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

Alex Drummond wrote:
>
> 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.

They _exist_. They are ipso facto "acceptable" -- if your little theory
can't account for them, then you just have to invent another kludge.
That's Chomskyism.

> You can probably find examples in corpuses of common patterns
> which most people judge to be slightly awkward or worse. Moreover, you

Maybe "most people" who have come under the sway of their prescriptivist
grade-school teachers. If the patterns are "common," then they are a
fortiori "acceptable"!

> 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

If such sentences (a) never exhibit coreferentiality and (b) don't
occur, then those phenomena have been "shown."

> 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,

Except they're not. Maybe you've only been in syntax classes with very
homogeneous classmates (all of them having had some form of RP beaten
into them by their teachers and their posh peers at uni). Over here,
syntax classes have students from all sorts of socioeconomic classes and
all sorts of native varieties of English, in addition to the foreigners
who have likely been taught British Standard English.

> 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.)

Have you ever tried Postal's "On the Surface Verb 'Remind'"? He insists
that the underlying semantic structure is "STRIKE LIKE" -- he simply
ignores the basic meaning 'recall to someone's memory'! That's a very
long article. I forget the name of something similar that was published
as a book.

> > > 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.

Sorry, but Romance and Germanic account for almost 0 difference from
English. They're closely related and exhibit what Whorf called Standard
Average European syntax (if he'd lived longer, he'd have contributed to
the study of Linguistic Areas).

> > > 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 only see what comes in *Language* every three months.

> > > 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.

A specialist in English romantic novels would have no qualms teaching a
class in Restoration comedy. If syntacticians and phonologists in your
variety of linguistics are so limited, then shame on them.

> > > 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:

Where?

> "The first application of the approach was to Modern Hebrew, a fairly
> detailed effort in 1949-50.

In fact I've submitted an abstract on the comparison on the two versions
of his M.A. thesis, "The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew" (June and
December 1951 -- was his memory failing him when he wrote those dates?),
for a meeting next spring.

> The second was to the native American
> language Hidatsa (the first full-scale generative grammar), mid-50s.

Who?

> The third was to Turkish, our first Ph.D. dissertation, early 60s.

Bob Lees, I think.

> After that research on a wide variety of languages took off. MIT in

Jim McCawley, Japanese phonology, pub. 1965.
Sanford Schane, French phonology, pub. 1968 (and a far more useful
introduction to Hallean phonology than SPE).
James Harris, Spanish phonology, pub. 1968?.
Robin Lakoff, Latin phonology, pub. 1970.
Michael K. Brame, Arabic phonology, unpub.
Carolyn G. Killean (my Arabic teacher) did Arabic syntax but at
Michigan.

etc.

In syntax I can think of Kuno and Kuroda on Japanese.

But meanwhile the "good guys" had gone off to create Generative
Semantics -- the topic of Randy Allan Harris's book -- incl. McCawley,
G. Lakoff, Haj Ross, Postal, Katz, Langendoen, and (let's not forget!)
our own Arnold Zwicky.

> 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

I already mentioned that Ken Hale is dead. He died young; he worked more
in Australian and South Pacific than in American. How many dissertations
did he direct, and how many of his students were part of the Chomsky
cabal?

> 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.

Which exotic languages have you studied?

> > 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.)

But you don't seem to be interested in language.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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