[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Mike Maxwell]

Rob Freeman wrote:
> You seem to have missed my point in this discussion. Which was...:
> 
> Chomsky failed at "the task of generating all and only the grammatical 
> sentences of a language."

That specific point is true, and was indeed the starting point of the 
discussion.  But the discussion quickly morphed into s.t. else, IMHO. 
Namely, that the Chomskian approach is wrong, and Chomsky himself needs 
(it was claimed) to admit his failure.  And that, I would claim, is 
wrong--provided "the Chomskian approach" is defined appropriately (IMHO, 
including other generative approaches like GPSG, LFG, HPSG and others). 
  (Big :-).  Chomsky would doubtless disagree with me.)

My counter-claim would be that a number of general claims Chomsky made 
early on are correct, and that a number of discoveries that linguists in 
the generative tradition (including Chomsky himself) made later on are 
correct.  The failure of linguists (yet) to generate all and only is no 
more damning than the failure of physicists (yet) to come up with a 
grand unified theory.  But I've been through that, and I shouldn't 
repeat myself.

> Unfortunately the net result of his success has been to polarize 
> theoretical linguistics into antagonistic factions which either reject 
> structural descriptions entirely, or believe such descriptions must be 
> innate.

Or rather, the ability to abstract such descriptions, and then to use 
them to create utterances in a language, is innate.
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
	"Theorists...have merely to lock themselves in a room
	with a blackboard and coffee maker to conduct their business."
	--Bruce A. Schumm, Deep Down Things

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