Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: Deep Structure/Initial PP |
| Submitter: | Ahmad Reza Lotfi |
| Description: | 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 |
| Date Posted: | 25-Nov-2004 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Linguistic Theories
Syntax |
| LL Issue: | 15.3303 |
| Posted: | 25-Nov-2004 |
