• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.225-230
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• 2020

This paper highlights the influence and the importance of the syntactic-grammatical knowledge on "the reading machine", appeared in Jackendoff (1999). Due to the lack of the detailed testing and implementation in his research, this paper tests an extensive data array using a component of Google Translate, currently available freely and most widely on the internet. Although outdated, Jackendoff's paper, "Why can't Computers use English?", argues that syntactic-grammatical knowledge plays a key role in the outputs of computers and computer-based reading machines. The current research has implemented some testings of his thought-provoking examples, in order to find out whether Google Translate can handle the same problems after two decades or so. As a result, it is argued that in the field of NLP, I-language in the sense of Chomsky (1986, 1995 etc) is real and the syntactic, grammatical, and categorial knowledge is essential in the faculty of language. Therefore, it is reassured in this paper that when it comes to human language, even the most advanced "machine" is still no match for human faculty of language, the syntactic-grammatical knowledge.