Reversal linguistics in explorations

“Geoffrey Sampson defends the extraordinary claim that there is no theoretically significant non-quantitative linguistic difference between a sentence of English and a string composed of the same words in the opposite order. Let me put that a different way. Order opposite the in words same the of composed string a and English of sentence a between difference linguistic non-quantitative significant theoretically no is there that claim extraordinary the defends Sampson Geoffrey.”

So writes professor Geoffrey K. Pullum (now Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland) in Ungrammaticality, Rarity, and Corpus Use Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, Volume 3, Issue 1, Pages 33–47.

The Geoffrey Sampson, to whom professor Geoffrey Pullum is referring, is now a research fellow at the University of South Africa, previously Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK.

Divided be might opinions, seems it, thus.