tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post7791451767645796642..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: The Economy of Research Norberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-45926169253350866842013-06-30T14:22:20.260-07:002013-06-30T14:22:20.260-07:00Thank you very much. Bošković's papers address...Thank you very much. Bošković's papers address exactly what I am interested in. VilemKodytekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13161547663393188912noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-65520571052387004722013-06-29T06:21:39.341-07:002013-06-29T06:21:39.341-07:00Željko Bošković has been arguing for some time tha...<a href="http://web.uconn.edu/boskovic/index.html" rel="nofollow">Željko Bošković</a> has been arguing for some time that there is a strong correlation between the ability of a language to scramble left-hand elements out of nominals (i.e. violate the Left Branch Condition) and the absence of overt articles in the language. The story starts with Slavic, where the languages with articles, Bulgarian and Macedonian (let's not start arguing whether they are separate languages or not, please) are also the languages within the group that are like English in utterly lacking the ability to construct Vergil-like sentences ((Cumaean I would now like to sing a song) -- but he has lists of languages outside the group as well. And he has a theory about why this is so, that explains a whole list of other properties that he thinks correlate. A few of these look pretty unlikely to me -- for example, absence of sequence of tense is supposed to correlate with absence of articles (despite the fact that Latin is the sequence-of-tense language from which we get the term itself) -- but others are intriguingly interesting. <br /><br />I think the paper in which he first stated the correlations is <a href="http://web.uconn.edu/boskovic/papers/nels.illinois.proceedings.final.pdf" rel="nofollow">this one</a>. Željko's proposal does not care about linear order, but rather constituency, so he would not predict that "the first chunk of discontinuous material appears in a left-peripheral discourse position" as in the thesis cited Avery, but would come close to this prediction insofar as linear order and constituency weakly correlate inside nominals (with open questions about suffixal articles as in South Slavic and other Balkan languages).David Pesetskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09666557087629655596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-85674921155578586862013-06-29T02:28:37.965-07:002013-06-29T02:28:37.965-07:00Thank you (not only) for the reference.
Thank you (not only) for the reference.<br /> VilemKodytekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13161547663393188912noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-44619975792060985712013-06-28T22:46:16.825-07:002013-06-28T22:46:16.825-07:00Including an MA thesis about discontinuous NPs in ...Including an MA thesis about discontinuous NPs in Greek and some other languages: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/general/MATheses/Ntelitheos_UCLA_MA_2004.pdf. The author also has a paper on which I can't find a date, but since the thesis isn't referred to, it's probably earlier.<br /><br />It is a require of this analysis (which applies to things that have been written about Polish and Russian) that the first chunk of discontinuous material appears in a left-peripheral discourse position; I know of at least one Md Greek poetic example for which that doesn't seem to work, but this could well be a divergence from the usual grammatical rules.<br />AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-92197203859156444852013-06-28T22:36:47.813-07:002013-06-28T22:36:47.813-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-14111736555102575322013-06-28T15:24:21.982-07:002013-06-28T15:24:21.982-07:00It's fair to say that that word order isn'...It's fair to say that that word order isn't intelligible in English. Md. Greek poets occasionally do things a bit like that (but in, as far as I've noticed, a very limited and stereotypical way), but they don't get translated that way into English by the translators.<br /><br />An important difference between Greek and Latin is that Greek has definite articles with rules about their distribution, which give evidence about NP structure (there's a lot of literature about this for the modern language).AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-85484186753219495502013-06-28T07:37:26.714-07:002013-06-28T07:37:26.714-07:00Note that Evans & Levinson’s argument against ...Note that Evans & Levinson’s argument against constituency based on Virgil's verse <br /><br />(1) Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas<br />last-Nom Cumaean-Gen comes now song-Gen age-Nom<br />The last age of Cumaean song has come now,<br /><br />(their examples 13 & 14) is another case of center-embeding. They refer to Matthews 1981 who says: “Such ordering would be unusual in other styles [in Latin]... But no rule excludes it.” (p. 255) And he adds that “all the [syntactic] relations are realized by inflections” here. <br /><br />In Czech a word-by-word translation of (1) can be understood but it's very, very, very marked (today even in poetry). However, the business of poets has always included breaking linguistic norms. Why the English could not have (if they wished) in poetry such extremely marked sentences like “The last of the Cumaean has come now song age”? Is there a rule that excludes it?VilemKodytekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13161547663393188912noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-55084865377236749752013-06-28T07:22:00.305-07:002013-06-28T07:22:00.305-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.VilemKodytekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13161547663393188912noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-78517139488071328592013-06-27T18:47:20.468-07:002013-06-27T18:47:20.468-07:00A less exotic version of the kind of thing I was t...A less exotic version of the kind of thing I was talking about might be found in acquisition of English and I believe many other languages, where, in children's input, the complexity of subject NPs tends to be considerably less than that of object NPs (according to what I've read, I have no authentic knowledge), yet the grammar comes out with no difference in the possibilities for complex structure.