doctorate in medicine in
1948
- PhD in mathematics in 1953
1 Definitions
(1) a tree for ‘the brown fox sings’
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• Linguistic trees have nodes. The nodes in (1) are A, B, C, D, E,
F,
and G.
• There are two kinds of nodes: internal nodes and terminal
nodes. The
internal nodes in (1) are A, B, and E. The terminal nodes
are C, D, F, and G. Terminal nodes are so called because
they are not expanded into anything further. The tree
ends there.
• Terminal nodes are also called leaf nodes. The leaves of (1)
are
really the words that constitute the sentence ‘the brown
fox sings’ i.e. ‘the’, ‘brown’, ‘fox’, and ‘sings’.
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c-command is used in the formulation of Condition C, a principle
used to determine what a pronoun may not refer to.
• CONDITION C
(5) A pronoun cannot refer to a proper name it c-commands.
Note that Condition C is a negative condition. It never tells you what a
particular pronoun must refer to. It only tells you what it cannot refer
to.
In general, if a pronoun cannot refer to a proper name (despite
agreeing in gender and number), you can conclude that the pronoun
c-commands the proper name.
In a way, they are just representations of facts that exist out in the
world - the facts that we can discover using constituency test. So one
way to make trees is by doing empirical work – taking a sentence,
applying various constituency tests to the words in the sentence, and
then drawing a tree based on the results of our tests.
This rule says ‘take the node X and expand it into the nodes Y and Z’.
Alternately, going from right to left (or from below), it says ‘if you
have a Y and a Z next to each other, you can combine them to make
an X’.
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• A grammar can then be thought of as a set of phrase structure rules
(categorial rules plus lexical rules).
The categorial rules can be thought of as (part of) the syntax and the
lexical rules as (part of) the lexicon.
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2.2 Introducing infinity
We know that human languages can contain sentences of arbitrary
length. Consider (11) which stands for an infinite number of
sentences.
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But is (12) all that the rules in (13) and (14) will generate?
How many sentences will (13) and (14) generate?
2.2.1 Overgeneration
The rules in (13) and (14) will also generate sentences (see the
structure below) like:
(16) *He ate that he believes pizza.
3 Noun Phrases
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phrase-level categories such as NP, VP, AP, PP etc. (somewhat
imprecisely, sequences of words which can ‘stand on their own’).
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There is evidence from constituency tests that the sequence of words
‘king of England’ forms a constituent.
(21) Vivian dared defy the [king of England] and [ruler of the Empire]?
(22) Edward was the last, and some people say the best, [king of
England].
(23) The present [king of England] is more popular than the last one.
This evidence doesn’t actually rule out the tree in (19). It is not easy
to rule out (19) on the basis of the discussion so far. However, an
assumption that natural language structures only involve binary
branching could be used to block structures like (19).
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position, and as a prepositional object. ‘king of England’ cannot
appear in any of these positions.
(24) a. subject:
• Consider the tree for ‘the king of England’ under the assumption
that ‘king of England’ is also an NP.i. I didn’t give any money to [the
king of England].
From this tree, we can read of the phrase structure rules involved in
building it. They are shown in (26).
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ii. Nking
iii. P of
iv. NPEngland
Now, it is very clear that none of the NPs in (27) are good noun
phrases in English. From this we can conclude that the categorial rule
(26a.i), which is the source of the recursion, cannot be correct.
So:
• ‘king of England’ cannot be an NP
and yet _ ‘king of England’ is a constituent of some sort.
Let us call nominal constituents that are bigger than words but still
not full phrases ¯N (or N0 or N-bar).
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Consider the phrase-structure rules responsible for generating (28) :
(29) a. NP DN0
b. N0 N PP
c. PP P NP
Likewise, (29) says that an N combines with any PP that follows it (i.e.
any postnominal NP) and forms an N’.
But is this really the case? Do the PPs in (30a, b) have the same
relation to the N?
PPs like ‘of Physics’ are called complements, while PPs like ‘with long
hair’ are called adjuncts.
Corresponding to this difference in terminology, a structural
difference is also proposed. This is shown in (32).
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c. N’ N PP (Complement Rule)
You could take an N and a complement PP and make an N0. Then you
could combine the N’ with an adjunct PP to make another N’.
You could, but you don’t have to. You can now just combine your
adjunct-less N’ with a D on its left to make an NP.
So, NPs don’t have to contain adjuncts. In other words, the adjunct
rule is an optional rule.
Still, the rules in (33) insist that every NP must have a determiner (the
Determiner rule) and a complement PP (the Complement rule). This
is, however, just false.
