From: lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY)
Subject: Re: Prototypes
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 92 04:10:19 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <1992Aug30.005723.15147@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>In article <10559@spark.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>>In article <1992Aug28.160327.19391@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>>>In any case, I know of no evidence, for example, that
>>>syntactic movement can "more or less happen" [...] or any
>>>example of 3pl object agreement or that "X sort of c-commands Y".

An example or few of syntactic phenomena which are sharply bounded is
hardly an argument that *all* syntactic phenomena (categories) are.
Do you claim, then, that all of the following are also sharply bounded:
"is derived from", "is a lexical item", "is a noun" (as opposed not 
only to "is an adjective" etc. but also to "is an N-bar (nontrivial)"
etc.), "is a constituent of",  

>>I may be missing something, but the sharp boundaries of syntactic
>>categories don't make them any different from birds, bachelors, or
>>Boston locations, do they?  You're approaching this concept from the
>>point of view of a syntactician.  From a zoo"logist's point of view,
>>nothing can be more or less a bird, sort of a bird, or anything like
>>that...

Maybe you should talk to a few zoo"logists.  There is a substantial and
influential part of the field who believe just that sort of thing.  Read
for example any of the recent overviews by Mayr, esp. concerning the 
"species" concept and speciation.  One crux is that "same species" (as
a relation between two individuals, for instance) is not sharply defined.

>Of course I agree with you totally. My nefarious purpose in starting
>this discussion was to see if I could draw out from anyone a reason why
>Lakovian "Cognitive" linguistics is a challenge to Chomskian syntax, as
>Lakoff (at least publically) has certainly claimed. Even giving Lakoff
>the benefit of the doubt concerning ostriches (which is more than I did
>in my earlier messages), I don't see the challenge.
>
>A syntactican has sharp boundaries in his nomenclature (one hopes) for
>the same reason an ornithologist does.  But what is important is the
>fact that syntax actually gets explained by theories with sharp
>boundaries.  In other words, it's not merely a convention or a mistake
>to eschew prototypes in syntax -- it seems to be the right way to do it.
>At least that's what the field seems to show.  So even if a syntactician
>can understand some notion like "a prototypical DP" or in a moment of
>sloppiness refers to "some version of government", real explanation so
>far never seems to call upon these notions.  I'm talking about
>explanations of what people do, not linguistics articles. Now if there's
>a real challenge from "Cognitive" linguistics, there must be arguments
>out there that indicate where syntax needs prototypes or similar
>apparatus.  I want to know where those arguments are.

One of the "things people do" is reanalysis of syntactic structure (the
sorts of things, for example, that result in passives like "The book was
written in" etc.).  This happens during adults' lives, not just as part 
of "acquisition".  If the "sources" for particular examples of reanalysis
are simply "generated" (i.e. are just "well-formed", are clearcut
examples of the category "sentence" on the basis of clearcut application
of clearcut rules, constraints, etc. on clearcut lexical material etc.), 
what generates the reanalysis?  What "explains" the change in their
grammars?  Proposing, BTW, new components, modules, etc. to salvage
the purity of syntactic categories hardly seems a deft application of
Occam's razor.

One of the things people do, more generally, is recognize utterances
of their languages.  The overwhelming evidence is that this categorization
(is an S of language L) is not clearcut at any level.  I do not mean, of
course, just conscious responses, but any other indicator of acceptability.
Yet the presumption that this judgment is, in general, categorical, is
the methodological bedrock of generative grammar.  If the dividing
line between "things people do" and "things people don't do" is 
not categorical, then how can "what people do" serve as *evidence* for
the clearcut nature of abstract categories derived from "what people do"?

Now there is nothing wrong a priori with positing sharply bounded 
categories operating in an abstract generative system and various
"fuzzifying" other components that intervene to make what we can
directly observe appear not so clearcut.  But that tactic (in any field)
is only credible when there is a reasonably justified account of
the system that intervenes and how it in fact relates to the presumed
underlying abstract system.  I don't see that here.

More generally, generative accounts (in the technical sense of
"generative") of a language seem ubiquitously to call on its practitioners
to commit a grievous category mistake.  This is the confusion between
a consistent (axiomatizable) account of a phenomenon (a good thing,
for many purposes) and a *description* of a cognitive structure (a
grammar, in this case) *as* a consistent axiomatizable system.  This
error is manifested in arguments, for example, that constraint X is
incorrect *because* it is inconsistent with well-motivated constraint Y.
But there is no reason from evolutionary plausibility, from 
what we know about computational efficiency, or from anything else to
believe that internal consistency is a property of any complex 
cognitive structures.  The reason we should be skeptical is that
only aspects of structure that have real consequences can ever be
influenced by evolution (or learning, for that matter).  And systems
can easily be inconsistent in ways that are never *really* manifested
in their operation.