4 ms·

"Chomsky's theories carried an atomistic, bottom-p approach to language to it's natural conclusion. It certainly did inspire a generation of research, most of

by samch 11y ago

"Chomsky's theories carried an atomistic, bottom-p approach to language to it's natural conclusion. It certainly did inspire a generation of research, most of it misguided. But its real flaw was one it inherited from its structuralist predecessors. It treated utterances as decomposable structures rather than as wholes, which is how the brain treats them. From the very first the Chomskyites had to admit that no research supported any connection whatsoever between the structures they posited and what went on in the brain. They assumed that further brain research would be needed to uncover those connections. But all the brain research since then has shown that transformational grammar (and even its rivals, which I studied) bears no resemblance to what the brain does with language. So what Chomsky gave us was the foundation for the ultimate mathematical elaboration of a structuralist theory that bears no relationship to anything in nature." -My dad (Ph.D. Linguistics, Yale - way back in the day)

raverbashing 11y ago
> was the foundation for the ultimate mathematical elaboration of a structuralist theory that bears no relationship to anything in nature So, like most theories? Or do you really think of electrons as 'tiny things'? You do the math and you get the results. But yeah, Chomsky structures seems to be more useful when applying it to computer languages than to real ones.
- samch 11y ago
  I think I've missed the point of your response (electrons?). Just to clarify, Chomsky's theories setup a framework for artificial reduction of language which did nothing to help elucidate the true nature of language (which is obviously a product of the evolution of the brain). The problem seems to be that Chomsky's influence sent a lot of grad students down a path that didn't really advance linguistics in terms of the human element. I don't even know if his theories really helped with computer analysis of language.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    What is the thing with languages anyway. Previous generations were so fetishist about it. I found I've learned deeper things by toying with musical instruments and geometry, although encoding geometry (among other things) as visual symbols was a great foot in the abstraction door. But these intellectual aesthetics are far from human communication IMHO. ps: sorry for that digression btw
  - discreteinfinit 11y ago
    Chomsky and people who study in the generative tradition have a lot to say about language as a biological organ (which obviously evolved from the language organs Chimps possess). In fact, Chimps have very similar systems to us. They can perceive voiced onset time (VOT) just as we do and they can reason about semantic issues. They can also utter and understand sound-meaning pairs however, they have nothing like our syntax for making novel and complex utterances out of the simple ones.
lnanek2 11y ago
Very accurate. Honestly, reading Chomsky in a lot of places he says things like there's no way a baby could learn this, it must be hard coded in their brain! Then in baby studies done later we actually find babies do have a natural understanding of things like probability and can do the things he says are impossible. There are many other flaws in his work. I tend to think of him as just an old man who wrote his stuff before we knew as much as we do about genetics, so was unfortunately really off base. It's nice that people who don't know the science were excited by him, I guess.
- discreteinfinit 11y ago
  Could you link some of those 'baby studies' you are referring to ?
  - panglott 11y ago
    I suspect this relates to the debate over the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument. It's a pretty fundamental premise of Chomskyan innatist arguments that seems to me totally wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus
discreteinfinit 11y ago
Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after Chomsky reviewed one of his papers. Skinner's brand of behaviorism was surely something we didn't need around anymore. He also changed the way everyone thinks about language. Before Chomsky, there really was no real theory of syntax that was even close to being scientific and formal. Although probabilistic machine learning methods replaced the Chomskyan brand of formal theoretic methods in NLP, a lot is owed to is work. Obviously there is the Chomsky Hierarchy but even things like the Penn Treebank POS tags are taken straight out of work in the Generative tradition from circa 1970 (not sure why no one has tried the updated and more accurate tags currently being used in theoretical linguistics). Anyways I could go on and on but Im wondering what your Dad has to say about this ? P.S There is an ongoing joke in the field of Linguistics about people who either think they understand Chomsky or just straight up don't understand him. Its difficult stuff.
- samch 11y ago
  "No question that a lot of the tools developed under generative grammar have proved useful, and one can certainly cite the Huxleyan principle that truth comes sooner from error than from a vacuum. I think I would say that the American structuralist tradition was headed in a wrong direction from at least 1933 (Bloomfield's Language) and that Chomsky (despite the claims of his followers that he made a revolutionary break from structuralism) simply gave structuralism a mathematical rigor that allowed it to be taken to its logical conclusion. The tools that were developed in the process have allowed the field (or the more brain-oriented parts of it) to move in a rather decisively different direction. Full disclosure: I got my PhD at Yale under Syd Lamb, so naturally I would not be classed as a Chomskyan. It took me some years to realize that Lamb's StratGram itself suffered from the same reductionist flaws. The only theoretical school I know of that had a chance of moving in the right direction (until very recently) was Firth's. Unfortunately, neither he nor his followers developed the theoretical tools that were needed. Certainly Halliday's Systemics became as reductionist as any of the others. Hudson's word grammar made some good moves but never really developed well. So yeah, Chomsky set something in motion that produced some useful theoretical tools that could be used to help push off in new directions. But the TGG tradition, being a well developed extension of the Bloomfieldian tradition, is still basically a dead end." -My dad
syllogism 11y ago
But meaning is compositional! At least in large part. Most sentences we encounter are novel, and yet they're understood. So, somehow, we break up the meaning of the novel sentence, relating it to sentences we've seen. And actually the process there isn't that mysterious. The basic facts of English syntax are pretty obvious. Any English speaker will agree that "The blahdies merikaled the beemers" implies "The beemers were merikaled by the blahdies", without knowing what these words mean. I see from your Dad's comment below that he's fond of the systemicist school, following Halliday etc. I've done substantial work with this theory, as it's what I learned in my undergrad. The rest of my career has been spent working with others.[1] If I had to identify a central objection to SFL, I might say this: SFL is very fond of proposing non-linear effects. The theory goes that it's all about interactions, and if you study anything in isolation, you won't find anything out --- because everything's non-linear. This assertion is basically unsupported. It just sort of sits there as an assumption. But we should assume simplicity, not complexity. The simplest assumption is that there is no relationship between X and Y, but the next simplest is that there's a linear relationship. If you want to tell me there's a non linear relationship, you'd better come with evidence. And SFL never does. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FXwlnmAAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FXwlnmAAAAAJ&hl=en
- samch 11y ago
  "Two comments: First, I'm not fond of the systemicists. I think Halliday took a wrong turning. Second, you say that "somehow, we break up the meaning of the novel sentence, relating it to sentences we've seen." Quite correct. But I think the essential point of the Firthian approach is that there is not necessarily a single decomposition of the string. There can be multiple decompositions, each yielding components that can be related to other utterances. All of the standard approaches start by assuming single decompositions (or decomposition trees) on each level. That's where I think the whole structurallist (and systemicist) project went off the tracks. I did manage to crank out a few papers in this direction many years ago, but left it before I had gotten my act together, and I succumbed to the lure of Milton's "that bad eminence" (administration)." -My dad

