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Article 4076 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Definition of understanding
Message-ID: <1992Feb27.175652.6030@spss.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1992 17:56:52 GMT
References: <1992Feb26.172245.10210@psych.toronto.edu> <1992Feb26.195645.9914@spss.com> <1992Feb27.045520.2238@psych.toronto.edu>
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In article <1992Feb27.045520.2238@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>Of course I have, but like AI-ists, Chomsky has never been able to demonstrate
>to anyone's satisfaction (even his own, I believe) that deep structure
>(or whatever we're calling it this decade) generalization capture all
>the semantic ones as well. I used a passive transformation simply as
>an example of two sentences which have the different (admittedly
>surface) syntactic structures but identical semantic contents. Perhaps
>you weren't following the thread. The claim I was relying to was that
>there is NO evidence that syntax and semantics are distinct things.
>If you know linguistics, surely you don't believe that.

As used in linguistics, yes, syntax is separate from semantics.
(Nor has Chomsky ever claimed otherwise, to my knowledge.)

What I was pointing out was that your sample sentences don't have much to
do with the distinction.  Your first two sentences (with similar surface
structures) could be distinguished, and your second two (with different
surface structures) related, on purely syntactic grounds.


