tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post3275991042259946369..comments2024-03-21T03:55:40.334-07:00Comments on Language: Athens Day 1Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-27165121533138460662015-06-08T08:55:46.105-07:002015-06-08T08:55:46.105-07:00Just wanted to say thanks a lot for reporting on t...Just wanted to say thanks a lot for reporting on the events in Athens! It's invaluable for the geographically disadvantaged ;)Erin Pretoriushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14272986394671591306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-12929012826716730992015-06-04T06:19:16.503-07:002015-06-04T06:19:16.503-07:00Thanks. I agree that these things should be part o...Thanks. I agree that these things should be part of a syntactician's toolkit. But there would be better or worse ways of implementing it. I think that there are specific questions and tools relating to PP that should be very helpful, and would ideally be incorporated into the curriculum for syntax, or for generative grammar more broadly. What I think would be less helpful would be to have courses that focus on the primary results of language acquisition research. That field, even the more linguistically inclined part, tends to have less to contribute to what a syntactician really needs. It's more focused on "Interesting things that kids do". I've seen cases where a language acquisition course was instituted as a required part of the linguistics curriculum, and it back-fired, likely for that reason.Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-12482242072906383442015-06-02T00:07:48.119-07:002015-06-02T00:07:48.119-07:00`Your comment makes me wonder whether people have ...`Your comment makes me wonder whether people have quite different views on the current status of PP, because they're judging it relative to different starting points.´ I think that is exactly right.<br />In the Athens meeting, Legate made a couple of interventions to the effect that she thought one should not wield PP arguments cavalierly within the context of purely syntax papers without knowing something about the actual acquisition literature. But now, I think maybe the argument should be made more forcefully that every syntactician should be more educated with respect to the things they are working on, about the results of acquisition and variation. Its only in that way that we can integrate considerations from PP properly into our theorizing. It makes things harder for the day to day working syntactician of course. But as Rizzi said at some point during Day 2: ´´You´re just saying that Science is Hard´´Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-31428216485626479212015-06-01T18:19:26.015-07:002015-06-01T18:19:26.015-07:00Thanks Gillian. Your response on PP raises an inte...Thanks Gillian. Your response on PP raises an interesting point. If the standard of comparison is "Does PP get the same attention that it did in the 80s?", then the answer is probably something like "Not as much explicit mention, but day-to-day practices are relatively similar". If the standard of comparison is "Does PP get comparable attention, relative to what is currently needed and possible?", then the answer is perhaps quite different. 35 years ago we knew a lot less about syntactic variation and the best that we could do was make educated guesses about learners' experience. So a smart syntactician could get a long way using a back-of-the-envelope approach. That same approach is less likely to cut it nowadays, because we know so much more about variation (it often seems dauntingly complex), because we can relatively easily make more-than-guesses about what is observable, and because we're getting closer to being able to say sensible things about what kind of experience is needed to drive what kinds of inferences. Your comment makes me wonder whether people have quite different views on the current status of PP, because they're judging it relative to different starting points.<br /><br />Why does this matter to syntactic theories? Because there's a tendency to want to constrain all syntactic variation in a similar way. And because the kinds of phenomena that lend themselves most readily to large-scale cross language surveys (and to deep dialect syntax projects) are also the kinds of phenomena that are more readily observable. This leads to a situation where we face sometimes dizzying variation, and where a 1980s style account of constrained variation seems like a hopeless dream. I wonder if things would look less daunting if we more systematically distinguished readily observable variation (i.e., PP not an issue) from not-so-observable variation. For example, we wouldn't want to see the kind of variation in scope phenomena that we see in clitic placement. That's just a hunch, but to go down that path would certainly require more than the old back-of-the-envelope approach to PP. (To be clear, I love good back-of-the-envelope arguments, but sometimes they're just the start.)Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-18401912859964330172015-06-01T14:14:02.081-07:002015-06-01T14:14:02.081-07:00Ah, well I got you wrong then to claim that you th...Ah, well I got you wrong then to claim that you think that the work of MLGs is largely done. Point taken. You just think that its not too early to be working on the next stage up.<br />On Plato's problem being only partially internalized, you might be right about it. But it would be wrong I think to judge its effect on syntactic work just by looking at whether it is explicitly mentioned or not. I have noticed syntacticians pointing out native speakers robust grammaticality judgements of unusual combinations as being particularly relevant, precisely because it is highly unlikely they could have been explicitly learned or heard before, which is a kind of version of a poverty of the stimulus argument. But I think I probably need to do some counting before I will stick out my neck again as to whether it has more or less influence on theorizing now than in the eighties for example.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-6095085494986104212015-06-01T07:45:59.548-07:002015-06-01T07:45:59.548-07:00Gillian, thx for this. I think that my views are a...Gillian, thx for this. I think that my views are a little different from the way you describe them. I do not think that all MLG work has been done. I believe that many are roughly right and that some might be wrong and that certainly others await discovery. However, I don't think that this means that we need to wait to begin to see how to unify them. Just as Explanatory Adequacy does not wait for the last word about descriptive adequacy (we study UG even if we have not yet perfectly described any given G, so too with factoring features of UG). Moreover, the only way to learn how to do this kind of thing is to do it. So cutting one's teeth on MLGs is a good way to proceed. Again, I take 'On Why Mvmt' to be a paradigm of the kind of work this would be.<br /><br />Last point: I agree with both David and Colin: we should be very pluralistic and opportunistic and sadly IMO PP has been largely ignored and only very partially internalized.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-2639789687486281872015-05-31T16:41:48.851-07:002015-05-31T16:41:48.851-07:00Thanks for these summaries, Gillian. Much apprecia...Thanks for these summaries, Gillian. Much appreciated.<br /><br />I'm puzzled by the idea that Plato's problem has disappeared from the discourse because it has been "so thoroughly internalized". It's true that it's something that folks are well versed in alluding to, but it seems to play almost no practical role in guiding analytical choices. That's unfortunate, since we have so much better opportunities to take it seriously nowadays than we did 20-30 years ago. In particular, we can get a far better idea than in the past about what learners' experience looks like, and hence we can make more confident claims about what is plausibly observable or non-observable in learners' input. This should be quite useful in constructing accounts of constrained cross-linguistic variation.<br /><br />Again, thanks for posting.Colin Phillipshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09724709677503698323noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-8000234198320614662015-05-30T00:00:55.472-07:002015-05-30T00:00:55.472-07:00I think that there are projects now in progress th...I think that there are projects now in progress that are beginning to create data bases based on units of theoretical interest in a typologically diverse set of languages. Here is one such NSF funded project at UCLA with Dominique Sportiche as the PI: http://grantome.com/grant/NSF/BCS-1424336 <br /><br />and there is the related Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages: http://sswl.railsplayground.net Patricia https://www.blogger.com/profile/18295501178013141466noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-5986940626442836932015-05-29T23:12:00.755-07:002015-05-29T23:12:00.755-07:00Thanks for the link, Miriam! I will take a look a...Thanks for the link, Miriam! I will take a look at it, although my first impression is that it is at a slightly surfacey level than what the linguists in the room were after. I mean that we want something that is allowed to use theoretical units that have been established by our theories. Like the notion of SUBJECT , or dependencies or clitics. I also don't necessarily just want a list of universals, I want a certain properties to be tracked. Like I might want to know whether you can combine the languages epistemic modal with non-stative verbs. Or whether you can put the bottom of a dependency inside a complex NP. <br />Stuff like thatAnonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-66365164905920343682015-05-29T23:05:48.994-07:002015-05-29T23:05:48.994-07:00Yeah, I agree with Bobalijk too. I think he is sim...Yeah, I agree with Bobalijk too. I think he is simply articulating what most good linguists actually do in practice, whether they put it to themselves that way or not. I agree with Miriam that LFG seems to emphasize or favour one of the directions in the tug of war at the expense of the other, and rhetorically underplays the other. But there's no doubt that they have it. In any case, I think it is always better to be explicit about your topdown influences and not pretend that you can consider data purely and objectively.