[Corpora-List] Looking for linguistic principles

[Rob Freeman]

Hi Stefan,

On Friday 14 October 2005 16:44, you wrote:
> ...from Finchs dissertation from the year 1993:
>
> Perhaps it was precisely the lack of these materials [large corpora,
> availability of machines] which made the structuralist programme
> infeasible during the 1950s, rather than some fundamental theoretical
> flaw.

"Perhaps", but what was the "theoretical flaw"?

> And I might add a little further up in the same section of Finchs
> dissertation:
>
> This [structuralist] paradigm was criticised by Chomsky (57) for failing
> to properly dissociate the definition of what structure existed in natural
> language from the procedures which allowed that structure to be found

This may be it, though I'm not clear exactly what Finch means by "failing 
to ... dissociate the ... structure ... from the procedures..." Does he mean 
Chomsky observed different procedures resulted in different structures?

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".)

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."

I posted a query about this on Funknet a while back and the best response I 
got was from Syd Lamb. Here is what he wrote (Funknet 25/6/2004):

'Chomsky was correct in pointing out that some of the criteria in use at that 
time for defining phonemic representations were less than airtight, but his 
alternative phonological proposals were even more faulty...

For example, perhaps his most celebrated argument concerns the Russian 
obstruents. He correctly pointed out that the usual solution incorporates a 
loss of generality, but he misdiagnosed the problem. The problem was the 
criterion of linearity...'

Syd goes on:

'What happened was weird. Chomsky responded to my published account (e.g. 
Prolegomena to a theory of phonology, Language 1966) by saying that (approx 
quote) "Lamb's attempt at refutation amounts to accepting my solution in toto 
with a change of notation". (!!) This despite that fact that Chomsky's 
solution retains linearity while rejecting biuniqueness (contrastive 
function), while mine rejects linearity while preserving biuniqueness.'

I'm afraid I had to agree with Chomsky, at least as far as the existence of a 
problem. Either linguistic representations can't be described contrastively 
(distributionally) or they are not linear (meaning they are dependent on 
context)? Either way we have to change the way we are thinking about language 
representation.

This strikes me as a central issue for distributional methods to address, but 
according to Syd:

"How did others (besides Chomsky) react? As far as I can tell, by simply 
ignoring these published refutations of mine, with their alternative 
solutions. It came to be generally accepted that the notion of a contrastive 
phoneme (Chomsky's "biuniqueness") had been thrown out by Chomsky. The 
phoneme was dead for the next two or three decades. Nobody (other than my 
students) was even aware of my refutation of his argument."

So this is the issue I am interested in. Have you heard anything else about 
this particular issue: loss of "generality" (Chomsky) or lack of 
"linearlity" (Lamb) of distributionally derieved language representations?

-Rob