John,
To be clear, I also do not subscribe to Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis. My thesis does not depend on it, nor make any claims about how humans acquire and develop natural language.
The TalaMind approach supports Langacker's discussion of "Floyd broke the glass" (page 214 "Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar"). In creating or processing a Tala sentence corresponding to "Floyd broke the glass", a Tala agent could also process related Tala sentences, such as those discussed by Langacker. Its processing would not be limited to Tala sentences, but could use other representations for meaning and context at the linguistic, archetype, and associative levels of an embodied TalaMind architecture.
Phil
> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:53:13 -0500
> From: sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Barbara Partee on Formal Semantics
>
> Phil and Simon,
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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"
>
> 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.
>
> What I find incredible is that Chomsky is still trying to defend
> the following fantasies:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 3. No further mutations arose since then that might have caused
> any degradation in that perfect UG.
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> 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
>
> I turned it off after 20 minutes, because I did not want to
> throw up on my keyboard.
>
> For an alternative, I recommend lectures by Michael Halliday and
> his colleague Christian Matthiessen:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC-blhaIUCk
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> John
>
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