Re: history of generative grammars

Helmut Richter wrote:
- Is it true that neither in linguistics nor in computer science any
type of grammar more general than context-free has ever played a
practical role?

What do you mean by "more general"? Up and down
the chomsky levels? Up you find context sensitive
languages down. Down you find regular expressions.

Computer languages are often not
context free languages. As soon as you have
some arguments attached to the production rules
of a context free grammar, you don't have
any more a context free grammar per se.

Also all the nice algorithms for efficient
parsing are based on some extension of
context free grammars. For example if you
add some look a head rules, strictly speaking
you are not using a context free grammar anymore.

Whereby diverting from context free gammars
as described above, leads to context sensitive
languages. Some have found regular expressions
helpful in stream search and editing.

So the answer is:
- more simple AND more complex grammars play a role,
you will easily find journals on that

- Is it true that there is only one spot in history where linguists
and mathematicians have met: when the latter took over the term
"context-free" from the former, nearly without any results beyond
the mere definitions?

Based on similar arguments as above, pure context
free grammars are also totally useless for computer
linguistics. But computer linguistics deals with
more than only surface structure of a language.

So if you count mathematical logic also to mathematics,
then mathematics can offer much more to computer
linguistics than only grammars. Namely in the
domain of semantics and pragmatics mathematical
logic is very useful.

So the answer is:
- there are many more spots where computer linguistics
and mathematics meet, you will easily find journals on that

Bye
.

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