tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post2600154116459490958..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: The Generative Death March, Part 1Norberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-79325901438254253292016-09-26T09:00:28.591-07:002016-09-26T09:00:28.591-07:00Yeah, that's interesting. Clausal comparatives...Yeah, that's interesting. Clausal comparatives are correlatives or relatives in many languages. Chomsky in the Wh-movement paper (citing Bresnan) mentions the presence of overt wh- for some speakers of English, which is why I was curious.Utpalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18166651069703369369noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-61759914217671233082016-09-26T08:52:26.039-07:002016-09-26T08:52:26.039-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Utpalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18166651069703369369noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-88701922002643015322016-09-26T08:38:16.962-07:002016-09-26T08:38:16.962-07:00Utpal, we didn't test the wh-comparative, but ...Utpal, we didn't test the wh-comparative, but it is pretty clearly not a part of mainstream American English grammar, so I'd be surprised if the wh-comparative is widely judged to be acceptable. And, as far as CHILDES goes, there are no long distance comparatives at all.Jeff Lidzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02662307721892528218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-68814318503092475672016-09-25T09:29:57.938-07:002016-09-25T09:29:57.938-07:00@Jeff: A clarification (playing the devil's ad...@Jeff: A clarification (playing the devil's advocate here): Do people who accept 3(b): "Valentine is a better value-ball player than I think Alexander is" also accept "Valentine is a better value-ball player than what I think Alexander is" (some English speakers accept them, don't know what percentage). No idea if child directed speech has any examples of any of these (the version with "wh" or without), but if the wh-versions exist in the data, won't a learner have evidence for "analogizing" with the wh-moved questions rather than with co-ordinate ellipsis?Utpalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18166651069703369369noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-76086663398474628292016-09-17T14:00:29.244-07:002016-09-17T14:00:29.244-07:00OK, but Peggy's point seems to be independent ...OK, but Peggy's point seems to be independent of whether Amazon's system is fixed in this sense, i.e. independent of whether, for some given set of book purchases, Amazon's recommendation system provides different output now than "it" did two years ago.Tim Hunterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11810503425508055407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-89759183477757911332016-09-17T07:36:22.348-07:002016-09-17T07:36:22.348-07:00A fixed algorithm (in technical language, a pure f...A fixed algorithm (in technical language, a pure functional algorithm) will of course produce different results on different inputs, but it will produce the same result on the same input every time you perform it. (Note that either you or other people borrowing more books constitutes a change in input.) The fixed algorithm of addition will produce different results for different summands, but always produces the same result for the same summands.<br /><br />I'm saying that Amazon's algorithm is probably not like this, and that its improvement over time is not just a matter of substituting one fixed algorithm for another.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-47795958917726762592016-09-16T19:20:32.142-07:002016-09-16T19:20:32.142-07:00Well, the only big typological study of comparativ...Well, the only big typological study of comparatives that also treats a bit of ellipsis is Stassen's 1985 book ("Comparison and Universal Grammar"), and he has to rely on secondary lit for descriptions of predicate ellipsis (mostly gapping and conjunction reduction), and this is highly partial and problematic. He posits a number of typological universals relating comparatives and ellipsis, but the data are too sparse to conclude much (he concludes). But in the crucial cases of interest to us here, he in a way concedes Jeff's point, writing "the index on the deleted predicate [what's left over after predicate "identity deletion"] will be pronominalized, relativized and adverbialized into some locative or instrumental case .... [it] will be syntacticized into a pronominal ... item with the original meaning 'to/at/by which'" (p.312), citing Russian and Albanian among others. If this is true, then we expect such wh-pronominals to be subject to island constraints. In other words, he doesn't believe that the plain vanilla ellipsis strategies available in those languages in his sample that have them (the sample seems to be 110 areally and genetically diverse languages) are actually the ones that will appear in the comparatives that show reductions: instead, a wh-pronominal appears. One reasonable interpretation of this, it seems to me, is that this is precisely Jeff's point. We just need the island facts to put the icing on the cake. Jason Merchanthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14803166493238954111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-5329528623841832872016-09-16T12:42:27.550-07:002016-09-16T12:42:27.550-07:00Of course it involves machine learning. (What was ...Of course it involves machine learning. (What was the other option?) And of course it's not fixed; that's why my recommendations are different from other peoples' recommendations. Does that mean that Amazon "has no specific built-in algorithm for determining recommendations"?