Re: Can a grammar checker do this

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

"David Downing" wrote:


>I ordinarily shun grammar checkers (for all the reasons many other folks
>shun them) but there is one error I was thinking they might help me find
>-- the typo which is itself a real word and thus goes unnoticed by the
>spell checker.  ("Your bank may refuse to honor your check, even is you
>have enough money in your account.")  

Word's grammar checker actually finds this sort of thing quite handily. In fact it finds a good number of errors quite handily. The principal problem with it is that people who have a weak grasp of English grammar assume the grammar checker is always correct. It isn't, but you know that.


I recall that long before anybody
>even thought of word processors, a linguist* had the idea of using a
>computer to assess the grammatical correctness of a sentence by
>searching for it a database of pre-existing published writing of all
>kinds.  The fewer instances of the sentence in the database, the more
>likely it was to be grammatically incorrect.  

I'd place the likelihood that this was Noam Chomsky at around 0.001 percent. But I could be wrong.

Turns out this isn't a
>reliable measure of grammatical correctness**, but maybe you could use a
>variation of it to at least show you strings of two or three words that
>occur very rarely, and are thus suspect.  

Actually you may be misremembering the whole thing (at least I hope you are). One of Chomsky's early observations was that any child can produce a huge number of grammatical utterances in his or her native language that have never been spoken before.



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Now's a great time to buy RoboHelp! You'll get SnagIt screen capture
software and a $200 onsite training voucher FREE when you buy RoboHelp
Office or RoboHelp Enterprise. Hurry, this offer expires February 28, 2002. www.ehelp.com/techwr

Have you looked at the new content on TECHWR-L lately?
See http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ and check it out.

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit 
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.