Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

From: Mike Maxwell (Mike_Maxwell@sil.org)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 15:58:26 MET DST

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    I thought I sent the msg below to this list a week or two ago, but it turns out I just sent it to John Goldsmith. (Maybe that explains why no one tried Samson's language identification challenge. No fair plowing with my heifer :-).)

    Since John quoted the relevant (technical) portion of it in a reply of his, there isn't much new here, and I don't intend to get into another round of msgs about this. But for the sake of completeness, I'm forwarding it.

        Mike Maxwell

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: Mike Maxwell <Mike_Maxwell@sil.org>
    To: John A. Goldsmith <ja-goldsmith@uchicago.edu>
    Sent: Friday, April 27, 2001 7:33 PM
    Subject: Re: Corpora: Chomsky and corpus linguistics

    Philistines, I, Samson, am going to drop out of this discussion with one final comment. (If you don't understand the allusion here, it came up several weeks ago in this thread.) This discussion is just taking too much of my time, and there are probably more useful things I can be doing. Thanks to all, and good luck with your future endeavors, even if they are statistically based :-).

    My final comment, coming off John Goldsmith's msg:

    >I hope it is clear to all concerned that a perfectly
    >respectable scientific theory of language (even
    >possessed of the right to say that it provides an
    >_explanation_) can be based on the statement that
    >the goal of the analysis is to provide a probability
    >distribution over V* (where V is the vocabulary of
    >the language), i.e., possible strings of words

    I'm sorry, but I completely fail to understand how a probability distribution can be a theory or explanation of anything (except maybe in quantum mechanics, where I gather the point is that there _is_ no explanation, unless you believe in the Copenhagen many-worlds interpretation). I don't believe there is a random number generator in our heads that explains the form of the sentences we utter, write or think.

    Penker weta. (10 Brownie points to anyone who can tell what language that is, and 20 points to whoever can tell what it means!)

          Mike Maxwell
          Summer Institute of Linguistics
          Mike_Maxwell@sil.org

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