[Corpora-List] Looking for linguistic principles

[John Goldsmith]

Hi Rob, I was responding to the question about the history of the subject -
I think that was what the original query concerned: what had been said (by
Halle, by Chomsky), and whether those early arguments had been answered or
simply ignored.

So the first thing to be clear on is that nobody argued that structuralist
distributional techniques led to inconsistent results. The Hallean argument
against the phoneme took the form: if you apply American structuralist
principles, then you are faced with the conclusion that the same
phonological rule will 

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Freeman [mailto:lists at chaoticlanguage.com] 
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2005 12:25 AM
To: John Goldsmith
Cc: 'Stefan Bordag'; CORPORA at UIB.NO
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Looking for linguistic principles

Hi John,

Thanks for the refs. but are any of these a solution to the problem (...that

the application of distributional methods to language was shown a long time 
ago to give us inconsistent results)?

Anderson says:

"The persuasiveness of Halle's original argument really rests crucially on 
one's willingness to take seriously the need to get rules right." (p.g. 15)

It may do, but given a desire to get rules right, distributional methods
seem 
to come unstuck. Can we use them or not?

Perhaps you are presenting generative phonology as the pattern for a
solution. 
But generative phonology doesn't deny the inconsistent results problem. It 
accepts there are multiple inconsistent results and seeks to find a 
"evaluation metric" which can be used to select between them.

Do you think this "evaluation metric" is the solution, and something all 
distributional methods for finding grammar should use?

-Rob

On Friday 14 October 2005 22:34, John Goldsmith wrote:
> ...
>
> The best discussion of the content, background, and impact of Halle's
> argument is to be found in Stephen Anderson's paper (
> http://bloch.ling.yale.edu/Public/Royaumont.pdf).
>
> I have a detailed webpage -- from a course I did last year -- on the
> development of early generative phonology from its structuralist
> antecedents:
>
http://humfs1.uchicago.edu:16080/~jagoldsm/Webpage/Courses/HistoryOfPhonolo
>gy/index.htm
>
> There is a discussion of Harris's views in my paper in the current issue
of
> Language (available also at
>
http://humfs1.uchicago.edu:16080/~jagoldsm/Webpage/Courses/HistoryOfPhonolo
>gy/index.htm )
>
> And a brief overview of the history of this area in a paper by Bernard
Laks
> and myself, at
>
http://humfs1.uchicago.edu:16080/%7Ejagoldsm/Papers/GenerativePhonology.pdf
>
>
>
> The controversy you refer to did not speak to the question of
> distributional methods in phonology or elsewhere; that was a separate
> issue, and the perspective that Chomsky criticizes was his interpretation
> of Harris (inaccurate, in my view), and Harris took what other linguists
of
> the period (like Charles Hockett) thought was a wildly extreme position,
> though they recognized that he did it in part in order to see the
> consequences of adopting a strong methodological position.
>
> John Goldsmith