LINGUIST List 3.834

Tue 27 Oct 1992

Disc: Unification

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1. steven schaufele c/o elaine schaufele, unification, inheritance, and cognitive theory

I wish to record total agreement with Anoop Sarkar's remarks (LINGUIST 3-784)
on the psycholinguistic/computational 'good sense' of lexical and grammatical
theories based on hierarchical network 'operations' like inheritance and
unification. Of course, this is consistent with my 'soft spot' for frameworks
like LFG
...
However, i can't agree that it would be desirable to abandon the constraint
concept in favour of an ontological theory, as Sarkar suggests in an earlier
posting (LINGUIST 3-782). As Mark Johnson and i have noted in previous
postings (LINGUIST 3-759, 3-784), there is a variety fo conceivable
constraint-types. What about cognitive-based constraints? By which i mean,
'constraints' that are simply formalizations of cognitive organization/
structure? We have textbook statements of physical 'laws' that read like
constraining equations but which are merely (supposed to be) formalizations
of aspects of the structure of the universe. Can't theoretical constraints
in linguistics be regarded as analogical to these?
 Steven Schaufele
 University of Illinois