What Kind of Language is English?

• English is Context Free.[Gazdar, G., ``NLs, CFLs, and CF-PSGs'', in Sparck Jones, K. and Wilks, Y., Eds., Automatic Natural Language Processing, Ellis Horwood Ltd., West Sussex, England, 1983.]

• English is not Context Free.[Higginbotham, J., ``English is Not a Context Free Language'', Linguistic Inquiry 15, 119-126, 1984.]

• English is Regular:
  • English consists of finite strings from a finite vocabulary.

  • English is recognized by people with finite memory.

  • There is no evidence that peoples' parsing time is more then O(n) .