dialect (Webster Dictionary) - a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language

differentiating signs - non-alphabet characters that enable words to be distinguished. These can include capital letters, italics and accents.

discourse - a complete text or conversation

frames / scripts (Obermeier, 1989)- a way of representing knowledge as chunks of information, which are actually data structures that represent stereotypical situations.

idioms (Webster Dictionary) - the syntactical, grammatical, or structural form peculiar to an individual language

language [1] (Maslov, 1975) - a system of elements, possessed by a certain group, with constitutes units of different levels (words, significant parts of words, etc.) plus a set of rules governing the usage of these units. The system of units is called the vocabulary of the language, while the system of rules for creating and understanding intelligible statements is called the grammar of this language.

language [2] (Webster Dictionary) - the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community

language [3] (Webster Dictionary) - a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalised signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings

language [4] (Webster Dictionary) - a formal system of signs and symbols (as FORTRAN or a calculus in logic) including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions

MT - machine translation

metonymy - the study of metaphors and their actual meanings

morphemes (Webster Dictionary) - a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful parts

morphology - the components, called morphemes, that make up words

NLP - natural language parsing

phonemes (Webster Dictionary) - a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful parts

phonology - the sounds that combine to form language

phrase (Webster Dictionary) - a word or group of words forming a syntactic constituent with a single grammatical function (e.g. "under the bridge", or "before breakfast")

pragmatics - the study of appropriate conversation content

prosody - the study of rhythm and intonation of language

semantics - the way that order and word components indicate meaning

sentences - a package of language that may or may not contain enough information to derive meaning (ie. context is important)

slang (Webster Dictionary) - an informal nonstandard vocabulary composed typically of coinages, arbitrarily changed words, and extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech

syllables (Webster Dictionary) - a unit of spoken language that is next bigger than a speech sound and consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or of a syllabic consonant alone or of either with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following

syntax (Webster Dictionary) - the part of grammar dealing with the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form constituents (as phrases or clauses)

words - constituents of a sentence that due to their order, their suffices, prefixes and differentiating signs give some meaning.

world knowledge - background knowledge, and goal understanding required to understand text and conversation

An example from Luger & Stubblefield (1998) uses a type of product system to reach the goal:

Rules

1. Sentence = Noun_Phrase + Verb_Phrase
2. Noun_Phrase = Adjective + Noun
3. Noun_Phrase = Article + Noun
4. Noun_Phrase = Noun
5. Verb_Phrase = Verb
6. Verb_Phrase = Verb + Noun Phrase
7. Article = ‘a’
8. Article = ‘the’
9. Noun = ‘man’
10. Noun = ‘dog’
11. Verb = ‘likes’
12. Verb = ‘bites’

Note: this is by no means an exhaustive list of sentence breakdowns

Thus the sentence "The dog bites the man" can be parsed as follows:

Output	Rule
Sentence	1
Noun_phrase + Verb_Phrase	3
Article + Noun + Verb_Phrase	8
‘The’ + Noun + Verb_Phrase	10
‘The’ + ‘dog’ + Verb_Phrase	6
‘The’ + ‘dog’ + Verb + Noun_Phrase	12
‘The’ + ‘dog’ + ‘bites’ + Noun_Phrase	3
‘The’ + ‘dog’ + ‘bites’ + Article + Noun	8
‘The’ + ‘dog’ + ‘bites’ + ‘the’ + Noun	9
‘The’ + ‘dog’ + ‘bites’ + ‘the’ + ‘man’

The idea that a universal grammar exists that all humans share was conceived by Noam Chomsky, a famous linguists and political writer. This Universal Grammar (UG) was an abstraction of the rules of every human language. Chomsky proposed that since human can so easily learn new languages and switch between them, that there must be a basic set of rules that govern all languages so that our brain can process them. Thus if our brains can process them then so can computers.

Some Natural Language examples that computers may have trouble understanding

Squad helps dog bite victim

Man eating piranha mistakenly sold as pet fish

Juvenile court to Try shooting Victim

Women are requested not to have children in the bar

Dwarf seer escapes from jail - small medium at large

Lost small terrier de-sexed at Hungry Jack's

Stud tires out

Drunk gets nine months in violin case

Iraqi head seeks arms

Queen Mary having bottom scraped

Note: Queen Mary is the name of an ocean liner

Yoko Ono will talk about her husband John Lenon who was killed in an interview with Barbara Walters

Two cars were reported stolen by the Groverton police yesterday

We will sell gasoline to anyone in a glass container

For Sale: mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating

New housing for elderly not yet dead

Note: These samples were taken from "The Language Instinct", a book by Stephen Pinker (1995) Australia Print Group: Maryborough