Re: re:What is branching

From: Greg Lee (greg_at_ling.lll.hawaii.edu)
Date: 12/20/04 

Date: 20 Dec 2004 15:41:36 GMT

endipatterson <endipatterson@yahoo-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote:
> I'm an EFL teacher, and I think my knowlege of grammar is better than
> most EFL teachers and I used to work as a chemical analyst, but I
> must admit that I'm getting a bit lost here. Most of what has been
> written seems to be aproaching a mathematical codification of
> language, yet I don't see any evidence that when so encoded,
> mathematical operations can be performed.

The idea is more to be explicit than it is to be "mathematical".

> It doesn't seem to have any
> pedagogical use for language learners, and I'm not even sure that it
> gives native speakers a deeper insight into their own language.

No, it doesn't seem to. It would be nice if it did, but that's
really not the point. Linguistics is focussed on characterizing
what native speakers and language learners already know, rather
than helping them to find out things they don't know.

> Above
> all else, what is the point of all this.

Discovering how human language works. 

-- 
Greg Lee <greg@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>

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