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(37) a. cheese from Greece
b. students
c. students with long hair
d. students of physics
e. students of physics with long hair
For such nouns, we can modify the determiner rule in the way we
modified the complement rule in (36).
(39) a. NP DN’ (Old Determiner Rule)
b. NP (D) N’ (New Determiner Rule)
(41) a. N’ N PP
b. N’ N
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(42) a. The [student] with long hair is dating the one with short hair.
b. This [student] works harder than that one.
c. * The [student] of chemistry was older than the one of
Physics.
How can we be sure that the node created by the complement rule
isn’t N-bar1 and the node created by the adjunct rule N-bar2?
Again by constituency test: we know that only like categories can be
co-ordinated and we find that N’ created by the two different rules
can be co-ordinated.
In addition, the pro-N’ one can refer to N0s created by either rule.
Hence we can conclude that the ‘output’ of both the rules is indeed
one kind of node, which we call N’.
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The Hierarchy
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stored on the first auxiliary work tape with the one that succeeds it in
the derivation. The second auxiliary work tape is used as an
intermediate memory, while deriving the successor of each of the
sentential forms.
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The language L(G) is accepted by the Turing machine MG, whose
transition diagram is given in Figure 4.6.1.
The components M1, M2, and M3 scan from left to right the sentential
form stored on the first auxiliary work tape. As the components scan
the tape they erase its content.
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The component M4 scans from right to left the sentential form in the
second auxiliary work tape, erasing the content of the tape during the
scanning. M4 starts scanning the sentential form in its first state,
determining that the sentential form is a string of terminal symbols if
it reaches the blank symbol B while in the first state. In such a case,
M4 transfers the control to M5. M4 determines that the sentential form
is not a string of terminal symbols if it reaches a nonterminal symbol.
In this case, M4 switches from its first to its second state.
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Consider any Turing machine M = <Q, , , , q0, B, F>. With no loss of
generality it can be assumed that M is a two auxiliary-work-tape
Turing machine , that no transition rule originates at an accepting
state, and that N = { | is in } { [q] | q is in Q } {¢, $, , , ,
#, S, A, C, D, E, F, K} is a multiset whose symbols are all distinct.
a. Production rules for generating any sentential form that has the
following pattern.
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The production rules for the nonterminal symbols S and A can
generate a string of the form ¢ a1 an$C for each possible input
a1 an of M. The production rules for the nonterminal symbols C
and D can generate a string of the form B B B B#E for each
possible segment B B B B of the first auxiliary work tape that
contains the corresponding head location. The production rules
for E and F can generate a string of the form B B B B#[q0] for
each possible segment B B B B of the second tape that
contains the corresponding head location. The production rules
for the nonterminal symbols that correspond to the states of M
can generate any sequence i1 it of transition rules of M that
starts at the initial state, ends at an accepting state, and is
compatible in the transition between the states.
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a. For each transition rule the set of production rules have
1. A production rule of the form X X for each X in {¢,
$, #}.
2. A production rule of the form a a, for each symbol
a in {¢, $} that satisfies the following condition: is a
transition rule that scans the symbol a on the input tape
without moving the input head.
3. A production rule of the form a a , for each symbol
a in {¢, $} that satisfies the following condition: is a
transition rule that scans the symbol a in the input tape
while moving the input head one position to the right.
4. A production rule of the form a b ab, for each pair
of symbols a and b in {¢, $} that satisfy the following
condition: is a transition rule that scans the symbol b in
the input tape while moving the input head one position
to the left.
5. A production rule of the form X Y for each 1 i 2,
and for each pair of symbols X and Y in that satisfy the
following condition: is a transition rule that replaces X
with Y in the ith auxiliary work tape without changing the
head position.
6. A production rule of the form X Y for each 1 i 2,
and for each pair of symbols X and Y in that satisfy the
following condition: is a transition rule that replaces X
with Y in the ith auxiliary work tape while moving the
corresponding head one position to the right.
7. A production rule of the form X Y XZ for each 1 i
2, and for each triplet of symbols X, Y, and Z in that
satisfy the following condition: is a transition rule that
replaces the symbol Y with Z in the ith auxiliary work tape
while moving the corresponding head one position to the
left.
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"simulate" the changes in the tapes of M, and the corresponding
heads position, because of the transition rule .
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C. "Simulating" production rules that correspond to (b.2-b.4) in
the proof of Theorem 4.6.2.
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Theorem 4.6.2, together with Theorem 4.5.3, implies the following
result.
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Figure 4.6.2 gives the hierarchy of some classes of languages. All the
inclusions in the hierarchy are proper
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