Re: To Matt Pearson

--- David Peterson wrote:
In a message dated 10/23/01 11:19:27 AM, Matthew.Pearson@DIRECTORY.REED.EDU
writes:

<< The problem with word-chain devices is that words don't just have
syntactic/semantic dependencies with the words or phrases which they are
adjacent to; there are also *long-distance* dependencies...

EITHER Marion likes ice-cream, OR James likes ice-cream.

  IF Marion likes ice-cream, THEN James likes ice-cream. >>

    See, to this I would say that "either" and "if" just have roles that need
to be filled somewhere on down the line, and that the speaker then has to
remember to fill the role.
--- end quote ---

Obviously that's what speakers do. The point is that there's no way to model this
formally using a word-chain device--but it's kind of hard to show why without
using non-email-friendly diagrams, so maybe you should read the stuff in
Pinker.

--- begin quote ---
<<For example, there's no principled reason why some word in some language
couldn't have the category NP/V/V/V/V/V ("combines with a noun phrase to give
something that combines with a verb to give something that combines with a
verb to give... etc."), but I don't think any such cases exist.>>

    What about Chinese?
--- end quote ---

What about Chinese? It certainly doesn't have anything like the example I gave. (It
has serial verb constructions, yes, but they're pretty clearly not put together
in the way implied by that category.)

--- begin quote ---
    Anyway, the main problem I continue to have with Chomsky's idea is that
people, while speaking, actually are making these transformations in their
head.  It seems largely counterintuitive, and counterproductive to fast
speech.
--- end quote ---

Well, Chomsky makes no claims about modelling what speakers are doing 'on line' when
they actually speak. Transformational theories attempt to model the knowledge
of language (competence) that a speaker has in his/her head that enables
him/her to judge whether a particular string of words is an acceptable,
interpretable sentence. Nobody claims that people are actually performing
transformations as they talk.

This is not to say that performance is unimportant, or that linguistic theories
need not--or should not--have anything to say about what is going on in
people's heads when they actually talk. (There is in fact a whole subfield of
linguistics called Language Processing which deals with this very issue.)
Chomsky's point is that it is possible to abstract away from performance and
talk just about the rules which people have in their heads which allow them to
discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical utterances.

Matt.

Matt Pearson
Department of Linguistics
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd
Portland, OR 97202 USA
ph:  503-771-1112 (x 7618)