Re: principles of collective organization
John,
I'm not talking about Chomsky's poverty of stimulus argument. I'm talking
about his "loss of generality" argument presented in "The logical basis of
linguistic theory", 1962?
In that argument Chomsky rejected empirical methods exactly because they found
no consistent primitives.
To quote Fritz Newmeyer (Generative Linguistics -- A Historical Perspective",
Routledge, 1996):
"part of the discussion of phonology in 'LBLT' is directed towards showing
that the conditions that were supposed to define a phonemic representation
(including complementary distribution, locally determined biuniqueness,
linearity, etc.) were inconsistent or incoherent in some cases and led to (or
at least allowed) absurd analyses in others."
-Rob
On Thursday 12 January 2006 19:19, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Rob,
>
> Just some historical points:
> > American Structuralism was essentially _all_ distributional.
> > Chomsky killed it in the '50s by pointing out it led to
> > inconsistent representations (=no primitives). Now that people
> > have forgotten Chomsky's objection distributional methods
> > have become a popular machine learning technique, but they
> > are searching for primitives again.
>
> The term I would prefer is _empirical_ instead of either
> _distributional_ or _primitives_. Bloomfield's first book,
>
> Bloomfield, Leonard (1914) An Introduction to Language,
> reprinted by J. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1983.
>
> was very strongly influenced by the semantic theories
> of German psychologists such as Wundt. But in the 1920s,
> he was seduced by the behaviorists, who persuaded him that
> anything that could not be directly related to observable
> data was "unscientific". That led him to the strongly
> data-oriented, anti-semantic, behaviorist structuralism
> of his second book:
>
> Bloomfield, Leonard (1933) Language, Holt, Rinehart,
> & Winston, New York.
>
> That book was the primary introduction to linguistics for
> the middle of the 20th century. A very popular structuralist
> goal was the search for "grammar discovery procedures", which
> would start with large volumes of linguistic examples and
> derive the grammar that characterized them. Various studies
> along those lines used finite-state machines and statistics
> as methods of analyzing and characterizing the grammars.
>
> In his 1957 book, _Syntactic Structures_, Chomsky retained
> Bloomfield's anti-semantic bias, but he fought against C. C. Fries
> (who did a very nice derivation of grammatical categories from
> a corpus of utterances in the early 1950s) and Claude Shannon's
> information theory (which was very popular among psychologists
> and linguists). Chomsky claimed that the data an infant received
> was insufficient to derive a complex grammar and that most of
> an infant's linguistic mechanisms had to be innate. In his work,
> Chomsky ignored real data and began the practice of using a native
> speaker's intuitions (i.e., made-up examples) as the basis for
> doing linguistics.
>
> The trend toward applying statistics to large volumes of data
> really began in earnest when computer systems began to have
> disks that were large enough to store significant volumes of
> data. But I think that the trend toward using real data instead
> of made-up examples is more significant than the idea of using
> statistical methods.
>
> As for primitives, they could be derived from data or from
> intuition, and they could be syntactic or semantic. I believe
> that the option of ignoring or searching for primitives is
> orthogonal to the issue of an empirical or arm-chair approach.
>
> John