LINGUIST List 5.1026

Thu 22 Sep 1994

Disc: The Teaching of Syntax: last posting

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1. David Pesetsky, The Teaching of Syntax -- REVISED VERSION OF POSTING

>From: "Philip Johnson-Laird" <philclarity.Princeton.EDU>
>Subject: Re: 5.1011 Sum: The teaching of syntax

>VERY interesting!
>P

I'm glad someone found it interesting. I found it tendentious and
misleading.

As usual, the view of linguistics (and now linguistics teaching)
presented in the context of a LINGUIST polemic bears little relation to
the field as it can be seen in real life -- for example, in the pages of
its journals or in the conference halls and hallway chatter of meetings.
I have no time (this time) for a reply on the subject of how GB teaching
prevents students from looking for patterns in data, because I'm too
busy pondering the implications of a recent class presentation by one of
our students on the syntactic implications of the stress patterns of the
Old Irish verbal system -- and then I need to get to reading another
student's latest attempt to figure out what's really going on with
Papago extraposition. Careful thinking about the recalcitrant data
requires too much of my attention to adequately answer the latest
posting about the inadequate respect of "GB" people for facts. Sorry.

-David Pesetsky