Re: What was Noam Chomsky's contribution to *LINGUISTICS*?

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> Alex Drummond wrote:
> > Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > > I've mentioned previously, though not recently,
> > > how the odious Paul Postal appears to have assigned asterisks
> > > arbitrarily in order to make his peculiar theories come out right. They
> > > didn't agree with anyone else's "native speaker intuitions."
> >
> > The thing is that you can't use corpus linguistics to falsify Paul
> > Postal's judgements, so it's not actually any use for that. If you
>
> If no examples at all are found of constructions that Postal claimed
> were ok, and if numerous examples of constructions he starred are found,
> then it's very useful for that.

But that doesn't say anything about the acceptability of those
examples. You can probably find examples in corpuses of common patterns
which most people judge to be slightly awkward or worse. Moreover, you
can't use a corpus to show that (say) coreference is impossible in "He
saw John" or that "John was taken without asking" isn't a valid
parasitic gap constriction. Better to do a careful and detailed study
of people's intuitions if the intuitions are in doubt. That's not to
say that statistical data from a corpus isn't suggestive in some cases,
but it's not going to be especially helpful in many of the most
difficult cases.

He proposed studying
> grammaticality judgments -- that is, polling, say, the students in
> syntax class to discover how many found a particular example acceptable.
> Such statistics, not just the judgments themselves, would be data.
>
> A few years later, Postal hosted a talk at NYU by the late Jerrold Katz.
> In the question period I introduced them to McCawley's suggestion
> (apparently they didn't keep in touch over the years) and they both
> called it ridiculous.

I think in most cases it would be a waste of time, since intutions are
clear in most cases, and in cases where intuitions are not clear your
theory should probably be able to account for the intuitions in both
directions as a case of dialectal microvariation. But I disagree with
Postal and Katz if they meant to suggest that the idea of studying
intuitions carefully is inherently ridiculous, which is clearly not the
case. Generally, Chomsky's pretty careful to point out where judgements
are disputed or unclear when I read his stuff, as I most other
syntacticians in my experience. Generally, dodgy judgements get busted
quite quickly; they aren't accepted uncritically. (But I think usually
dodgy jusgements result from previously unknown cases of
microvariation.)

> > It would if they were supported only by English data, but by the time
> > of GB theory quite a lot of other languages were routinely considered
>
> I don't have that impression. (And what is "a lot"?)

I said "quite a lot". In lectures on government and binding (the book)
a number of Romance and Germanic languages enter into the discussion. I
think possibly Japanese too, but I don't have the book here.

> > in analyses. Today you rarely if ever see a paper with only English
> > data unless it's about some specific fact of English syntax.
>
> I don't have that impression.

You don't seem to be very familiar with the recent generative syntax
literature, which is fair enough if generative syntax isn't your bag.
I'd be surpised if you could, say, find a recent (last 10 years)
Linguistic Inquiry where more than one of the papers had nothing but
English examples.

> > I said a decade or two for generative linguistics, which is probably
> > optimistic, thinking about it a bit more I'd say never. Frankly, I'll
> > take Lasnik's opinion over yours on this one, since I have some vague
> > idea of how vast even just the generative linguistics literature is by
> > now. Maybe we should have a straw poll. I would have thought that at
> > the very least, the idea that someone could familiarise themselves with
> > the whole of linguistics (not just generative linguistics) would be
> > thought completely absurd these days. I don't know of anyone who's
> > claimed to have such knowledge (unless, of course, linguistics was
> > taken to refer to some purified discipline without any heretical
> > literature included).
>
> Do you not know any senior scholars at all?

Not personally. Deirdre Wilson mentioned in a lecture that she hadn't
kept up with the syntax literature because she had been too busy with
pragmatics. I've seen plenty of evidence that syntacticians generally
know only about syntax in detail, phonologists only about phonology in
detail, etc -- nobody seems at all ashamed about such gaps in their
knowledge. Perhaps there are some savants out there who know it all,
but I suspect the people who you think fit this description are people
who know all the bits of linguistics which you think are worth knowing.

> > Inevitably, since most of the research goes on in the US, there is a
> > bias towards looking at English examples. The only alternative would be
>
> Why is it "inevitable"? Before Chomsky, almost no work was done on
> English in the US; there was a recognized need to record what was left
> of the Native languages of the Americas and Africa. South and Southeast
> Asia were largely left to linguists from elsewhere; much of the US work
> was missionary-driven, of course, and much of it was excellent.
>
> > to do poor quality research on lots of other languages without the aid
> > of native speaker knowledge. There is no magic way of studying the
> > world's languages in detail and integrating that study into a coherent
> > program of theoretical development. As in any other discipline,
> > generative syntacticians have to muddle along as best they can with
> > what's available.
>
> Again I say, you _must_ find out what linguists were doing before 1980.

It's inevitable because native English speakers can work most
productively on their own language. It was a while before there was a
large body of native speakers of other languages who were trained in
generative syntax and able to contribute to the literature. Generative
syntax is more dependent on native speaker resources than a lot of
other approaches, so there was an inevitable bias towards English for a
long time -- especially since Chomsky and other leading figures in the
field were native English speakers. You really are misinformed about
the quantity of work on non-English languages in early generative
syntax though, for example Chomsky points out:

"The first application of the approach was to Modern Hebrew, a fairly
detailed effort in 1949-50. The second was to the native American
language Hidatsa (the first full-scale generative grammar), mid-50s.
The third was to Turkish, our first Ph.D. dissertation, early 60s.
After that research on a wide variety of languages took off. MIT in
fact became the international center of work on Australian Aboriginal
languages within a generative framework [...] thanks to the work of Ken
Hale, who also initiated some of the most far-reaching work on Native
American languages, also within our program; in fact the first program
that brought native speakers to the university to become trained
professional linguists, so that they could do work on their own
languages, in far greater depth than had ever been done before. That
has continued. Since that time, particularly since the 1980s, it
constitutes the vast bulk of work on the widest typological variety of
languages."

> If you have no idea at all what the alternatives are, how can you have
> any certainty at all that whatever approach you're learning is better,
> let alone best?

I don't have any certainty as such. The mentalistic approach to the
study of linguistic knowledge is what I'm interested in. Most other
approaches don't come under that category. The ones that do (e.g.
alternative generative theories such as CCG, HPSG) I do find
interesting and I do take the time to find out about the basics of
these approaches.

> If you're not interested in language, why not just go into math(s) or
> comp.sci. or AI?

I'm interested in theories about language, less interested in theories
about numbers, differential equations, computation, etc. In fact I am
quite interested in comp. sci., but I just happen to find it less
interesting than linguistics. There's no accounting for personal
tastes. (W.r.t. AI I'm a bit of a skeptic anyway.)

Alex

.

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