[Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics

Thu Dec 24 18:40:07 UTC 2020

Dear all,

FWIW, there's a detailed critique of Chomsky's idea (that "discovery
procedures" accurately describe Bloomfieldian and other structuralist
practice) in the second chapter of Ryckman's dissertation:

http://zelligharris.org/TR.html

Apologies if this is well known.

best,
Andrew

On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 10:31 AM Frederick J Newmeyer <fjn at uw.edu> wrote:

> Dear Adam,
>
> Yes, there is lots of textual support. If you want to see discovery
> procedures carried to an extreme, then read anything by Zellig Harris, for
> example:
>
> Harris, Zellig S. (1955). 'From Phoneme to Morpheme', Language 31: 190-222.
> Harris, Zellig S. (1946). 'From Morpheme to Utterance', Language 22:
> 161-83.
>
> Harris's book wasn't (originally) entitled '*METHODS in Structural
> Linguistics*' for nothing. The whole book is devoted to discovery
> procedures.
>
> For the most empiricist of the descriptivists, the goal was to arrive at a
> grammar of a language by performing a set of operations on a corpus of
> data, each successive operation being one step farther removed from the
> corpus. It followed then that the levels of a grammatical description had
> to be arrived at in the order: first, phonemics, then morphemics, then
> syntax, then discourse: ‘There is no circularity; no grammatical fact of
> any kind is used in making phonological analysis’ (Hockett 1942: 20).
> Martin Joos's comments after many of the papers in his edited volume *Readings
> in Linguistics* (1957) will give you a flavour of discovery procedures.
> He approves of Bernard Bloch's 'Phonemic Overlapping' article, even though
> he himself recognized that Bloch's analysis was counterintuitive. But Bloch
> had to discover the phonemes directly from the phones without using any
> other sort of information, so his final analysis was weird.
>
> There were less extreme structuralists in the US in this time period.
> Those with a Prague School background, like Jakobson, of course. And
> Kenneth Pike argued -- to the scorn of many of his colleagues -- that you
> had to use grammatical information in a phonemic analysis. But even Pike
> did not really break from operationalism, as he proposed discovery
> procedures to 'find' the grammatical information.
>
> I think that in *Chomsky's Current Issues in Linguistic Theor*y (1964),
> you will find a number of references to post-Bloomfieldian discovery
> procedures.
>
> Fritz
>
>
> Frederick J. Newmeyer
> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon Fraser U
>
>
> On Thu, 24 Dec 2020 at 09:50, TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr> wrote:
>
>> Dear Bill (if I may),
>>
>> Thanks for your response and directing us to the passage where this issue
>> is addressed. In fact, I see Seuren's response as a way of evading the
>> methodological problems you highlight by conflating discovery procedure
>> with diagnostic or criterion.
>>
>> Dear Fritz (if I may),
>>
>> Is there any obvious textual support for Chomsky's interpretation? I have
>> not found any, but perhaps I am misreading things with a hindsight vision.
>> After reading Longacre's book, I feel that the tagmemicist notion of
>> 'discovery procedure' is very similar to the way 'diagnostic' or
>> 'criterion' is typically used today (e.g. affix diagnostic, word
>> diagnostic) - not just in generative literature, but in Dixon's
>> presentation of 'Basic Linguistic Theory', for instance. Perhaps the notion
>> articulated by Chomsky was an idea 'in the air' so to speak and was not put
>> on paper.
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Adam
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
>> ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
>> CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
>> Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
>> Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
>> ------------------------------
>> *De :* William Croft [wcroft at unm.edu]
>> *Envoyé :* jeudi 24 décembre 2020 18:04
>> *À :* TALLMAN Adam
>> *Cc :* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> *Objet :* Re: discovery procedures vs. diagnostics
>>
>> Adam's quotation from Seuren's review of *Radical Construction Grammar *prompts
>> me to cite a passage of the book (pp 10-11) which Seuren ignored in his
>> review:
>>
>> "It has been suggested to me that the methodological question is of
>> relatively
>> minor importance. In particular, reference is made to Chomsky's argument
>> that it is unreasonable to ask linguistic theory for a discovery procedure
>> for identifying the right grammar for a particular language (Chomsky 1957:
>> 50–3). However, the problem which I am referring to is more basic than
>> that. It is what Chomsky calls the condition of generality (ibid., 50),
>> necessary for any adequate theory of grammar: ‘we must characterize the
>> form of grammars in a general and explicit way so that we can actually
>> propose grammars of this form for particular languages’ (ibid., 53–4).
>> That is, for a particular language we can argue for and thus justify the
>> analysis of that language's structures as an instance of the structures
>> found in Universal Grammar.
>>
>> It is the condition of generality that I believe current syntactic
>> theories fail. That is, the methods that linguists use to argue for their
>> syntactic theories carry hidden fallacies which are largely unremarked
>> upon. When these fallacious assumptions are uncovered, their abandonment
