Re: SUO: RE: Link Grammar and Parser - RRGs
I am really very disturbed about the rather low
level of linguistic awareness and plain knowledge
being shown in "linguistic" discussions on the SUO
list at present. I get an impression similar to
watching TV documentaries about an area
that one knows about: the documentary is
often trivialising, not in touch with a broad state
of the art, and missing points.
>Too many divergent opinions. And is there really ANY liguist
>who knows enough about enough languages to build a believable
>typology. Maybe a committee of linguists could do it, but
>who would fund such a large effort?
>
There are very large and funded typology efforts that look at very
varied phenomena in wide ranges of languages and employ native
speakers according to various methodologies in order to acquire
comparable data. Such projects are funded in the US, in Europe,
in India, probably most places. The very idea of
"ANY liguist who knows enough about enough languages"
sounds like the old joke about telling someone at a party
that you are linguist and getting the question "oh, how
many languages do you speak?". I suspect from the
current discussion that many on the list would not even
realise why this is a joke (and, worse, may even be
the ones who ask that kind of question...).
Similar feelings arose in the recent exchanges about RRG, in
bringing in Universal Grammar, in the preponderance of
references to Levin's EVCA when there are more complete
descriptions around, in the reference to FrameNet as something
bearing much on linguistic descriptions (that one is more
controversial, but will require linguistic discussion and not
ontological), in the mixing in of Wierzbicka as if there is no
difference in ontological status or in methodology for
developing those categories, the confusion (and yes
I write confusion) of participant roles in a linguistic
sense (of which there are at least two and probably more
ontologically distinct types which should themselves not
be confused) and an ontological
sense, and many many more.
The downside of the above remarks for me is that I now wonder about
the areas where I do not know so much. If the SUO discussion
is at a similar low-level there, and I just do not know, then I should
not be giving it much attention. Certainly any faith in the status of
the SUO-list
as a "source of expert knowledge" is for me very much shaken
by this.
Could not perhaps the members of the SUO list stick to their
areas of expertise? Or at least separate out the kind of comments
that they make according to "interests" and real expertise? Or
is this more a gentleman's discussion group, wide ranging and
free..... but with little depth.
John Bateman.