In an earlier message, I wrote:
>...Engineers who try to build useful artefacts
>might reasonably expect to build on a sound
>theoretical foundation provided by those who
>claim to be doing scientific study in the area
>concerned. As language engineers, or applied
>linguists, we must be profoundly disappointed
>by the abject failure of Chomskyan linguists to
>make the slightest useful contribution to human
>language technology.
and Mike Maxwell replied:
>
> I'm not sure how common this attitude is, so perhaps I'm
> preaching to the
> choir. But do the engineers at Boeing complain that
> ornithologists haven't
> contributed to the design of the 747?
>
I guess you're talking about flight, since this is what birds and Boeings
have in common.
The point is, the ornithologists are not the theorists of flight, the
physicists are. Bird flight is a natural embodiment of the physics of flight
(albeit an extremely complex one), so the ornithologists in the flight
domain correspond to the psycholinguists in the language domain. I didn't
talk about psycholinguists, but I guess they have the right to expect the
same support from the theorists as the engineers do. Ornithologists like
Penicuik, and the aerospace engineers at Boeing, say 'the physicists have
told me the basic equations governing the relationship between aerofoil
shape, lift, thrust etc. - here's the way that they are or can be embodied
in a specific system'. Do you ever hear psycholinguists and language
engineers say 'those guys at MIT have really clarified the fundamental
relationships between sounds, texts and meanings, now all we have to do is
model them in wetware and software?'
Pete
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Apr 05 2001 - 12:11:57 MET DST