[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computationnel linguistics

[John F. Sowa]

It is truly sad when a man who had taught us all a great deal at
one time long ago has walled himself off from any input that might
raise questions he had decided to ignore five decades ago.

R. Krishnamurthy> It seems odd to link "corpora" and "Chomsky" in
 > the same sentence.
 >
 > In a recent article...
 >> Joszef Andor
 >> The master and his performance: An interview with Noam Chomsky
 >> Intercultural Pragmatics 1-1 (2004), 93–111
 >
 >...Chomsky said:
 >> (p 97) Corpus linguistics doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying
 >> suppose a physicist decides, suppose physics and chemistry decide
 >> that instead of relying on experiments, what they’re going to do
 >> is take videotapes of things happening in the world and they’ll
 >> collect huge videotapes of everything that’s happening and from
 >> that maybe they’ll come up with some generalizations or insights.

Actually, they do that, but they do that "in addition to", not
"instead of".  In every experiment, they record (sometimes with video)
what happens.  For fields on a gigantic scale, such as astronomy,
meteorology, or plate tectonics, "instead of" is the only thing that
is humanly possible.  And those fields have made enormous progress
in the past 50 years.

Anna Wierzbicka commented on another pronouncement by Chomsky in
that same interview:

 > In a recent extended interview for the journal “Intercultural
 > Pragmatics”, Noam Chomsky (in Andor 2004) declared that next to
 > nothing is currently known about the mental lexicon. Since
 > evidently all that falls into Chomsky’s field of vision is the
 > work done within the generative paradigm, his conclusion is not
 > surprising: the sterility of the generative approach to semantics
 > in general and to the mental lexicon in particular must be evident
 > to anyone, friend or foe, who has followed the fortunes of the
 > generative enterprise. As this article shows, however, outside
 > the Chomskyan paradigm a great deal has come to be known about
 > the mental lexicon.

See http://www.ali2006.une.edu.au/Wierzbicka_Mental_lexicon.pdf

As an example of what Chomsky could have become, I recall an interview
with the physicist Eugene Wigner in _Physics Today_ in the early 1980s.
At that time, Wigner was approaching 80, but he was still publishing
research articles in physics.  The interviewer asked how he was able
to continue making contributions to a field that is usually considered
the province of much younger researchers.  Wigner replied that he had
his own range of insights, which he continued to develop over a long
period with fruitful results.  But, he added, he was careful not to
make discouraging remarks about younger researchers because they might
have fruitful insights into areas that were outside his expertise.

The "first rule of reason" by C. S. Peirce was "Do not block the way
of inquiry."  Wigner observed that rule, but Chomsky didn't.

John Sowa