

The 50th Anniversary of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax - tintinnabula
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/06/22/revolutionary-methodological-preliminaries/

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samch
"Chomsky's theories carried an atomistic, bottom-p approach to language to
it's natural conclusion. It certainly did inspire a generation of research,
most of it misguided. But its real flaw was one it inherited from its
structuralist predecessors. It treated utterances as decomposable structures
rather than as wholes, which is how the brain treats them. From the very first
the Chomskyites had to admit that no research supported any connection
whatsoever between the structures they posited and what went on in the brain.
They assumed that further brain research would be needed to uncover those
connections. But all the brain research since then has shown that
transformational grammar (and even its rivals, which I studied) bears no
resemblance to what the brain does with language. So what Chomsky gave us was
the foundation for the ultimate mathematical elaboration of a structuralist
theory that bears no relationship to anything in nature."

-My dad (Ph.D. Linguistics, Yale - way back in the day)

~~~
discreteinfinit
Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive
Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after
Chomsky reviewed one of his papers. Skinner's brand of behaviorism was surely
something we didn't need around anymore. He also changed the way everyone
thinks about language. Before Chomsky, there really was no real theory of
syntax that was even close to being scientific and formal.

Although probabilistic machine learning methods replaced the Chomskyan brand
of formal theoretic methods in NLP, a lot is owed to is work. Obviously there
is the Chomsky Hierarchy but even things like the Penn Treebank POS tags are
taken straight out of work in the Generative tradition from circa 1970 (not
sure why no one has tried the updated and more accurate tags currently being
used in theoretical linguistics). Anyways I could go on and on but Im
wondering what your Dad has to say about this ?

P.S There is an ongoing joke in the field of Linguistics about people who
either think they understand Chomsky or just straight up don't understand him.
Its difficult stuff.

~~~
samch
"No question that a lot of the tools developed under generative grammar have
proved useful, and one can certainly cite the Huxleyan principle that truth
comes sooner from error than from a vacuum. I think I would say that the
American structuralist tradition was headed in a wrong direction from at least
1933 (Bloomfield's Language) and that Chomsky (despite the claims of his
followers that he made a revolutionary break from structuralism) simply gave
structuralism a mathematical rigor that allowed it to be taken to its logical
conclusion. The tools that were developed in the process have allowed the
field (or the more brain-oriented parts of it) to move in a rather decisively
different direction.

Full disclosure: I got my PhD at Yale under Syd Lamb, so naturally I would not
be classed as a Chomskyan. It took me some years to realize that Lamb's
StratGram itself suffered from the same reductionist flaws. The only
theoretical school I know of that had a chance of moving in the right
direction (until very recently) was Firth's. Unfortunately, neither he nor his
followers developed the theoretical tools that were needed. Certainly
Halliday's Systemics became as reductionist as any of the others. Hudson's
word grammar made some good moves but never really developed well. So yeah,
Chomsky set something in motion that produced some useful theoretical tools
that could be used to help push off in new directions. But the TGG tradition,
being a well developed extension of the Bloomfieldian tradition, is still
basically a dead end."

-My dad

~~~
discreteinfinit
I mean, if you happen to have some data that Stratificational Grammar can
explain better than Generative Grammar I would love to see it. There are a
bunch of theories directly influenced by Chomsky which offer alternatives to
generative grammar. I've yet to see someone show that one is superior. In many
ways, they are all extensionally equivalent.

~~~
samch
"I never said that StratGram can explain things better than TGG. I said it had
the same reductionist flaws. It and all the theories influenced by Chomsky are
really outgrowths of Bloomfieldian structuralism and share its underlying
orientation. As you say, in many ways they are all extensionally equivalent.
The field needs to move beyond all of them. Don't know what assumptions you
are referring to, but a forum like this really isn't the place for detailed
arguments (even though I used to require my students to provide data,
analysis, and argument in two-page, double spaced papers). Just check out J.
R. Firth, and read him not for the outdated details but to see what his
underlying assumptions are."

-My dad

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snitzr
Recommended: Is The Man Who is Tall Happy? on Netflix. A nice introduction to
Chomsky and his linguistic ideas.

~~~
nsajko
Does somebody know any alternative (legal) sources? Netflix is not available
to me without proxying through another country.

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pc2g4d
> It is rather surprising that more has not been done this year (thus far,
> anyway) to commemorate a significant semicentenary: the 50th anniversary of
> what could reasonably be called the most influential linguistics book of the
> 20th century.

Linguistics as a field is in a post-Chomsky hangover and none-too-happy to
celebrate the man that put them there. Chomsky's many years as the dominant
voice in the field were traumatic for linguistics. Once a decade or so he
would promulgate The New Way of doing syntax, handed down from on high from
this very influential man, which meant incredible disruption not only for
syntacticians but also for those working in semantics and
morphology/phonology.

Much of Chomsky's influence came not from his intellect (though that was
surely prodigious) but from his forceful personality. His will to publicly
ridicule not only opposing ideas but opposing personalities was a big part of
his rise and continuing dominance. Linguistics was a nasty place to work for a
long time. (See "The Linguistics Wars").

Now that he's not actively working to maintain it, Chomsky's academic
reputation has suffered substantially and the field is largely trying to move
on. Large-scale corpora and computational capabilities enable more empiricist
rather than rationalist approaches to human language, which has made the
argumentation less personal and more productive.

At least, that's my take.

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formerlinguist
This was actually not Chomsky's first book on this topic. That was Syntactic
Structures (1957).

~~~
bdchauvette
Neither the title here nor the article itself claim it to be his first book,
only an incredibly influential one.

The article even agrees with you:

> §3 sets out a radically revised structure for transformational grammars,
> quietly abandoning the notion of “kernel sentence” from _Chomsky’s first
> book, Syntactic Structures_ , and introducing the term “deep structure,”
> which in a sense replaces it.

