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

Alex Drummond wrote:
>
> scholar.google.com shows a reference for Matthews on Hidatsa syntax as
> early as 1962, which suggests that Chomsky could well have read it in
> the late 1950s (or perhaps he was a year or two out in his memory).

So now you retract your assertion that this Hidatsa grammar was a
Chomsky student's dissertation. I don't know who G. H. Matthews (as
identified by Brian) is or was.

> Alex Drummond wrote:
> > I was reading the talk pages for the article at the time he sent the
> > email to another editor, so I am sure of the source (insofar as I trust
> > the other editor). If you dig through the talk archive you'll find it.
> > There was a lot of unpublished work floating around in the 1950s (even
> > LSLT didn't get published until ages later for example).

The University of Chicago Libraries held a photocopy of Jim McCawley's
copy of LSLT (in three fat spring-binders) presumably since 1965 when
Jim joined the faculty. The book was published (incompletely) by the
University of Chicago Press in 1975. I certainly didn't try to read
either version (they are a work of mathematics, not of linguistics), but
the published version certainly is not a faithful transcription of the
typescript.

Just as with the published version of the M.A. thesis, which is quite
different from the version that got him his degree at Penn.

> > Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > > On 12 Nov 2005 17:25:36 -0800, Alex Drummond
> > > <ralph_the_wonder_llama@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
> > > <news:1131845136.329919.101640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > in sci.lang:
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > >> Where? [did Chomsky write about study of non-English
> > > >> languages in early GG]
> > >
> > > > Email to somone (not me) on Wikipedia. It's quoted on the
> > > > page on him.
> > >
> > > Not helpful: the quotation attributed to him is not given a
> > > source there, so far as I can tell from an admittedly quick
> > > look, and in any case you already gave it, so there's
> > > nothing more to be learned there. Elsewhere Chomsky
> > > mentions 'other detailed work of the 1950s (particularly GH
> > > Matthews, Hidatsa Syntax)', though further investigation
> > > indicates that the book was actually published in 1965 (by
> > > Mouton).

Chomsky wasn't directing any dissertations in the 1950s.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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