[Corpora-List] ANC, FROWN, Fuzzy Logic

[Mike Maxwell]

John F. Sowa wrote:
> Chomsky's fallacy was to take a mathematical formalism, namely
> Post production systems, and make the claim that they capture
> the fundamental nature of natural language.  If he had softened
> that claim to saying they were a promising model of an important
> aspect of language, he and his colleagues could have done the
> same research, but without inciting the religious wars.

I thought that's what he did do.  That is, he did not claim that his 
formalism covered semantics, and he later argued heavily against 
generative semantics, which did make more or less that claim.  So if by 
"religious wars" you mean the Generative Semantics Wars, then the 
argument was in the opposite direction, with Chomsky on the side 
claiming that transformational grammar explained only syntax, not 
semantics (and certainly not phonology; as for morphology, it was 
subsumed under syntax and phonology).

If however by "religious wars" you mean the earlier years, when the 
fight was against behaviorists, then Chomsky's argument was that 
transformational grammar was a sufficient formalism for the syntax of 
natural languages, and that notably weaker models, including finite 
state automatons and CF and CS phrase structure grammars, were not 
sufficient.  (Later Chomsky looked for ways to constrain 
transformational grammar in order to explain learnability; this surfaced 
in Aspects (1965), but came to the fore only after the GS war was won.)

As for phonology, which is where most of the conflict between Chomsky 
and the American Structuralists came (since apart from Zellig Harris and 
a couple others, most American Structuralists stayed away from syntax), 
I don't think the argument was over the mathematical formalism.  Rather, 
it was over the representation (phonemes vs. distinctive features), 
including whether there was such a thing as a phonemic level of 
representation, and over the way to find the atoms of the representation 
in a particular language.  (At least that's my reading; John Goldsmith 
is probably lurking out there, and can correct me if I'm wrong.)
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu