language learning

[Rob Freeman]

On Thursday 24 June 2004 01:29, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
> Dear Funknet,
>
>   Thanks to Geoff Nathan for picking up the ball on Rob Freeman's
> question about the logical problem of language acquisition. Although
> Chomsky floated some ideas in "Syntactic Structures" and "Aspects" about
> language being unlearnable because of degenerate input, that idea was
> abandoned when Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman showed that input to
> children was, if anything, even more grammatically well-formed than adult
> conversation.
>   Attention then turned to a particular version of "Plato's Problem"
> couched in terms of question formation in English, just as Geoff has noted.
> ...

Thanks to Geoff and others. Degenerate input is closer to what I was thinking
of, but it wasn't the innateness issue itself I wanted to concentrate on, but
some of the early evidence which was garnered to the cause. In short evidence
of subjectivity.

The particular analysis which interests me is one I found in a historical
retrospective by Fritz Newmeyer and others "Chomsky's 1962 programme for
linguistics" (in Newmeyer's "Generative Linguistics -- A Historical
Perspective", Routledge, 1996, and apparently also published in "Proc. of the
XVth International Congress of Linguists".)

Newmeyer is talking mostly about Chomsky's "Logical basis of linguistic
theory" paper (presented at the Ninth Int. Congress of Linguists?) Chomsky's
argument as he presents it focused largely on phonology, and was
controversial because it attacked what was at the time "considered a
fundamental scientific insight: the centrality of the contrastive function of
linguistic elements."

This interests me because I also believe in the "centrality of the contrastive
function of linguistic elements" (as do all Functionalists?)

But what was Chomsky's objection? According to Newmeyer "part of the
discussion of phonology in 'LBLT' is directed towards showing that the
conditions that were supposed to define a phonemic representation (including
complementary distribution, locally determined biuniqueness, linearity, etc.)
were inconsistent or incoherent in some cases and led to (or at least
allowed) absurd analyses in others." Most importantly the interposition of
such a "phonemic level ... led to a loss of generality in the formulation of
the rule-governed regularities of the language."

It is this "loss of generality" as an argument which I find most relevant.
Evidence of a "loss of generality" could be seen as negative for learnability
if you assume what is to be learned must apply universally, which seems to be
the way Chomsky took it, but it is positive evidence if you imagine once that
language structure might be elusive only because it is fundamentally
subjective (the multiple contradictory orderings thing).

Has there been any debate on this issue: the fact that such "loss of
generality" does not so much support innateness as it supports (functional
centrality and) structural subjectivity?

-Rob