>...One poster even claimed a "right wing
> linguist" had "debunked" Chomsky's work -- a funny and
> disturbingly thick-headed assertion for many reasons.
Geoffrey Sampson. Liberty and Language by Geoffrey Sampson
http://www-mcnair.berkeley.edu/uga/osl/mcnair/Sophal_Ear_canon.html http://www.counterpunch.org/herman07262003.html
http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/corpora/2001-2/0053.html Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics From: Geoffrey Sampson (geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk) Date: Wed Apr 25 2001 - 11:30:05 MET DST I find Amanda Schiffrin's approach to these issues extremely congenial (generative v. corpus-based approaches being like top-down v. bottom-up approaches to the same problem, which with luck will eventually meet in the middle). I think there are signs that the overall discipline is developing in a way that makes hers an increasingly accurate description of the situation -- I very much hope so.
The problem which has been aired in earlier postings is that, regrettably, in the past, and to a considerable extent even today, things have not been like that. Many generative linguists have made it clear that they not only were working at a distance from the empirical data but saw empirical data as in principle largely irrelevant. Concepts such as "competence" v. "performance" (and more recent generative terminology which I have not kept up with) were used to shield generative accounts from any possibility of being tested against observation. Mandy writes that theories which cannot be backed up by "real" evidence should be "discarded without a second thought", to which three hearty cheers; but there has been a strong current within academic linguistics of "If performance data seem incompatible with our theory, discard the data without a second thought". (I realize that these are large statements which I myself am making here without giving chapter and verse -- I do the latter in parts of my recent book _Emprical Linguistics_, apologies for the plug.)
The attitude I am describing has been so widely and strongly asserted during the period of my own career that the effort of disagreeing with it has left me feeling slightly psychologically marked, as perhaps is apparent from this posting! If Amanda's comments imply that a new wave of people are coming forward for whom being empirical just isn't an "issue" any more, that is really good news.
Geoffrey Sampson
G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences University of Sussex Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB
e-mail geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk tel. +44 1273 678525 fax +44 1273 671320 web http://www.grsampson.net
Michael Pugliese