<div dir="ltr">Hi, Piotr, John, Yorick & even Al.,<div><br></div><div>We're all of course saddened greatly at Fillmore's death, and all the 'nice guy' and 'genius' comments are more than richly deserved (as they are equally for his wife, Lily Wong Fillmore, in a slightly different part of the field). As for George Lakoff, we both got our introduction to linguistics as undergraduates in the same class at the same time from Morris Halle, along with the first entering group of grad. students in linguistics at MIT, and I've always liked his work a lot, though I myself have a different, less-well-founded take on metaphor which may be closer to what's really going on and which I have to talk about with Yorick at some point; but that's a separate issue. </div>
<div><br></div><div>It may be of interest for the discussion of 'cognitive linguistics' that this has spread to Spanish as well, where the very word 'cognitivo' has gone, apparently in the space of a couple of decades (and this should be checked out in <a href="http://corpusdelespanol.org">corpusdelespanol.org</a>), from a relatively infrequent synonym of the word 'cognoscitivo' to having almost entirely displaced the latter word (except for a few diehards like me, and even I have started to cave).</div>
<div><br></div><div>I think the bottom line is that Chuck was a tremendously influential and productive linguist (more versatile even than many will be aware, having done important practical work on acoustics in the 60s). </div>
<div><br></div><div>One thing this thread illustrates, though, is that, much as linguistics and NLP may have been historically distanced from one another, and at (somewhat mutually mystified and even blind) loggerheads much of the time, the two fields really need one another: It cannot be denied that the ever greater use of corpora for linguistic analysis has greatly widened linguists' ambits for discovery of linguistic facts, as well as making research easier in many ways. On the other hand, I believe that the inherent limits of statistical approaches to NLP will only be able to be overcome by good old linguistic analysis of the basic corpus data (genannt Sitzfleisch). I think nowadays most NLP researchers recognize the need for linguistics, and vice versa, though perhaps closer collaboration is needed to find the proper, ideal mix of the two types of areal expertise.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Jim</div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>James L. Fidelholtz<br>Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje<br>Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades<br>Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO</div>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Piotr Bański <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bansp@o2.pl" target="_blank">bansp@o2.pl</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Dear John,<br>
<br>
On 21/02/14 22:26, John F Sowa wrote:<br>
[...]<br>
<div class="">> Re Lakoff's summary: the only points I disagree with are George's<br>
> constant claims that "cognitive science is a young field" in which<br>
> all the major discoveries occurred in the past 40 years.<br>
</div>[...]<br>
<br>
He obviously means *his* cognitive science. Since the early 90's, I have<br>
been increasingly amazed at the skill, with which the newly arrived<br>
"cognitive grammar" has been hijacking the adjective "cognitive", soon<br>
applying it simply to "linguistics", as if there had been nothing<br>
cognitive about linguistics before Lakoff, Langacker, and their<br>
colleagues. That was accompanied by the setting up of a journal with a<br>
corresponding title, appropriately named conferences, and the general<br>
publicizing of new (and hence, to many, intellectually attractive)<br>
ideas, and now, we can learn from Wikipedia, that, e.g.,<br>
<br>
"Langacker develops the central ideas of Cognitive Grammar in his<br>
seminal, two-volume Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, which became a<br>
major departure point for the emerging field of Cognitive Linguistics."<br>
<br>
("Foundations" appeared around 1990)<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
<br>
Piotr<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
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