Is my parser broken?
Here is a quote, ironically, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition :
My parsing of this sentence is a) Noam Chomsky is dead, and b) Eric Lenneberg might or might not be alive now, but he was when Chomsky died, and has stopped arguing for the innateness hypothesis since Chomsky's death.
Apparently, whoever wrote this sentence did not intend that. What's the deal with forward-referencing pronouns? Is my language analyzer broken, or is the author's language synthesizer broken?
UPD: Was meant to be posted as http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/2569015.html
For fifty years, linguist Noam Chomsky and, before his death, Eric Lenneberg, strongly argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning.
My parsing of this sentence is a) Noam Chomsky is dead, and b) Eric Lenneberg might or might not be alive now, but he was when Chomsky died, and has stopped arguing for the innateness hypothesis since Chomsky's death.
Apparently, whoever wrote this sentence did not intend that. What's the deal with forward-referencing pronouns? Is my language analyzer broken, or is the author's language synthesizer broken?
UPD: Was meant to be posted as http://community.livejournal.com/linguaphiles/2569015.html