Abstract
Transmitting information by means of a natural language like Chinese, English, or German is a real and well-structured procedure. This becomes evident when we attempt to communicate with people who speak a foreign language. Even if the information we want to convey is completely clear to us, we will not be understood by our hearers if we fail to use their language adequately.
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As an example of such an aspect, A. Turing 1950, p. 434, mentions the artificial recreation of human skin.
See also CoL, p. 317.
In 1903, the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright succeeded with the first manned motorized flight.
Irrational reasons against a modeling of natural communication reside in the subconscious fear of creating artificial beings resembling humans and having superhuman powers. Such homunculi, which occur in the earliest of mythologies, are regarded widely as violating a tabu. The tabu of doppelganger similarity is described in Girard 1974.
Besides dark versions of homunculi, such as the cabalistically inspired Golem and the electrically initialized creature of the surgeon Dr. Frankenstein, the literature provides also more lighthearted variants. Examples are the piano-playing doll automata of the 18th century, based on the anatomical and physical knowledge of their time, and the mechanical beauty singing and dancing in The tales of Hoffmann. More recent is the robot C3P0 in George Lucas’ film Star Wars,which represents a positive view of human-like robots.
Though this may seem quite reasonable from the viewpoint of sparrows.Introduction
Examples are nativism, behavorism, structuralism, speech act theory, model theory, as well Givón’s iconicity, Lieb’s neostructuralism, and Halliday’s systemic approach.
Known by acronyms such as TG (with its different manifestations ST, EST, REST, and GB), LFG, GPSG, HPSG, CG, CCG, CUG, FUG, UCG, etc. These theories of grammar concentrate mostly on an initial foundation of internal truths such as ‘psychological reality,’ ‘innate knowledge,’ ‘explanatory adequacy,’ ’universals,’ ’principles,’ etc., based on suitably selected examples. Cf. Section 9. 5
From a history of science point of view, the fragmentation of today’s linguistics resembles the state of astrology and astronomy before Kepler and Newton.
Moreover, the structural hypothesis of the SLIM theory of language is a regular, strictly time-linear derivation order — in contrast to grammar systems based on constituent structure. The functional explanation of SLIM is designed to model the mechanism of natural communication as a speaking robot — and not some tacit language knowledge innate in the speaker-hearer which excludes language use (performance). The mathematical model of SLIM is the continuation-based algorithm of LA-grammar, — and not the substitution-based algorithms of the last 50 years.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hausser, R. (1999). Introduction. In: Foundations of Computational Linguistics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03920-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03920-5_1
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