nl-kr-request@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (NL-KR Moderator Brad Miller) (11/12/88)
NL-KR Digest (11/11/88 20:22:33) Volume 5 Number 28 Today's Topics: best grammatical theories asking "how do you know" type questions quirky case Subjectivity, Mud-slinging, Behaviorism Re: Syntactical *definition* of English was predictive knowledge... Submissions: NL-KR@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU Requests, policy: NL-KR-REQUEST@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 11 Nov 88 16:11 EST From: Avery Andrews <munnari!fac.anu.oz.au!andaling@uunet.UU.NET> Subject: best grammatical theories > How can you tell if one theory of syntax is better than another? >Walter Rolandi >rolandi@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM >NCR Advanced Systems Developmbou, Columbia, SC Well, to begin with, you have to define what the NL syntax is actually doing. (which I will henceforth call `grammar', to distinguish it from various other things that people sometimes call `syntax'). I'd suggest that a grammar is a scheme whereby a classification of the the vocabulary of a language into a finite collection of (in general overlapping) categories, plus some additional principles, is used to indicate how the meanings of the words (or formatives, or morphemes) are to be put together. In a PSG-based account of English, for example, we would say that there were lexical categories, or `parts of speech', such as Det, Adj, N and V, and phrase-structure rules such as S -> NP V (NP) (NP) NP -> (Det) Adj* N (grossly oversimplified, of course) We'd also say something to the effect that NP's refer to entities, that their components indicate the properties of the entity referred to, and that the V in an S indicates the relation between the entities referred to. How this is said depends on what approach to semantics we're taking. So the PS rules and the semantic principles tell us how to sort out the attributes between the entities in a sentence like The naive herpetologist handed the beautiful princess a worried-looking crocodile Other languages employ different sorts of principles, often involving grammatical feature-based methods such as case-marking and agreement, and other theories describe the facts in rather different ways--categorial grammar, for example, builds virtually all of the language-particular aspects of grammar directly into the system of categories, with the rules being universal principles (function application, composition, and type-raising, for example). But these variations are always based on classifying the vocabulary into a finite set of classes (including those defined by features). Generative grammars frame these principles in such a way that they interact so as to assign each string of words a possibly empty set of grammatically legitimate ways of composing the meanings of its words. Ungrammatical strongs have none, ambiguous ones more than one. (By speaking of ways of composing word-meanings, rather than of meanings, we allow for a degree of fluidity in the lexicon, and for the use of contextual knowledge to discover the meaning of unknown words by reverse engineering.) In a successful utterance, knowledge of context + common sense is sufficient to allow the hearer to choose the intended meaning from the grammatically + lexically legitimate ones. It turns out that there are lots of alternative ways of presenting such principles, which are *not* created equal. We could replace the PSG above with the following finite-state grammar (FSG): S = (Det) Adj* N V ((Det) Adj* N) ((Det) Adj* N) (Technically, this isn't really an FSG, since it describes the arrangement of word-classes rather than individual words. Maybe it should be called a Word-Class Grammar (WCG). Linguistically, FSG's have all the faults of WCG, and more besides). Although this generates the same strings as the PSG, and could be equipped with an equivalent semantics, it can be read as making very different claims about the causation of linguistic behavior. The PSG says that there are two distinct causal factors, S-structure, and NP-structure, which interact in a certain way, essentially, the NP-structure principles govern the internal form of some sequental blocks of words, whose external arrangement is determined by the S-structure principles. The FSG says no such thing--there is just a big formulae saying what order words appear in. The PSG says that there is one causal factor behind the relative order of Det, Adj and N in the three positions, while the FSG says that there are three different ones, which is definitely wrong. (If they were different, why would they have the same effect, in position after position? And why would similar phenomena appear, with different details of order, in language after language?) PSGs are better than FSGs, but they get into trouble quickly, for example, with subject-verb agreement, which, for `classical' (e.g. feature-free) PSGs, requires that many rules be split into `singular' and `plural' verions. eg.: S -> {NPsg Vsg (NP) (NP), NPpl Vpl (NP) (NP)} NP -> {NPsg, NPpl} NPsg -> (Detsg) Adj* Nsg NPpl -> (Detpl) Adj* Npl What's wrong with this is that it says that there are different causal factors behind the order of words in singular S and NP than in plural ones, and this is clearly wrong: phrases differing properties such as number, gender or case show essentially the same gross internal structure. There are many known cures for this ailment: agreement transformations were the first formal proposal widely accepted by linguists. Various kinds of feature-sharing principles are today most popular, especially among those with computational inclinations. All of these solutions have in common that they treat the arrangement of the agreeing elements as one factor and the details of what is shared as another. Wh-movmement is a third example: here we have superposed on the basic machinery for assigning semantic roles (on the basis of agreement, word order, case-marking, etc., depending on the language) some additional machinery that allows constituents to appear elsewhere than their basic expected position, subject to interesting constraints. Many ways of accomodating the most obvious facts are now known: transformational movements or deletions, coindexing schemes, `slash-feature' manipulations, `functional uncertainty', functional composition+type raising are some current contenders. Thus one major desideratum a grammatical theory is to allow one to formulate principles that correspond accurately to the underlying causal factors behind grammatical phenomena, and correctly predict their interactions. The corresponds pretty accurately to what Chomsky has sometimes called `descriptive adequacy' (he has unfortunately also applied this term to less interesting properties, such as simply generating the right set of sound-meaning correspondences, without regard to whether it has been done right.) It also corresponds pretty closely to being a pleasant language to specify grammars in. Current grammatical theories (GTs) use a wide range of mechanisms to say to a considerably extent the same kinds of things about how grammatical phenomena are to be carved up, They thus have a wide range of overlap in the phenomena they handle well. Nonetheless, they nonetheless differ significantly in how well they approximate descriptive adequacy in various areas. LFG seems to me to be unequalled for basic predicate-argument structure and the complement system: proponents HPSG, GPSG, and the presently available varieties of Categorial Grammar have not yet told in public any convincing story about things like Quirky Case in Icelandic, or preverbal pronouns in French and Spanish. The other theories seem to do better with Wh-movement and related phenomena: proponents of LFG have not yet told in public a sensible story about parasitic gaps or accross-the-board extraction. People tend to prefer the theory that does best with the stuff they actually are working on at the moment. Beyond descriptive adequacy are somewhat murkier and more controversial concerns, which tend to go under the label of `Explanatory Adequacy'. The most generally accepted of these is the desideratum that a GT help explain why language-learning is possible. The basis of this is the idea that the less one has to specify to determine the language, the easier it is to imagine how children can do it. The ultimate position here is that taken by Chomsky and his followers in GB, who believe that an interesting portion of the grammar of all languages (`core grammar') can be specified by setting the values of a relatively small number of binary-valued (or maybe finite list-valued) parameters. I find this idea pretty bizarre, but many linguists seem to accept it. A more modest claim is the difference between a transformational passive rule and a `classic' LFG one: TG Passive: NP - X - V - NP - X => 1 2 3 4 5 4 2 be+en+3 0 5+by#1 LFG Passive: SUBJ -> OBLby/0 OBJ -> SUBJ 0 -> Pass.Part The TG rule is a structure changing operation which has a complicated statement because it has to recapitulate most of the basic facts of English clause structure (the subject comes before the verb, the object after, auxiliaries come between the subject and the verb, and prepositional phrases come after, and before their NPs). And it doesn't *really* work anyway. The LFG rule is a lexical rule operating on lexical items whose argument positions are associated with grammatical relations: it creates a new lexical entry, altering the grammatical relation/semantic role assignments and the feature composition of the item as indicated. It is much simpler because it doesn't recapitulate basic facts of clause structure, but depends on other components of the grammar that account for these facts (the rules associating grammatical relations with NPs, and connecting the feature-composition of verb forms with their distribution). Furthermore, just about everything in it corresponds to an actual