[lbo-talk] munchers

[ravi]

On Jun 9, 2009, at 4:03 PM, Aaron Stark wrote:
>
> [civility paragraph I cited above]
>
> "But Noam does not denigrate others to build himself up. Likewise,
> Noam does not evidence the kind of condescending and self-promoting or
> guilt-salving concern for others that is all too frequent in many
> circles, particularly, I hate to say it, in progressive (politically
> correct) circles. Noam's caring is real. There is no pomp or
> circumstance. He does not weep wildly or gush effusively. But Noam
> remembers people's needs. He fulfills requests. He notices pain and
> tries to do real things to alleviate it. He is quite civil. You could
> even call Noam very conservative in daily life characteristics. If
> there is a sign to stay off a lawn, Noam obeys. Noam routinely abides
> almost all rules unless higher values take precedence. "
>

This is the very picture I have of Chomsky. And it is one of a  
splendid human being.


> Also, I wanted to clarify what I said above, related to the charge of
> linguistic "intellectual hyperconservatism": it's not only
> sociolinguists and computational linguists who have problems with the
> theory of generative grammar. There are also semanticists,
> syntactians, morphologists, phonologists, phoneticians, historical
> linguists, etc, who think that generative grammar is the wrong way to
> go about analyzing language. Since I've not kept up with the
> literature since 2001, unfortunately I can't really say what
> proportion of each subfield works within the generative framework,
> what proportion works outside of it, and what proportion works in a
> blended theory.

I would like to hear more about the above. Are Chomsky's critics  
questioning the validity of the UG idea as well? W.r.t how to analyse  
language... isn't that a bit of a different thing? I tend to think  
(perhaps wrongly?) of Chomsky as a linguist as someone studying the  
human faculty of language, not so much particular languages (IOW,  
generative grammar is an analysis of grammar, and only indirectly one  
of languages). In such a view, individual languages are end points,  
empirical bits that validate (or refute) the theses proposed. This  
impression of mine seems to be shared by Wikipedia authors on  
Generative Grammar:


> When generative grammar was first proposed, it was widely hailed as  
> a way of formalizing the implicit set of rules a person "knows" when  
> they know their native language and produce grammatical utterances  
> in it (grammaticality intuitions). However Chomsky has repeatedly  
> rejected that interpretation; according to him, the grammar of a  
> language is a statement of what it is that a person has to know in  
> order to recognize an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis  
> about the processes involved in either understanding or producing  
> language.

I tend to think of the above research programme of Chomsky as falling  
more under a theory of mind with attention to language. Thoughts?

	--ravi