[Corpora-List] Lakoff on Fillmore

[Jim Fidelholtz]

Hi, Piotr, John, Yorick & even Al.,

We're all of course saddened greatly at Fillmore's death, and all the 'nice
guy' and 'genius' comments are more than richly deserved (as they are
equally for his wife, Lily Wong Fillmore, in a slightly different part of
the field). As for George Lakoff, we both got our introduction to
linguistics as undergraduates in the same class at the same time from
Morris Halle, along with the first entering group of grad. students in
linguistics at MIT, and I've always liked his work a lot, though I myself
have a different, less-well-founded take on metaphor which may be closer to
what's really going on and which I have to talk about with Yorick at some
point; but that's a separate issue.

It  may be of interest for the discussion of 'cognitive linguistics' that
this has spread to Spanish as well, where the very word 'cognitivo' has
gone, apparently in the space of a couple of decades (and this should be
checked out in corpusdelespanol.org), from a relatively infrequent synonym
of the word 'cognoscitivo' to having almost entirely displaced the latter
word (except for a few diehards like me, and even I have started to cave).

I think the bottom line is that Chuck was a tremendously influential and
productive linguist (more versatile even than many will be aware, having
done important practical work on acoustics in the 60s).

One thing this thread illustrates, though, is that, much as linguistics and
NLP may have been historically distanced from one another, and at (somewhat
mutually mystified and even blind) loggerheads much of the time, the two
fields really need one another: It cannot be denied that the ever greater
use of corpora for linguistic analysis has greatly widened linguists'
ambits for discovery of linguistic facts, as well as making research easier
in many ways. On the other hand, I believe that the inherent limits of
statistical approaches to NLP will only be able to be overcome by good old
linguistic analysis of the basic corpus data (genannt Sitzfleisch). I think
nowadays most NLP researchers recognize the need for linguistics, and vice
versa, though perhaps closer collaboration is needed to find the proper,
ideal mix of the two types of areal expertise.

Jim

James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO


On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Piotr Bański <bansp at o2.pl> wrote:

> Dear John,
>
> On 21/02/14 22:26, John F Sowa wrote:
> [...]
> > Re Lakoff's summary:  the only points I disagree with are George's
> > constant claims that "cognitive science is a young field" in which
> > all the major discoveries occurred in the past 40 years.
> [...]
>
> He obviously means *his* cognitive science. Since the early 90's, I have
> been increasingly amazed at the skill, with which the newly arrived
> "cognitive grammar" has been hijacking the adjective "cognitive", soon
> applying it simply to "linguistics", as if there had been nothing
> cognitive about linguistics before Lakoff, Langacker, and their
> colleagues. That was accompanied by the setting up of a journal with a
> corresponding title, appropriately named conferences, and the general
> publicizing of new (and hence, to many, intellectually attractive)
> ideas, and now, we can learn from Wikipedia, that, e.g.,
>
> "Langacker develops the central ideas of Cognitive Grammar in his
> seminal, two-volume Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, which became a
> major departure point for the emerging field of Cognitive Linguistics."
>
> ("Foundations" appeared around 1990)
>
> Best,
>
>   Piotr
>
>
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