Language Hierarchy
Possibly the most applied result in combinatorics on words is the Chomsky hierarchy, developed by Noam Chomsky. He studied formal language in the 1950s. His way of looking at language simplified the subject. He disregards the actual meaning of the word, does not consider certain factors such as frequency and context, and applies patterns of short terms to all length terms. The basic idea of Chomsky's work is to divide language into four levels, or the language hierarchy. The four levels are: regular, context-free, context-sensitive, and computably enumerable or unrestricted. Regular is the least complex while computably enumerable is the most complex. While his work grew out of combinatorics on words, it drastically affected other disciplines, especially computer science.
Read more about this topic: Combinatorics On Words
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or hierarchy:
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990)