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<TITLE>RE: [Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics</TITLE>
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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">John,</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Thanks for yet another excellent reference! I notice that Wierzbicka's</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">NSM still motivates her:</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">The universal human concepts which can be found in every language in the form of specific, readily identifiable lexical units (words and wordlike elements), constitute the core of a language's lexicon -</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"><B><I> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">a core on the basis of which all other, more complex, meanings can be built, and through which all other, more complex, meanings can be understood</FONT></I></B></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">. Within the NSM theory, the sixty or so empirical</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">ly identified universal human concepts are regarded as each language's set of 'semantic primes' - unanalyzable elements of meaning which underlie a given language</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">'s entire semantic system and which are the cornerstone of its entire lexicon. ..."</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">In effect, Wierzbicka is saying that</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">she believes the core primes are sufficient to establish the meaning of all other words. This is still a difference between her</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">beliefs</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"></FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">and yours, as we discussed in earlier messages. Do you still feel that specific experiences are needed before a person can fully understand more subtle words and phrases? I'm undecided on this issue. I would like to find a way to interpret</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">some nontrivial portion of daily</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">language</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">behaviors</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">in a mechanical way</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">through a very limited set of primitives, but I am swayed by your arguments that people have vivid experiences which define less primitive words and phrases in their own contexts, not in the context of primes. </FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">-Rich</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></P>
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<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">-----Original Message-----<BR>
From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [<A HREF="mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no">mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no</A>] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa<BR>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 8:13 PM<BR>
To: Ramesh Krishnamurthy<BR>
Cc: corpora@uib.no<BR>
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics</FONT></SPAN><SPAN LANG="en-us"></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">It is truly sad when a man who had taught us all a great deal at</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">one time long ago has walled himself off from any input that might</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">raise questions he had decided to ignore five decades ago.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">R. Krishnamurthy> It seems odd to link "corpora" and "Chomsky" in</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > the same sentence.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> ></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > In a recent article...</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> Joszef Andor</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> The master and his performance: An interview with Noam Chomsky</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> Intercultural Pragmatics 1-1 (2004), 93–111</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> ></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >...Chomsky said:</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> (p 97) Corpus linguistics doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> suppose a physicist decides, suppose physics and chemistry decide</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> that instead of relying on experiments, what they’re going to do</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> is take videotapes of things happening in the world and they’ll</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> collect huge videotapes of everything that’s happening and from</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> >> that maybe they’ll come up with some generalizations or insights.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Actually, they do that, but they do that "in addition to", not</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">"instead of". In every experiment, they record (sometimes with video)</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">what happens. For fields on a gigantic scale, such as astronomy,</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">meteorology, or plate tectonics, "instead of" is the only thing that</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">is humanly possible. And those fields have made enormous progress</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">in the past 50 years.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">Anna Wierzbicka commented on another pronouncement by Chomsky in</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">that same interview:</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > In a recent extended interview for the journal “Intercultural</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > Pragmatics”, Noam Chomsky (in Andor 2004) declared that next to</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > nothing is currently known about the mental lexicon. Since</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > evidently all that falls into Chomsky’s field of vision is the</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > work done within the generative paradigm, his conclusion is not</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > surprising: the sterility of the generative approach to semantics</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > in general and to the mental lexicon in particular must be evident</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > to anyone, friend or foe, who has followed the fortunes of the</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > generative enterprise. As this article shows, however, outside</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > the Chomskyan paradigm a great deal has come to be known about</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New"> > the mental lexicon.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">See <A HREF="http://www.ali2006.une.edu.au/Wierzbicka_Mental_lexicon.pdf">http://www.ali2006.une.edu.au/Wierzbicka_Mental_lexicon.pdf</A></FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">As an example of what Chomsky could have become, I recall an interview</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">with the physicist Eugene Wigner in _Physics Today_ in the early 1980s.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">At that time, Wigner was approaching 80, but he was still publishing</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">research articles in physics. The interviewer asked how he was able</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">to continue making contributions to a field that is usually considered</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">the province of much younger researchers. Wigner replied that he had</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">his own range of insights, which he continued to develop over a long</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">period with fruitful results. But, he added, he was careful not to</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">make discouraging remarks about younger researchers because they might</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">have fruitful insights into areas that were outside his expertise.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">The "first rule of reason" by C. S. Peirce was "Do not block the way</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">of inquiry." Wigner observed that rule, but Chomsky didn't.</FONT></SPAN></P>
<P ALIGN=LEFT><SPAN LANG="en-us"><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Courier New">John Sowa</FONT></SPAN></P>
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