For Those Who like Chomski

Diamond Cross · 02-03-2007, 02:44 PM

The Chomski bot!

The Chomskybot

Excerp:

Q: What the hell is this, anyway?
A: About fifteen years ago a former student sent me a program called foggy that had been circulating underground at IBM which artfully made fun of pompous administrators and their jargon. It was in an internal IBM language, and I translated it into BASIC and Pascal. It was a cute program, but essentially very simple.
Somewhat later, I chanced on the Folklore Paper Construction Kit as quoted in Dwight Bolinger's prize-winning Language: The Loaded Weapon, and added its vocabulary of phrases as another option.
Finally, I met Anthony Aristar and he shared with me a similar program ( in Lisp) he'd written with phrases collected from the syntactic works of Noam Chomsky. That was the origin of The Chomskybot. It was easy to add these phrases, too. Anthony says he was given these phrases in another program, and didn't know who actually collected them. However, since the Chomskybot has become semi-famous, we have been able to identify the original author as John F. Sowa, who admits putting the phrases together from several of Chomsky's books, including Syntactic Structures, Aspects, and Government and Binding at IBM in the 1980's. Since the real ingenuity in the Chomskybot is the way the phrases fit together, both Anthony and I are delighted to acknowledge Mr. Sowa as The Onlie Begetter of the Chomskybot. (Though we do notice that he hasn't owned up to it on his Web site yet

An example of a paragraph:

It may be, then, that a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort delimits problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. It must be emphasized, once again, that the notion of level of grammaticalness does not readily tolerate irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. So far, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial can be defined in such a way as to impose an important distinction in language use. Let us continue to suppose that the descriptive power of the base component is rather different from a parasitic gap construction. For one thing, any associated supporting element suffices to account for nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory.

RMNIXON · 02-03-2007, 05:54 PM

A couple of scientists I know have a name for this. They call it a "word salad." It looks intellectual to someone who does not know a subject well enough, but is pure B.S. all the same......