Alternatives to Chomsky

Joan Bresnan bresnan at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Thu Dec 9 17:46:32 UTC 1999


In a message of 9 Dec 1999 John Myhill wrote:

> ...  Chomskyan devotees have a tendency to stop doing active research and
> detach from research affairs when they have been away from The Master for a
> few years, so I would not say 'conversions' like, e.g. Tom Wasow are worth
> anything). And since almost all graduate schools now are already clearly
> pro-Chomsky or anti-Chomsky (I include places such as Stanford as
> 'pro-Chomsky', although some of the faculty members have made names for
> themselves as professional gadflies), ...

My, my.  Let's not get personal.  John, you may not be in touch any
more with what's been going on at Stanford.  We have been building
intellectual bridges between formal and functional approaches.
Elizabeth Traugott and Paul Kiparsky are working together on a
historical project that centrally involves grammaticalization.  Ivan
Sag and some of his students have become deeply involved with the
Fillmore-Kay Construction Grammar, which bears close family
resemblances to HPSG/LFG.  Bresnan (that's me) has a collaborative
research project with Judith Aissen at Santa Cruz on "Optimal
Typology" which focusses on using Optimality Theory as a formal tool
to explore syntactic markedness hierarchies and explain some of their
problematic properties (softness, variable expression, recurrence).
We are arguing for using typologically motivated and functionally
grounded constraints, much as has happened in phonology.  Edward
Flemming in phonology is one of the leading young exponents of the OT
functionalist approach to phonology which argues that perception
shapes the structure of language.  Tom Wasow does corpus linguistic
studies and natural language processing, so you're more likely to find
his recent papers in _Cognitive Psychology_ and _Language Variation
and Change_ than in _Linguistic Inquiry_.  The corpus approach is very
big at Stanford.  Our new young faculty memember Chris Manning who
holds a joint appointment with Computer Science argues that the new
surge of statistical approaches to Natural Language can restore some
of the balance in the field by strengthening areas such as historical
linguistics and sociolinguistics that were somewhat marginalized by
the Chomskyan revolution.

Come spend a sabbatical year at Stanford, and see for yourself!

Joan Bresnan
http://www-ot.stanford.edu/bresnan/



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