It is true that this gets progressively longer and longer so I will cut this down dramatically, I apologize in advance for any topics left unanswered.
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Originally Posted by The Evil One
Clearly so. But “acceptable” always means “acceptable TO SOMEONE”. The question is, who gets to do the accepting and decide what is or is not acceptable?
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Who owns a contested piece of land? Answer: The ones capable of holding on to it. Same thing here, grammar gets prescribed by those able to conceive of, and carry out, such an agenda, even if it is not the effort of a single individual.
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But the reason that these forms are more highly valued is entirely social rather than linguistic, and largely a matter of historical accident.
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More social than linguistic, sure, but not entirely so. There are clear linguistic reasons for compartmentalizing adjectives and adverbs apart from each other. Even if it came about purely by natural evolution and will one day disappear through the same mechanism, it is still a useful construct, one that deserve promotion through prescription.
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If the language of education in the Middle Ages had been Arabic rather than Latin, then a whole different set of English forms would be seen as superior by the PGs. If the dialect of English spoken by England’s rulers had been one of the ones which lack an adjective/manner adverb distinction, then you would right now be arguing that using the “-ly” morpheme was “unfortunate” and not as efficient for communication as leaving it off.
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I disagree on empirical grounds. Since I speak several languages, I know that there are constructs familiar to me, not through natural induction from exposure during childhood, but constructs learned later in life that appeal to me more than those conventions that represent aspects of my natural background. One does not, or should not, adopt an academic viewpoint solely based on familiarity with the prevailing grammar. I like some things and dislike others, how they came about and how familiar I am with them seems to have far less impact on my proclivities. This is a personal observation but since I hold that opinion I can easily argue that you over-generalize, at the very least.
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I’m not a Chomskyan (or any kind of formalist, in fact) and I’m not particularly familiar with the Chomsky hierarchy. However, you are surely aware that the position of Chomsky and his disciples is that all natural languages have basically the same grammar (that is, they all fall at exactly the same point in the Chomsky hierarchy). So you look in vain to Chomsky for any support for the idea that there can be a difference in “quantifiable efficiency” between any given pair of grammars.
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I am not familiar enough with his work to say what position I hold in relation to his ideas. My knowledge of Chomsky comes from references in various papers and books.
One day I might read his stuff, but I doubt it...
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Again you claim that quantifying “the number of variations, the number or rules, the manner of their execution” is simple, without actually giving any hint as to how this is to be achieved. You don’t seem to understand how vast, and radical, a claim this is.
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I gave a description of how achieve such a measurement. Use grammar induction from a corpus of sufficient size and you will get a measurement of the complexity of the grammar in hard numbers.
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At this point, I should clear up a point which may or may not be a point of confusion. You admit that my point holds for “descriptive linguistics”, but what you don’t seem to acknowledge is that that’s the only real sort. Prescriptive linguistics – prescriptive grammar – is solely the domain of people who don’t really know anything about language except what they like and what they don’t like. These people often come up with complicated explanations of why what they like is objectively better in some way, these explanations often being very entertaining, but always being completely unfounded. This is what I see you doing with regard to “-ly”.
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Again, in the clear distinction between adverb and adjective we simply will not agree. I have already said that context helps us out of trouble in most cases. Without context you wouldn't have a clue in many cases what was being said without the morphological distintion. Of course, dependency is still a problem in some cases, but not so much in this type of case as we see with prepositions, for example, which is a huge mess and a great boon to comedians.
Groucho Marx: Yesterday I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How it got into my pyjamas, I have no idea...
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Well, the people I work with who do parsing (I’m familiar with some of Abney’s work, but not what you cite) are of the opinion that probabilistic parsing is the most effective. That’s what I was thinking of. Certainly there is no evidence that the human mind uses a hidden Markov model or anything like that.
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No, but we receive one word at a time in sequence and can progressively make sense of the sentence which is similar to how dependency parsing works, that was my point. Now, how the actual machinery in the brain works...? Who knows, it could be a Markov Model, for all we know...
