LINGUIST List 15.3303

Thu Nov 25 2004

Disc: Re: Deep Structure/Initial PP

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1. Ahmad Reza Lotfi, Re: Deep Structure/Initial PP

Message 1: Re: Deep Structure/Initial PP

Date: 25-Nov-2004
From: Ahmad Reza Lotfi <ahmadreza_lotfi

hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Deep Structure/Initial PP

For previous messages in this discussion, see
   Linguist 15.3231 (http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3231.html)
   Linguist 15.3262 (http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3262.html)
   Linguist 15.3263 (http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3263.html)
   Linguist 15.3272 (http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3272.html)
   Linguist 15.3277 (http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3277.html)

Dear Linguists,

On  21-Nov-2004  Pius ten Hacken < P.Ten-Hacken

swansea.ac.uk > wrote:

>
>Two obvious remarks any Chomskyan linguist would make in this respect are:
>
>1. Phrase structure rules and transformations are meant to describe
>the grammatical competence of a speaker, not the processes of
>production or interpretation of linguistic performance.
>

What is less obvious, however, is whether (Dan Slobin's) psycholinguistic
experimentations with such rules, which established the (true?) belief that
these rules are at best those of linguistic competence rather than those of
real-time speakers' performance/mental processes are still valid given the
superiority of parallel processing models to serial ones for a good number
of mental activities including visual ones, and most probably also for
those of mental grammar:

All a reaction-time experiment shows is that the sentence S1 allegedly
involving more transformations than S2, e.g. passives vs. their active
counterparts, does not get more time to process. This does not necessarily
mean that they've got no pyschological reality. There's still a chance that
(some) T-rules apply in parallel irrespective of the superficial feeding
relationships among them, hence not different in computation time but
perhaps different in the amount of resources employed. I think
generativists of the time withdrew too hurriedly when they confined their
rules to mere competence.

Regards,

Ahmad R. Lotfi, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of linguistics,
Chair of English dept.
Graduate School
Azad University at Khorasgan (IRAN)

http://www.geocities.com/arlotfi/lotfipage.html
http://www.webspawner.com/users/ahmadrlotfi/index.html

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Syntax
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