<br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-79772478160931334202015-05-29T14:21:38.240-07:002015-05-29T14:21:38.240-07:00First, @Gillian: thanks for these posts! As someon...First, @Gillian: thanks for these posts! As someone who is not in Athens for this gathering but interested to hear what's going on, they are invaluable. Also, thank you for leaving the posts open for comments so we can have a conversation here. I'm actually writing to reply directly to something Amra wrote; I hope that's okay.<br /><br />@Amra: To borrow from Bobaljik's <a href="https://castl.uit.no/phocadownload/Road_Ahead/bobaljik.pdf" rel="nofollow">statement</a> for the Athens event, one needs both induction and deduction (and a "tug of war" between the two, as he puts it). I dare say that induction alone, much like deduction alone, is close to pointless. Induction in the absence of some kind of restrictive theory (or at least a general idea) of what possible and impossible outputs of the inductive process might look like amounts to an exercise in summarizing the data. Since no one doubts that the data can be summarized (to _some_ nonzero extent), we have no way of knowing whether the data having been so summarized constitutes a significant result or not.<br /><br />To be clear, this is not a pro-minimalism or anti-LFG stance; people proposing analyses in constraint-based lexicalist frameworks surely have a sense of "this is or isn't an insightful/interesting/significant analysis" when they're looking at one. That sense implies a criterion against which the results of induction are measured (formally or informally). And so I think we're all in the same boat, here.<br /><br />In the same vein, deduction in the absence of induction risks a loss of touch with the facts themselves. I think this is something that a few of the statement-writers were bemoaning, at least the way I read their remarks.<br /><br />And so, as Bobaljik said, the interesting action happens when both forces are exerted.Omerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06157677977442589563noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-61602606202024966832015-05-29T13:50:06.345-07:002015-05-29T13:50:06.345-07:00"but there might be ways to start building da..."but there might be ways to start building data bases and lists of generative questions that we would like to have answers to, for each language that gets studied or described." Frans Plank has been building one of exactly these for years. Check out http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/<br /><br />As to Gillian's question --- I guess LFG takes the inductive strategy. Look at a lot of empirical data, figure out generalizations, create theories, check them with new data, revise or make new ones as more evidence is accumulated. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06139719217159113389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-79060312327669459352015-05-29T13:39:38.723-07:002015-05-29T13:39:38.723-07:00fun fun fun! keep it coming! :) Thanks!fun fun fun! keep it coming! :) Thanks!hhhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01842920098087151992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-57807214131381562782015-05-29T08:40:38.802-07:002015-05-29T08:40:38.802-07:00Well, sounds like Gereon's is using 'algor...Well, sounds like Gereon's is using 'algorithmic level' in a very weird way. A grammatical theory is a computational level specification of what the actual link between sound/sign and meaning is, irrespective of derivations or constraints or whatever. And I'm obviously younger than I think, because I agree with Graf here: it's probably notational, and even if the notations are different in terms of how complex they have to be to deal with, say, opacity, we're not at the point where that's a desideratum.<br /><br />Agree with you that Darwin's problem is at too high a level of abstraction, or at least I find it isn't a driver in my own work. My own feeling is that we should be theoretically pluralistic and opportunistic, and as long as we're doing good science, we'll make progress. I think there's a crucial role at the analytical level, trying to understand phenomena within and across languages using the tools of analysis at our disposal, and using successful analysis to challenge theoretical principles. That said, we need people to be thinking at the theoretical level to develop those principles. <br /><br />As you know, I'm a sunny optimistic person, so it's not bad at all!<br /><br />Wish I could have been there with you guys. But why ask for the moon, we have New york!davidadgerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00821774928618824698noreply@blogger.com