Building a psychologically plausible sentence generator
The psychological process of translating semantic into syntactic structures has dynamic properties such as the following. (1) The speaker is able to start pronouncing an utterance before having worked out the semantic
content he wishes to express. Selection of semantic content and
construction of syntactic form proceed partially in parallel. (2) The human sentence generator takes as input not only a specification of semantic content but also some indication of desired syntactic shape. Such indications, if present, do not complicate the generation process but make it easier. (3) Certain regularities of speech errors suggest a two-stage
generation process. Stage I constructs the “syntactic skeleton” of an utterance; stage II provides the skeleton with morpho- honological information. An outline is given of the type of grammar which is used by a sentence generation system embodying these characteristics. The system is being
implemented on a computer.
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