Re: Universal grammar

Hans,

Hans Aberg wrote:
In article <1161142005.979456.53400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Are you saying you want to look up what was said about linguistic
universals to give you new ideas for constructing computer languages?

The original question was actually about linguistic grammar universals,
not language universals. I looked up Joseph Greenberg, and he seems to
have been into language classification, rather than finding a universal
grammar theory. So I suspect, though interesting, it might not be useful.

I wouldn't spend too much time looking for those grammatical universals
either if I were you. The whole issue is a trip wire for doctrinal
affiliations, but I think it is safe to say, at least, that there is
not the consensus about it within linguistics which you would want
before you tried to carry any supposed insights over into your theorem
prover.

What is funny about Universal Grammar is that arguably it was only
proposed because linguistic universals were _not_ seen in natural
language. They were not seen to the extent that observable entities did
not even seem to be consistent throughout a single language (e.g. the
way phonemes sometimes have one sound value and sometimes another.) If
structure general to a language, the very building blocks of the
language, could not be observed, the argument went, it cannot be
learned, and if it cannot be learned it must be innate.

The trouble is, it proved impossible to posit workable universals on
theoretical grounds either. Optimality Theory in the '90s might be
thought of as a last attempt to describe a level at which they might
work. Wikipedia: 'The main idea of OT is that the observed, "surface"
forms of the language arise from the resolution of conflicts between
grammatical constraints.' But at that point they seem to have been
reduced to a level of "universality" so deep, it would be hard to
distinguish from the neural substrate. Indeed Wikipedia now tells me
what I did not know, that OT owed its origins at least as much to
connectionism as generative grammar.

The search for the fundamental building blocks of natural language
keeps grabbing handfuls of air.

I write on a theorem prover. And as pure mathematicians do no agree on
notation, I build it up around certain semantic constructs, which the
parser can translate into. It then does not matter exactly what the input
language is, if only the parser is set right. And one can write out in
different notation, if one has the opposite of the parser, called
"expresser" perhaps.

I can understand why you might think semantic constructs could provide
you with the universals you need. That was the way one branch of
generative grammar developed. Look up Generative Semantics. It
collapsed under the wealth of detail in the '70s and largely became a
theory of lexicon (Cognitive Grammar) or metaphor (Lakoff.)

The search for universals has come full circle and it has become a
canon of Cognitive Linguistics that to capture the wealth of semantic
detail parametrizing language, only the actual language in use
suffices.

No-one has been able to find a universal representation for meaning,
any more than they have been able to find other universals.

But you are right. I think the issue is very closely related to that of
a general theorem prover in maths. Actually, I didn't think it was
still considered possible to build a general theorem prover in maths
(and I am personally convinced that is for the same reason we have not
been able to find universals of language or meaning.)

I have been recommending to linguists that they look at this talk by
Greg Chaitin:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/cmu.html

Didn't Goedel prove back in the '30s that a general theorem prover was
not possible?

Or have I mistaken what you mean by "theorem prover"?

-Rob Freeman

.

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