Mike Maxwell escribió:
...
> 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
>
I'm also lurking out here, and I don't think I've seen a better précis of
this bit of recent history of linguistics than Mike's.
Jim
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje, ICSyH
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla MÉXICO
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