Are most sentences unique? An empirical examination of Chomskyan claims
A repeated claim in linguistics is that the majority of linguistic utterances are unique. For example, Pinker (1994: 10), summarizing an argument by Noam Chomsky, states that "virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe." With the increased availability of large corpora, this is a claim that can be empirically investigated. The current paper addresses the question by using the NLTK …
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.page