The documentation of (unbounded-len~h) copying and cross-serial constructions in a few languages in the recent literature is usually taken to mean that natural languages are slightly context-sensitive. However, this ignores those copying constructions which, while productive, cannot be easily shown to apply to infinite sublanguages. To allow such finite copying constructions to be taken into account in formal modeling, it is necessary to recognize that natural languages cannot be realistically represented by formal languages of the usual sort. Rather, they must be modeled as families of formal languages or as formal languages with indefinite vocabularies. Once this is done,.
