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Mike S., On 24/09/2012 15:46:
On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 3:25 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote:
The main reason I haven't been able to make any useful comment on this is lack of time to digest and lack of the mental acuity necessary to grock the scheme in the course of a first reading. Partly also, though, to understand it I'd have to rewrite the rewrite rules into something more like natlang syntax. On the whole, natlang syntax is driven by combinatorial properties of the terminal nodes, and credible candidates for exocentric constructions are few. For a loglang, I'd formulate the rules as the syntagmatic relations established for each word during a L-to-R parse with no backtracking or lookahead.
Is there a specific part that you are unable to grock? Can you grock
the currently official grammar? If not, I'd be happy to explain the
gist of BNF. Or is there something specific about my notation and
explanations that throws you off? If I am too brief then please ask.
I do not wish to be cryptic.
I understand BNF notation; I just can't translate it at a glance into something more linguistic (like, say, X' syntax). I can translate it only laboriously. And because my thinking is based in linguistics rather than computer science, I can only understand the syntax once it is translated into linguistic terms. Human language syntax is based on combinatorial properties of words, and exocentric phrases, if they exist at all, do not occur willynilly. In practice, this just means that to comprehend your proposals, I'd have to sit down and translate them into a formalism that makes sense to me, and that takes more time than I have at the moment, what with me no longer being on holiday. It doesn't mean you've been too brief or cryptic. If you did want to translate into a formalism easy for me to grock, then I'd say: assume, as far as possible, that (i) there is no syntagmatic relation other than an asymmetric complement-of relation, and (ii) all nodes are terminal (or, all phrases are endocentric). --And.