Status Updates From Syntactic Structures

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I did my best to work out the examples in §7 on paper. I lost him when he started explaining how the transformational rules proposed throughout the section would cover the exceptions of “to be” and “to have” as main verbs; I figure it’s more likely that my own math was wrong, so I kinda nodded and moved along. I do see how a grammatical model along such lines is elegant and easily expressed

§5, on the limitations of phrase structure analysis, made sense; I can see how it becomes unmanageable to describe the full set of grammatical constructions solely through a set of simple production rules. As for §6, I got pretty lost when he explained how a less ambitious theory of linguistic structure can resolve outstanding controversies about linguistic levels and the relationships between them.

§4 on constituency analysis made more sense to me than the previous section, so I probably ought to review some more proofs regarding that key theorem about finite state languages. In my own linguistics education I was never once asked to do any sort of logical proof. Hopefully with time and study I will not feel so hopelessly inadequate

I get the gist so far but because he’s mostly glossing over the proofs there was something I didn’t get. In §3, he illustrates that English is not a finite state language with examples of English sentence structures allowing for the production of symmetrical strings. Essentially I am failing to see how the English structures “have all the mirror image properties” of the example non–finite state language