Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id FAA03028 for ; Mon, 27 Nov 1995 05:03:09 -0500 Message-Id: <199511271003.FAA03028@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 0B4FA7CE ; Mon, 27 Nov 1995 5:52:49 -0400 Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 04:50:52 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: misc responses to And #2 X-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Mon Nov 27 05:03:11 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU >> I again cite center embedding as a well-known example both of the limits >> of recursion and of formal grammatical structures. > >That's no good. I've already told you that's a special case. Plus, >centre embedding does not result in nonsense, though it does result >in unacceptability. As far as I am concerned,as a native English speaker, a 10-level center embeddding is just as much nonsense as, for example, taking a perfectly grammatical sentence and writing the words in reverse order. One happens to be permitted by Chomskyan recursive transformations, and the other is not, but neither is acceptable, grammtical or whatever. Whatever or grammtical, acceptable is neither but, not is other the and, transformations recursive Chomskyan by permitted be to happens one. lojbab