Abstract
In [13], N. Chomsky says that “the main problem of immediate relevance to the theory of language is that of determining where in the hierarchy of devices the grammars of natural languages lie.” Formulated in other terms, the question is “where are the natural languages placed in the Chomsky hierarchy?” The debate started in 1959 and is not yet settled. Various arguments over English [4], Mohawk [92], Swiss German [112], Bambara [16], Chinese [95], etc., were given, refuted, rehabilitated — see pro and con arguments as well as further bibliographical information in [38] and [70]. The main difficulty is not a mathematical one but a linguistic one: what is English, what is a natural language, can we separate the syntax and the morphology from semantics or pragmatics? Whatever is or will be the position with respect to these questions, the linguists seem to agree (see again [70]) that “all” natural languages contain constructions which cannot be described by context-free grammars. Three basic such features of natural languages are:
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reduplication, leading to languages of the form {xx | x ∈ V*}
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multiple agreements, modeled by languages of the form {a n b n c n | n ≥ 1}, {a n b n c n d n | n ≥ 1}, etc.
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crossed agreements, as modeled by {a n b m c n d m | n, m ≥ 1}.
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Dassow, J., Păun, G., Salomaa, A. (1997). Grammars with Controlled Derivations. In: Rozenberg, G., Salomaa, A. (eds) Handbook of Formal Languages. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-07675-0_3
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