[Corpora-List] The Language I D

[Rob Freeman]

Hi David,

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 06:33, Dr Hatch wrote:

> ...as I flunked my phonology course as a fresher, perhaps someone explain
> what the hell all this has to do with that subdiscipline ­ in NORMAL
> language.

:-)

The issue runs like this. Chomsky's first argument for innatism, as I 
understand, was not "poverty of stimulus", it was phonological.

The argument was not so much that (phonological) representations could not be 
learned (i.e. "poverty of stimulus"), but that learning led to certain 
irreconcilable problems. To borrow from John Goldsmith's earlier posts:

'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 sometimes be labeled a "rule of 
allophony" (regulating the allophones by which a phoneme is realized) and 
sometimes a rule at a higher level, a rule of morphophonology.'

and later...

'a phonemicist analysis of Russian requires two rules that are very similar to 
bear different labels ("rule of allophony" and "rule of morphophonology").'

That seems a bit technical, but what I understand of it is this: if you learn 
purely from patterns in the raw data, the rules you find cause you to "chase 
your tail". You can't define phonemes without taking into account how they 
combine, but you also can't take into account how they combine until you 
define the phonemes.

Or perhaps I am getting my problems mixed up... Anyway, the point was you got 
problems in the rules which could be learned directly from the data, and that 
led Chomsky to propose something innate must guide the learning process, to 
sort the wheat from all the chaff.

This is the debate I'm looking for evidence of in machine learning circles, 
not "poverty of stimulus".

I agree there are lots of good refutals of "poverty of stimulus" around. I 
want to see discussion of the idea (distributional) learning led to problems, 
inconsistencies, "mixing of levels" and such, in the rules.

-Rob