common ground

[John Myhill]

You may be right, Joan. You may be right.

For the first 15 years of my linguistics career, I dutifully read formal
linguistics articles of all types, in approaches such as your LFG or Simon
Dik's functional grammar which claimed to be something new, something
integrating formal and functional findings and results, to an extent I find
hard to believe any other functionalist could stand (with the exception of
Matthew Dryer). I have thought about formal issues enough that I can say
that, e.g., I have been more influenced by 'On Wh-movement' than by
anything else Chomsky has written, more by Burzio than by Rizzi, etc. I
have never refrained from referring to formal articles or even arguments
when they were relevant to my research. I even once gave a straight LFG
paper on Indonesian at the LSA. But none of it, NONE of it, not LFG, not
FG, not Construction Grammar, escaped from the same conceptual trap. So I
gave up attempting to keep up; five years ago, after yet another 'Chomskyan
revolution' which was more of the same, I deduced that it was a waste of
time and decided to devote my research time to other things. I have been
listening to you saying for nigh-on 20 years that you-all are doing
something 'really different' from Chomsky, I spent a lot of time
investigating whether it was true, and I came to the conclusion that it
simply wasn't (which was what Chomsky himself maintained as well).

But I have fallen behind. You may be right. This time there may really be a
wolf. It is quite possible. But it will be hard for me to convince myself
to take the time out from other things to check it out for myself now. But
maybe some day...

John








>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