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I've found myself engrossed in studying the formal language/grammar theory lately. Yet, I can't solve every problem I stumble upon along the way. From my experience, StackExchange Linguistics users are not keen on such questions as my CFG-related posts get downvotes and votes-to-close.

I understand that the completely formal Chomsky-style approach is pretty much rudimentary at this point, yet those problems are still a neat puzzle which historically gave rise to some mathematical structures used by linguists.

What is the reason behind such attitude? Should I consider any other StackExchange site when I want to ask a question of such sort?

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  • I don't really feel strongly for or against allowing these questions, but are you aware that these questions are better welcomed at Computer Science as long as you show your work? (recent CFG questions) – Keelan Apr 2 at 9:10
  • @Keelan thank you. I will consider this site. I’m still a bit clumsy with Stack Exchange - I’m sort of new. – Zhiltsoff Igor Apr 2 at 9:34
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There are many academic fields where there are schemas that unite lots of phenomena.

For example, consider how chemistry broadly covers and unites molecular physics, to organic and inorganic chemistry, to molecular biology, neurochemistry, etc.

Formal language theory concerns sequences of tokens, and covers Turing machines, finite state machines, natural human languages, programming languages, data formats, etc. One famous linguist Noam Chomsky, came up with one system for organising these systems, the Chomsky hierarchy. The Chomsky hierarchy can be used to consider many types of sequences, including natural human languages. Natural human languages can be considered within the framework of the Chomsky hierarchy to see which aspects of language could be analysed as which level of the heirarchy.

But at all times the topic of this site remains about linguistics proper, the study of natural human languages. Questions about context-free grammar that are not about human languages are not part of the scope of this site and are strictly off-topic. You will need to go elsewhere to ask questions about them. There are several SE science sites which CFG questions may fit, depending on the specific question.

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