Homosyntaxism¶
homosyntaxism · syntax · validated
A rewriting that keeps the grammatical structure of the source intact, substituting new words of the same part of speech throughout.
Provenance¶
- Source: Oulipo, Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981)
- Attribution:
reference— attested in a standard reference rather than traced to an origin - Checkability:
source— decidable against the source text it was made from - Attested:
codified— formulated as a rule by a tradition rather than declared by an author
Details¶
- Kind: both
- Languages: en
- Requires:
tokens,pos - Deterministic: no
- In other languages: Homosyntaxisme (fr)
Notes¶
"New words" is checked at the six UD open classes (ADJ, ADV, INTJ, NOUN, PROPN, VERB) only; a determiner or preposition may stand, because English closed classes are small enough that the frame usually fixes the member and requiring a different one would make the form near-unsatisfiable. That split is a ruling of this project, not a reading of the Atlas. The checker compares a tag sequence, which is a coarser thing than a parse, and the tags come from a model measured at 0.9342 UPOS accuracy on UD English-EWT v2.18, so a verdict on a word the tagger never saw is marked undecided rather than silently trusted. Two clauses of the definition nothing here decides, stated plainly because a green suite cannot see either. "A rewriting" is not tested at all: no derivation, sense or idiomaticity is checked, so word salad carrying the right tags in the right order is satisfied. "Keeps the grammatical structure intact" is verified as a positional tag sequence and nothing more — sentence boundaries do not enter the comparison, so one ten-word sentence satisfies a two-sentence source with the same ten tags. What the row decides is real and narrower than the definition reads.
Prompt hint¶
Keep the sentence structure exactly and replace each word with another of the same class.
Parameters¶
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
source |
string | — |
The text this one was made from. |
Examples¶
parallel-sentences¶
en — this text satisfies the procedure.
The girl read the book. A woman closed a window.
Parameters: source='The boy ate the bread. A man opened a door.'
Source: constructed example; DET NOUN VERB DET NOUN twice over, with every open-class word replaced and the determiners left standing
the-function-words-stand¶
en — this text satisfies the procedure.
The girl ran to the window.
Parameters: source='The boy walked to the door.'
Source: constructed example for the ruling in the module docstring: the preposition and both determiners are the source's own, and the row is satisfied because "new words" is required at the open classes only
structure-not-kept¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
Bread was eaten quickly by a very hungry boy.
Parameters: source='The boy ate the bread. A man opened a door.'
Source: constructed counterexample; a passive rewriting of the same content
an-open-class-word-kept¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
The girl ate the book.
Parameters: source='The boy ate the bread.'
Source: constructed counterexample; the tag sequence is right and the verb is the source's own, which is the half of the definition a POS-only checker would miss
a-shorter-text¶
en — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
The girl read.
Parameters: source='The boy ate the bread.'
Source: constructed counterexample; two positions of the source go unanswered