Phil and Simon, (01)
When I read Chomsky's first book (Syntactic Structures), I was very
impressed. I even considered his second book (Aspects) an important
contribution. But I agree with Marvin Minsky that linguistics would
have progressed much faster if Chomsky had never returned to the field
after his politicking against the Vietnam war. (02)
Phil
> John's interpretation of "Floyd broke the glass" illustrates the
> pervasive importance of metaphor in natural language, and also
> reminds us of the importance of Robert Floyd's work. (03)
Yes. I should have googled that sentence to find the example.
Instead, I tried to interpret it as a metaphor that considered
Robert Floyd's work on the semantics of programming languages as
anticipating the later developments in attempting to formalize NLs. (04)
Simon
> A repeat of of "Floyd broke the poi-jar" is of course "I declare
> it it it Floyd do it Floyd cause it it poi-jar be it poi-jar break
> i happen have to you" (05)
That is the kind of reductio ad absurdum that drove me (and nearly
everybody else in computational linguistics) to reject the works
and pomps of Chomsky and some (not all) of his former students. (06)
What I find incredible is that Chomsky is still trying to defend
the following fantasies: (07)
1. NL syntax is a formal system that miraculously arose in a
perfect or nearly perfect form as a result of a magical
mutation about 50 thousand years ago. (08)
2. The fact that people with any genetic background can learn
to speak any NL with native competence implies that the
magic mutation gave rise to a universal grammar (UG), which
underlies the special syntaxes of every NL. (09)
3. No further mutations arose since then that might have caused
any degradation in that perfect UG. (010)
4. The UG is so complex that children could never master it from
the limited amount of language they hear in their first few years.
(The so-called "poverty of the stimulus" principle.) (011)
5. The mutation that created UG was independent of the use of
language for communication. Any attempt to analyze language
as a system of communication is unscientific. (012)
If you think those points are an exaggeration, you can hear them
directly from the horse's mouth in a two-hour lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urrNTVxuCxs (013)
I turned it off after 20 minutes, because I did not want to
throw up on my keyboard. (014)
For an alternative, I recommend lectures by Michael Halliday and
his colleague Christian Matthiessen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC-blhaIUCk (015)
Halliday and Chomsky were born in the same year, but they never
cite one another. Halliday began his career in Chinese linguistics,
and he spent a few years in China to develop proficiency in the
language. He was also a co-founder of CLRU (Cambridge Language
Research Unit), which was a pioneering center for machine
translation and computational linguistics. For a summary of
their approach, see the review I wrote of their book:
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/Halliday.pdf (016)
That same YouTube page has a link to a lecture by Terrance Deacon
about genetics and the evolution of language. He points out that
Chomsky's assumptions about a language gene that spontaneously
arose from a magic mutation is hopelessly unrealistic. (017)
John (018)
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