AW: "Generative" serves them right

[SHALOM LAPPIN]

Sorry Tibor, but I don't recall reporting that Chomsky accepted our
criticisms (I asume you mean the critical work that David and I did in
our &P article and our CSLI monograph) either publically or privately.
I am also not aware that he did accept any of our arguments or even
relates to them in any way. He did cite our L&P paper in his Minimalist
Inquiries (1998) in a footnote in which he lists us together with
Collins as pointing out that global economy conditions involve
complexity problems. Interestingly, we devote a chapter of our book
arguing against Collins' proposal for local economy
conditions. Collins entirely disrgards our work on both global and local
economy principles in his chapter on economy in the Handbook on
Syntactic Theory, which he co-edited with Mark Baltin. Regards.
                                Shalom
On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Tibor Kiss wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I fully agree to Ash, and again, I want to point out that my kind of
> exclusive use of "generative" was an allusion to earlier e-mails on this
> list.
>
> I don't think that Chomsky can be cured in his style of citation, and also,
> it is not necessary to get quoted by Chomsky. An alternative strand has been
> followed by Bresnan/Gazdar et al. in the late 70s to around 1985: Beat them
> by showing them that they are wrong, i.e. make provably wrong predictions.
> Very little attempts have been made in this direction in recent years, an
> exception being the work done by Lappin/Johnson.
>
> In the meantime, we find a lot of work in the MP framework which is open to
> discussion or criticism. For instance, I am preparing a discussion of
> Hornstein's recent (and in my eyes strangely flawed) attempt to eliminate
> binding theory in favour of movement and pronominalization. Lasnik
> (2000:185) points out that MP cannot explain the ungrammaticality of '*John
> left not.' and '*John not left' (believe it or not, it's true). Also (cf.
> Lasnik 2000:182) the whole Pollock-contrast (embrasse souvent -- often
> kisses) cannot be handled within Chapter 4 (Categories and Transformations,
> Chomsky 1995).
>
> Perhaps, Sergio or other guys don't get quoted by Chomsky if they tackle
> these problems, but they presumably find their audience elsewhere. (On the
> other hand, Shalom has reported that Chomsky publicly accepted their
> criticism as valid.)
>
> Best
>
> Tibor
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss -- Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut
> Ruhr-Universität Bochum, D-44780 Bochum
> +49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265 // +49-234-3214137 (fax)
> You come here, you must think about minimalism
>
>
>