parameter of variation in passive-like constructions: sometimes the old subject is always suppresssed (the 0 option for SUBJ), sometimes never; sometimes OBJ must be present and become SUBJ, sometimes not; sometimes the grammatical category of the verb form become participial, sometimes not, It is most unlikely than language learners would learn the TG rule, but it isn't crazy to suppose that they could pick up the LFG one. This concept of explanatory adequacy is actually closely connected with descriptive adequacy, because the greater the extent to which the notation is free from redundancy and formal fuss, the easier it is to imagine how a learning procedure might successfully find its way through the space of possibilities it provides. But there is still nothing in descriptive adequacy that says that the GT shouldn't provide more facilities than one actually needs to describe languages right, which this kind of explanatory adequacy does. One can also ask that a GT illuminate actual facts about acquisition, rather than just make it easier to imagine how it might be possible. Recent work by Hyams and Pinker attempts to do this. But this requires an actual theory of learning as well as a GT. Another brand of explanatory adequacy pertains to processing. The way in which a GT presents grammatical information can make a big difference to the possibilities for using it in comprehension and production. TG's are pretty terrible in this regard, many more recent theories are much better. (You can get an LFG parser to run on your PC from the Institute for Machine Translation at the University of Stuttgart; nothing like this is even envisionsable for classical TG). A complicating factor is the possibility of compilation: maybe language learning, and the halting performances of beginners, are based on direct processing of some kind of augmented PSG, while the highly overlearned performance of fluent speakers is based at least in part on the use of FSGs + strategies generated by various kinds of compilation processes. Only psycholinguistics will be able to sort that out. But the generalizations (e.g. basic causal factors) detected by linguists still have to be taken as part of the causal order, for otherwise there is no account of why they are there). The import of Explanatory Adequacy is that the generalizations discovered by linguists represent real causal factors. Thus, they ought to interact sensibly with other kinds of causal factors, such as learning procedures and and processing mechanisms. There is at least one complicating factor. The generalizations (e.g. causal factors) identified by grammatical analysis are supposed to reside in the minds of language users. Because sometimes linguists get fooled. For example, languages tend to undergo sequences of regular sound changes, which can turn formerly regular and uninteresting systems of forms into things that look like the results of applying long sequences of phonological rules to rather abstract underlying representations. There is good reason to believe that there exist things that look and act pretty much like standard generative phonological rules (the original sound changes, at a minimum), but looking at say, the residue of the great vowel change in English, it is hard to say what is historical residue and what is genuine Modern English grammatical structure. Chomsky + Halle's rules in SPE do roughly represent genuine causal factors in linguistic behavior, but it's not so clear what there locus is: history, or the brains of modern speakers. Happily, most of syntactic and contemporary phonological theory seems reasonably secure against this line of attack, but one has to rely on common sense to ascertain what is the actual locus of causal factors revealed by grammatical analysis. (If a group of people started speaking a language taught to them by aliens, its grammatical generalizations would not be of direct relevance to human GT, since their utlimate locus would be the minds of the aliens, not the human speakers. On the other hand, the changes that human speakers introduced into the language might be highly revealing for human GT.) Avery Andrews The Australian National University andaling%fac.anu.oz@seismo.css.gov ------------------------ Date: Thu, 10 Nov 88 09:44 EST From: w.rolandi <rolandi@gollum.UUCP> Subject: asking "how do you know" type questions >As far as who listens when "linguists >speak" as much responsibility falls on the (potential) listener as does >the speaker. That's not blame that can be laid solely at the door of >linguistics. Perhaps I should endeavor to be a more imaginative listener. >And just who is to determine which questions are of interest? It is true >that analysis and experimentation has played next to no role in linguistics >*until recently*, but again, who determines what is "real science"? Besides >you, that is. "Real science" is predictive knowledge of nature. So, assuming you are asking a serious question, I'd say that "who" is, in