<br /><br />What all those smart folks at Amazon spend their time doing is to devise the initial state of the machine that performs the appropriate generalizations; if the initial state were not rich and intricate, it would not require such expertise.Tim Hunterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11810503425508055407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-88943275929759743232016-09-16T12:41:57.591-07:002016-09-16T12:41:57.591-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Tim Hunterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11810503425508055407noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-6123150570021517652016-09-16T09:05:52.354-07:002016-09-16T09:05:52.354-07:00But do you have actual knowledge that it does? Th...But do you have actual knowledge that it does? There are a lot of smart folks at Amazon, and I'd be surprised if the algorithm didn't involve a hefty amount of machine learning and is by no means fixed.John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-62113258373269250572016-09-14T07:34:41.685-07:002016-09-14T07:34:41.685-07:00Nice to see the Greek and Norwegian data, but I...Nice to see the Greek and Norwegian data, but I'll get really excited once there is evidence from, say, 10-15 languages from different families and three different continents. Baker (2015) did such a study on case, in a really admirable way, but he didn't come up with any strong universal generalizations. It may well be, though, that ellipsis phenomena are less variable across languages than case – one would have to study them systematically.Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-31921271655831221292016-09-12T10:28:17.155-07:002016-09-12T10:28:17.155-07:00I think Jeff's point can be made even more gen...I think Jeff's point can be made even more general, and help to address Martin's concern about English: if a language L with grammar G has a nonreduced clausal comparative (like German, English, Greek, Russian do) and if L has a kind of predicate anaphor (whether involving ellipsis or a pro-form of some kind) that appears in both comparatives and non-comparatives (in coordinations, for example, but not just in those), then putting that predicate anaphor in a clausal comparative where the anaphor is separated from the marker of the standard of comparison ("than", "als", "apoti", "chem" etc) by an island will be ill-formed. One version of this argument (from Norwegian and German) is given in (<a href="http://home.uchicago.edu/merchant/pubs/Bentzen2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">Bentzen et al 2013</a>), for example.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10326272927224445117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-89195748238226206002016-09-12T08:40:06.991-07:002016-09-12T08:40:06.991-07:00Peggy Speas I'm reading a book (Robt. A. Burto...Peggy Speas I'm reading a book (Robt. A. Burton, 'On Certainty') that has a very nice analogy for the widespread misunderstanding of innateness - He says that saying that nothing about language is innate is like thinking that since Amazon has no recommendations for you the first time you ever sign in and then it generates recommendations based on its experience with your and others' purchases, Amazon has no specific built-in algorithm for determining recommendations.Peggyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06401562591838000609noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-67116477571713272752016-09-12T08:31:27.588-07:002016-09-12T08:31:27.588-07:00Here is an excellent paper by Jason Merchant which...Here is an excellent paper by Jason Merchant which is helpful for thinking about the typological and theoretical issues together: http://home.uchicago.edu/merchant/pubs/gk.comps.jgl.pdf<br />I suspect Jason would have more to say about this topic, given his expertise in ellipsis and comparatives. Jeff Lidzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02662307721892528218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-91992724591720674042016-09-12T06:26:46.895-07:002016-09-12T06:26:46.895-07:00I agree, Omer, I think. I guess what I have in min...I agree, Omer, I think. I guess what I have in mind is the following. The constraint we're after to capture your generalization has to do with how syntactic dependencies can be encoded. Ideally, this constraint exceeds the phenomenon of verbal agreement. So if a language lacks verbal agreement altogether (Korean, Danish), one would hope to be able to discern the constraint on different phenomena in Korean and Danish. Otherwise the constraint ends up being structure-specific and that wouldn't be an ideal constraint to have as part of your UG. So perhaps it's more programmatic what I have in mind than "analysis in practice" because you cannot know in advance what the generality of the constraints we seek looks like. Olaf K.https://www.blogger.com/profile/12208936369604838525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-82905832926447566792016-09-12T05:25:30.202-07:002016-09-12T05:25:30.202-07:00@Olaf: I don't see what is undesirable about t...