The Chomskybot
The Chomskybot is a PERL script that I ran across a few years ago, and it immediately leaped to mind when I first heard about this assignment. It generates prose in the style of our own famous linguist, Noam Chomsky. The program has a long and involved history, and actually began as a BASIC program to generate and mock pompous managerial doubletalk. To read more of the history, you may refer to the page about the Chomskybot maintained by John Lawler at the University of Michigan. Here is a sample of some of the prose it produces: If the position of the trace in (99c) were only relatively inaccessible to movement, the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition is, apparently, determined by the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. It must be emphasized, once again, that any associated supporting element is rather different from the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. Thus a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort delimits the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). Of course, a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds does not readily tolerate a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. It appears that the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is not to be considered in determining nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. The way it works is simple. It has four files containing initiating phrases, subject phrases, verbal phrases and terminating phrases, all taken from prose by Chomsky. To make a sentence, it grabs one of each at random and sticks them together, making sure not to repeat a phrase with a paragraph. Surprisingly, it seems to work. |
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