Corpora: Chomsky/Harris - one more fun question.

[Pete]

Earlier Steve Seegmiller wrote:

> It is unfortunate that many people in the corpus
> linguistics community have put themselves in opposition
> to Chomskyan linguists. (At the recent conference on
> Corpus Linguistics and Language Teaching in Boston,
> sevral references were made to "the enemy' at MIT.
> That is a most unfortunate, and unnecessary, view.)
> There is no iherent incompatibility between theoretical
> generative linguistics and corpus linguistics, and
> by focussing on the enmity, many corpus linguists are
> making it impossible to discuss the real issues
> involved.

Unfortunate it may be, but it is hardly surprising. Engineers who try to
build useful artefacts might reasonably expect to build on a sound
theoretical foundation provided by those who claim to be doing scientific
study in the area concerned. As language engineers, or applied linguists, we
must be profoundly disappointed by the abject failure of Chomskyan linguists
to make the slightest useful contribution to human language technology.

Instead of the support we need, we've been subjected to an ever
proliferating array of inaudibilia, a complete lack of interest in real
data, a standard of argumentation that is a million miles from what I'd call
science, and condescension, if not hostility, towards those outside the
initiated who -have- tried to do the science of language.

Does anyone want to make a case for a contribution by the MIT school to any
aspect of (human, as against programming) language technology or language
teaching?


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