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And Rosta scripsit: > 'Parsing' without 'really parsing', involves assigning meaningless > and potentially arbitrary structures to phonological strings. This > is what the English parsers I knew back in the day did, and what > Lojban parsers do. Whereas real processing of language involves taking > phonological strings as input, and outputting a logical form -- i.e. > decoding. The problem is terminological, then. We computer weenies understand "parsing" as the process of going from linear tokens to purely syntactic structures (hopefully not quite arbitrary, though they may have arbitrary bits here and there). Everything past that is "semantic processing". > Maybe with programming languages the isomorphism between form > and meaning is so close that assigning structures to form very > straightforwardly translates into the structures of meaning. But > natlangs aren't like that, and engelangs that do that are too verbose. There is always at least some semantic processing. Variables (anaphora) have to be dealt with, and in most languages types (subcategorization restrictions) as well. -- [W]hen I wrote it I was more than a little John Cowan febrile with foodpoisoning from an antique carrot cowan@hidden.email that I foolishly ate out of an illjudged faith http://ccil.org/~cowan in the benignancy of vegetables. --And Rosta