From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 13:41:36 GMT

In article <#-mn4l_@lynx.unm.edu> lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY) writes:
>>conclusions about language?
>
>Because, as several others and I have said several times in this thread
>cognitive linguistics is about a lot more than just prototypes.  In fact,
>I don't know any cognitive linguists who spend their days chatting 
>about prototypes.  Karen van Hoek's recent post hinted at some of what
>at least some of the work is about.  A browse of Langacker 1991 (the
>book I mentioned recently) will give some idea.  
>

Good. The prototype discussion was becoming quite stale. 

>In my view, cognitive linguistics can be reasonably considered an
>exploration of the hypothesis that insight into linguistic structure
>can be gained by thinking of grammar as "knowledge of language" (a view
>you and your intellectual mentors presumably share :-) ) and trying to
>see how much what we believe about knowledge generally applies in the
>special case of language.  Along with this, of course, goes a particular
>orientation to cognitive psychology (small "c"), exemplified not just
>by Rosch, but by a large number of people with connectionist or 
>spreading activation network views.  This orientation seems to me
>diametrically opposed at its foundation -- though not in all
>conclusions -- to your own, which seems to assume that language is
>unique and is highly skeptical of any suggestion that anything general
>is instantiated in grammar.  That's a caricature to be sure, but it
>captures part of the difference for me.  And to head off one strain of
>herring, cognitive grammar does not deny at all that there are 
>language specific elements in grammar.  Any more than it denies that
>there are vision-specific elements in the visual system.  It does adopt
>the strategy of not assuming total uniqueness.  
>

There is a property of linguistic debate (probably true of all science)
which goes as follows: most theoretical positions have an extremist face
and a human face.  Take the reasonable face of any position, ignore all
actual analyses of real phenomena, and it looks just like every other
position.  This is true of the positions being discussed here.  No one
sensible denies that phenomena which pretheoretically can be called
"language" can be products of non-linguistic systems (cf. Jackendoff's
work), and you have indicated that there is no dogmatic avoidance of
language-specific constructs within cognitive linguistics.  (In this,
you differ from the official hard-line face of connectionism, no?  Of
course you do not differ from some, like Smolensky.) So, to quote
apocryphal Shaw, we're now quibbling over the price.  Of course, price
is one of the things that counts.

Relatred remark: linguists are fond of comparing foundations.  This is
fair enough; everything should be discussed.  But in actual practice,
nearly identical houses can often be built on radically different
foundations, and one and the same foundation can host many rather
different houses.  That's no doubt one of the reasons why cognitive
linguists don't "spend their days chatting about prototypes" any more
than architects spend their days chatting about cinderblocks. So having
established that the reasonable face of the foundations of generative
grammar and cognitive grammar are similar, let's talk houses, if you
wish.  (I can also understand a desire to stop the whole thing, too.)

Is there any phenomenon (and I mean facts, not a rubric like "passive")
where there is a cognitive grammar account and a
transformational-generative grammar account that can be compared for
insight, empirical coverage, links to solutions of related problems,
etc?  In other words, are there houses actually built on my foundation
that would look like Hurricane Andrew aftermath on your foundation, or
vice-versa?

This might be a more productive discussion that the now-tired discussion
of Brookline restaurants and ostriches.

-David Pesetsky
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english