Re: Non-Explanations (was Moraic codes)

And Rosta wrote:

> John to Jim:
...
> > I would also point to early (unconstrained) TG, whose problem was that
> > everything could be explained by PS rules and transformations.
>
> That was the criticism levelled at it by its critics, and it's true that
> theories' own PR makes claims about the constrainedness of their
> representational power, but in fact it is (IMO) probably the case that
> pretty much any grammatical theory could come up with some analysis for
> pretty much anything, but theories' analyses would differ as to how
> 'explanatory' (to use the technical linguistics term) the analyses are.
> Explanatoriness is a slippery and complex thing, but if one interprets it
> as 'insightful' one is not that far off the mark.
From what I've seen, grammatical theories are not 'theories' so much
as 'coordinate systems' (a very important thing to be). They are tools
for describing and mapping the abstract space in which grammatical
processing might be said to occur, and it makes no more sense to argue
about grammatical theories than it does to argue about Cartesian
versus polar coordinates. Neither of which will explain why the
mountain is here and not there.

Adrian.