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I wouldn't presume to speak for jheem; but, having preposed that, maybe it's the difference between sheep and bison?! a herd of buffalo (hi eta!) is a lot more prepossessing than a flock of sheep, after all.
or maybe he's pulling our collective leg.. naah.
Last edited by tsuwm; 02/10/11 10:39 PM.
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What ís the difference between a flock and a herd?
A flock takes a plural verb, but a herd does not. They're the same thing as far as the referents go.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I've forgotten most of my algebra/geometry, Zm....
But I do get some of it.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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old hand
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OP
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. Syntactically, the noun phrase, the trail of ants, is the subject of the sentence. Subject verb concord would be based on the head noun phrase the trail. How you handle the verb, singular versus plural, does have something to do with how you interpret the whole NP, the trail of ants. I would treat a flock of sheep as plural, but a herd of bison as singular: e.g., "A flock of sheep were cropping my lawn", but "a herd of bison was blocking the road". Thanks. That is useful to know. How would you treat "a trail of ants" - with the verb concord based on the noun or NP?
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old hand
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I was thinking more along the lines of variable substitution. You can have the following (simple) grammatical rule:
S -> NP VP
NP -> det N (PP)
PP -> prep NP
VP -> V (NP) (PP)
det -> a | an | the
N -> dog | cat | book | bird | pond
prep -> on | at | by
V reads | loves | eats
So, the follow are valid or (*) invalid sentences licensed by this grammar:
The dog ate the book.
A cat reads a book by the pond.
*A car ran over my dog.
etc.
It's way more complicated than that with nodes being headed by certain words or subnodes, etc.
Way Interesting! Does that mean we can get a computer to form sentences through programming grammar?
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I would treat a flock of sheep as plural, but a herd of bison as singular: e.g., "A flock of sheep were cropping my lawn", but "a herd of bison was blocking the road". In this case it's the individual sheep that were cropping your lawn, not the flock. On the other hand, it's really the herd that's blocking the road, not any of the individual bisons. I would say that the flock of sheep was blocking the road and the herd of bison were cropping my lawn.
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Ooh, I loved diagramming sentences...and geometry too! Thanks for the links, zmjezhd. One of external links at the bottom of the first one lets you type in any sentence, and it will diagram it for you--what fun!
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----please, draw me a sheep----
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Does that mean we can get a computer to form sentences through programming grammar?
Yes, you can use these kinds of grammars to parse sentences and generate them. The actual grammars are way more complicated than my little toy snippet was. There's a whole field of study called computational linguistics that works on this very thing. There are also statistical grammars and n-grams and all kinds of cool stuff. A decent university library should have some books on it. Or I can give you some pointers if you wish.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Yes thanks. I would be interested to know more, but do dumb it down a bit. I am not as well informed as you in grammar or computers, and some times your posts I find hard to understand. The grammar as variable substitution post I understood ferpectly though.
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