News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Parent comment

Re:The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the The... by samch on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @01:51PM (#9766353)
"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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the The... by discreteinfinit on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @02:00PM (#9766413)
I mean, if you happen to have some data that Stratificational Grammar can explain better than Generative Grammar I would love to see it. There are a bunch of theories directly influenced by Chomsky which offer alternatives to generative grammar. I've yet to see someone show that one is superior. In many ways, they are all extensionally equivalent.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the The... by samch on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @02:40PM (#9766736)
"I never said that StratGram can explain things better than TGG. I said it had the same reductionist flaws. It and all the theories influenced by Chomsky are really outgrowths of Bloomfieldian structuralism and share its underlying orientation. As you say, in many ways they are all extensionally equivalent. The field needs to move beyond all of them. Don't know what assumptions you are referring to, but a forum like this really isn't the place for detailed arguments (even though I used to require my students to provide data, analysis, and argument in two-page, double spaced papers). Just check out J. R. Firth, and read him not for the outdated details but to see what his underlying assumptions are."

-My dad

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the The... by discreteinfinit on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @01:55PM (#9766372)
Your Dad really likes assumptions and not providing arguments but Ill look into some of the names Ive never heard of. Thanks !
[ Parent | on HN ]