SUO: Re: Link Grammar and Parser
John,
I strongly agree with your conclusion:
> Which just goes round to my original point: better to adopt
> views of linguistic information that are as realistic as one
> can make them in the face of the data rather than trying
> to sell your own flavour of formalism: something that 80s-style
> linguistics spent almost all of its energy on. And some still do....
I would broaden that point by saying that it applies to many
more research areas than just linguistics, but the linguistic
disease is especially virulent because the infection came from
the most partisan of all parties, Noam C. It is also an implicit
theme underlying Yorick Wilks' remark and my discussion of it.
Re realistic: I use the term "knowledge soup" to characterize
the undeniably realistic mess that people have in their heads,
and which is very far from being fully addressed by the current
views of lexical semantics and even less model-theoretic semantics.
I don't see any conflict between lexical semantics and model-
theoretic semantics. I just view them as isolated pieces
of the puzzle of which many, many more pieces are missing.
John