Posted by alexandra_k on November 19, 2005, at 14:38:58
In reply to Re: wanna know something? » alexandra_k, posted by rainbowbrite on November 19, 2005, at 10:21:35
> I was reading something tht was just comma after comma. how many is too many in a sentance? I wonder if there is a limit.
Apparantly... According to the rules of formal syntax... No, there is no limit. (We limit it in practice for style and ease of comprehension apparantly). I remember being very worried about there not being a syntactic limit when I did my undergrad philosophy of language course... But apparantly with the 'no limit' thing on commas and joining sentances together with 'and' and your being allowed to string as many adjectives as you want together... Well it turns out that construed that way, language has a couple of funny properties...
Generativity - There are an indefinate number of meaningfully different sentances that you can generate from a finite number of words.
(Well... People argue whether it is an INDEFINITE amount or whether it is an INFINITE amount...)
And it follows from that one:
Novelty - There are always going to be novel sentances (that we have never encountered before) EVEN IF we never introduced any new words.And thus... Language acquisition and comprehension CANNOT be explained by the principles of behaviourism. Because... Of our ability to understand and generate novel sentances that we have never been reinforced for :-)
poster:alexandra_k
thread:580293
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20051109/msgs/580423.html