view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

t/01_old_junk.t  view on Meta::CPAN

Agreement systems (as in the English paraphrases) in some languages might
disambiguate this particular case (i.e., if "pretty" showed agreement with
"school" or with "girls"), but such systems are not a general solution.  In
the languages I've read grammars of, I've never found anything approaching
a general solution to this.  So I conject:

Burke's Ambiguity Conjecture:
* All natural languages are subject to syntactic ambiguity.

And a corollary:
* Artificial languages constructed to make syntactic ambiguity impossible
will be so unnatural as to be unlearnable by humans.  (I.e., that aspect of
the language will be unlearnable.  The rest of the language might well be
quite learnable.)


Another way to say this is: the mechanism that the brain uses to generate
synactic sentences is /incapable of reliably recognizing/ (or learning to
reliably recognize) when it has produced a synactic structure that contains
ambiguity.  Or: that it's incapable of distinguishing the kinds of