Deforesting Lf

This grand aspiration subsumes the more modest research goal of simply characterizing the knowledge that people have of their native languages. Given this overlap in aims, it makes sense to leverage whatever is known about language itself in the pursuit of computational models of language use. Indeed, in confronting such a daunting challenge it would be foolish to waste intellectual resources doing the same job twice. Since linguistics, as a field, includes a large community whose professional goal is the formal specification of knowledge of language, a sensible methodology would somehow include the results of linguists’ efforts — grammars — in model language users. This idea, known as the Competence Hypothesis dates back to the earliest days of generative grammar.