From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was Cognitive Linguistics...)
Date: 14 Sep 92 23:13:13 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: Research & Technology

In article <82462@bcsaic.boeing.com> rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake) writes:
   ....
   Generative theory, unless it has evolved beyond any similarity 
   with its past, takes the grammar to be an intuition-generating device.  How
   that relates to the noises the child makes when it attempts to speak isn't
   entirely clear.

Arild Hestvik (AH) responds:

AH> This is a rather narrow (and uninteresting) conception of what the grammar
AH> is which I don't think are shared by many workers. The grammar is a system
AH> for generating representations used in comprehension/production.
AH> Acquisition is the process of fixing certain variable properties of the
AH> innate grammar, based on information on the environment-language. The
AH> intutions themselves are just a reflection of these representation and how
AH> they  are used. The grammar itself does not generate intuitions, the
AH> performance system does.   

In modern discussions about the ontology of the "generative grammar," it is
fairly common to be told what the grammar doesn't do.  We are told that the
grammar is "used," but never precisely how it is used or what that means.
It is almost like arguing with the religious zealot who attributes motives to
God when it is convenient, but falls back on the claim that God's motives are
unknowable when it is inconvenient to try to explain them.  If my description
of the role of the grammar is "narrow" and "uninteresting," then give us a
"broad" and "interesting" alternative.  Just to say that the grammar has
something to do with comprehension/production, without specifying what, is
even less interesting than my so-called caricature of the generative position.

David Pesetsky (DP) writes:

DP> That's like saying that human beings are a brainwave-generating device.
DP> Intuitions give us clues about the nature of the grammar, and they are
DP> the often the best or only clues we have, but the grammar along doesn't
DP> generate intuitions, and intuitions are not any sort of "purpose" of the
DP> grammar.  A grammar is one of the things people have, and "generative
DP> theory" tries to discover what this grammar is, using intuitions, among
DP> other sources of data.  ERP studies, child act-out tasks, MRI imaging
DP> perhaps -- all are possible alternative tools in this endeavor.  Would
DP> you then say that the grammar is an "ERP-generating device"?

What I get out of it is nothing more than that the brain "has" a grammar.  It
just sits there, not doing anything.  Or, at best, what it does is a total
mystery.  It reminds me of an old paper by Tom Bever in which he argued that
the grammar just "withered" away by adulthood, sort of like the Marxist view
of the evolution of the state.  Tom, at least, provided a functional role for
the grammar during language acquisition.  An aid to acquiring performance
strategies.  This wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but the only reason Tom was
saying that was to try to make sense out of what psychological role a
"generative grammar" could possible have for theory.  

I really ought not to say this to you, David, but I think that the word
"grammar" here might be one of those "radially-structured" categories that
Lakoff talks about.  You may have gone up the wrong spoke when you read my
phrase "intuition-generating" device.  :-) After all, there can be
conversations in which human beings are taken to be little more than
brainwave-generating devices.  By the same token, you might sometimes take the
grammar to be a mathematical description of patterns, sometimes to be that
plus the "algorithm" that looks at rules and generates patterns, or sometimes
to be that plus the "algorithm" that matches generated patterns against
inputs.  The matching process, of course, requires some kind of truth
functionality, and that was included in my usage of the term.  So I was
thinking of the "grammar" as an integral part of the intuition-generation
process.  I think that you are excluding the decision-making process in your
usage.  Maybe.  Having said all that, I don't think that we have fundamentally
different views of how a Generative Grammar works.  Since you think that
"generative theory" tries to discover what the grammar is (Say, Greg, does
this sounds familiar? ;-) using intuitions, then you must believe that grammars
play some role vis a vis intuitions.  Can you please explain what that role
is?  Can we find out where in the generative model intuitions and grammars
converge, meet there, and have a discussion?

-----
Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA
Newsgroups: sci.lang