Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: sci.lang FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
In-Reply-To: jon@babel.ifl.uib.no's message of Wed, 30 Nov 1994 13:58:08 +0100
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Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 02:19:26 GMT
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In article <jon-3011941358080001@hfmac323.uio.no> jon@babel.ifl.uib.no
(Jon Hareide Aarbakke) writes:

>I had no idea that the adherents of GB defined the domain of sci.lang.
>Could we have a somewhat less prejudiced FAQ file, please?  Below are a
>few quibbles.  What I don't quibble with I can largely agree with -it's
>less controversial as well.

Well, there are those of us who still think that generative semanitcs wasn't a
bad idea.

>> 4. What are some good books about linguistics?

>>   AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE, by Fromkin and Rodman (1974), is one of the 
>>      best intro linguistics survey texts. (Read it!) There are many others.

>It's distressingly GB and hence contains a lot of unsupportable claims
>about the language FACULTY, as opposed to claims about language. The bit
>about recursion is particularly sad reading for anyone with a mathematical
>background.

I see.  If it's transformational, it's GB.  Chomsky's _Lectures on Government
and Binding_ was printed in 1980, from a series done in 1979.  Fromkin and
Rodman were, as I recall, not in Chomsky's 1974 camp (interpretive semantics).

But I agree that we need some breadth in the suggested readings--and some
history, too.  Let's get Jespersen, Pedersen, and Sapir in there.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
