While working on my dissertation in physics at the University of Chicago right after the second world war it occurred to me that the newly emerging computer technology might be able to help with other things beside computing, for example translating languages.

On graduation in 1953, I went to MIT to become the second person to be employed full time on the problem of machine translation. Important papers of that era introduced the three-step transfer model of machine translation and specified the architecture of the COMIT programming language designed for use by linguists. COMIT was later used by Bell Labs as a basis for their language SNOBOL. With the COMIT language we were able to write computer programs that would produce sentences to order at random following the rules of a grammar. The method of random generation proved very effective in writing complex grammars that were internally consistent and testing them against what informants would accept as grammatical. This work led to the gradual realization that linguistic theory was not advanced enough as a science.

An early computer program to produce English sentences to order led to the "depth hypothesis," that syntactic tree structures are restricted in their left branching but unrestricted in their right branching and that this might be caused by language becoming adapted through historical processes to the limited temporary memory of the human brain. Difficulties in testing this hypothesis further underlined the questionable scientific status of generally accepted linguistic theory.

Moving to Chicago in 1965, I began searching for ways to overcome what now loomed as very serious problems in the foundations of linguistics. It seemed that what was true about the depth hypothesis was due to the degree to which it modeled speakers and its problems stemmed from the degree to which it rested on traditional unscientific assumptions tracing back to ancient Greek philosophy and normative grammar. The newly emerging videotape technology allowed an examination of the use of temporary memory in guiding the speech and turn-taking behavior of people engaged in conversation. This research turned up the phenomena called the "back channel." It also led to the observation of people forgetting what they were going to say, which provided new support for the depth hypothesis. Further support came from comparing its predictions with the studies of Charles C. Fries and his students in the 1930's on the historical changes of the English genitive from 900 to 1300 A.D. Efforts to model what people do when they speak and understand led to the Simplex notation and a computer model written in FORTH that ran on a PC in 1986.

The result of several decades of research has led to the laying of new foundations for general linguistics that I think overcome most or all of its problems stemming from ancient Aristotelian and Stoic semiotic theory and the philosophical and grammatical traditions that have been unquestioningly accepted in modern linguistics. A short introduction to this work is the attached paper "Two foundations for linguistics briefly compared."

 Two foundations for linguistics briefly compared
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 Page created July 22, 1997
Last updated November 20, 1998