Axioms for Natural Language Processing

  1. Language is a faculty only possessed by humans.
  2. Language is recursive.
    1. Corollary: language is able to generate an infinite number of natural language expressions using only a finite number of symbols.
  3. The internal system of thought generation is unordered.
    1. Corollary: the propositional structure of thought has no innate subject, verb, object order distinction (or some variation thereof).
  4. The externalisation process of thought is necessarily linearly ordered.
  5. The sensory-motor systems used to externalise thought existed prior to the faculty of language.
    1. Corollary: externalisations of thought are not language.
    2. Corollary: true language is the internal system that generates thought.
  6. Every natural language makes the noun-verb grammatical distinction, but not all require an explicit subject in the sentence (i.e. null-subject languages).