3 ms·
As another (ex but not disillusioned) linguist, can I ask what’s the alternative? Say I’m puzzled by the acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion structures
by foldr 6y ago
As another (ex but not disillusioned) linguist, can I ask what’s the alternative? Say I’m puzzled by the acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion structures. I know how to tell a broadly Chomskian story about it. What other options are on the table?
I hear lots of broad brush criticism of generative linguistics, but in almost all cases it turns out that the proposed alternative approaches are just working on different problems, and aren’t really alternatives at all.
- ribit 6y agoI don't think that you will find my answer satisfactory, but does there have to be an alternative? I think that many syntactic mysteries are mysterious only because syntacticians assume that they work in particular ways. Once you start looking at these problems from the perspective of pragmatics, competing interpretations and conventionalisation, many of these mysteries disappear. The point to make is that interpretation makes use of multiple sources of information, of which syntax is just one. You don't need an elegant, tight fitting, constrained syntactic structure to use language. Which incidentally is why we can understand things even they are not grammatical. I firmly believe that the issue of "grammaticality" simply boils down to convention. Not to mention that many constructed examples used to motivate formal grammar research (be it syntax or semantics) are borderline acceptable themselves to many native speakers.
- foldr 6y agoOk. How would you apply this approach to ACD? It is not clear to me how to make the mystery “disappear” in this case.
- shp0ngle 6y agoI studied NLP in Prague, and we tend to use "dependency grammars" more than "phrase structure grammars" of Chomsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar I didn't work in the field at all after finishing the studies, so I cannot really tell you any actual implications of the different grammar approach anymore.
- foldr 6y agoDependency grammars are just another grammar formalism. They’re an alternative to Chomsky’s specific technical proposals but not to his overall approach.