Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k years ago: hypothesis

Re:Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k ye... by kazinator on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @02:26PM (#20627972)

Nope; these sentences share a common root-level grammar production, that's all.

They are not identical. They are similar at this production step:

  S -> subj verb obj

The verb is common:

  verb -> ... -> bit

So we have the same overall sentence pattern with the same verb, in the same tense.

Other than that, the derivation diverges:

  subj -> ... -> a dog
  subj -> ... -> my friend

You can't just ignore substructure differences and symbol identities in comparing trees!

Of course, any two things are the same, if you choose to ignore anything that is different and define "sameness" that way.

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Re:Recursive language and modern imagination acquired 70k ye... by chowells on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @08:37PM (#20631029)

Ignoring the symbols is exactly what is meant by "the grammar" of a sentence. Two things are grammatically the same if they use the same grammar productions when parsing/producing.

This isn't conveniently bending definitions to make myself sound correct. This is the specific technical definition that was worked out by linguists in their empirical examination of language (and later adopted by computer scientists because it happens to work nicely with programming languages too). It might not match with some colloquial uses, but it's a reasonable assumption that an article discussing linguistics would be using the precise linguistic definition.

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