13 July 2009
Infinite Sentences
Posted by bsypniewski under: foundations .
Infinite sentencesThere is a linguistic truism that “language” can create an infinite number of sentences. This claim is made frequently, usually in passing, and, as far as I have been able to determine, never critically. I have become interested in the foundations of modern linguistics and the infinite sentence claim is one of the bases of the discipline.
If one takes the notion of the “infinite” seriously as it appears in mathematics and related disciplines and applies that notion to “language”, one finds that the purpose of the claim is not to describe an observed aspect of reality but to support the need for “language” to have a “grammar”. If “language” can truly generate an infinite number of “sentences” (the linguistic notion of the sentence is confused with the logical/mathematical/computer science notion of a “string” of characters with no intrinsic semantical meaning), most of the “sentences” generated will be either meaningless (in the semantic sense), gibberish (in the sense of a meaningless collection of characters), or in some way defective. “Grammar” comes to the rescue by determining which of these random sentences are acceptable for human communication.
For this to work, human communication must be, essentially, random. But we know that human communications are NOT essentially random. This raises the serious question of the purpose of “grammar”. If there is no need to distinguish between good and bad sentences, what is the purpose of grammar?
Sypniewski, Bernard. 2008. Infinite sentences. LACUS Forum Click here for the PDF: infinitesentences02.pdf