tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post8867997680509848153..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Three psychologists walk into a bar…Norberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-74866662351678631802013-10-22T19:29:34.862-07:002013-10-22T19:29:34.862-07:00Thank you for your kind literature recommendation....Thank you for your kind literature recommendation. You may be interested in this review of "Of Minds and Language" http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001778<br />After you've read that you may understand why I have slight doubts about the relevance of the biology presented there. So if you could suggest one of the 'more' I'd appreciate it. Preferably with fewer digressions into the genetically fixed behaviour of bees or nematodes. To paraphrase what you say; it was already known in the 1950s that studying these organisms will reveal nothing about human language. In fact even Rene Descartes knew that back in the 17th century. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-53093062025667009692013-10-21T12:54:37.144-07:002013-10-21T12:54:37.144-07:00@Christina:
"You ask some interesting quest...@Christina: <br /><br />"You ask some interesting questions. Answering them in any depth would of course require much more space than FBC had in their short paper. So maybe not quite fair slamming them for merely making SUGGESTIONS that could be an alternative to the Minimalist doctrine."<br /><br />I think that if we were in the 1950's perhaps making shot-in-the-dark suggestions might be excusable, but we're not - and this level of murkiness can't be chalked up to our collective ignorance. The authors assert that they offer no alternative mechanism, nor are they trying to articulate a proposal that would be explicit enough for evaluation. This paper seems more polemical then scholarly. Moreover, every time I read over classic transcripts on debates in the 50's-70's (ish) era about linguistic inquiry outside of technical narrow work I notice these same debates recurring. And every time the same excuse is used: "well, we may have no evidence - but I'm just offering a suggestion." Take a look at the Royaumont debate for example: the parallel is uncanny (and sad). <br /><br /><br />"Now maybe you can direct me to a source where minimalists answer these questions. It would seem for 'expressing my own thought to myself' none of this stuff is needed either and simple Merge alone [the only thing for which Chomsky "explains" how it evolved won't get us even close to the brain structures that ARE required. I have been asking for more than a year now what BIOlinguists HAVE discovered in terms of domain specific brain structures - so far just big silence..."<br /><br />I think the following conference transcript reports on some interesting investigations on these questions within the framework: {http://www.amazon.com/Of-Minds-Language-Dialogue-Chomsky/dp/0199544670}. <br /><br />I could suggest more works that I've found interesting.<br /><br />I do think the issue here isn't that we have a set of questions posed, and a variety of camps trying to work them out: <br /><br />the issue, from my observation, seems to be that we have a set of questions, and a sector of the community that is trying to answer them; meanwhile another sector is trying to come up with a framework in which these questions don't arise at all. <br /><br />I haven't seen any convincing evidence that the question of say, structure-dependent rules or their acquisition can be dumped by appeal to general learning mechanisms, which is what these alternative proposals boil down. Maxim Baruhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01889104131534548077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-17968522025776767642013-10-21T02:13:19.954-07:002013-10-21T02:13:19.954-07:00Avery, I did not mean to suggest that FBC wrote a ...Avery, I did not mean to suggest that FBC wrote a flawless paper. i think it is not even particularly good. But that is no reason to trash it in the way Norbert did. Identify the problems and DEMONSTRATE [not merely assert] how minimalism [=Norbert's framework] solves them. And please remember that for biolinguists it is not merely enough to provide a story that is formally plausible [capturing significant generalizations by getting the prior over grammars +/- consistent with observed phenomena]. They also need to show [or at a minimum] suggest] how their proposal can be implemented in a human brain [constrained by what is known about human brains]. Maybe the inability to address the biology questions i keep asking has something to do with the fact that "the profession doesn't seem to have managed a coherent and non-humorous response to FBC"? And to be honest that inability "seems to me to be a Bad Sign" as well,Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-1123753553200444282013-10-20T15:18:26.090-07:002013-10-20T15:18:26.090-07:00The problems with FBC go far beyond any fight with...The problems with FBC go far beyond any fight with Minimalism. The most fundamental support for the hierarchical nature of language is that in many languages, utterances fit a pattern of repetition of NP-like phrasal units interspersed with other stuff, such as, for English:<br /><br /> (P NP) NP (aux)* V (NP) (NP) (P NP)*<br /><br />were the NPs themselves have a range of structural possibilities that recur in every position where the NPs are allowed, eg something like<br /><br /> (Det) (Adj)* N (P NP)<br /><br />And while there might be more than one possible theory of the relatively simple manifestations of this that appear in certain genres such as sports news, any theory of the phenomena (including tendencies, which statistics tells us are really just as important as absolute rules) has to explain how there also appear far more complex manifestations of NP-within-NP, including the sometimes rather spectacular center-embeddings found in German and Greek.