[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Rob Freeman]

On 7/27/07, Terry <tmorpheme at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I wonder if someone could clear up a small point. I understand that in
> Syntactic Structures, Chomsky set himself the task of generating all and
> only the grammatical sentences of a language.
>
> Presumably, in the intervening 50 years or so since that work, he has
> never
> succeeded. But has he ever said: "I have failed in this task"? Surely, at
> a
> certain point, this is what a scientist would do.


That's true Terry. But Chomsky is not the only one who has failed. All of
linguistics has failed to do this, by any means.

And the goal is good, because we all do it, every day.

Sure, we can bag Chomsky for failing, but bagging Chomsky is too easy. His
solution (innateness) didn't work out, but nor did anyone else's, to judge
by the results.

Wind back before the solutions, and look at the problems. Chomsky's solution
was wrong, but he identified a problem. Observable language can't be
abstracted satisfactorily. (Corpus linguistics enshrines this in dogma,
without really wondering why.) Are we any smarter for ignoring the problem?

-Rob
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