John F. Sowa wrote:
> Chomsky's fallacy was to take a mathematical formalism, namely
> Post production systems, and make the claim that they capture
> the fundamental nature of natural language. If he had softened
> that claim to saying they were a promising model of an important
> aspect of language, he and his colleagues could have done the
> same research, but without inciting the religious wars.
I thought that's what he did do. That is, he did not claim that his
formalism covered semantics, and he later argued heavily against
generative semantics, which did make more or less that claim. So if by
"religious wars" you mean the Generative Semantics Wars, then the
argument was in the opposite direction, with Chomsky on the side
claiming that transformational grammar explained only syntax, not
semantics (and certainly not phonology; as for morphology, it was
subsumed under syntax and phonology).
If however by "religious wars" you mean the earlier years, when the
fight was against behaviorists, then Chomsky's argument was that
transformational grammar was a sufficient formalism for the syntax of
natural languages, and that notably weaker models, including finite
state automatons and CF and CS phrase structure grammars, were not
sufficient. (Later Chomsky looked for ways to constrain
transformational grammar in order to explain learnability; this surfaced
in Aspects (1965), but came to the fore only after the GS war was won.)
As for phonology, which is where most of the conflict between Chomsky
and the American Structuralists came (since apart from Zellig Harris and
a couple others, most American Structuralists stayed away from syntax),
I don't think the argument was over the mathematical formalism. Rather,
it was over the representation (phonemes vs. distinctive features),
including whether there was such a thing as a phonemic level of
representation, and over the way to find the atoms of the representation
in a particular language. (At least that's my reading; John Goldsmith
is probably lurking out there, and can correct me if I'm wrong.)
-- Mike Maxwell maxwell@ldc.upenn.edu
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