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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sowbug who wrote (1143)	4/12/1998 7:27:00 PM
From: Jack Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4710

Sowbug, I wonder how in the world computers will ever be able to speak English. I'm no programmer, but I find it hard to accept that a computer program will ever be able to embrace the nuances which we talk about daily on this thread. I don't believe that business about the monkey typing out a Shakespearean play, either. I guess I have to add the obligatory BWDIK! Jack

To: Sowbug who wrote (1143)	4/13/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: Achilles	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4710

>>Sentences like that one show that synthesis and analysis of natural language seems to require more than just an understanding of grammar.<< Sowbug, I am going to disagree with you here, or rather qualify it heavily. The issue is what is grammar and how is it created. It is useful to differentiate between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar. Prescriptive grammar is a set of rules that prescribe to us what is acceptable. It is necessary for schoolchildren (though sadly not taught anymore) and, for example, imposes noun-verb agreement on them. Prescriptive grammar is more than most people know, and sufficient for most purposes. But if you are really interested in language, as most on this thread are, you need to consider grammar as descriptive--that is, a set of rules that are reverse-engineered from language and describe what is acceptable. (These rules, of course, can then become prescriptive for those who need it.) And so, someone with prescriptive grammar only might have trouble with the sentence "he, and only he, is present", until perhaps you point out that the number of a subject can either be grammatical ('x and y should be plural') or logical ('x and y are the same, so the subject is singular'). So prescriptive grammar still works. A good example of descriptive grammar at work is the sentence that we muddled over a couple of weeks ago, 'Everyone loves their own kind', which prescriptive grammar might censure as a failure of agreement. Descriptive grammar, after establishing that this construction is well established in English usage (since the 16th century), that it is used by good authors, and that it is euphonic to the modern ear, sets out to explain it. After mulling it over for a couple weeks, I would now explain it as a lexicographical evolution: that the word 'their' in such sentences has come to function as a singular, gender-nonspecific, adjective. Again, however, the rules of prescriptive grammar end up working.