performance/competence, cooperation, and the future

Tue Nov 6 00:31:24 UTC 2007

Tom,

     It would be a shame to let such a constructive message pass by  
without further commentary. From my point of view, you raise three  
interesting questions here.  The first two relate to the specific  
examples you cite.

1.  Regarding the "who bought what" sentences, I believe that you  
received a reply earlier from Bruno Estigarribia regarding the  
attempts to deal with multiple wh-questions in the light of violations  
of the superiority condition.  I see a URL on the web for a poster  
with Inbal Arnon on this at
www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/semfest/Estigarribia.pdf
I think the Stanford group would like to explore ways in which  
processing, context, and input statistics shape these preferences, but  
certainly all accounts are still on the table here. What impresses me  
in this area is the paucity of data on children's productions.  So, we  
can move ahead with experiments, but, given the vagaries of  
experimental methods with young children, I would personally like to  
see information on this from all fronts.

2.  Next is the issue of children's first vs. second person  
perspective shift, as in (a) and (b)
a. Honestly, who can report on this?
b. Who can report on this honestly?
Carol Tenny and Peggy Speas have been exploring this and related  
markers of perspective shift for several years.  I began my interest  
in this stuff with an article on perspective in Language back in  
1974.  Carol, Sandiway Fong, and I mapped out some more of this  
shifter stuff with questions.  As in the contrast between (c) with  
speaker perspective and (d) with listener perspective.
c.  The bicyclist appears to have escaped injury.
d.  Did the bicyclist appear to have escaped injury?
I totally agree that finding out when children learn this is crucial.   
But, my intuition here is that, with forms like "appear" and  
"apparently", the contrast is available as soon as they learn the  
form.  The whole thing seems like common sense.  I realize that is not  
an adequate statement, and clearly we need real data.

3.   I was a bit more unsettled about a third issue.  This is the use  
of terms like "dignity" and "respect" as criteria for evaluating the  
value of scientific accounts.  I have not read your book and maybe  
this would be clearer then.  I think people are truly remarkable  
beings, full of creativity and wonder.  But I would certainly not like  
to see a time when scientific accounts were either included or  
excluded from discussion on the basis of whether or not some group of  
scientists judged them as insufficiently "respectful of human  
dignity".  I hope you understand the basis of my concern.

--Brian MacWhinney

On Nov 2, 2007, at 9:37 AM, Roeper, Tom wrote:

>
> Info childes    performance/competence and cooperation
>
> Dear  Performance/Competence discussion-
>
>    I'd like to shift the discussion-if it continues-- from that of
> errors, which are incontrovertible signs of performance, to questions
> of interfaces which is in many ways a new thrust in linguistic theory
> partly aimed at incorporating in a single mechanism many phenomena
> previously associated with performance.  I think it offers an exciting
> future and many avenues for cooperation---let me illustrate.
>      I have been silent because I was in Cyprus attending a
> fascinating meeting sponsored by the European Union, organized by Uli
> Sauerland from ZAS, aimed to developing
> instruments to assess children's language in a wide variety of
> European
> languages.    In the group of 40 were many people associated with Dan
> Slobin and Michael Tomasello.  Issues linked to "performance" are
> a constant factor in designing experiments---hardly something ignored
> in practical terms, because speech pathologists were also a central
> part of the group.   How to build those factors into
> a language interface that is connected to the subtleties of grammar is
> a
> real theoretical challenge, but being sensitive to them in day to day
> experimental design is just a given.
>      Let me offer more  about thiis conference.  After some
> discussion we got to work designing experiments.  Using insights
> gained from the DELV test,  which Harry Seymour, Jill deVilliers and I
> (and many others) devised for English, we looked at  exhausitivity in
> "who bought what" (where many children answer  with
> one person or a single pair-not all required) and quantifier spreading
> in "every dog as a bone", where some children think it means "every
> bone".  Now these sentences will be explored in up to 17 different
> languages and dialects.   Experimental ideas from many other quarters
> were incorporated as well.
>      These questions   are askable precisely because they are linked
> to linguistic universals that transcend language differences.  They
> come straight from linguistic theory---yet everyone who hears about
> them  gets interested whether they are followers of generative
> linguistics or not.  Experimentation in Polish, Bulgarian, and Romani
> has already begun, with interesting results.
>      Recent work in linguistic theory has focused on Interfaces,
> which includes pragmatics and semantics, and the leader of the
> EU group, Uli Sauerland, is a specialist in precisely these domains.
> and a major focus has been how implicatures work.
>        The challenge I raised before remains---and it is a tough one-
> without obvious answers: how do we build a mechanism---commensurate
> with the speed of language---that can build other
> compuatational abilities into  language while realizing their
> creative and generative power.  How do we represent creativity
> in memory to match the creativity of recursion?  How do we
> generate unique implicatures in unique situations?  Any model
> which avoids the creative algorithms misses the essence of the
> mechanism---and I believe ultimately leads to an image of children
> that does not honor their dignity.  This is the argument I make
> in my book The Prism of Grammar.
>       An analogy might help.   While syntax perhaps captures the
> skeleton of language---one might holler "how about all the muscles
> that enable movement?". Good question, but it requires exactly a
> concept of the interface: where exactly do muscles connect to bones so
> that they can move them efficiently and how does the physics of
> movement
> get represented.  A theory of muscles that ignores exactly how
> they are connected  with bones won't tell us much.
>     Take an example (from Christ Potts) on implicatures and
> Point of View.  If  I say "honestly you can climb a mountain"
> it is my honesty that is implicated, if I invert the auxiliary
> "Honestly, can you climb a mountain" it is yours.   And we
> get different readings for: "honestly who can report" and
> "Who can report honestly".  The implications are tightly
> linked to the syntax.  There is a natural experiment for someone.
> to do: when do children control that switch.  (Anna Verbuk has
> done interesting relevant work.)
>     I think the discussion can be much more productive if we
> discuss real examples and project precise theories of how they
> can work.  That is the challenge we can explor together, much
> more beneficially than by a debate that too heavily linked to
> imprecise abstractions.
>
> Tom Roeper
>
> See you at BU if you are coming--
>
>
> >
>

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