Myhill's message

[Joan Bresnan]

John, I apologize for characterizing your message as "flame bait".
You are obviously sincere in your beliefs and not merely trying to
elicit reactions from others.

As I've tried to show, I think you may be mistaken in your judgements
about the state of current linguistic research as being completely
polarized into binary camps "pro-Chomsky" and "anti-Chomsky", or
"formalist" and "functionalist".  You seem to advocate simply writing
off all work emanating from institutions or people that you
characterize as "pro-Chomsky".  (And there are those at MIT who have
the same attitude toward you and the other "anti-Chomsky" posters to
this list.)  But your arguments do not refer to the substantive ideas
and empirical claims that are made (as Brian MacWhinney's do, for
example).  Instead you refer to your judgments about the sociology of
the field and even about the personalities and worth of individuals.
I was pretty shocked when I saw how personal the remarks in your
postings were.

Neverthless, like it or not, there is a new functionalism attracting
(among others) researchers who have been trained in formal methods and
models, and there are new mathematical models for language making use
of optimization and probability.  The widespread availability of
on-line corpora and powerful computers is also having its effect on
attitudes toward data and methology: Stanford students working in
syntax and semantics, for example, simply start doing corpus based
research as a matter of course.

I personally think that the most interesting work will hybridize the
best from both worlds--research on symbolic representation (the work
of the "formalists") and research on data driven cognitive modelling
(the work of the "functionalists"), to put it very roughly.

In other words, I think that substantive and serious discussions are
possible between those on this list and those who you write off.
There's no need for us to be so sectarian about our work!

Joan