<br /><br />There are consistent and sensible ways of taking the position that sequencing constraints matter more than some current syntactic theories acknowledge; LFG with its use of phrase-structure rules has maintained this for decades, and, more recently, Jackendoff and Culicover argue for it in their 'Simpler Syntax' framework, proposing very flat phrase-structure rules (cf Culicover (2009) _Natural Language Syntax_ ch 4).<br /><br />FBC otoh seem to be contradicting both themselves and reality as linguists have mostly seen it, claiming on the one hand that a facility to manage hierarchical structure can't have evolved, but on the other sort of admitting that it sometimes seems to be there anyway, just not used very much, and producing no worked-out story about the phenomena that have led most linguists to think that it exists (I see zero chance that the frame-hopping story could be filled out in a workable way so as to be anything but yet another account of hierarchical structure, of which conventional PS rules and Minimalist Merge/Move are simply two inhabitants of a stable that contains a number of others).<br /><br />That the profession doesn't seem to have managed a coherent and non-humorous response to FBC seems to me to be a Bad Sign, & my theory of what it is a bad sign of is that we have not paid enough attention to what Chomsky called 'descriptive adequacy', in the sense of capturing the significant generalizations, which we can now reformulate as getting the prior over grammars more or less consistent with what we can observe (such as similar patterning of referring expressions in multiple positions, including inside of each other). Rather, we have been somewhat excessively mesmerized by the pursuit of rather fragile supposed explanations. ("We must move beyond mere explanation to actual description" - Bruce Hayes (2000), 'Phonetically grounded phonology',AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-44437280557708782942013-10-20T02:16:41.356-07:002013-10-20T02:16:41.356-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-62952451346482972922013-10-20T01:47:08.860-07:002013-10-20T01:47:08.860-07:00You ask some interesting questions. Answering them...You ask some interesting questions. Answering them in any depth would of course require much more space than FBC had in their short paper. So maybe not quite fair slamming them for merely making SUGGESTIONS that could be an alternative to the Minimalist doctrine.<br /><br />Now maybe you can direct me to a source where minimalists answer these questions. It would seem for 'expressing my own thought to myself' none of this stuff is needed either and simple Merge alone [the only thing for which Chomsky "explains" how it evolved won't get us even close to the brain structures that ARE required. I have been asking for more than a year now what BIOlinguists HAVE discovered in terms of domain specific brain structures - so far just big silence...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-66235383956346370992013-10-19T14:43:40.706-07:002013-10-19T14:43:40.706-07:00Aside from what's already been said, what I fi...Aside from what's already been said, what I find bizarre is how in one breath FBC say that hierarchy is disallowed on evolutionary grounds while in another breath say that everyone is equipped to use hierarchy for linguistic analysis. The difference? for FBC hierarchical analysis, assigning a structural description to a sentence (and its parts) is a case of special scrutiny by the organism. <br /><br />Obvious questions are begged. A sample of them are: <br />1 - why, where does hierarchical cognition come from?<br />2 - how does a person acquire it (for competence and performance)? <br />3 - why is it present in linguistic cognition? <br />4 - why should this ability be available on demand? <br /><br />the basic question is just reformulated in this paper + lots of hand waving. Maxim Baruhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01889104131534548077noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-41534529572105853132012-10-25T03:51:44.485-07:002012-10-25T03:51:44.485-07:00I do think they were being serious. I even think t...I do think they were being serious. I even think they have a couple of valid points, although the paper also has some serious flaws. I tried to address two of those flaws as explicitly as I could - that their parallel streams may turn out to nothing but hierarchical structure by another name once you allow for the kind of diacritics needed to make sure the switched happen at the right points, and that their argument from evolutionary continuity rests on the unspoken and quite possibly flawed assumption that non-linguistic processes are universally non-hierarchical in nature.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-84981724190749397972012-10-24T16:43:59.619-07:002012-10-24T16:43:59.619-07:00Mockery! I was taking their contribution as seriou...Mockery! I was taking their contribution as seriously as it deserves to be. It really was very funny and very well done. Surely your don't think they were being serious, do you?Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-2238003047945393972012-10-24T07:43:18.154-07:002012-10-24T07:43:18.154-07:00I'm sympathetic to your motives, but I don'...I'm sympathetic to your motives, but I don't think mockery is the right way to deal with this kind of research, so I tried to address some of their claims in a more direct manner over at http://panloquens.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/hierarchies/<br /><br />JakobAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com