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I hate to quote an abstract, but I'm really struggling to understand the purpose here -- it seems like they're angry that Chomsky defined language as symbolic o

by bbor 2y ago

I hate to quote an abstract, but I'm really struggling to understand the purpose here -- it seems like they're angry that Chomsky defined language as symbolic operations and relegated the external facets to "history of language" or "anthropology of language" or other such fields. We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition. What is the difference between "language is a cognitive adaptation used for communication" and "language is the communication enabled by a cognitive adaption", really? Other than a, as Chomsky would call it, "terminological dispute"

sprawld 2y ago
The one part that directly contradicted Chomsky was the argument languages tend to minimise dependency length, which flies in the face of long range dependencies like question movement, topicalisation, pronoun binding etc. And misses the main point Chomsky was making: why have a system with movement? The article seems to be arguing that statistically most sentences (in most languages) are simple. OK, sentences like "Which boys do the girls expect to fight each other?" may not be common, but you instantly understand that "each other" binds not to the closer "the girls", but the long range dependency "which boys". In order to understand it you reconstruct the question to its original position "the girls expect <which boys> to fight each other" to know that the boys are the ones fighting, and bind to each other (the boys are fighting the boys) Why have a system like that (in basically every language)? How is that optimised for simple dependencies & communication?

by bbor 2y ago

sprawld 2y ago

The one part that directly contradicted Chomsky was the argument languages tend to minimise dependency length, which flies in the face of long range dependencies like question movement, topicalisation, pronoun binding etc. And misses the main point Chomsky was making: why have a system with movement? The article seems to be arguing that statistically most sentences (in most languages) are simple. OK, sentences like "Which boys do the girls expect to fight each other?" may not be common, but you instantly understand that "each other" binds not to the closer "the girls", but the long range dependency "which boys". In order to understand it you reconstruct the question to its original position "the girls expect <which boys> to fight each other" to know that the boys are the ones fighting, and bind to each other (the boys are fighting the boys) Why have a system like that (in basically every language)? How is that optimised for simple dependencies & communication?