@Olaf: I don't see what is undesirable about this. It is par for the course in linguistics and, I suspect, in all empirical sciences. (Relativity is not damaged by the fact that I cannot see its effects in my backyard.)<br /><br />Example: I have noted (in work with Masha Polinsky) that if a verb X covaries in person/number/gender features with a nominal argument Y, then either (i) X and Y are clausemates, or (ii) X is in a higher clause than Y. But never: Y is in a higher clause than X. I have also argued, separately, that there is no such thing as "abstract" agreement (i.e., agreement that is null across the entire person/number/gender paradigm). This means that in a language like, say, Korean, the former property, concerning the structural relationship between verbs and nominals, is unobservable.<br /><br />It's true that if everything that was true of our linguistic capacity was surface-true in every language, our jobs would be easier. But I think it would also be way less challenging :-)<br /><br />Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-42259774381325584472016-09-11T23:35:47.221-07:002016-09-11T23:35:47.221-07:00I guess what Omer has in mind is the following. If...I guess what Omer has in mind is the following. If a language has property X, then X is (universally) constrained in the following way. If language lacks X, the relevant constraints are latent and therefore invisible at the surface. However, since we want our constraints to be as general as possible, this seems to me an ultimately undesirable situation. Olaf K.https://www.blogger.com/profile/12208936369604838525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-85650597581108189952016-09-11T22:52:41.761-07:002016-09-11T22:52:41.761-07:00Thanks, Jeff, this sounds like a pretty concrete p...Thanks, Jeff, this sounds like a pretty concrete prediction. I wish more generative authors spelled out their predictions in a clear way, and I wish that people turned this into an actual research programme, e.g. by applying for funding to test the predictions in a systematic fashion. It might be possible eventually to test the claims, but it might not (in practice), given that it's so hard even to know what should count as VP, and given that few languages have comparative constructions that are at all like English comparatives. So it may be that the argument will remain at the abstract level, and we'll have to hope that somehow our opponents will go away ot die, which would be really sad...Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-60872670940695252252016-09-11T13:29:15.220-07:002016-09-11T13:29:15.220-07:00Here is a prediction that can be readily made, spe...Here is a prediction that can be readily made, specific to the phenomenon in the post (though Norbert's points are exactly right as well). If a language has predicate ellipsis like English (e.g., the aux remains but the remained of the VP/AP are elided) and also has comparatives over predicates that involve ellipsis, then the comparative ellipsis will pattern like wh-movement (i.e., be island sensitive). Moreover, we can make the prediction that if a comparative construction is sensitive to the complex-NP island we observe here, then it will also be sensitive to relative clause islands, adjunct islands, etc. (ie., you won't find a construction which obeys only a subset of the islands). Further, if you have a comparative construction like this, it will not only be sensitive to islands, it will also induce islands for other island-sensitive phenomena (e.g., topicalization, clefting, wh-movement, relativization, etc).Jeff Lidzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02662307721892528218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-78301650559959696122016-09-11T13:25:13.732-07:002016-09-11T13:25:13.732-07:00Regarding (3a) and (3b), Alex Drummond, Dave Kush ...Regarding (3a) and (3b), Alex Drummond, Dave Kush and I conducted an acceptability rating study with naive speakers which shows the relevant interaction. 3a-c are roughly equivalent and 3d is markedly worse. We will surely publish this data soon, when we finish analyzing the relevant parts of the child directed speech (which our initial analyses suggest provides almost no data of the kind that would allow learners to distinguish coordinate ellipsis from comparative ellipsis). So, the usage-based theorist has no room to maneuver here about the data. <br /><br />As for your second point, I think the generative analysis has more to offer than you think. There are essentially three types of dependency that are relevant here. Anaphoric dependencies, which can be cross-sentential; Binding dependencies (everyone thinks that he is a force for good), which are obligatorily inter-sentential, but which originate in an A-position. And A-bar dependencies, which are obligatorily inter-sentential, but which originate in an A-bar position. When learners see that VP ellipsis is possible across sentence boundaries, then it follows that they will not be island-sensitive. Assuming that something about the meaning of comparatives with ellipsis require them to be treated as A-bar dependencies (eg., something requiring degree-abstraction), then the island facts follow. No string likelihoods required. And this is a good thing because speech to children contains very little of the relevant data to generalize from.