Food for thought

[JuanTwoThree]

Clearly, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, this selectionally introduced contextual feature appears to correlate rather closely with the extended c-command discussed. I suggest that these results would follow from the assumption that an important property of these three types of EC delimits a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. Furthermore, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial raises serious doubts about an important distinction in language use. Let us suppose that the systematic use of complex symbols suffices to account for problems of phonemic and morphological analysis.

from:

http://rubberducky.org/cgi-bin/chomsky.pl

food for thought for us all

[fluffyhamster]

I'm brewing something up right now, will be back soon!

[fluffyhamster]

Right, I'm back, kettle's boiled and I've got my tea now. Anyway, what is it that you were saying, again, exactly?

[woodcutter]

It would be nice if we could burn all the empty-skulled jargonizing academics at the stake. Unfortunately, until you grasp all the jargon of a particular field it is hard to see if a particular academic is an egregious offender. And when you have learned all the jargon you want people to think jargon is important, and like to use it to keep out the riff-raff, and demonstrate that you are a real paid-up intellectual!

I like to think that the tide is turning a little though. Many leading academics now become popular by writing populist things, like *beep* or Huntingdon, and seem to receive the kudos for their journalese that used to be reserved for unintelligble Frenchmen.

[woodcutter]

The *beep* refers to the bloke who wrote that History is Over. Give me strength.

[fluffyhamster]

F*kyurmama?

[JuanTwoThree]

Suppose, for instance, that the natural general principle that will subsume this case raises serious doubts about the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. Thus the notion of level of grammaticalness does not readily tolerate nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. Furthermore, this selectionally introduced contextual feature is unspecified with respect to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. To provide a constituent structure for T(Z,K), the earlier discussion of deviance suffices to account for a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is not subject to a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test.

Perhaps this will shed some light:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/ ... q.html#how

[lolwhites]

Excuse my ignorance, but even after concentrating till my head hurts I can't work out what's being discussed here.

Can someone please tell me in plain English before my brain explodes?

[JuanTwoThree]

Sorry, perhaps this is clearer:

The descriptive power of the base component does not readily tolerate the strong generative capacity of the theory. Note that any associated supporting element suffices to account for the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. However, this assumption is not correct, since a descriptively adequate grammar may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that the natural general principle that will subsume this case can be defined in such a way as to impose the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any proposed grammar. To characterize a linguistic level L, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction raises serious doubts about the extended c-command discussed.

Follow this link:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/foggy.faq.html

[fluffyhamster]

(Found this very clear explanation by copying and pasting the first dollop JTT alerted us to):

CHOMSKY is an aid to writing linguistic papers in the style
of the great master. It is based on selected phrases taken
from actual books and articles written by Noam Chomsky.
Upon request, it assembles the phrases in the elegant
stylistic patterns that Chomsky is noted for.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/foggy.lsp

(Same website)

[lolwhites]

Needless to say the web address is now doing the rounds in my staffroom with hilarious consequences...

[woodcutter]

Since this thread is entitled 'food for thought' and not 'tee hee hee', what are the thoughts, Juan? Is Noam Chomsky at his worst really just a drivel machine? Are most academics such worthless twits that they spend their lives pretending to understand intellectual mashed potato?

Who knows, maybe Noam thought so, and that's why he quit linguistics for politics. At least he can be fairly easily understood doing that, although he is one of these all brilliant-critiques-of-what's-wrong and yet practical-solutions-are-beneath-me kind of thinkers.

[JuanTwoThree]

Really it was meant to be an intriguing but uninformative title to get people to read the thread!

Chomsky? Maybe it's food for thought that chopped up Chomskiness can be put together to read very like Chomsky. Perhaps Chomsky wouldn't be at all surprised. This is the real thing:

"To say that "the displacement property [is] forced by legibility conditions" is to say, less informally, that expressions generated by states of FL will not be (properly) accessible to the external systems unless they satisfy this property. The thought systems, for example, require that expressions have certain properties: that they have phrases with certain relations which can be interpretated as semantic relations. Maybe agent-patient, and maybe theme-rheme, new/old information, etc. Those of the former type seem to involve "deep structure" (first Merge); those of the latter type seem to involve "displacement" (maybe the thought systems are designed to explore "edge of constructions" to detect these). If that's the way the thought systems work, then displacement is "forced by legibility conditions" in the sense that unless FL provides for displacement, the expressions won't be legible -- properly legible, that is; they might be interpreted as some kind of word salad."

[Andrew Patterson]

If that's the way the thought systems work, then displacement is "forced by legibility conditions" in the sense that unless FL provides for displacement, the expressions won't be legible -- properly legible, that is; they might be interpreted as some kind of word salad.

I think that this suggests that the chopped up Chomski in the previous posts is a sort of Chomski word salad. Which I supose is something like a colourless green salad that sleeps furiously.

[LarryLatham]

Chomsky? Maybe it's food for thought that chopped up Chomskiness can be put together to read very like Chomsky.

Uhhh Huhhh. Mmmm...I suppose that's similar to the occasional hurricane that blows through the junkyard and assembles something very like a Boeing 747. Doesn't happen very often.

Chomsky (the real thing) does not always seem to be so obscure or hard to read. But you do have to keep your wits about you. He does not suffer lazy readers. Of course, you cannot just accept everything he has to offer. Sometimes his stuff looks like he's been smoking dope (furiously).

Larry Latham