Discussion Details
| Title: | A Challenge to the Minimalist Community |
| Submitter: | Martha McGinnis |
| Description: | I was intrigued by Richard Sproat's challenge to the Minimalist
community. As I understand it, the challenge calls for a renewed connection between computational and theoretical linguistics. The idea strikes me as intriguing -- it could create intellectual excitement and lead to new discoveries (not to mention more of those bright computer-science students in our syntax classes, always a good thing). Currently, the goals of the two fields are quite distinct: generative syntactic theory seeks to identify the universal structural principles constraining human language, which often manifest themselves most clearly in rather obscure and rarely-used aspects of language, like multiple wh-questions or passives, as well as in child language errors, selective impairments in aphasia, and so forth. By contrast, computational linguistics (at least the kind Richard Sproat is describing) seeks to develop an engineering tool that can reliably and efficiently parse a corpus into syntactic structures. Not surprisingly, practitioners in the two fields spend their time solving very different kinds of problems. Generally, I imagine, computational linguists have enough to do without also internalizing the current theoretical literature, and syntacticians have enough to do without also internalizing the current computational literature. Still, it seems as though there's a potential for convergence, if both theoretical and computational linguistics could be brought to bear on a computational model of the human language faculty, with all its 'inefficiencies' and limitations, as well as its capacities. A promising area for establishing an initial common ground would be sentence processing. For example, Ted Gibson's work on sentence processing is framed within a computational approach; and Colin Phillips' 1996 MIT dissertation proposes a very intriguing union of syntactic theory with sentence processing. This syntax-processing-computation nexus seems like an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to implement a computational model of language processing within a current principles-and-parameters approach. I do hope that Richard Sproat's challenge will result in a surge of interest and activity in this area. However, it seems to me that if such an effort is to succeed, it will not be made by scholars in one field submitting to the goals and assumptions of another. It will require genuine collaboration, with syntacticians, psycholinguists, and computational linguists working together to develop collective goals and assumptions, and committing their knowledge, time, and resources to cross-disciplinary interaction and the training of graduate students. This kind of collaborative research is challenging and very time-consuming, but it can pay big intellectual dividends. I imagine there are many linguists who would be happy to act as resources on Minimalist theory, if someone is looking for collaborators. Cheers, Martha _____________________________________________ Martha McGinnis, Assistant Professor Linguistics Department, University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary AB T2N 1N4 phone: (403) 220-6119 fax: (403) 282-3880 http://www.ling.ucalgary.ca/~mcginnis/ _____________________________________________ |
| Date Posted: | 20-Apr-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.1251 |
| Posted: | 20-Apr-2005 |