<br /><br />But my point about the conspicuous silence is not that it is impossible to engage using their theoretical vocabulary; it's that they dismiss the fundamental results of generative grammar rather than trying to engage them. I will talk more about this in a subsequent post.Jeff Lidzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02662307721892528218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-28465735930954812912016-09-11T12:59:25.581-07:002016-09-11T12:59:25.581-07:00I can tell you what sort of grammar should be very...I can tell you what sort of grammar should be very hard to find. For example one that uses mirror image rules systematically, one that regularly allows adjuncts to form A'chains into islands, one in which anaphoric dependents systematically c-command their antecedents, one's in which movement involves lowering rather than raising. Such Gs should be very sparse on the ground. Now, you will come back and tell me that I am talking Gs and you are interested in languages. And I would reply that's correct, we are talking about different things, which though related are not identical. But if GG is right, then Gs are the right objects of study, not languages. Is this a problem? Not really. But it does mean that from where I sit your challenge is ill posed. It should be what kind of G can't exist, and for this question we have quite a bit to report.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-79301731984601713982016-09-11T12:21:37.936-07:002016-09-11T12:21:37.936-07:00Of course, if X is innate, it need not be observab...Of course, if X is innate, it need not be observable directly, but it MUST constrain languages in such a way that there are empirical consequences. What are these? I compare languages worldwide, and I do find lots of universals, but not many that might help with acquisition. And please note that I'm not advocating IT's "solution" of the acquisition problem – I think they are pretty naive about syntax. What I'm saying is that it's quite unclear how UG provides a solution that has empirical consequences.Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-25419636986617862872016-09-11T12:18:24.810-07:002016-09-11T12:18:24.810-07:00I would be really impressed if your explanation ma...I would be really impressed if your explanation made a prediction that can be tested readily. Mayve "predicate ellipsis" can be compared across languages (though it hasn't been studied systematically, as far as I know), but comparatives and coordination patterns vary quite widely across languages, so that it isn't obvious at all what the relevant claim about UG (that is compatible with what we know so far) might be. So here's my challenge to you: Tell me what sort of language couldn't exist, according to this particular theory of UG.Martin Haspelmathhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06543404533971718475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-1527144124329730082016-09-11T12:13:41.327-07:002016-09-11T12:13:41.327-07:00Maybe I am alone here, but the thing that most str...Maybe I am alone here, but the thing that most struck me about the IT paper is how poorly it identified the main features of the GG program. There are no references, quotes of positions, outlines of arguments, data points, nothing. Just stream of consciousness dissatisfaction. Clearly T is a big name (maybe I is too, I don't know) but the shoddiness of the argument and reasoning is really breathtaking. We live in dark times when this is published and tacitly endorsed as serious thinking.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-8680337399253905292016-09-11T11:44:46.492-07:002016-09-11T11:44:46.492-07:00One reason I'm sympathetic to the IT view (or ...One reason I'm sympathetic to the IT view (or parts of it, anyway) is that the data are more nuanced, and connected to the practicalities of usage, than a generative account admits. Consider this substitute for (4c):<br /><br />(i) Which opponents did you hear some news that Serena & Venus hate to play against? <br /><br />The point is not that an example can be improved, but that the data are not nearly as black & white as originally conceived. Added to this, I think the contrast you've presented in (3a) & (3b) is questionable: how do you know those are the same? The latter sounds worse to me, and I reckon naive judgments would reveal as much. I'm not trying to quibble, but rather point out that the case you're making is built on data that have been pre-interpreted. Usage-based accounts, I think, take this variation in acceptability seriously as part of what needs to be explained, beyond just the mere existence of strong contrasts.<br /><br />More pertinent to the points of this post, I don't think usage-based accounts are conspicuously silent about the examples you show. Here's one silly but possible analysis: in English, comparatives and coordination structures differ in the probability of the right-daughter element beginning with an S-in-S structure. Similarly, wh-dependencies into complex NPs are rare, but not impossible and not unheard of. Of course, this begs the question as to how things got that way, but this is not a question generative accounts answer either. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10029669968729575799noreply@blogger.com