[Corpora-List] Looking for linguistic principles

[John Goldsmith]

Stefan Bordag wrote:
> 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, and of being too ambitious in any case, there not being enough 
> information in a corpus of a natural language to define its structure.

Mike Maxwell wrote:

-What Chomsky was arguing against was the prevailing American Structuralist 
-theory of the time, which was indeed very much concerned with the issue of 
-procedures for discovering generalizations, what were termed "discovery 
-procedures".  This was particularly true in phonology.  


Mike, that's not right. On the terminological side, the structuralists did
not use the term "discovery procedure"; it was Chomsky who invented the
term, during his efforts to weaken the structuralists stronghold. On a more
substantive plane, it must be emphasized that structuralists' concerns
during this period (which began in 1924, with the founding of the Linguistic
Society of America) was the establishment of an approach to language
analysis which was worthy of being called "scientific", and *all*
discussions of the nature and character of science during this period
emphasized the special character of scientific *methods* of exploration:
their concern with quantifiable laboratory results (i.e., measurements of
events in time and space), their replicable character, and so on. This is
the background to the dispute in the 1950s that has to borne in mind;
Chomsky's "offer" to linguistics was the promise of a style of grammar that
could, in some sense, *do more*; but the structuralists concern was what the
methodological price was to pay: would this method lead us back to the dark
days of introspectionist psychology, as in the German psychological
laboratories of the late 19th century? Their fear was that it would, and one
can interpret at least some of the "I can't say your sentence in *my*
dialect" disputes of the 1960s as being precisely the unscientific
methodological pitfalls the structuralists feared would loom.


Harris focused on formal characteristics of the correct analysis of a
grammar, and it was Harris who Chomsky rebelled against. Hockett, and others
of a more anthropological leaning, were much more concerned with developing
a grammatical model that mimicked (that is, modeled) human competence.


-It was harder to 
-come up with discovery procedures in morphology, although people tried 
-valiently to come up with s.t. like the notion of minimal pairs--Longacre, 
-long after most American Structuralists had retired, wrote a book which 
-(IIRC) was called "Discovery Procedures", and proposed a notion of minimal 
-pairs in grammar.  As for syntax, there was virtually no work done on that 
-among the American Structuralists (except for the aforementioned work by 
-Longacre, and a grammar of English by Nida, IIRC).


Mike, again I don't think I agree here, from a historical point of view.
Harris was exactly concerned with this question, and thought he had solved
the problem (with this "From Phoneme to Morpheme" paper in the mid 1950s).
Hockett thought that Harris's solution was misguided, because he believed
(correctly, IMO) that he had shown that morphemes could not be defined as
sequences of phonemes; this is addressed specifically in Hockett's paper in
Language in 1951.




-As for the dissociation between structure and procedures, I think that is a

-very apt characterization of Chomsky's view.  What he was saying was 
-basically, look, here is the obvious phonological structure of language X; 
-but the discovery procedures don't allow you to capture that, they can only

-get you this inferior analysis that misses an obvious generalization. So 
-get rid of the discovery procedures, so we can get on with real 
-linguistics.  (The most widely used example of the failure of discovery 
-procedures came from Russian phonology, I believe; the analysis was done by

-Halle, and I would guess that Chomsky simply took that over as a good 
-example case.  Chomsky and Halle of course famously teamed up together.)

To repeat, Halle's argument was never couched as an argument against
discovery procedures; it was given as an argument against a missed
generalization, because a phonemicist analysis of Russian requires two rules
that are very similar to bear different labels ("rule of allophony" and
"rule of morphophonology").  


 

-As I say, I think what he was doing was attacking the _American_ 
-Structuralists, who (apart from Pike) were indeed wedded to behaviorism. 

Mike, that's just not true. Read anything by Hockett between 1945 and 1960,
such as his short 1949 paper (reprinted in the Joos reader) in which he says
that the goal of the linguist is to write a grammar that models what is
happening in the nervous systems of the speaker. That is as far as you can
get from behaviorism.


 
 

-Furthermore , the generativist view has always been that language learning 
-is a matter of psychology (something real), whereas AS (sorry, I'm getting 
-tired of writing it out) more or less treated linguistics as a way of 
-cataloging data, and certainly not s.t. that might have some sort of 
-psychological reality.


That's just not true. Students of Sapir, such as Swadesh and Voegelin,
interpreted formal simplicity as empirical evidence of scientific
correctness, exactly as (us) generativists do. A famous example of this is
Swadesh and Voegelin's paper (with Sapir as a silent third author):

"If it has been possible, by the recognition of a non-patent phonology
involving two morpho-phonemic types of consonants and two of vowels and a
set of mechanical rules, to reduce the apparent irregularity of Tübatulabal
phonology to system, this very fact guarantees the truth of our theory.
Truly irregular alternations could not be reduced to order."

Here is how Hymes and Fought view Bloomfield's position:

[Quote from Hymes and Fought's history of American Structuralism]: There is
another tradition, associated with Bloomfield, of rejecting as invalid any
deductions about psychological reality based only on the form of a
linguistic analysis, and demanding (or awaiting) instead some independent
confirmation of such claims from experimental psychology. [ref to
Bloomfield's Postulates]. In the absence of such confirmation, validation in
the Bloomfieldian tradition was based necessarily on internal evidence, on
criteria it is tempting to call formal, except for the confusion this would
surely produce with the issue of rules vs forms. Prominent among these
internal criteria were consistency in the application of criteria and
simplicity of the resulting analysis, this property being closely related to
the parsimony of entities advocated everywhere in science. Here is Joos, for
instance, reminiscing about Bloomfield speaking of htis kind of simplicity
(50, p. 3):

Bloomfield once said to me, apropos of the number of symbols in a phonetic
alphabet (I think it was when I said that he seemed to be making a virtue
out of using the fewest possible symbols) 'Of course; that's what I mean by
a scientific description', as if to say that simplicity (not that he could
have meant that it was that easy to measure simplicity) was the measure of
science. [End of quote]


 

Thanks for opening this forum for a stimulating discussion!

John