You wrote:
> One of the disputes -- Chomskyans versus dependency
> syntax people -- thatyou described seems to have a
> political dimension. The idea that syntax is
> independent of semantics strikes me as akin to a
> liberal notion of justice: justice is procedural;
> free speech as form can & should be defended
> independent of content; etc.
Not quite. The indenpendence of syntax from semantics does not render all sentences semantically equivalent.
Chomsky's famous sentence to demonstrate the indenpendence of syntax from semantics, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is -- or as Scott pointed out, _was_, because it's now been placed in who knows how many contexts that have imparted it meaning -- nonsense. On the other hand, I'm certain a string of offensive terms that weren't syntactically well-formed could be considered objectionable on the morphology of each of term.
Chomsky doesn't draw political conclusions from his linguistic work; instead he seems to rely mostly on a naive moralism illustrated by comparisons, e.g., the US gov't and press damn A for doing this to B, but when C does the same thing to D, the US and its press look the other way.
But again, I have to qualify that, for his essay on Skinner, to me at least, *hints* constantly that an infinite productive capacity for language justifies the notion that human being are free entities.
Re: infinite productive capacity for language (which Ian Murray -- I think -- asked about), for those who aren't familiar with the argument (or with the old version of generative grammar, which it pretty much boils down to), I'm hashing together something which is too long to post, and should be done in a day or so. It's probably too long to post, so anybody interested can mail me offlist. (It's basically a cheat sheet for the first few sections of _Syntactic Structures_) NB to Scott: could you give a ref to or, if they're short and simple enough, post an lexicalist argument for infinite productive capacity? I'd be curious to see it.
-- Curtiss
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