fact, nature. Another metric might be that real science supports applications of its fundamental knowledge, in other words, engineering disciplines. >I don't think you can remove information/messages/intentions >from language without throwing the baby out with the bath water. If language >is none of these things, then what, pray tell, do you think it is? Verbal behavior. And the analysis of behavior does not require evoking explanatory fictions like information/messages/intentions. Exactly what is an intention? How do you operationally define and measure it? >>What's wrong with pragmatics and linguistics in general is that neither >>field addresses any issues of scientific import. >According to whom? What exactly has given you the authority to make this >bogus and unsubstantiated claim? Are you saying that I haven't the authority to cite the absence of controlled experimentation, measurement, and causal analysis? This IS rich. A sort of "Linguistics: love it or leave it". >When you know all about particle physics, what do you know? Many of the behavioral properties of light and energy. How to make bombs and other things. (see stuff about engineering above). >I suggest that you find out a bit more about what is going on in >linguistics before you sling mud again. Chomsky is not the only linguist >out here. Is asking "how do you know" type questions slinging mud? Are you prepared to tell me that there is no place for this sort of thing in the rigorous science of linguistics? Make my day. Your pal, Walter Rolandi rolandi@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM NCR Advanced Systems Development, Columbia, SC ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Nov 88 06:44 EST From: Clay M Bond <bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Subject: Re: asking "how do you know" type questions Walter Rolandi: > [ Lots of mud not worth repeating ] Objections to current ideas are the stuff of science and progress of knowledge. However, I would say the same to you as I would to the "anti-formalists" who have been doing the same all these years: Please object. But if you have no alternative to offer which addresses your complaints by correcting what you perceive to be deficiencies, you are contributing nothing to anything. Or to be more colloquial, put your money where your mouth is. Whatever else I may think of Chomsky and his ideas, he at least had a contribution to make. >Make my day. I'm so unimpressed. -- << Clay Bond -- IU Department of Leath-er, er, uh, Linguistics >> << bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu AKA: Le Nouveau Marquis de Sade >> << {pur-ee,rutgers,pyramid,ames}!iuvax!bondc *********************** >> ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 7 Nov 88 12:27 EST From: Avery Andrews <munnari!fac.anu.oz.au!andaling@uunet.UU.NET> Subject: quirky case The basic reference for Complementation in Icelandic, including the evidence that there is Raising of Quirky-case subjects to object position, is: Thrainsson, Hoskuldur (1979) On Complementation in Icelandic. Garland Press. An LFG analysis of the phenomenon is to be found in: Andrews, Avery (1982) On the Representation of Case in Modern Icelandic, in Bresnan (ed), The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. See also: Maling, Joan, and Annie Zaenen (to appear) Modern Icelandic Syntax. Academic Press. Avery Andrews andaling%fac.anu.oz@seismo.css.gov ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Nov 88 20:06 EST From: Clay M Bond <bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Subject: Subjectivity, Mud-slinging, Behaviorism ..RM79/ Walter Rolandi: >Sure Rick. I think that the body of knowledge that is linguistics is >somewhat obscure and scarcely known to anyone outside of the field. >When linguists speak, mostly just linguists listen. This is not without some element of truth, but only if you leave out cognitive/computational/psycholinguists. Linguistics, at least that done by computational linguists is more than scarcely known in AI, for example, as is psycholinguistics in psychology, and cognitive linguistics in psychology/neuroscience/compsci. As far as who listens when "linguists speak" as much responsibility falls on the (potential) listener as does the speaker. That's not blame that can be laid solely at the door of linguistics. >I am suggesting that >this would not be the case if the discipline were to address questions >which, if answered, would be of interest to the general scientific community. >More specifically, I am suggesting that linguistics will take a giant >step towards science when the field embraces causal analysis and >controlled experimentation. This is the stuff of all real science. And just who is to determine which questions are of interest? It is true that analysis and experimentation has played next to no role in linguistics *until recently*, but again, who determines what is "real science"? Besides you, that is. And you can produce bullshit just as easily with "real science" as you can with "irreal (?) science". >Silly me, I supposed that to mean that pragmaticists were busy producing >a body of data that defines the causal relationships between the >people, places, and objects around us that effect [sic] the contents of what >we say. What I found instead was a lot of pompous intellectualizing on >the nature of "communication". _hat I have seen is little more than >mentalistic, philosophical, even literary analysis of things like >"information", "messages", and "intentions". Pompous intellectualizing! Not a wee bit resentful here, are we? I can sympathize with your objection to mentalism/philosophy/literature masquerading as science, but I don't think you can remove information/messages/intentions from language without throwing the baby out with the bath water. If language is none of these things, then what, pray tell, do you think it is? When you use language does it contain no information/messages/intentions? >What's wrong with pragmatics and linguistics in general is that neither >field addresses any issues of scientific import. According to whom? What exactly has given you the authority to make this bogus and unsubstantiated claim? >Who cares about >anti-homophones, u-umlaut and y (or rather, u-double-dot and y), and >embedded, recursive prepositional phrases? A lot of people, obviously. Your statement had no purpose but to be offensive. >When you know all about >these things, what do you know? I want to know why people say the >things that they say and why their utterances take the forms that they do. When you know all about particle physics, what do you know? The answer is the same. I also want to know why people say the things that they say. And the things that they say are intrinsically bound up with information, messages, and intentions, those things you thumbed your nose at earlier. >I want a scientific answer. Is it unfair or unkind of me to ask this >of linguistics? It is if you don't ask or require it of yourself. Double standards are never fair or kind. >>(BTW, use the term 'linguist' to refer >>to linguists in general. If you are just complaining about generative >>linguists, then say so.) > >I stand accused. You do indeed, twice. And at least once by one who is not a generative linguist. >I want it [linguistics] to aspire to >substance: give me a causal explanation of verbal behavior. You cannot explain behavior without explaining cognition. Without cognition, behaviorism *is* push-pull mechanism, which gives no more causal explanation than does mentalism. Behaviorism without cognitive theory has no explanatory power. I suggest that you find out a bit more about what is going on in linguistics before you sling mud again. Chomsky is not the only linguist out here. -- << ***************************************************************** >> << Clay Bond -- IU Department of Leath-er, er, uh, Linguistics >> << bondc@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu AKA: Le Nouveau Marquis de Sade >> << {pur-ee,rutgers,pyramid,ames}!iuvax!bondc *********************** >> ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 8 Nov 88 16:43 EST From: Rick Wojcik <rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP> Subject: Re: Syntactical *definition* of English Greg Lee writes: me> [writing about relative clauses containing resumptive pronouns] me> Note that relative clauses that violate extraction constraints *must* me> contain pronouns that agree with the head NP. GL> Two counter-notes. Such relative clauses do not violate extraction GL> constraints, strictly speaking, since nothing is extracted (obviously). Let's not jump to conclusions either way. The constraints were originally described in terms of movement rules. The question is over what it buys you to use the gap metaphor or movement metaphor in describing these syntactic constructions. I don't think that there is any absolute truth here. GL> And it is not clear that they must contain the pronouns you say they GL> must. After all, there are relative clauses that contain neither GL> gaps nor resumptive pronouns -- we call them appositive. In this regard, there is a very interesting article by Francis Pelletier "Vacuous Relatives and the (Non-) Context-Freeness of English" in _Linguistics_ and_Philosopy_ (11:3, 255-260, 1988). Pelletier discusses a controversy over 'such that' constructions, which are very similar to relative clauses with resumptive pronouns (e.g. 