<br /><br />This is a contrast with German possessives, where the prenominal ones do seem to be genuinely more restricted than the postnominal ones. Md. Greek might also be interesting, since prenominal possessives seem to tend to be simpler than the postnominal ones, in the genres where they occur at all, but there are probably no fixed rules.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-75334779081431534342013-06-27T06:28:21.539-07:002013-06-27T06:28:21.539-07:00Addendum: I just noticed that Norbert's passag...<strong>Addendum:</strong> I just noticed that Norbert's passage does have a less remarkable parse in which there is no voice mismatch:<br /><br /><i>... or more accurately should not [be held responsible], some unfair types just might [be held responsible] ...</i><br /><br />But surely that's not what Norbert meant. Being Norbert, he must have meant the more exotic, but real-world-plausible:<br /><br /><i>...or more accurately should not [be held responsible], some unfair types just might [hold them responsible] ...</i>David Pesetskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09666557087629655596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-22414505484502729742013-06-27T06:10:18.203-07:002013-06-27T06:10:18.203-07:00Yes, beautiful point! By the way, did anyone notic...Yes, beautiful point! By the way, did anyone notice that Norbert used a construction in his posting that is surely as rare as they come: an instance of VP-ellipsis that fails to match its antecedent in voice, and is center-embedded to boot I have in mind this passage - I've boldfaced the relevant bit:<br /><br /><i>"I should add, before proceeding, that the remarks below are entirely mine. LPY cannot (or more accurately ‘should not,’ <strong>some unfair types just might</strong>) be held responsible for the rant that follows. </i><br /><br />Now this kind of mismatch is presumably rare (though we need Charles to tell us whether it's rarer than predicted by the baselines for VP-ellipsis, active VP and passive VP). What is especially exciting about Norbert's version, which makes it very relevant to our discussion, is that it's not only an instance of voice-mismatch VP-ellipsis, it's also center-embedded and cataphoric. Now that does entail it's tough to parse, and this kind of construction must be vanishingly, vanishingly, vanishingly rare. I noticed it because it took me a second to figure out what Norbert meant, but I did get it in the end. As Jason Merchant showed in a <a href="http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000403" rel="nofollow">beautiful paper</a> (still unpublished?), rare and parsingly troubled though active-passive mismatches may be, its availability is governed by strict laws. For example, mismatches are possible with VP-ellipsis, but not with Sluicing (e.g. *<i>Some policeman arrested Mary, but I don't know by who</i>). Crucially, one family of theories about how voice works, but not another, can explain these laws. And nothing changes if we try center-embedded versions: <i>Some policeman arrested -- I don't know who/*by who -- my friend from the LSA Institute</i>. I would be willing to wager that not only were Norbert-sentences not in my input as a child, but have been missing from my life until yesterday. And yours too. Yet somehow we know that Norbert-sentences with VP-ellipsis are hard, but English, while no such examples can possibly be constructed with Sluicing.David Pesetskyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09666557087629655596noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-3791809026799669892013-06-27T03:01:47.867-07:002013-06-27T03:01:47.867-07:00Nice point, Avery (and Alex). And rare constructi...Nice point, Avery (and Alex). And rare constructions are indeed rare.Charles Yanghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06041398285400095406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-55762651206099086202013-06-27T02:52:31.431-07:002013-06-27T02:52:31.431-07:00That's a very good point -- the rarer the comp...That's a very good point -- the rarer the complex constructions are, the more there is to explain. It makes the learning problem harder, so the attempts over the years by various connnectionists/empiricists/non-Chomskyans to say "oh but we never observe this exotic phenomenon in practice, so we don't need it in our theory" seem very confused. They should be arguing that they are frequent and thus can be learned. <br /> Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-64906169358804611832013-06-26T18:32:30.067-07:002013-06-26T18:32:30.067-07:00I think there's a possible strenghening of LPY...I think there's a possible strenghening of LPY's position that they seem to me to miss, which is that the extreme rarity of complex center embeddings in normal spoken production (and therefore, presumably, in the child's input during the first six years) makes it even more significant when they are occasionally produced and not rejected.<br /><br />We of course don't know much about the kinds of input that young upper class Classical Athenian kids like Plato got, but it presumably included some instances of the [Det [Det N]:GEN N] pattern that was often used for possession, e.g.<br /><br />ho tou Philippou hippos<br />the the(G) Philip(G) horse<br />'Philip's horse'<br /><br />That he later came out with the more complex:<br /><br />ta te:s to:n pollo:n psu:che:s ommata<br />the the(G) the(G) many(G) soul(G) eyes<br />'the eyes of the soul of the multitude'<br /><br />would seem to indicate that his UG (cheat sheet for language acquisition, whatever is on it and whereever it comes from) was biased in favor of a recursive analysis of the simpler structures that were very likely all that occurred in his input.<br /><br />Plato is perhaps particular interesting because, although Modern Greeks have some somewhat similar structures in certain genres, one could always say that they were just imitating the classical models when they produce them, but Plato was the classical model - center embedded possessors don't occur in Homer, & even if they did that would regress the problem of where they came from in the first place to an earlier period.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.com