Re: USAGE: Naturalness, etc.

Mattathias Persona scripsit:

> A better example of non-compositionality would be an idiom like "kick
> the bucket" or a formula like "how's it going?" or "far be it from me".
Indeed.

> It's true that "Would you pass the salt?" is not interpreted as a yes/no
> question, but I think that the use of the yes/no question formula to
> express muted commands is prevalent enough to be considered a part of
> the grammar.
Hmm.  It's definitely part of the grammar my wife and I use, but
my daughter persists in interpreting such remarks as mere
requests or even questions (so it goes when you're eleven).

> While it's important to focus on how a given language is
> actually used, I think it's also useful to test the 'design limits' of
> language by subjecting native speakers to highly atypical utterances and
> seeing whether they accept them, and if so, how they interpret them.
> [...] I do treat such judgements with a grain of salt.
This laudable attitude reflects your intellectual position, which
is somewhat correlated with your physical position (see below).

> Perhaps.  Again, I resist the characterisation of Chomsky as intellectual
> dictator:  While he garners more respect than anyone else in the formalist
> camp, he also receives more of a pummeling than anyone else.  Maybe they
> worship him at MIT, but here at UCLA every new paper he sends out is greeted
> with an extremely high level of skepticism
You work in linguistics Brussels, midway between the East Pole and
the Non-East Pole.

> (and not a little annoyance, since
> he's a *very* bad writer and extremely hard to read).
See the Chomskybot (http://stick.us.itd.umich.edu/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl).

Also see Nick's page at http://www.lexicon.net.au/~opoudjis/Play/antichomsky.html .
Excerpt:

# I attended a talk by Chomsky when he last visited Australia
# (January 1995). It was a linguistics talk, which meant he got all
# obfuscatory: methodological dualism was introduced as equivalent to
# mental materialism, and vice versa, and if you missed the first two
# minutes of the talk, you'd have no idea what was going on.

My comment: I once talked to Chomsky for about an hour, mostly about
conlangs, and while he wasn't filled with enthusiasm, he didn't
try to butcher me either.  (I was considering going to MIT at the
time; I went to see him because he was a friend of a friend of
my father's.)

# At one point, Chomsky said something like "if you're a physicist, you
# don't stick a video camera out the window and start filming. You
# conduct controlled experiments. Similarly, if you're a linguist, you
# don't just turn on a tape-recorded and start taping people.
# You construct sentences."
#
# In one word: Bollocks.
#
# In a few more words: constructing sentences does give us some insights
# into language we wouldn't otherwise get --- although the enterprise is
# fraught with difficulties and fine print. But to say that turning on a
# tape-recorder and analysing speech as it actually happens is not
# linguistics [...] will not win you favour...

> The hard scientists (physicists,
> biologists) tend to look down on us formal linguists, and claim that what
> we do is "unempirical" and "not real science".
And as Geoffrey Pullum once said, by the standards of *real* formalists
(logic & mathematics), there simply is no formal linguistics yet.
So you get skewered from both sides.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
        You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
        You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
                Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)