Corpora: Chomsky/Harris - one more fun question.

[Susana Sotillo]

Let's not forget that Chomsky has published in many other areas that have a
lot to do with the way language is used to oppress and deceive (the politics
of doublespeak).  His output is truly extraordinary.  He is truly
multidimensional.

Susana



"James L. Fidelholtz" wrote:

> Dear CORPORA:
>         (By the way, what do you call it if you don't have *any* yet?).
>
>         OK, I'm interested in corpora, and what they can tell us about
> language.  I also feel sorry for Mike Maxwell being the only one to
> defend generative linguistics (pace Carl Mills, who, along with Mike
> and a couple of others, have injected a bit of reason into the
> discussion, it seems to me -- by the way, Carl, from the very
> beginning, part of the sport of generative grammar was shooting down
> people's examples, which we never considered was tantamount to
> shooting down their theories -- I think even then we talked about
> 'refining theories' and such).
>         I studied at MIT, and almost my first research in linguistics
> was on English vowel reduction as a research assistant to Chomsky and
> Halle, during which I discovered the 'frequency rule' for
> pre-heavy-cluster vowel reduction in English, and although I perhaps did
> not manage to convince Chomsky and Halle that this was worth their
> taking into account in SPE, I've been a confirmed frequency buff ever
> since.
>         While I was there, Stan Petrick, Barbara Hall (now Partee) and
> various others took part in a project for, I believe, the MITRE
> Corporation, in which they designed a question-and-answer system in
> English for, if memory serves, searching databases.  I somehow doubt if
> this was the very first such system, but it must have been
> state-of-the-art for then (early 60s), and certainly made a lot of use
> of Chomsky's (and of course their own) work on English syntax.  Also, as
> Fritz Newmeyer has pointed out, a very large portion of early theses at
> MIT (in the 60s, including mine) were fieldwork theses, often on
> indigenous, or at least non-Indo-European, languages.  I believe Petrick
> used his MITRE experience as a springboard for his thesis, which I
> believe was on such a system.
>         The point here is that not all MIT-trained linguists are averse
> to data (of different types, even), nor even averse to working with
> corpora.  This sort of fake dichotomy must have gotten started from the
> (correct) perception that Chomsky has very little personal interest in
> the application of his theories in any practical pursuits, which seems
> to aggravate a large number of linguists, especially if they, for
> whatever reason, are not adherents of generative theories.  My answer to
> these people would be: give the guy a break!  He has other interests,
> and has done quite well, thank you, in pursuing them and in giving what
> nearly all observers admit are the underpinnings of modern linguistics,
> pretty much independent of the theory or approach one uses.  Chomsky
> certainly has no objection to people using his theories (or even
> others) in any number of practical ways.  *He* just isn't interested in
> doing so.  He'd probably even be interested if some corpus studies
> proved relevant for linguistic theory, but that's up to corpus linguists
> to do, after all.  Very few people criticized Michael Jordan for being a
> rather mediocre baseball player (although some criticized him for even
> trying it! -- and they may have been right).  You guys are all
> smart--you get the point.
>         In sum, to get the attention of the 'MIT linguists', corpus
> linguistics has to show that it is relevant to the formulation of
> theories.  Probably very few of the MIT group would dismiss corpus
> evidence out of hand, but they've got other fish to fry than puttering
> around in corpora like we do.
>         I guess I'll close with a limerick (oxymoron: it's indelicate):
>
> There once was a guy from Byzondum
> Used a dried hedgehog skin for a condom.
> His girlfriend would shout,
> As he pulled the thing out,
> "De gustibus non disputandum".
>
>                 Jim
>
> --
> James L. Fidelholtz                     e-mail: jfidel at siu.buap.mx
> Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje       tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705
> Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades    fax: +(01-2) 229-5681
> Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO