Recursion Isn’t Necessary for Human Language Processing: NEAR (Non-iterative Explicit Alternatives Rule) Grammars are Superior
| Autor: | Derek Partridge, Kenneth R. Paap |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: |
Theoretical computer science
Computer science business.industry Left recursion Computer Science::Computation and Language (Computational Linguistics and Natural Language and Speech Processing) Parsing expression grammar Context-free grammar Mutual recursion Philosophy TheoryofComputation_MATHEMATICALLOGICANDFORMALLANGUAGES Recursive language Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence Equivalence (formal languages) business Context-sensitive language Generative grammar |
| Zdroj: | Minds and Machines. 24:389-414 |
| ISSN: | 1572-8641 0924-6495 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11023-014-9341-y |
| Popis: | Language sciences have long maintained a close and supposedly necessary coupling between the infinite productivity of the human language faculty and recursive grammars. Because of the formal equivalence between recursion and non-recursive iteration; recursion, in the technical sense, is never a necessary component of a generative grammar. Contrary to some assertions this equivalence extends to both center-embedded relative clauses and hierarchical parse trees. Inspection of language usage suggests that recursive rule components in fact contribute very little, and likely nothing significant, to linguistic creativity. Further than this, if the productivity of human language is considered as not rigidly bound, but not infinite, then the need for any sort of iteration in generative grammars vanishes and can be replaced with a Non-iterative Explicit Alternatives Rule grammar. The knock-on effects of dispensing with recursive (or any iterative) grammar components are: that language diversity can simply be based on rule and lexicon combinatorics with no potentially infinite dimensions derived from recursive or iterative components of rules; the oddity of a vast, multiply-infinite competence set of `grammatical but unacceptable' productions is gone; and the development of a language faculty based on rules that eschew iterative rule components avoids any need for explaining `special' mechanisms. On the broader front of searching for the mechanisms of mind, our analysis can be similarly applied to the proposals for a recursive basis for mind as an explanation for humanity's great leap forward. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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