Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
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From: jqb@netcom.com (Jim Balter)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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References: <3gtu3i$rf3@mp.cs.niu.edu> <D3p5D7.F5A@hpl.hp.com> <3hbgfe$eks@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3hbsq4$arh@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 20:53:13 GMT
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In article <3hbsq4$arh@agate.berkeley.edu>,
 <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) wrote:
>
>] >The similar construction with a conjunction,
>] 
>] >"I saw John and Mary." => "Who did you see John and?"
>] 
>] >is not grammatical in any language. Why not? It makes perfect sense.
>] 
>] It doesn't make sense to me.
>
>An important point.  I see the above argument a lot, i.e., "it
>makes sense".  But it doesn't.  What it looks like is two errors,
>i.e., (first) the bizarre combination of:
>
>"Who did you see?"
>
>with
>
>"Did you see John?",
>
>and (second) a failure to complete a sentence, as in:
>
>"Did you see John and...(Henry?)"
>
>or
>
>"Who did you see and...(where did you see him?)"
>
>In short, the sentence given by Bo Curry produces complete
>semantic confusion (in a person who has not previously been
>prepared by a linguistics book to interpret it as attempting
>to ask:  "Who did you see John with?").

"John and Mary" is commutable; both subjects are given equal, or at least
similar, worth.  "John and ... ?" is inherently not commutable; John and Mary
(if that is whom he was with) play radically different *semantic* roles in the
question, and therefore it is hardly surprising that we do not use a syntactic
form that gives them equal roles.  We would no sooner ask "Whom did you see
John and?" than we would ask "Whom did you see and John?", whereas we readily
ask either "Whom did you see John with?" or "Whom did you see with John?".
All of Pinker's examples are readily explained through semantics, and it takes
an effort of will to not be able to come up with such explanations.  In fact,
all of these examples could be given as evidence that there is no innate
syntax.  In syntax driven systems, we might expect forms like "negation I went
to the store" or "store the to went I", but in semantic systems the action,
not the statement, is negated, and the negation signal is given first to avoid
conceptual backtracking; the arrow of time can hardly be considered to be a
*grammatical* constraint.  Aside from this, there are ridiculously obvious
syntactic reasons why such forms don't exist: they require buffering (for word
inversion), or introduction of verbal parentheses in complex forms.  How would
word inversion work for "I ate but didn't drink" and "I neither ate nor
drank"?  All this talk of sentence inversion is a typical misleading intuition
pump.  Give an actual grammar for complex utterances using it, and we can talk
more about what is wrong with it.  In particular, for strictly semantic
reasons, when talking about what I did or didn't do, the first word out of my
mouth is "I".  Often the sentence begins with "I, um, ...".  If Chomsky's
inversion grammar doesn't let me start my sentences that way, or if he argues
that I start my sentences that way because of some innate *grammatical*
restriction, then I really can't take the argument seriously.

If this is the best that Chomskyists can offer, I am sorely disappointed.

[Since some of this discussion seems to take, on the surface, a personal tone,
I will point out that I have met and spoken to Noam Chomsky and have the
highest personal regard for him.]
-- 
<J Q B>

