tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post7939795975019208597..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Bad DataNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-11408361289849562302013-01-12T03:22:13.838-08:002013-01-12T03:22:13.838-08:00A website containing replications of Marc Hauser&#...A website containing replications of Marc Hauser's work on cognitive science, of interest for the general discussion: http://hauserreplications.blogspot.fr/Pierre Picahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01102759213909457478noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-49660517878749888472013-01-09T14:43:15.805-08:002013-01-09T14:43:15.805-08:00Minor correction: 'before or after N or NP the...Minor correction: 'before or after N or NP they modify' -> 'before or after Art (Adj)* N of NP they modify'.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-36768277226912220022013-01-09T14:40:18.543-08:002013-01-09T14:40:18.543-08:00I certainly hope more people start paying attentio...I certainly hope more people start paying attention to S&A, but I suspect the people who most need to won't, because they've already made up their minds that grammatical intuitions are some weird thing that they don't have to pay any attention to.<br /><br />My idea for trying to do something about this is to try to find out how much exposure to language data is needed for people to successfully predict intuitions (of various kinds, presumably). For example I think that somebody who looked at enough Modern Greek text would eventually come to the conclusion that although genitive NPs can come before or after the N of an NP they modify, attributive PPs can only come after:<br /><br /> s-tis mamas to spitaki<br /> on the(G) mommy(G) the house-dim<br /> "On mommy's little house" (mild variant<br /> of something from the Stephany corpus)<br /><br /> sto spitaki tis mamas<br /><br /> sto spitaki me ta zoa<br /> on-the house-dim with the animals<br /><br /> *se me ta zoa to spitaki<br /><br />I've somehow picked up the intuition that the last PP is bad, without ever asking for a judgement from a native speaker, nor noticing it proclaimed bad in the literature (tho my eyes are rather likely to have passed over some statement to that effect), but I don't know the size of the corpus I've been exposed to<br /><br />This actually subdivides into two significantly different questions, how much data does a learner need to be exposed to to have an intuition that the bad form is bad, and how much data does a linguist have to see to reliably predict that native speakers will reject the forms, and there are cases where people reject things but frequently produce them anyway, but I think that this is a territory that we need to understand much better than we seem to now.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.com