On Wednesday 26 July 2006 17:53, FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE wrote:
> Hi, all,
>
> Before I start, I should clarify that I have never worked on compression,
> so maybe I'm missing something obvious to those who do work on it. Still, I
> can't buy Rob's claim that
>
> > To explain every idiosyncrasy of a given individual's productions it
> > seems likely you would need that individual's entire corpus, but for
> > understanding you would only need overlap.
>
> Getting a 'complete' corpus for any individual would be theoretically
> impossible, since no one produces all of their knowledge about language.
> Ie, there *does* exist passive knowledge (as well as implicit knowledge,
> not the same), as we know from all those 'silent period' kids (most of
> them) before they start speaking, but *do* understand (often not speaking
> at all until well into their second year of life); the well-known fact that
> our 'passive' vocabulary is much larger than the vocabulary we use; etc.
>
> On the other hand, it takes rather little exposure to a language to begin
> to make noticeable strides in acquiring ift, as anyone who has ever learned
> a second language 'in situ' as an adult knows very well. You don't ever get
> it all, but you sure can get significant 'overlap', as Rob would say. And
> an hour or so of a demonstration of this to an impressed MIT freshman by
> Kenneth Pike is what made me into a linguist (that and a serendipitous but
> super course from Morris Halle a couple of years later).
I'm not sure what "overlap" you are talking about here Jim, but of purely
historical interest I'd love to hear what "overlap" Kenneth Pike was
presenting at the time, and why it motivated you to go into linguistics.
This whole transition between the structuralist and the generativist tradition
interests me. In particular how people were thinking about it at the time and
what motivated them.
To the extent we look at all, we see this now with 18/20 hindsight and put our
own spin on it. I'm interested to hear how it looked from the other
direction.
By the way, I don't know if you will accept characterization as a classic
generativist, but to the extent you are a generativist can you tell me what
you hope to get out of a corpus list? How do you see the relationship between
the generativist tradition and corpora?
Do you see yourself as a generativist now?
> OK. That's my story and I'm sticking to it (that's what happens when you
> let Old Dogs into the list!).
If you want to stick to your story I'm sure you will Jim, but I don't think
anyone really believes the current state of linguistics is acceptable, and as
you know progress requires change. Here is my suggestion:
As I understand it you are saying: sure most of our rules turn out to be
fuzzy, but we've got to keep trying.
Rewind, look at your assumptions. Why do you assume there is a complete
explanation in terms of rules to be found (for grammar, but also for anything
else)? In particular, to get away from Chaitin's formulation in terms of
compression for a minute, how do you reconcile this with Goedel's result that
any sufficiently powerful formal system will be inconsistent or incomplete.
Apart from your own position, I'd be interested to know if you have any
insights how Chomsky saw this at the time? I believe he read some Russell and
some Wittgenstein. I don't know if he was familiar with Goedel. If he was
then I'd be interested to know how he saw the issue.
-Rob
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