"No matter how we ultimately decide to construct linguistic theory, we shall surely require that the grammar of any language must be finite. It follows that only a countable set of grammars is made available by any linguistic theory; hence that uncountably many languages, in our general sense, are literally not describable in terms of the conception of linguistic structure provided by any particular theory. Given a proposed theory of linguistic structure, then, it is always appropriate to ask the following question:
(3) Are there interesting languages that are simply outside the range of description of the proposed type?
In particular, we shall ask whether English is such a language. If it is, then the proposed conception of linguistic structure must be judged inadequate. If the answer to (3) is negative, we go on to ask such questions as the following:
(4) Can we construct reasonably simple grammars for all interesting languages?
(5) Are such grammars "revealing" in the sense that the syntactic structure that they exhibit can support semantic analysis, can provide insight into the use and understanding of language, etc.?"
Versteht jemand was Chomsky (1956) damit sagen will? Ich habe das jetzt 1000mal gelesen, aber komme irgendwie nicht drauf...
Quelle: Chomsky, Noam (1956). "
Three models for the description of language". In: IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2 (3): 113–124.