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Of course, knowing that you’re a formalist makes this point clearer. As I’m a non-formalist, I would say that human parsing can’t possibly be the same as machine parsing because machine parsing doesn’t use semantics, pragmatics, contextual information, and world-knowledge to aid the parse. But if you’re a formalist I imagine you’d argue that human parsing doesn’t either!
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At some level, of course, the human brain uses those things. Machines are beginning to, as well. Eventually, the whole thing boils down to bits turning on or off, or neurons firing or not. Not too different really. Semantics are being used more and more for disambiguation. For example:
The children ate the cake with the spoon.
There are three ways you can attach that preposition, but one is more likely than others. That's where probabilistic parsing and semantics come in handy. Is it the children with the spoon? Does the cake have a spoon? Or does it say how they ate it? Obviously, the latter is the most likely. People are working on getting computers to see the same reason but then we are getting into knowledge representation, a field which hasn't seen much useful movement in many years. Semantics look promising, though. Another example:
She ran up the bill.
No explanation needed there.
At least, not to any humans reading this post.
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No it’s not. Where do you get this from? You can’t make a word plural in English solely by the addition of some other word. The plural morpheme appears to be compulsory even if you’ve got another word present that indicates the plurality. So English can’t do everything that Chinese can. You are twisting the evidence to favour your conclusion.
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No, I made a mistake here. You are correct, it was my bad to imply that plural could be formed in English without the affix. It can't, even with the help of an adjunct.
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Have you never had to write -(s) at the end of a word to indicate that you’re referring to one or more than one? EG “poster(s)”. I know I’ve needed to do that. It’s a pretty clunky way of indicating unspecified number, isn’t it? For a start, how would you pronounce it? Almost makes you wish you spoke a language with some means of indicating unspecified number, eh?
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The problem is that in Chinese it would no longer be unspecified once a number was attached, however, there would be no need for that pesky (s) addition, this is true. That would be handy, to be sure.
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...only way of objectively determining the “expressive range” of different languages, be “of dubious value”?
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I say dubious because even if it could be quantified (and I explained earlier in this post how) I cannot see how such a measurement would have any practical value. As for the use of 'ly' to indicate an adverb it is obviously better since it eliminates the need for context to resolve the meaning in most cases. For example,
'We are doing good here.'
This is an actual sentence I have heard. Is he saying that they are fine? Or that they are doing good deeds? How would you know without context? You would have to guess. If you could rely on him using adjectives and adverbs correctly, you would know what he was saying without guessing.
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Again you mention prescriptive grammar as if it actually has any value. It doesn’t. Prescriptive grammar consists of praising the language of groups of people you identify with and doing down the language of groups of people you don’t identify with. That’s all it consists of.
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We will just have to disagree on this point. Which is kind of strange considering that I deal exclusively with descriptive grammar when writing a syntactic parser.
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Please give a single example of a natural case in which the absence of a distinction between an adjective and a manner adverb has lead to “confusion”.
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I gave you one earlier in this post, surely you can think of a million examples...?
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As for the notion that “context and habit saves us” – well, if it’s not ambiguous in context, then no confusion can result, can it? That rather proves my point. Of course formalists love to pretend that context can be ignored, but the fact is that in the real world all language is interpreted in context.
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Well, after all, formalism is largely done using CFG (Context-Free Grammar specifications)...
Context cannot be ignored, even in formal grammar. It has to be ignored in a CFG specification or it is not a CFG anymore but something for more complicated. Idiomatic expressions and collocations totally depend on context. "You shall know a word by the company it keeps," I forget who said that... Phrase and sentence level structures frequently depend on context, but then we are getting into discourse analysis.
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Spoken like a true formalist!
If you wanted to write about the rules according to which the plural is produced in, say, Farsi, how exactly would you discover those rules in the process of describing them? Obviously, you can’t. You’ve got to find out what they are. You’ve got to ask Farsi speakers, or analyse some Farsi text, to find out what they are before you can write about them.
Discovery and description are as separate in linguistics as they are in history or particle physics.
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I used 'is' here for a reason. You can reverse the sentence, if you like. The discovery is the description. Yes, you listen to a language, you read it, you speak it, you interview people. And, as you do that, as you perform that discovery, you also find your description. I don't think we disagree
here, at least...
Julian
01-27-2007, 10:08 AM
