Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: A Challenge to the Minimalist Community |
| Submitter: | Martha McGinnis |
| Description: | Let me elaborate slightly on my response to the Sproat/Lappin
challenge. Though a ''smart car'' may be a better analogue to Minimalism, Carson Schütze's Corvette/SUV analogy makes a crucial point: P&P is designed to meet certain goals, so to challenge it to meet additional goals is to ask, not for an achievement equivalent to that of statistical parsing, but for something much better. This is one issue underlying the suggestion to approach the challenge by means of constructive collaboration. Minimalist syntacticians can't reasonably be expected to leap at the chance to pour resources into a computational challenge that even computational linguists have been unable to meet. A second issue is what determines the course of intellectual inquiry. Each of us rightly prefers to pursue the problems that seem both (a) interesting to us, and (b) within our capacity to solve. For each of us, there are many solvable questions that appear uninteresting, and many interesting problems that appear beyond our capacity to solve. Given that Sproat and Lappin have formulated their challenge as a goal for others to meet, it would be easy to infer that they do not find it sufficiently interesting or solvable to undertake themselves. If so, no one else can reasonably be criticized for feeling the same way. My sense is that the problem they pose *is* potentially interesting and almost certainly solvable. Barring a lucky breakthrough, however, the problem seems most likely to be solved via extensive collaboration among computational linguists, psycholinguists, and syntacticians. If Sproat and Lappin are indeed convinced that the problem is both solvable and worth solving, I invite them to lead a collaborative project to solve it. Cheers, Martha |
| Date Posted: | 09-May-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Syntax Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.1454 |
| Posted: | 09-May-2005 |
