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A comment on Apology critics who want to teach you how to say you’re sorry (2017). Parent comment

Re:Apology critics who want to teach you how to say you’re s... by foldr on Tuesday February 09, 2021 @07:07AM (#26076546)
>English does not have a context free grammar.

Pedantic note: the 'context' in context free grammar has no relation to the kind of context you're talking about here. It's a very technical notion.

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Re:Apology critics who want to teach you how to say you’re s... by DarkWiiPlayer on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @04:17AM (#26087068)
We're talking about the linguistic concept of grammar, not the mathematical one, which makes a huge difference here.
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Re:Apology critics who want to teach you how to say you’re s... by foldr on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @04:31AM (#26087161)
As a linguist, I can assure you that there is no 'linguistic' concept of a context-free grammar as distinct from the mathematical concept.

A language being non-context-free just means that the string language doesn't fall within a certain class. It in fact took quite a while to show conclusively that English was not context-free; it's far from obvious.

None of this has anything to do with 'context' in the sense we're talking about here.

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