[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Rob Freeman]

Mike,

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."

BUT he was tremendously successful in pointing out that "observable language
can't be abstracted satisfactorily."

...which is now mostly ignored.

Your reply is a case in point. You simply ignored it.

On 8/5/07, Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.)


If you want to redefine "the Chomskian approach" to be something that
Chomsky himself would disagree with, so you can win an argument that Chomsky
was not wrong..., that is OK with me. I love paradoxes.

What interests me is that I still don't see anyone addressing my claim that
"no one has considered the equally plausible conclusion that structural
descriptions of language are necessarily multiple, and selected by context."

-Rob
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