Discussion Details
| Title: | RE: 15.3318, Disc: Deep Structure/Initial PP |
| Submitter: | Ahmad Reza Lotfi |
| Description: | Dear linguists,
Philip Carr <philip.carr@univ-montp3.fr wrote: Ahmad Lofti's points (Linguist 15.3303) are interesting. We see here an attempt to sustain a process-based interpretation of 'psychological realism', but defined in terms of parallelism, rather than sequential mental operations. But it's still a process-based approach, and I find it hard to see how that can fit with the idea that one is attempting to characterise (Chomskyan) mental *states* ('knowledge'), as opposed to *processes* ('use of knowledge'). One might think that declarative frameworks would be better suited to characterising static mental states, rather than mental activities, but even with declarative approaches, one sees appeal (implicit or otherwise) to the idea of processes (such as structure-building). Although it may sound too radical (if not absurd!) to some readers, I find the division of the world into its states and processes rather artificial (though prhaps still legitimate given man's limitations in understanding what's going on around/within him): As the world is in permanent motion and change, it's only the human mind that takes one snapshot out of a process and terms it a state; a single slide taken away from the film in progress on the screen for scrutiny. What Chomsky does in characterising mental states (knowledge of language) is to make this real-time mental process stand still momentarily in order to see what's going on there. It's a forced move on the scientist's part to make sense of the reality, but not the reality itself. While Chomsky has never claimed his theories to be those of mental processing/performance but of mental states/competence, the very terminology he's always employed since ST through GB and finally in MP strongly suggests he's well aware of the potentialities of his competence model in paving the way to afford a performance model embracing mental processing. Given the existing gap between competence and performance(= one between states and processes), which is due to (a) the complexity of the world, and (b) our present limitations in seeing what's in the flow rather in a frame-by-frame presentation of the process, we might decide to approach Chomskyan ideas cautiously once in the realm of psychological processing. This does not mean, however, that the potentialities of generative models should be left unexplored. Ahmad R. Lotfi Assistant Professor of linguistics, Chair of English dept. Graduate School Azad University at Khorasgan (IRAN) |
| Date Posted: | 30-Nov-2004 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Linguistic Theories
Syntax |
| LL Issue: | 15.3342 |
| Posted: | 30-Nov-2004 |
