Hi John,
Thanks for the refs. but are any of these a solution to the problem (...that
the application of distributional methods to language was shown a long time
ago to give us inconsistent results)?
Anderson says:
"The persuasiveness of Halle's original argument really rests crucially on
one's willingness to take seriously the need to get rules right." (p.g. 15)
It may do, but given a desire to get rules right, distributional methods seem
to come unstuck. Can we use them or not?
Perhaps you are presenting generative phonology as the pattern for a solution.
But generative phonology doesn't deny the inconsistent results problem. It
accepts there are multiple inconsistent results and seeks to find a
"evaluation metric" which can be used to select between them.
Do you think this "evaluation metric" is the solution, and something all
distributional methods for finding grammar should use?
-Rob
On Friday 14 October 2005 22:34, John Goldsmith wrote:
> ...
>
> The best discussion of the content, background, and impact of Halle's
> argument is to be found in Stephen Anderson's paper (
> http://bloch.ling.yale.edu/Public/Royaumont.pdf).
>
> I have a detailed webpage -- from a course I did last year -- on the
> development of early generative phonology from its structuralist
> antecedents:
> http://humfs1.uchicago.edu:16080/~jagoldsm/Webpage/Courses/HistoryOfPhonolo
>gy/index.htm
>
> There is a discussion of Harris's views in my paper in the current issue of
> Language (available also at
> http://humfs1.uchicago.edu:16080/~jagoldsm/Webpage/Courses/HistoryOfPhonolo
>gy/index.htm )
>
> And a brief overview of the history of this area in a paper by Bernard Laks
> and myself, at
> http://humfs1.uchicago.edu:16080/%7Ejagoldsm/Papers/GenerativePhonology.pdf
>
>
>
> The controversy you refer to did not speak to the question of
> distributional methods in phonology or elsewhere; that was a separate
> issue, and the perspective that Chomsky criticizes was his interpretation
> of Harris (inaccurate, in my view), and Harris took what other linguists of
> the period (like Charles Hockett) thought was a wildly extreme position,
> though they recognized that he did it in part in order to see the
> consequences of adopting a strong methodological position.
>
> John Goldsmith
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