From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was Cognitive Linguistics...)
Date: 29 Sep 92 17:02:25 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1992Sep28.010610.13781@athena.mit.edu>, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
> In article <1992Sep27.153555.43396@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>>
>>Major international languages, perhaps; but the development of
>>Chomsky's thought, and that of the MIT school in general, suggests a
>>lack of familiarity at the beginning with a variety of languages.
> 
> Wasn't Matthews at MIT writing a transformational grammar of Hidatsa,
> and Postal doing research on Mohawk morphophonology and syntax?  Is the
> index to SPE devoid of discussion of other languages?  What topic did
> Kuroda's dissertation discuss? 

Nothing much ever came of Matthews's treatment of Hidatsa, though
Chomsky pronounced it a major breakthrough; nor did Postal's work on
Mohawk reach fruition.  SPE, OK.  And yes, Kuroda's was first-rate and
very influential.  In general phonology was always better in this
regard, probably because interesting issues don't arise all that much
in the phonology of English.

[...]

>> or languages in which position
>>classes do not match hierarchical structure.  
> 
> What do you mean?  Split ergativity?

I was thinking of morphology.  Apachean verb structure should look
like this:

                              VERB
                               /\  
                             /    \
                           /        \
                         /            \
                       /                \
               derivational             BASE
                prefixes                 /\
          (inflectional)               /    \
                                     /        \
                                   /            \
                                 /                \
                         adverbial              THEME
                         prefixes                 /\
                       (derivational)           /    \
                                              /        \
                                            /            \
                                          /                \
                                   thematic              STEM
                                   prefixes

However, this does not match the position classes, which are, from
left to right:

     1  some adverbial prefixes (derivational)
     2  iterative marker (der? infl?)
     3  distributive plural marker (inflectional)
     4  object pronominal prefix (inflectional)
     5  one subject pronominal prefix (inflectional)
     6  other adverbial prefixes (derivational)
     7  aspect, mode, tense (der? infl?)
     8  another subject pronominal prefix (inflectional)
     9  thematic prefixes (derivational)

The base contains the theme and usually items from at least 1, 6,
9; this mess of stuff has to be the lexical entry for the verb
because it is this specific mess of stuff that is inherently
intransitive, transitive, or passive; inherently active or stative;
and subcategorizes complements.  (I could be a little rusty on
this.)  To boot, the stems are suppletive.

Now we have ways of handling this sort of thing (though maybe not
in very revealing ways) but as late as l982 you have Selkirk
developing a theory (_The Syntax of Words_, LI Monograph 7) that
requires, if I'm not mistaken, that position classes match
morphological structure.

>> I am neither
>>anti-Chomsky nor anti-theory; it was useful for nearly the entire
>>field to work within the same paradigm for a while.  But I believe
>>that at the outset Chomsky knew little more than English and Hebrew.
>>As for English, I think his famous "Remarks on nominalization" paper
>>revealed a surprising earlier naivete.
> 
> How so?  The paper itself is naive about morphology, especially when
> read with 1990s eyes, but it was, I think, Chomsky's first discussion of
> the topics discussed there, so how does it reveal earlier naivete?

In "Remarks on nominalization" Chomsky, if we choose to read him
this way, stated it himself.  He wrote:
     In the earliest work on transformational grammar... the
     correctness of the transformationalist position [as opposed to
     the lexicalist position] was *taken for granted* [emphasis
     mine]
When you consider what it was that was taken for granted--the
possibility of actually getting all English derived nominals by
transforming clauses--this could be read as an admission of
earlier naivete.  He then goes on to say that developments in the
theory "raise the issue" of choice between the alternatives
[transformationalist vs. lexicalist].  It always seemed to me that
an English grammarian with any insight would have seen this problem
from the start, and would not have had to wait until the theory
itself "raised the issue."  It's just hard to believe that Chomsky
studied the grammar of English very thoroughly; a fortiori for
other languages.  Apparently there was something in the method that
dissuaded one from first studying languages, then building
theories.
-- 
********************************** +.............................+
*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
*There is no privileged position.* :are my own and are not to be :
*	-God, Derrida, others    * : attributed to my employer   :
********************************** +.............................+

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