[retrac]

You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.

eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.

Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."

Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.

Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.

But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.

To the mind not natural Yoda's speech is.

[gerdesj]

Language cannot be decoupled from what it is trying to work with. It is a tool! We can manipulate the air in such a way with our mouths that ears can hear.

I don't think there is anything wrong with allowing a small amount of "world knowledge" to guide language parsing - the world caused language to "be" not the other way around.

Anyway whenever, outside of smoking crack, did a girl get eaten by a biscuit? Never, so that phase is unambiguous.

Object before subject: I'll grant you that - its a probable sign of madness or a green puppet.

Me, really? You screamed!