Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: A Challenge to the Minimalist Community |
| Submitter: | Seth Cable |
| Description: | Although they have worked to clarify their position on the matter, it still
puzzles me what Drs. Sproat and Lappin intend to learn from “the community’s” success or failure at their proposed challenge. There is the strong suggestion from their words in passages such as the following that they see the challenge as some sort of ‘crucial experiment’ weighing on the whole edifice of related P&P proposals. It seems to us that if the claims on behalf of P&P approaches are to be taken seriously, it is an obvious requirement that someone provide a computational learner that incorporates P&P mechanisms, and uses it to demonstrate learning of the grammar of a natural language. Surely it is long past time to ask for some substantive evidence in the way of a robust grammar induction system that this view of grammar induction is computationally viable. Most other major theoretical models of grammar have succeeded in yielding robust parsers in far less time, despite the fact that they do not, as far we know, make analogous claims about the nature of language learning. Suppose that we learn (somehow) that in its present form P&P is thoroughly, inescapably computationally ‘unviable’, and that a learner of the sort Drs. Sproat and Lappin imagine cannot be built. This would certainly stand as a consideration against the theory in its present form. But, it would simply be one consideration within an expansive, turbulent sea of supporting and conflicting data. There exist, after all, a great many phenomena which stymie the P&P model – tough-movement being one well-known case. On the other hand, there are other domains of fact that P&P handles rather superbly, in ways superior to ‘competing’ proposals. The Root-Infinitive Stage in language development, for example, has been most productively studied and analyzed by researchers assuming some version of P&P. At the risk of sounding banal, there are advantages and disadvantages to P&P as there are to *any* model at this very early stage of our understanding (and it *is* early yet to seek out theories which approach anything near a widely-encompassing model of the language faculty; no one even knows how relative clauses work). We do ourselves a great disfavor by setting up ‘litmus tests’ for proposals. One is not being ‘unscientific’ in pursuing HPSG, LFG or statistical models despite their being unable to illuminate the Root Infinitive Stage, nor is one being ‘dogmatic’ by adopting the TAG system of Frank (2002) despite its being unable to derive sentences in which wh- movement interleaves with raising (Frank 2002, chapter 6). The most reasonable goal for researchers interested in questions regarding the language faculty is to assess the advantages and disadvantages of each proposal, always with an eye towards incorporating and combining the insights of each. In this regard, posing ''challenges'' to one another is unproductive and a little absurd. If one wishes to examine how ideas developed to cover one domain of fact could apply to another, the standard operating procedure is for one to take up the mantle themselves. In this light, consider the following statement by Drs. Sproat and Lappin. Finally since our challenge has actually stimulated relatively little discussion from the P&P community, we suspect the following may also be one response: 8. Ignore the challenge because it's irrelevant to the theory and therefore not interesting. RESPONSE: This is the ''answer'' we had most anticipated. It does not bode well for a field when serious scientific issues are dismissed and dealt with through silence. I am one of many individuals who did not earlier contribute to this discussion. Was it because I found this challenge “irrelevant to the theory”? Of course not; success or failure at the task could stand as consideration for or against certain ideas in the P&P literature. Indeed, it might be that success at the task Drs. Sproat and Lappin imagine would be an interesting feat for a P&P learning algorithm (though, surely, not any more interesting than the discovery of some subtle prediction regarding language acquisition). I maintain, however, that this challenge is not the Great Race Around the World they seem to imagine it, but only one part of a very long, slow and plodding discussion that we should not seek to bring prematurely to its conclusion. Arguing in Defense of Disinterest, Seth Cable. |
| Date Posted: | 09-May-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Syntax Discipline of Linguistics |
| LL Issue: | 16.1454 |
| Posted: | 09-May-2005 |
