[Corpora-List] Chomsky and computational linguistics

[Michael Maxwell]

> I agree Mike. I don't think Chomsky argued against observational adequacy.
> Any theory must explain the data. I would say Chomsky argued against
> observational sufficiency.
>
> I hope that won't now lead to an argument about the meaning of the word
> "sufficiency".

You won't get an argument from me about observational sufficiency, and in
fact I think that's exactly right: a grammar that captures all of some set
of observations (whether those are from a corpus, or from introspection,
or both) is not necessarily complete nor necessarily a grammar of what a
native speaker knows, and therefore not sufficient.

(I would also argue that a grammar that captures all the data in some
corpus may even be wrong, depending on how you collected the corpus and
controlled for typos and other errors etc.; but that is a separate
question from the sufficiency one.)

Of course one could argue about the *purpose* of the grammar, and maybe
that's a fruitful discussion.  My guess is that some of the discussion
that's gone on in this thread over rare constructions (I keep bringing up
parasitic gaps :-)) is really an argument about what grammars are for and
what they are supposed to capture.  And I think that was one of Chomsky's
fundamental claims: grammars are about something in the minds of native
speakers, not about observations.  I suspect we don't all agree that
that's the right way to look at it.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD


_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora