Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!newshost.marcam.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!psinntp!scylla!daryl
From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: What's innate?
Message-ID: <1995Feb28.141459.8696@oracorp.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Inc.
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 1995 14:14:59 GMT
Lines: 43

pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:

>>...maybe that is because Chomsky was very vague about
>>what *he* meant. But in that case, it seems to me that Neil should be
>>attacking the vagueness, instead of saying that the poverty of
>>stimulus argument works as well for driving or juggling.

>Why? Indicating that the same (POS) arguments applies for other skills
>too, where it seems rather silly, exposes its vagueness.

But it seemed to me that POS *doesn't* apply to other skills, for
various reasons. How does misusing an argument show that the argument
is wrong?

>As I have stated in my other posting it seems to me that it depends on
>what we mean by "grammatical". If by "grammatical" we mean conforming
>to an abstract set of rules created by linguists as a phenomenological
>tool for organizing observed language into small set of generating
>principles, then such phrase are "grammatical" by definition. However,
>if by "grammatical" we meant "used in real speach", then they are
>not.

Grammatical definitely *doesn't* mean that! There are many factors
that influence what people actually say besides grammar. It is
influenced by meaning (what do you want to say?), by pragmatics (is
this sentence getting too long and complicated to follow?), by the
vocabulary of the speaker, by subtle nuances of the words.

>From what I have seen I have an impression that linguists
>sometimes assume an attitude: "let's not get confused with facts, they
>will spoil our simple, beautiful theory". Of course linguists are not
>the only ones who fall in such a trap.

What facts do you think linguists are confused about? Everyone agrees
that people don't naturally utter sentences that contain 100 nested
relative clauses. However, there are simpler explanations (processing
limitations, for example) this than saying that they are
ungrammatical.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY

