John
I couldnt agree more with your characterization of the situation,
personal and intellectual: I too started in maths at Cambridge and got
out before it was too late (but doing enough maths to get a degree,
certainly by today's standards). I always argue if pressed that its
only virtue was to make me unafraid/unawed by the formalisms I didnt
agree with---and, as you note, they often come from people without
mathematical backgrounds. I have heard statistics colleagues make the
analogous point: much statistical linguistics now comes from people
with no firm grip on the basics of statistics.
Best
Yorick
On Sunday, October 2, 2005, at 08:05 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Mark,
>
> I've been a long-term "math-head", but I sympathize
> with your point to a considerable extent:
>
> MPL> As a matter of personal preference, I could do
> > with fewer math-heads in linguistics.
>
> There are quite a few people with both linguistics
> degrees and other kinds of degrees who try to pursue
> elegant formalisms at the expense of preserving the
> phenomena.
>
> In fact, some of the worst offenders are those who do
> *not* have math or comp. sci. degrees. They suffer
> from a certain degree of math envy and overcompensate
> by becoming "more formal than thou". One could accuse
> Chomsky of that fault, but there are many, many others.
>
> There are also people with a solid background in logic,
> such as Montague, who have tried to force their view
> of logic onto language. Although I believe the formal
> semanticists have made some interesting contributions,
> I also believe that lexical semantics has made far more
> useful contributions to NLP as well as theoretical
> linguistics. Barbara P. has also been softening her
> views on that issue. (See the quotation below.)
>
> And I would add one further advantage of having a good
> background in math: self defense. It gives you enough
> self confidence to see through the some of the empty
> formalism. (See the poem by Henry Kautz below.)
>
> John Sowa
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> Source: http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2005/RGGU054.pdf
>
> In Montague’s formal semantics the simple predicates of the
> language of intensional logic (IL), like love, like, kiss,
> see, etc., are regarded as symbols (similar to the “labels”
> of [predicate calculus]) which could have many possible
> interpretations in many different models, their “real meanings”
> being regarded as their interpretations in the “intended model”.
> Formal semantics does not pretend to give a complete characterization
> of this “intended model”, neither in terms of the model structure
> representing the “worlds” nor in terms of the assignments of
> interpretations to the lexical constants. The present formalizations
> of model-theoretic semantics are undoubtedly still rather primitive
> compared to what is needed to capture many important semantic
> properties of natural languages, including for example spatial
> and other perceptual representations which play an important role
> in many aspects of linguistic structure. The logical structure
> of language is a real and important part of natural language
> and we have fairly well-developed tools for describing it. There
> are other approaches to semantics that are concerned with other
> aspects of natural language, perhaps even cognitively “deeper”
> in some sense, but which we presently lack the tools to adequately
> formalize. It is to be hoped that these different approaches can
> be seen as complementary and not necessarily antagonistic.
> ____________________________________________________________
>
> If your thesis is utterly vacuous,
> Use first-order predicate calculus.
> With sufficient formality,
> The sheerest banality
> Will be hailed by all as miraculous.
>
> If your thesis is quite indefensible,
> Reach for semantics intensional.
> Over Montague grammar,
> Your committee will stammer,
> Not admitting it's incomprehensible!
>
> by Henry Kautz
>
>
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