Semantics and the Syntactic Classification of Words

In presenting some aspects of our somewhat unusual grammar to a gathering of qomputational linguists, I feel justified in taking two things for granted: first, that most people who have taken an active interest both in computers and in natural language have come to realise that computers, although impressively fast and reliable in many tasks, are not very brilliant when it comas to making in-ductive decisions on the basis of insufficient or not thoroughly defineddata; and, second, that what we linguists know about the workings of natural ~anguage is by no means enough to supply computers, as they are, with a solid basis for the fully automatic handling of natural-language. data. This is not meant to be a disparaging comment on previous efforts in linguistics, for, after all, the contingency that has opened our eyes to these shortcomings did not exist until a few years ago. Traditional linguists,. and especially grammarians, could carry on their business quite happily on the more or less explicit assumption that language-like so many things in the still widespread Platonic view of the world-could be separated into two levels: the ideal, uncontaminated one of pure structure