primitive image-schemas 3

[Rob Freeman]

Steve,

If there were only one way of generalizing experiences what you say might be
true.

This suggests a question which has interested me recently. It puts the focus
of discussion back on language, but I think the point is quite general.

What were Chomsky's reasons for dismissing the discovery methods of the
"post-Bloomsfieldian" structuralists (Pike, Harris, Trager-Smith?) I mean
apart from lack of generativity. I understand Harris had 'a "synthesis"
procedure, which could be understood as generative grammar', but still
Chomsky felt it could not work.

Does anyone know the exact reason Chomsky felt it could not work?

My understanding is that this was because these discovery procedures resulted
in "incoherent or inconsistent" representations. I would like to know if this
was the reason, or the only reason.

-Rob Freeman

On Friday 11 June 2004 09:25, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 6/10/04 6:32:26 AM, rjfreeman at email.com writes:
> << Steve: I think what you are saying I covered when I said all languages
> are constrained to refer to the "same thing". >>
>
> What you wrote was:
> "It starts to sound like a confusion between "primitive" and "average".
> Are the primitives we see really primitives, or are they the average of a
> lot of subjective conceptions of the same thing?"
>
> The confusion may be caused by your assumption that "primitives" are in
> some way opposite to an average of subjective perceptions.  They are apples
> and oranges.
>
> The word "primitives" in the original post appears to refer to this
> statement: "Talmy's original discussion (in a talk at Berkeley, summer
> 1975) made the observation that, although spatial relations terms seem to
> have quite different meanings in the languages of the world,  those
> meanings can be decomposed into primitive 'images' that recur across
> languages. Talmy surmised that there was a set of such primitives that was
> universal."
>
> Logically, if we are talking about reducing diverse spatial relations terms
> to common "primitive images," we are no longer talking about language per
> se. One can certainly perceive spatial facts as basic as depth -- in either
> a visual scene or a "subjective" memory of that scene -- without having
> words to describe that perception.  Infants and non-human animals certainly
> perceive a 3-dimensional world, even if they cannot describe it.  (And
> because these non-language users will be fooled by optical illusions of
> depth, it appears that they are responding to the same visual cues of depth
> that we humans do.  The problem is, of course, without language we have no
> self-reports from these subjects.)
>
> As Tom pointed out -- "primitive" spatial perceptions might be expected to
> have some standard variance.  But what makes these primitives "average" is
> that they are primitive, i.e., fundamental, basic.  An organism that does
> not have depth perception or a language that cannot express depth
> perception, for example, represent a fundamentally different reality than
> we consistently experience.
>
> So there's no real point in asking whether these "subjective" perceptions
> are really primitive or just averages.  Primitives in this sense must
> overwhelmingly be the average, since not having them would promise severe
> operational problems.
>
> There's an important point here.  And it is that this has nothing to do
> with whether these primitives are pre-wired or learned.  Such critical,
> basic attributes of the world would shape either learning or pre-wiring in
> exactly the same way.  For example, even if humans are plastic enough to
> perceive a non-3-dimensional physical space, the environment we live in
> offers little room for that amount of variance in our perceptions.
>
> And that would be why it would show up in all languages, in any case.
>
> Steve Long