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Lots of linguistics researchers would disagree about the existence and necessity of universal grammar or Chomsky's 'language acquisition device' and in fact the

Lots of linguistics researchers would disagree about the existence and necessity of universal grammar or Chomsky's 'language acquisition device' and in fact the success of LLMs and statistical models which very clearly have no LAD and no universal grammar over feature engineering or grammar based schemes suggests the opposite.

kilgnad 4y ago
I'm outdated on this research. I took a linguistics class in UCLA about a decade ago and at the time universal grammar was the prevailing norm. Has it changed since then? Have they found a significant number of human civilizations that use divergent grammars?
- solarmist 4y ago
  Chomsky’s universal grammar is a modification of Harris’s Operator grammar. Harris’s operator grammar was based on set theory however Chomsky was enamored with formal logic and ran in that direction. Also, Chomsky became famous while Harris didn’t. Operator grammar is self-discoverable and he published a full description of English grammar in the 1980’s using this theory and an extension in the 1990’s which generalized to other languages. It is not fully deterministic (final word selection and ordering is probabilistic), but it is much more convincing to me and in line with how we understand brains to work. Over the last 20 years Chomsky has begun to fall out of favor because it’s just so complicated and requires external structures, etc.
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    Well the model needs to be invalidated by science not by elegance or logic. Which grammar is actually more universal or is it a case where both can be applied. In the class I attended Chmosky's stuff was taught as foundational linguistics.
    - solarmist 4y ago
      I’m not sure what you’re arguing. Any theory that explains all the facts is valid, there can be more than one competing theory. Fame of the author absolutely matters and so does elegance of the theory. Chomsky has held on so long because it did pretty well and he became very famous, but over time it has needed larger and larger patches to cover its flaws, so other explanations are gaining traction once again.
      - kilgnad 4y ago
        Hold on. I'm not biased here. I already admitted my knowledge is outdated. I am actively welcoming new information. I am not arguing. No the elegance of the theory does not matter. The truth of the theory does. I'm saying does the universal grammar you describe, is it actually universal? Amongst all the languages in the world, do they all share this other grammar you describe? If not then the theory is incorrect. It doesn't matter how elegant the theory is. I brought this up specifically because your reasoning wasn't "scientific" it was more along the lines of logical elegance. >Chomsky has held on so long because it did pretty well and he became very famous, but over time it has needed larger and larger patches to cover its flaws, so other explanations are gaining traction once again. See this makes sense and is basically the answer to the question I am asking. So you're basically saying that there were flaws? As in he had to make up new rules constantly because the science was contradicting his theory. Am I correct in this characterization?
        solarmist 4y ago
        Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I didn’t really get what you were trying to say. I’m not an expert, but if I recall I think the big flaw was insistence on determinism. And to my knowledge operator grammar is universal to the degree there isn’t a counter example in the dozen of languages he explored and hundreds he had others help him with. But to my knowledge the only language he fully mapped was English. Edit: take a look at the article on Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_grammar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_grammar

kilgnad 4y ago

I'm outdated on this research. I took a linguistics class in UCLA about a decade ago and at the time universal grammar was the prevailing norm. Has it changed since then? Have they found a significant number of human civilizations that use divergent grammars?

solarmist 4y ago
Chomsky’s universal grammar is a modification of Harris’s Operator grammar. Harris’s operator grammar was based on set theory however Chomsky was enamored with formal logic and ran in that direction. Also, Chomsky became famous while Harris didn’t. Operator grammar is self-discoverable and he published a full description of English grammar in the 1980’s using this theory and an extension in the 1990’s which generalized to other languages. It is not fully deterministic (final word selection and ordering is probabilistic), but it is much more convincing to me and in line with how we understand brains to work. Over the last 20 years Chomsky has begun to fall out of favor because it’s just so complicated and requires external structures, etc.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  Well the model needs to be invalidated by science not by elegance or logic. Which grammar is actually more universal or is it a case where both can be applied. In the class I attended Chmosky's stuff was taught as foundational linguistics.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    I’m not sure what you’re arguing. Any theory that explains all the facts is valid, there can be more than one competing theory. Fame of the author absolutely matters and so does elegance of the theory. Chomsky has held on so long because it did pretty well and he became very famous, but over time it has needed larger and larger patches to cover its flaws, so other explanations are gaining traction once again.
    - kilgnad 4y ago
      Hold on. I'm not biased here. I already admitted my knowledge is outdated. I am actively welcoming new information. I am not arguing. No the elegance of the theory does not matter. The truth of the theory does. I'm saying does the universal grammar you describe, is it actually universal? Amongst all the languages in the world, do they all share this other grammar you describe? If not then the theory is incorrect. It doesn't matter how elegant the theory is. I brought this up specifically because your reasoning wasn't "scientific" it was more along the lines of logical elegance. >Chomsky has held on so long because it did pretty well and he became very famous, but over time it has needed larger and larger patches to cover its flaws, so other explanations are gaining traction once again. See this makes sense and is basically the answer to the question I am asking. So you're basically saying that there were flaws? As in he had to make up new rules constantly because the science was contradicting his theory. Am I correct in this characterization?
      - solarmist 4y ago
        Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I didn’t really get what you were trying to say. I’m not an expert, but if I recall I think the big flaw was insistence on determinism. And to my knowledge operator grammar is universal to the degree there isn’t a counter example in the dozen of languages he explored and hundreds he had others help him with. But to my knowledge the only language he fully mapped was English. Edit: take a look at the article on Wikipedia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_grammar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_grammar