[Avery Andrews 930127.1000]
Bill Powers (930126.0830)
Your description of `gaia failure' is pretty much how I heard the onset
of diabetes described once.
As for linguistics, what the grammars are supposed to do is define
a set of constraints, to which others can be added. What these
constraints do is give you a limited number of OK pairings of overt
strings (utterances) and semantic structures. Then their can be additional
constraints added, such that the structure be one involving a
certain overt string (that's parsing) or semantic structure (that's
production). So I don't really see what the problem is in general
terms, tho the specifics are obviously a mess, & I think the notion
of `semantic structure' is especially dubious (but have no coherent
ideas about what to replace it with).
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au