хомский и серль (англ.)

[avva]

Гигант лингвистики Ноам Хомский и гигант философии Джон Серль выходят на кулачный бой.
В этом споре я - за Серля.

Comments

Re:

[avva.livejournal.com]

А почему по-английски - просто так или по какой-то глубокой причине? Не то чтобы я mind конечно.

Coincidence... I am just now reading a book called The Minimalist Program, which is a collection of articles which start at P&P and go forward from there.

Right. I'm gonna get me something like that soon. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to the Minimalist Program.

To define the rules of English grammar is not too difficult, and has been done in the 50s.

I don't think that's quite true, at least not for the meaning of "rules of English grammar" that really matters. Are you familiar with the grammar of Quirk et al.? Now that's a descriptive tome that really makes you understand just how hopelessly naive those enumerations of the 50ies were.

The current problems of linguistics in my humble understand are as follows:

I think the primary problem of linguistics was and remains -- to understand what language is, how it functions and evolves, individually and collectively, on all levels. Studying language acquisition by children is a pretty important way of helping us get there, but it shouldn't be taken as an end in itself.

To describe how words get formed from structural descriptions (concepts) that exist in the brain.

Is this a linguistic problem, even? Anyhow, I don't think we're anywhere near understanding how the brain functions, how it stores "structural descriptions" (and whether it does). All our intuitions about it are virtually worthless.

We're better off discussing (for instance) "the lexicon" in the Chomskyan framework as some abstract storehouse of words and morphemes with some possible properties and behaviour patterns that might help us explain stuff on lower levels, than trying to picture it as a real physiological thing at this or other place in the brain. It's way to early to try and do that - we're just going to be led astray by our own metaphors.

So they are discussing whether or not he misunderstood what Chomsky said.

Not really. Searle is a pretty sharp guy, actually. What he's saying is that Chomsky's been changing the methodology and the goals of generative linguistics, all the while pretending that nothing's really changed. And I think he's right. His words chime pretty well with what I've been reading and hearing elsewhere about the evolution of Chomsky's thought and his school of linguistics.

Chomsky's the one who's trying to present this as Searle's misunderstanding of Chomsky's terminology. I'm not buying this -- well, perhaps to some extent I am, but not completely.

[lom.livejournal.com]

"I'm gonna get" - sounds terrible in English. In a casual talk you can say "I gonna get", but not in writing...

I also think Searle is sharp in precise in this article.
It is true that classical grammar relies on the very existance of the native speaker - one who's always right. It merely explains how he's speaking. Not that it is bad, it is just limited, you don't get a complete structure, you do not get power to research in depth.
GG is like an attempt to built a Super Blue chess computer rather than raise a few new Grandmasters. Chess programs are imperfect, but they have unlimited potential and so on.

I think that Searle correctly pointed to a Chomsky's shift in "programming base".
It should not be a big deal at all, so I am not sure why this argumet aroused...

[oblomov-jerusal.livejournal.com]

Язык& с одной стороны есть способность индивида, а с другой—коллективное явление, эволюционирующее со временем состояние большой системы состоящей из людей. Я подозреваю, что в хомскизме недостаточное внимание уделяется коллективной природе языка. Так, ведётся поиск языковых универсалов—общих свойств всех языков, и предполагается, что такие универсалы выражают свойства врождённой "универсальной грамматики", присущей индивиду. По-моему, при этом игнорируется возможность, что эти универсалы проистекают из природы коллективного процесса языковой эволюции. Известно, что большинство найденных универсалов представляют собой не строгие правила, а тенденции, что, мне кажется, ясно доказывает их происхождение в коллективных процессах.