![]() If you want to produce a description of the sentences of a language, this must be an adequate theory: if you intended to throw light onto human linguistic processes, then the theory is inadequate. ![]() A theory can be adequate at different levels: for instance, it might describe all possible sentences that a language includes (and no other sentences) but not give any insight into how a brain produces these sentences. Linguists evaluate their theories by criteria of adequacy. If you are a pessimist, you'll view being described as "barely sufficient" as a negative way of looking at things: if you are an optimist, you'll see that being "barely sufficient" means that something may have been achieved with the minimum of resources. ![]() The way you think about these words is similar to the joke about the optimist and the pessimist. Think about the words: barely sufficient. This much is obvious: we want a description to cover everything we're trying to describe, otherwise we would be unable to describe some things we know to exist. The idea of evaluating a theory by adequacy is that the theory should be sufficient to describe or explain the observed phenomenon. proportionate ( to the requirements) sufficient, satisfactory barely sufficient hence adequacy. My desktop dictionary (an edition of The Concise Oxford dictionary)has the following definition:Īdequate a. We have to be certain we know what we mean by adequacy. A key word used by linguists is adequacy. We must have some way of evaluating our statements about language.
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