![]() ![]() ![]() Linguists constrain their theories by requiring them to be "barely sufficient". If you want to produce a description of the sentences of a language, this must be an adequate theory: if you intended to throw light onto human linguistic processes, then the theory is inadequate. A theory can be adequate at different levels: for instance, it might describe all possible sentences that a language includes (and no other sentences) but not give any insight into how a brain produces these sentences. Linguists evaluate their theories by criteria of adequacy. If you are a pessimist, you'll view being described as "barely sufficient" as a negative way of looking at things: if you are an optimist, you'll see that being "barely sufficient" means that something may have been achieved with the minimum of resources. The way you think about these words is similar to the joke about the optimist and the pessimist. Think about the words: barely sufficient. This much is obvious: we want a description to cover everything we're trying to describe, otherwise we would be unable to describe some things we know to exist. The idea of evaluating a theory by adequacy is that the theory should be sufficient to describe or explain the observed phenomenon. proportionate ( to the requirements) sufficient, satisfactory barely sufficient hence adequacy. ![]() My desktop dictionary (an edition of The Concise Oxford dictionary)has the following definition:Īdequate a. We have to be certain we know what we mean by adequacy. A key word used by linguists is adequacy. We must have some way of evaluating our statements about language. The Notational adequacy of Finite State Automata.The Mathematical adequacy of Finite State Automata.Also Finite State Automata descriptions of the syntax of natural language are repetitious and long-winded. However, it is possible to show that any Finite State Automata cannot model some language constructs, for instance centre-embedded phrases. It is possible to use Finite State Networks to recognise many acceptable English sentences. SEM1A5 - Part 3 - The adequacy of Finite State Automata The adequacy of Finite State Automata for syntactic processing ![]()
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