Hi Stefan,
On Friday 14 October 2005 16:44, you wrote:
> ...from Finchs dissertation from the year 1993:
>
> Perhaps it was precisely the lack of these materials [large corpora,
> availability of machines] which made the structuralist programme
> infeasible during the 1950s, rather than some fundamental theoretical
> flaw.
"Perhaps", but what was the "theoretical flaw"?
> And I might add a little further up in the same section of Finchs
> dissertation:
>
> This [structuralist] paradigm was criticised by Chomsky (57) for failing
> to properly dissociate the definition of what structure existed in natural
> language from the procedures which allowed that structure to be found
This may be it, though I'm not clear exactly what Finch means by "failing
to ... dissociate the ... structure ... from the procedures..." Does he mean
Chomsky observed different procedures resulted in different structures?
The particular analysis which interests me is one I found in a historical
retrospective by Fritz Newmeyer and others "Chomsky's 1962 programme for
linguistics" (in Newmeyer's "Generative Linguistics -- A Historical
Perspective", Routledge, 1996, and apparently also published in "Proc. of the
XVth International Congress of Linguists".)
According to Newmeyer "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." Most
importantly the interposition of such a "phonemic level ... led to a loss of
generality in the formulation of the rule-governed regularities of the
language."
I posted a query about this on Funknet a while back and the best response I
got was from Syd Lamb. Here is what he wrote (Funknet 25/6/2004):
'Chomsky was correct in pointing out that some of the criteria in use at that
time for defining phonemic representations were less than airtight, but his
alternative phonological proposals were even more faulty...
For example, perhaps his most celebrated argument concerns the Russian
obstruents. He correctly pointed out that the usual solution incorporates a
loss of generality, but he misdiagnosed the problem. The problem was the
criterion of linearity...'
Syd goes on:
'What happened was weird. Chomsky responded to my published account (e.g.
Prolegomena to a theory of phonology, Language 1966) by saying that (approx
quote) "Lamb's attempt at refutation amounts to accepting my solution in toto
with a change of notation". (!!) This despite that fact that Chomsky's
solution retains linearity while rejecting biuniqueness (contrastive
function), while mine rejects linearity while preserving biuniqueness.'
I'm afraid I had to agree with Chomsky, at least as far as the existence of a
problem. Either linguistic representations can't be described contrastively
(distributionally) or they are not linear (meaning they are dependent on
context)? Either way we have to change the way we are thinking about language
representation.
This strikes me as a central issue for distributional methods to address, but
according to Syd:
"How did others (besides Chomsky) react? As far as I can tell, by simply
ignoring these published refutations of mine, with their alternative
solutions. It came to be generally accepted that the notion of a contrastive
phoneme (Chomsky's "biuniqueness") had been thrown out by Chomsky. The
phoneme was dead for the next two or three decades. Nobody (other than my
students) was even aware of my refutation of his argument."
So this is the issue I am interested in. Have you heard anything else about
this particular issue: loss of "generality" (Chomsky) or lack of
"linearlity" (Lamb) of distributionally derieved language representations?
-Rob
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