Linguistic Applications
Chomsky initially hoped to overcome the limitations of context-free grammars by adding transformation rules.
Such rules are another standard device in traditional linguistics; e.g. passivization in English. Much of generative grammar has been devoted to finding ways of refining the descriptive mechanisms of phrase-structure grammar and transformation rules such that exactly the kinds of things can be expressed that natural language actually allows. Allowing arbitrary transformations doesn't meet that goal: they are much too powerful, being Turing complete unless significant restrictions are added (e.g. no transformations that introduce and then rewrite symbols in a context-free fashion).
Chomsky's general position regarding the non-context-freeness of natural language has held up since then, although his specific examples regarding the inadequacy of context-free grammars (CFGs) in terms of their weak generative capacity were later disproved. Gerald Gazdar and Geoffrey Pullum have argued that despite a few context-sensitive constructions in natural language (such as cross-serial dependencies in Swiss German and reduplication in Bambara), the vast majority of forms in natural language are indeed context-free.
Read more about this topic: Context-free Grammar
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“It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say “that is red” instead of “that reddens,” either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.”
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