>> leads us to a very different approach to syntactic theory than that
>> advocated by formalist theories and even the functionalist syntactic
>> theories referred to above."
>>
>> I've written about those hidden assumptions and fallacies in numerous
>> places besides the book, particularly in the references cited below.
>>
>> Happy Holidays,
>> Bill
>>
>> Croft, William. 2009. “Methods for finding language universals in
>> syntax.” *Universals of language today*, ed. Sergio Scalise, Elisabetta
>> Magni and Antonietta Bisetto, 145-64. Berlin: Springer.
>>
>> Croft, William. 2010. “Ten unwarranted assumptions in syntactic
>> argumentation.” *Language usage and language structure,* ed. Kasper Bøye
>> and Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, 313-50. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
>>
>> Croft, William. “Word classes in Radical Construction Grammar.” *The
>> Oxford handbook of word classes, *ed. Eva Van Lier. Oxford: Oxford
>> University Press. Draft at http://www.unm.edu/~Papers/WordClassesRCG.pdf
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of
>> TALLMAN Adam <Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr>
>> *Sent:* Thursday, December 24, 2020 3:50 AM
>> *To:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <
>> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> *Subject:* Re: [Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics
>>
>>
>> *  [EXTERNAL]*
>> Oh there was one more source I meant to attach by Seuren, in his review
>> of Croft's 'Radical Construction Grammar'. It is really the only source
>> that directly brings up the relationship (that I know of it), but its very
>> succint (and silly).
>>
>> "Croft then proceeds to show (pp. 29–47) that, on this premiss,
>> distributionalanalysis leads to a quandary caused by the fact that no
>> two elements have exactly the same distribution under any system of
>> categorization in anylanguage, which makes it hard to establish
>> syntactic categories. Moreover,once categories have been established for
>> one language, as a result of‘methodological opportunism’, a further
>> appeal must be made to this ‘opportunism’ to establish cross-linguistic
>> categories, such as those of noun,adjective, adverb, or subject, direct
>> object, etc., which all have non-identicaldistributions in different
>> languages. Therefore, established linguistic methodology is at fault and
>> RCG will put things right.
>>
>> The first thing a professional linguist will say, at this point, is that
>> thisquandary has been well-known since at least the 1950s. It was
>> precisely thereason why the inductive method of distributional analysis
>> meant to yield so-called DISCOVERY PROCEDURESwas abandoned as a method
>> for discoveringcorrect linguistic analyses and replaced with the
>> deductive method of theformation and testing of descriptive hypotheses.
>> That is, one just positscategories for each specific language and
>> assigns them certain structuraland/or semantic properties, and one then
>> sees to what extent the machinery(or module) that is based on them
>> yields the right results, according to an agreed set of eliminative
>> adequacy criteria."
>>
>> Any other sources that try to draw out the relationship would be
>> appreciated (even if they are not particularly informative or accurate,
>> like the one above).
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Adam
>>
>>
>>
>> Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
>> ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
>> CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
>> Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
>> Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
>> ------------------------------
>> *De :* Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] de la part de
>> TALLMAN Adam [Adam.TALLMAN at cnrs.fr]
>> *Envoyé :* jeudi 24 décembre 2020 11:20
>> *À :* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> *Objet :* [Lingtyp] discovery procedures vs. diagnostics
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I wonder if anyone has read any sources that explicitly discuss the
>> difference or relation between (in theory and/or in practice) between
>> 'diagnostics', which are used to link up theoretical models with new data,
>> and 'discovery procedures', which are disparaged, but seem to be, in some
>> ways, ancestors of the former notion.
>>
>> Attached are some relevant citations if you've never heard of the notion
>> 'discovery procedure'.
>>
>> best & happy holidays,
>>
>> Adam
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Adam James Ross Tallman (PhD, UT Austin)
>> ELDP-SOAS -- Postdoctorant
>> CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
>> Bureau 207, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
>> Numero celular en bolivia: +59163116867
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-- 
I am honored to work on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the
Ohlone people.

Andrew Garrett (he/him)
Professor of Linguistics, Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of
Cross-Cultural Social Sciences
Director, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages & California
Language Archive
Curator of Sound Recordings, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology
1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650
University of California
Berkeley CA 94720-2650
email: garrett at berkeley.edu
web: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~garrett
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