John Goldsmith wrote:
> Mike Maxwell wrote:
>
> -What Chomsky was arguing against was the prevailing American
> Structuralist -theory of the time, which was indeed very much concerned
> with the issue of -procedures for discovering generalizations, what were
> termed "discovery -procedures". This was particularly true in
> phonology.
>
> Mike, that's not right. On the terminological side, the structuralists
> did not use the term "discovery procedure"; it was Chomsky who invented
> the term, during his efforts to weaken the structuralists stronghold. On
> a more substantive plane, it must be emphasized that structuralists'
> concerns during this period...was the establishment of an approach to
> language analysis which was worthy of being called "scientific", and
> *all* discussions of the nature and character of science during this
> period emphasized the special character of scientific *methods* of
> exploration:
I think everyone will be happy to know that I'm not going to go on about
this. John knows a lot more about the history of this than I do, and if he
says that phonology during the 1950s was not about discovery procedures,
then I won't argue. I'll just say that from my reading of the history (and
from the intro to phonology I got in the 1970s from a structuralist
viewpoint--anyone who knows the history will be able to guess where I got
that intro) led me to think that there were strict procedures to be
followed to come up with a phonemic analysis. And if you couldn't get
there by those procedures, then it wasn't phonemics/ allophonic (maybe
morphophonemics, which was a whole nother beast). There were lots of
recalcitrant cases, such as alternate phonemicizing, and head scratching as
a result, but in the end the procedures seemed to reign, at least in the
mainstream.
Anderson talks about a couple such cases in his "Reflections on 'On the
Phonetic Rules of Russian'" paper, where American structuralists like
Bernard Bloch (this was in 1941) said roughly "Such-and-such might look
like the right analysis, but our theory shows us that the right analysis is
s.t. else." Maybe that's a product of other scientific methodology of that
era, but it still sounds to me like discovery procedures...
> [me] -It was harder to -come up with discovery procedures in morphology
>
> Mike, again I don't think I agree here, from a historical point of view.
> Harris was exactly concerned with this question, and thought he had
> solved the problem... Hockett thought that Harris's solution was
> misguided...
Well, that's sort of my point; phonemics was the success story, morphology
was not in such (apparent) good shape. Harris (who was, it seems to me, a
bit of an outsider) came up with a theory, and Hockett (the insider)
disagreed. But clearly morphology was in better shape than syntax, so I
guess you could say this was a half full (you) vs. half empty (me) view.
I could drone on about the other points, but I'll spare you :-)
-- Mike Maxwell maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu
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