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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: Chomsky's Theorem
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References: <3kjtta$a57@riscsm.scripps.edu> <smryanD5tn7w.5D6@netcom.com> <D5vJrz.538@eskimo.com> <3krm5l$svo@riscsm.scripps.edu>
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 1995 01:21:40 GMT
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In article <3krm5l$svo@riscsm.scripps.edu>,
Mark Israel <misrael@scripps.edu> wrote:
>In article <D5vJrz.538@eskimo.com>, rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik) writes:
>
>> Mark Israel [...] criticized someone for expressing an affinity for the
>> advice of linguists.  He responded with the rhetorical question "What does 
>> Chomsky's Theorem or Greibach's Theorem have to do with natural language?"  
>>
>> I proposed that he had no idea what "Chomsky's Theorem" (which I was not 
>> familiar with by that rubric) was, and to please prove me wrong.  The 
>> discussion devolved to the point where...well it doesn't really matter.  
>>
>> My point to him (which I have had extreme difficulty getting across) was 
>> that those theorems have very little to do with what mainstream 
>> linguistics is about.
>
>   Getting your point across would have been easy.

Yet another point that we disagree on.  ;-)

>   You could have said, "I'm sorry; I was wrong.  You *do* know what 
>Chomsky's Theorem is, and I apologize for thinking that you did not.   But 
>those theorems have very little to do with what mainstream linguistics is 
>about."
>
>   But you didn't want to admit that you were wrong, so you didn't say
>that.

Perhaps it would be better if we just addressed the issue of why I made
that challenge to you.  Your rhetorical question implied that linguists
thought that those two theorems had something to do with natural language.
That implication was simply false.  Since you didn't understand that point,
I inferred that you didn't understand what the theorems even meant.  (I
myself have never used those particular names for the theorems, which are
commonly discussed in works on computational linguistic theory.)

As for your remarks on generative grammar, they really have little to do
with the relevance of either theorem to natural language.  I myself
disagree with the classical Chomskyan position on generative grammar, as do
many modern linguists.  It is important not to confuse the entire field of
linguistics and the community of linguists with a theoretical framework or
a single group of linguists, especially when dealing with such broad issues
as prescriptivism and descriptivism.  Linguists as a whole may disagree
among themselves on the "best theory", but they do agree on the need to base
language policies on sound descriptive methodologies.
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