by samch 11y ago

raverbashing 11y ago

> was the foundation for the ultimate mathematical elaboration of a structuralist theory that bears no relationship to anything in nature So, like most theories? Or do you really think of electrons as 'tiny things'? You do the math and you get the results. But yeah, Chomsky structures seems to be more useful when applying it to computer languages than to real ones.

samch 11y ago
I think I've missed the point of your response (electrons?). Just to clarify, Chomsky's theories setup a framework for artificial reduction of language which did nothing to help elucidate the true nature of language (which is obviously a product of the evolution of the brain). The problem seems to be that Chomsky's influence sent a lot of grad students down a path that didn't really advance linguistics in terms of the human element. I don't even know if his theories really helped with computer analysis of language.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  What is the thing with languages anyway. Previous generations were so fetishist about it. I found I've learned deeper things by toying with musical instruments and geometry, although encoding geometry (among other things) as visual symbols was a great foot in the abstraction door. But these intellectual aesthetics are far from human communication IMHO. ps: sorry for that digression btw
- discreteinfinit 11y ago
  Chomsky and people who study in the generative tradition have a lot to say about language as a biological organ (which obviously evolved from the language organs Chimps possess). In fact, Chimps have very similar systems to us. They can perceive voiced onset time (VOT) just as we do and they can reason about semantic issues. They can also utter and understand sound-meaning pairs however, they have nothing like our syntax for making novel and complex utterances out of the simple ones.

lnanek2 11y ago

Very accurate. Honestly, reading Chomsky in a lot of places he says things like there's no way a baby could learn this, it must be hard coded in their brain! Then in baby studies done later we actually find babies do have a natural understanding of things like probability and can do the things he says are impossible. There are many other flaws in his work. I tend to think of him as just an old man who wrote his stuff before we knew as much as we do about genetics, so was unfortunately really off base. It's nice that people who don't know the science were excited by him, I guess.

