[Corpora-List] Looking for linguistic principles

[Rob Freeman]

On Saturday 15 October 2005 16:59, Stefan Bordag wrote:
> ... I unfortunately have not read enough about
> phonology to make literate comments on that part of the debate that went
> on there.

OK. I think you should take a look at it, though. I see no reason to believe 
the problem is limited to phonological representations. It strikes me as the 
single most important issue in distributional methods then and now.

> ...I guess that the potential of clustering and
> this contrastive method of comparisons (which are really independent of the
> language level used) is what Chomsky didn't understand, although this
> sounds almost unlikely.

I agree. I think Chomsky understood it good.

He understood it, but found it led to rules which lacked generality.

Chomsky's conclusion was this lack of generality was fatal to the method. We 
don't have to draw that conclusion. Like Syd Lamb we can explain it as 
evidence language rules are not "linear", or other. But we gain nothing by 
ignoring the observation.

John Goldsmith seems to be focusing on the historical impact of the 
observation, pointing out that it was not so much that the problem forced us 
to accept rules, but rather that the problem only presented itself once you 
started to think about rules. But he is not disputing the fact that 
distributional methods were shown to result in rules which were not general. 
Beyond that his position seems to be the classical generativist one that this 
is evidence everything comes down some innate language facility which selects 
between possible representations. As far as I can tell. John can correct me 
if I am wrong.

What is in "The language instinct debate"? Once again does it dispute the 
observation of a lack of generality in distributionally derived 
representations, or only the innatist conclusions Chomsky drew from it?

-Rob