On Saturday 15 October 2005 16:59, Stefan Bordag wrote:
> ... I unfortunately have not read enough about
> phonology to make literate comments on that part of the debate that went
> on there.
OK. I think you should take a look at it, though. I see no reason to believe
the problem is limited to phonological representations. It strikes me as the
single most important issue in distributional methods then and now.
> ...I guess that the potential of clustering and
> this contrastive method of comparisons (which are really independent of the
> language level used) is what Chomsky didn't understand, although this
> sounds almost unlikely.
I agree. I think Chomsky understood it good.
He understood it, but found it led to rules which lacked generality.
Chomsky's conclusion was this lack of generality was fatal to the method. We
don't have to draw that conclusion. Like Syd Lamb we can explain it as
evidence language rules are not "linear", or other. But we gain nothing by
ignoring the observation.
John Goldsmith seems to be focusing on the historical impact of the
observation, pointing out that it was not so much that the problem forced us
to accept rules, but rather that the problem only presented itself once you
started to think about rules. But he is not disputing the fact that
distributional methods were shown to result in rules which were not general.
Beyond that his position seems to be the classical generativist one that this
is evidence everything comes down some innate language facility which selects
between possible representations. As far as I can tell. John can correct me
if I am wrong.
What is in "The language instinct debate"? Once again does it dispute the
observation of a lack of generality in distributionally derived
representations, or only the innatist conclusions Chomsky drew from it?
-Rob
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