'every triangle such that two of its sides are equal'). The argument turns, in part, around Pullum's (and other's) feelings that expressions like 'every triangle such that two sides are equal' are as well-formed as expressions with the resumptive pronoun. I agree with Pelletier that they are not and that "this is not an area where one should look to find a proof of the non-context-freeness of English." My knowledge about resumptive pronouns derives primarily from the study of Breton, where such pronouns occur in relative clauses marked by 'hag' /ag/ (literally 'and'). So you say the following: an istor hag en-deus klevet ar paotr anezhan 'the' 'story' 'and' 'he-has' 'heard' 'the' 'boy' 'IT (resumptive)' "the story that the boy heard" Interestingly, the use of question words for relatives, an innovation caused by exposure to French, disallows resumptive pronouns: an istor petra en-deus klevet ar paotr (*anezhan) 'what' (In fact, most Bretons seem to prefer a passive clause with relativization out of subject position here. But my active clause gets grudging acceptance. :-) So the use of a non-pronominal relativizer 'and' is associated with the use of resumptive pronouns. My question concerns other languages with resumptive pronouns. Are there examples of languages that have true pronoun relativizers (requiring morphological agreement between head and relativizer) and resumptive pronouns in the clause? I suspect that this is rare. The occurrence of pronominal relativizers facilitates the existence of gaps. This is so because pronominal relativizers help the listener to identify the gap site, whereas non-pronominal relativizers obscure it. Anyway, this is my gut feeling. -- Rick Wojcik csnet: rwojcik@boeing.com uucp: uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!rwojcik ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Nov 88 00:27 EST From: Greg Lee <lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> Subject: Re: Syntactical *definition* of English From article <8563@bcsaic.UUCP>, by rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik): " ... " In this regard, there is a very interesting article by Francis Pelletier The only point seems to be that James Higginbotham made a bad argument. Surprise, surprise. ""Vacuous Relatives and the (Non-) Context-Freeness of English" in " _Linguistics_ and_Philosopy_ (11:3, 255-260, 1988). Pelletier discusses a " controversy over 'such that' constructions, which are very similar to relative " clauses with resumptive pronouns (e.g. 'every triangle such that two of its " sides are equal'). The argument turns, in part, around Pullum's (and other's) " feelings that expressions like 'every triangle such that two sides are equal' " are as well-formed as expressions with the resumptive pronoun. I agree with " Pelletier that they are not and that "this is not an area where one should " look to find a proof of the non-context-freeness of English." If you say they are not well formed, you are not agreeing with Pelletier, because he doesn't say that. No participant in the controversy (Pullum, Higginbotham, Pelletier) says that. But let's say they're not. Then a GPSG analysis would have to treat such-that clauses parallel with relative clauses, and assign them to a special category. Where does that get us? Or are we no longer discussing the appropriateness of Gazdar's theory? " ... " occurrence of pronominal relativizers facilitates the existence of gaps. This " is so because pronominal relativizers help the listener to identify the gap " site, whereas non-pronominal relativizers obscure it. Anyway, this is my gut " feeling. Makes sense to me. Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Nov 88 14:14 EST From: w.rolandi <rolandi@gollum.UUCP> Subject: was predictive knowledge... In response to Clay's: >Please object. But if you have no alternative to offer which >addresses your complaints by correcting what you perceive to >be deficiencies, you are contributing nothing to anything. Or >to be more colloquial, put your money where your mouth is. What on earth do you think I've been talking about? From the onset, I have been suggesting that the science of human behavior, behavior analysis, offers specific advantages, both in its causal model and in its experimental methodology for addressing the deficiencies of linguistic knowledge. Ironically, your emotional responses have unwittingly served to reinforce my impression that linguists possess an impoverished understanding of the purpose, spirit, and methods of science. I have stated methodological and epistemological criticisms of linguistics. Curiously, you do not address my specific complaints. Forfeiting an opportunity to cite data that would prove me wrong--on my own terms, no less--you act as if you are stepping forward to avenge the honor of an unjustly maligned loved one. Your first response questioned my authority to make such statements, as if facts are untrue unless cited by authorities. Your second response essentially entreats me to find something nice to say about linguistics or to refrain from saying anything at all. What can I say? I am talking about methodological issues associated with obtaining a predictive knowledge of natural phenomena. The problem is that I am talking specifics in an audience that is oblivious to the general plan. Who else but, Walter Rolandi rolandi@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM NCR Advanced Systems Development, Columbia, SC ------------------------------ End of NL-KR Digest *******************