[Corpora-List] Re: ANC, FROWN, Fuzzy Logic

[FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE]

Mike Maxwell escribió:
...
> I thought that's what he did do.  That is, he did not claim that his 
> formalism covered semantics, and he later argued heavily against 
> generative semantics, which did make more or less that claim.  So if by 
> "religious wars" you mean the Generative Semantics Wars, then the argument 
> was in the opposite direction, with Chomsky on the side claiming that 
> transformational grammar explained only syntax, not semantics (and 
> certainly not phonology; as for morphology, it was subsumed under syntax 
> and phonology). 
> 
> If however by "religious wars" you mean the earlier years, when the fight 
> was against behaviorists, then Chomsky's argument was that 
> transformational grammar was a sufficient formalism for the syntax of 
> natural languages, and that notably weaker models, including finite state 
> automatons and CF and CS phrase structure grammars, were not sufficient.  
> (Later Chomsky looked for ways to constrain transformational grammar in 
> order to explain learnability; this surfaced in Aspects (1965), but came 
> to the fore only after the GS war was won.) 
> 
> As for phonology, which is where most of the conflict between Chomsky and 
> the American Structuralists came (since apart from Zellig Harris and a 
> couple others, most American Structuralists stayed away from syntax), I 
> don't think the argument was over the mathematical formalism.  Rather, it 
> was over the representation (phonemes vs. distinctive features), including 
> whether there was such a thing as a phonemic level of representation, and 
> over the way to find the atoms of the representation in a particular 
> language.  (At least that's my reading; John Goldsmith is probably lurking 
> out there, and can correct me if I'm wrong.)
> -- 
> 	Mike Maxwell
> 	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu 
> 
I'm also lurking out here, and I don't think I've seen a better précis of 
this bit of recent history of linguistics than Mike's. 

Jim 

James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje, ICSyH
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla     MÉXICO