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by foldr 1957 days ago
>English does not have a context free grammar.

Pedantic note: the 'context' in context free grammar has no relation to the kind of context you're talking about here. It's a very technical notion.

1 comments

We're talking about the linguistic concept of grammar, not the mathematical one, which makes a huge difference here.
As a linguist, I can assure you that there is no 'linguistic' concept of a context-free grammar as distinct from the mathematical concept.

A language being non-context-free just means that the string language doesn't fall within a certain class. It in fact took quite a while to show conclusively that English was not context-free; it's far from obvious.

None of this has anything to do with 'context' in the sense we're talking about here.