Discussion Details
| Title: | A challenge to the minimalist community |
| Submitter: | Oren Sadeh-Leicht |
| Description: | The challenge suggested by Richard Sproat is in my opinion a most
important research idea, vital to the further development and expansion of P&P, although I share some of the worries expressed by previous writers here. I would like to add that the positive approach to this challenge should be “how can P&P be made to work”, and not “let’s see how P&P fails to meet its claims”. There is growing skepticism in psycholinguistic circles that P&P, though accepted, does not deliver: It provides no practical gain in answering the question how language is acquired (satisfying explanatory adequacy). Moreover, the MP is considered to be too complicated, only accessible and understood by a small isolated group of people, therefore of no practical use, although it makes claims about explanatory adequacy. Quantum physics is also extremely complex and difficult to understand, yet nobody has claimed that it is of no practical use or isolated from the real world. Generative circles have already identified the growing disparity between P&P and psycholinguistic research. Currently, a broad research program headed by Janet Dean Fodor et al. (CUNY) is carried out to satisfy explanatory adequacy – to meet Sproat’s challenge. I hope that one of the researchers will post a message here, or that Richard Sproat will post their messages on the matter, should he get any. Cheers, -Oren. |
| Date Posted: | 22-Apr-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.1288 |
| Posted: | 22-Apr-2005 |
