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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

15 points| BerislavLopac | 5 years ago |en.wikipedia.org | reply

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[+] carapace|5 years ago|reply
Chomsky's Transformational Grammar[1] was applied to transcripts of gifted psychologists (Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls) to develop the "Meta-Model"[2] and eventually Neurolinguistic Programming, a very potent and rigorous school of applied psychology.

It's also the origin of the Chomsky hierarchy "a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars."[3]

Pretty neat, eh? Computer languages and a formal working psychological toolkit both have roots in Transformational Grammar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformational_grammar

[2] https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Meta_model_(NLP)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

[+] tsimionescu|5 years ago|reply
> Neurolinguistic Programming, a very potent and rigorous school of applied psychology

"Neurolinguistic Programming" is far from "a potent and rigorous" school of anything, it is gobbledygook that has nothing to do with Chomsky's insights into linguistics.

In particular, Chomsky's work focuses on understanding the basic patterns behind language itself as a general human trait, at a very basic level, because that's all that can be studied at the moment. The concepts from Transformational Grammar and Universal Grammar are far too simple to be used in analyzing actual human speech, it would be like trying to use Newton's laws of motion to analyze how athletes run and claiming you discovered something important: pseudo-science at its worst.

[+] CameronNemo|5 years ago|reply
I ran across the Chomsky hierarchy last week while researching expression languages (like jsonnet and Nix). Really blew my mind. Made me think how we could reimagine our legal language in a more structured way.