4 ms·

It bugs me that he doesn't actually give a reason for why these orderings are "right", beyond his having an intuition for them (which might be just pattern lear

by clebio 11y ago

It bugs me that he doesn't actually give a reason for why these orderings are "right", beyond his having an intuition for them (which might be just pattern learning, as others here mention). It's been said (citation needed) that phrases like "tick tock" and "see saw" are in those orders because it's a high or hard vowel before the low or soft (e.g. "tock tick" sounds weird). Maybe that is why "little old" lady sounds more correct to us? I don't know. But the article goes off to draw a parallel to mathematical intuition, and leaves the original grammar problem unresolved, in my opinion. Incidentally, I usually _really_ like the Better Explained articles.

kalid 11y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you've enjoyed the articles thus far :). The adjective order rules are interesting in that we have to reverse-engineer them from our brains, but aren't consciously aware of them. It's apparently an area of ongoing research why certain orderings are correct. (Maybe there's something about the specificity of the adjective, where the more-specific items are closest to the subject.) I think the higher-level concern is we can get tricked by thinking we need to consciously master the structure in order to be fluent, vs. letting our brain's pattern-matching skills do some of the heavy lifting.
- clebio 11y ago
  Hey, appreciate your reply to my comment! And fair response, I'm glad to hear from scientists that are able to talk about open research, as opposed to trying to make a dogmatic point or conjecture without evidence. I like the view that this is an open problem and an area of active research, much more than the more conventional, lay-person settling of the issue as "developed an ear for the language" and that's the end of it. The impressive work of people like Steven Pinker and Chomsky (in his actual academic field) is to look very carefully at different ethnographic groups, and the larger cultures those groups are embedded in. By doing so, finding groups isolated enough or with a materially different context, such that they don't exhibit the same patterns. The title of the article felt like a bait-and-switch, I guess. When I realized it was on betterexplained, it did make more sense that it was ultimately about mathematical reasoning. No worries!
  - kalid 11y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I struggled with the title a bit, in my head I think of the "XYZ Fallacy" as a trap we are likely fall into. For me, the trap was overemphasizing a set of implicit rules and trying to explicitly teach those rules to newcomers. (I.e., the newbies are required to use a structured approach that proficient practitioners never needed or even know about.) This is my personal lingo though, and might not make sense to others.
jameshart 11y ago
That's not the point - grammar doesn't have an underlying truth so there's no reason why one order is right and another isn't. The point is to give an example of how people are able to make progress in successfully using and understanding English without having any awareness of one underlying rule (people will even argue - as they do here in these comments - that there is no underlying rule, even though there certainly does seem to be, even though native speakers are generally never taught it). That does make it different from mathematics, where there are reasons for the rules (you can't divide both sides of an equation by a value if that value might be zero, for example). But the point is more to suggest that it could be possible to make progress in carrying out and understanding mathematics without understanding some of the formal underlying rules beneath a concept. That seems like a valid point.

by clebio 11y ago

kalid 11y ago

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you've enjoyed the articles thus far :). The adjective order rules are interesting in that we have to reverse-engineer them from our brains, but aren't consciously aware of them. It's apparently an area of ongoing research why certain orderings are correct. (Maybe there's something about the specificity of the adjective, where the more-specific items are closest to the subject.) I think the higher-level concern is we can get tricked by thinking we need to consciously master the structure in order to be fluent, vs. letting our brain's pattern-matching skills do some of the heavy lifting.

clebio 11y ago
Hey, appreciate your reply to my comment! And fair response, I'm glad to hear from scientists that are able to talk about open research, as opposed to trying to make a dogmatic point or conjecture without evidence. I like the view that this is an open problem and an area of active research, much more than the more conventional, lay-person settling of the issue as "developed an ear for the language" and that's the end of it. The impressive work of people like Steven Pinker and Chomsky (in his actual academic field) is to look very carefully at different ethnographic groups, and the larger cultures those groups are embedded in. By doing so, finding groups isolated enough or with a materially different context, such that they don't exhibit the same patterns. The title of the article felt like a bait-and-switch, I guess. When I realized it was on betterexplained, it did make more sense that it was ultimately about mathematical reasoning. No worries!
- kalid 11y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I struggled with the title a bit, in my head I think of the "XYZ Fallacy" as a trap we are likely fall into. For me, the trap was overemphasizing a set of implicit rules and trying to explicitly teach those rules to newcomers. (I.e., the newbies are required to use a structured approach that proficient practitioners never needed or even know about.) This is my personal lingo though, and might not make sense to others.

jameshart 11y ago

That's not the point - grammar doesn't have an underlying truth so there's no reason why one order is right and another isn't. The point is to give an example of how people are able to make progress in successfully using and understanding English without having any awareness of one underlying rule (people will even argue - as they do here in these comments - that there is no underlying rule, even though there certainly does seem to be, even though native speakers are generally never taught it). That does make it different from mathematics, where there are reasons for the rules (you can't divide both sides of an equation by a value if that value might be zero, for example). But the point is more to suggest that it could be possible to make progress in carrying out and understanding mathematics without understanding some of the formal underlying rules beneath a concept. That seems like a valid point.