discreteinfinit 11y ago
Could you link some of those 'baby studies' you are referring to ?
- panglott 11y ago
  I suspect this relates to the debate over the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument. It's a pretty fundamental premise of Chomskyan innatist arguments that seems to me totally wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus

discreteinfinit 11y ago

Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after Chomsky reviewed one of his papers. Skinner's brand of behaviorism was surely something we didn't need around anymore. He also changed the way everyone thinks about language. Before Chomsky, there really was no real theory of syntax that was even close to being scientific and formal. Although probabilistic machine learning methods replaced the Chomskyan brand of formal theoretic methods in NLP, a lot is owed to is work. Obviously there is the Chomsky Hierarchy but even things like the Penn Treebank POS tags are taken straight out of work in the Generative tradition from circa 1970 (not sure why no one has tried the updated and more accurate tags currently being used in theoretical linguistics). Anyways I could go on and on but Im wondering what your Dad has to say about this ? P.S There is an ongoing joke in the field of Linguistics about people who either think they understand Chomsky or just straight up don't understand him. Its difficult stuff.

samch 11y ago
"No question that a lot of the tools developed under generative grammar have proved useful, and one can certainly cite the Huxleyan principle that truth comes sooner from error than from a vacuum. I think I would say that the American structuralist tradition was headed in a wrong direction from at least 1933 (Bloomfield's Language) and that Chomsky (despite the claims of his followers that he made a revolutionary break from structuralism) simply gave structuralism a mathematical rigor that allowed it to be taken to its logical conclusion. The tools that were developed in the process have allowed the field (or the more brain-oriented parts of it) to move in a rather decisively different direction. Full disclosure: I got my PhD at Yale under Syd Lamb, so naturally I would not be classed as a Chomskyan. It took me some years to realize that Lamb's StratGram itself suffered from the same reductionist flaws. The only theoretical school I know of that had a chance of moving in the right direction (until very recently) was Firth's. Unfortunately, neither he nor his followers developed the theoretical tools that were needed. Certainly Halliday's Systemics became as reductionist as any of the others. Hudson's word grammar made some good moves but never really developed well. So yeah, Chomsky set something in motion that produced some useful theoretical tools that could be used to help push off in new directions. But the TGG tradition, being a well developed extension of the Bloomfieldian tradition, is still basically a dead end." -My dad

syllogism 11y ago

But meaning is compositional! At least in large part. Most sentences we encounter are novel, and yet they're understood. So, somehow, we break up the meaning of the novel sentence, relating it to sentences we've seen. And actually the process there isn't that mysterious. The basic facts of English syntax are pretty obvious. Any English speaker will agree that "The blahdies merikaled the beemers" implies "The beemers were merikaled by the blahdies", without knowing what these words mean. I see from your Dad's comment below that he's fond of the systemicist school, following Halliday etc. I've done substantial work with this theory, as it's what I learned in my undergrad. The rest of my career has been spent working with others.[1] If I had to identify a central objection to SFL, I might say this: SFL is very fond of proposing non-linear effects. The theory goes that it's all about interactions, and if you study anything in isolation, you won't find anything out --- because everything's non-linear. This assertion is basically unsupported. It just sort of sits there as an assumption. But we should assume simplicity, not complexity. The simplest assumption is that there is no relationship between X and Y, but the next simplest is that there's a linear relationship. If you want to tell me there's a non linear relationship, you'd better come with evidence. And SFL never does. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FXwlnmAAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FXwlnmAAAAAJ&hl=en

samch 11y ago
"Two comments: First, I'm not fond of the systemicists. I think Halliday took a wrong turning. Second, you say that "somehow, we break up the meaning of the novel sentence, relating it to sentences we've seen." Quite correct. But I think the essential point of the Firthian approach is that there is not necessarily a single decomposition of the string. There can be multiple decompositions, each yielding components that can be related to other utterances. All of the standard approaches start by assuming single decompositions (or decomposition trees) on each level. That's where I think the whole structurallist (and systemicist) project went off the tracks. I did manage to crank out a few papers in this direction many years ago, but left it before I had gotten my act together, and I succumbed to the lure of Milton's "that bad eminence" (administration)." -My dad