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See? There's a moron now. Told you I could spot one a mile away
Universal Grammar not Universally Accepted Anymore
- Thread starter Unkotare
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See? There's a moron now. Told you I could spot one a mile away
Fenton Lum
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Let me attempt to help you.
No. I guess you haven't read any of his political doggerel.[/QUOTE]
Exactly what I'm referring to ......[/QUOTE]
What is exactly what you're referring to?[/QUOTE]
Meathead
Diamond Member
Chomsky's a whore but not a complete moron. Fenton is both.
Fenton Lum
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Zealots are always convinced of their own proselytizing.
Fenton Lum
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Let me attempt to help you.
No. I guess you haven't read any of his political doggerel.[/QUOTE]
Exactly what I'm referring to ......[/QUOTE]
What is exactly what you're referring to?[/QUOTE]
- Mar 31, 2009
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It's the tin foil hat
Meathead
Diamond Member
Now see, the agent in passive is introduced by "by" not "of". Bye bye
Fenton Lum
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Poor things, God won't allow you to choose who walks the planet.
Fenton Lum
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Good bye hon.
Fenton Lum
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You could have engaged, but ran from your own shyte, kudos.
I think the jury is still out. I'll see if I can get the Harper's letter concerning this issue.
Language, Chomsky - Everett
From Harper's Magzine, the October 2016 issue
'War of Words'
"Tom Wolfe paints a florid and darkly conspiratorial picture of a decade-old discussion in linguistics, in which my colleagues and I are assigned the role of bad guys [“The Origins of Speech,” Essay, August]. The dispute concerns Daniel Everett’s assertion that Pirahã, an indigenous Brazilian language, has unique features that overturn a supposed linguistic orthodoxy attributed to Noam Chomsky. I was one of three authors of a 2009 paper that weighed in against Everett’s claims, a paper extensively discussed by Wolfe in dramatically negative terms (“a swollen corpus of objections — cosmic, small-minded, and everything in between”).
There is so much to object to in Wolfe’s narrative. There is the name-calling and over-the-top rhetoric (“Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky”). There are the many passages in which Wolfe purports to know my private thoughts and those of my colleagues, despite having made no effort to contact us for interviews. There is the description of my department at MIT as a den of “modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts” — contrasting, apparently, with the genuinely manly field linguistics practiced by Everett. (Many of my MIT colleagues and students are women, by the way, and some of them are fieldworkers.)
But the most important shortcoming of Wolfe’s essay is his misrepresentation of the scientific issues at stake. In a 2005 paper, Everett argued that the Pirahã language lacked subordinate clauses (“Mary said that it is raining”) and the ability to nest possessors inside of other possessors (“Mary’s canoe’s motor is big”), along with a few other properties. He further maintained that these “gaps” contradicted a theory about language that he attributed to Chomsky. Puzzled by the apparent weakness of the evidence presented for these claims and the significance alleged for them, Andrew Nevins, Cilene Rodrigues, and I decided to investigate. In his own previous papers, we found blatant counterexamples to Everett’s claims, which he had left not only unexplained but unmentioned, and we argued that many of the supposedly unique properties of Pirahã had precedents in other languages of the world.
Crucially, we also pointed out that even if Everett’s new factual claims about Pirahã were correct, they would have no bearing whatsoever on the issues that he believed his work addressed — because he misrepresented those issues. Chomsky has never proposed that every language must have subordinate clauses, nested possessors, or any other specific grammatical construction. All linguists know that languages vary in the constructions they allow and disallow, and the principles that underlie this variation constitute one of the main topics of our field. In the Science paper that Everett cited repeatedly for the assertion that every language must have subordinate clauses, Chomsky and his coauthors actually said nothing of the sort, mentioning subordinate clauses only as an illustrative example in a broader discussion of the human capacity for hierarchically organized phrase structure.
One limitation of our paper was its reliance on the published record for its data. Over the past few years, however, exciting new field research on the Pirahã language has emerged, which supports our conclusions from fresh angles. Uli Sauerland, the coordinator of Berlin’s Centre for General Linguistics, has shown with an ingenious set of on-site experiments that Pirahã speakers do in fact use and understand subordinate clauses. Raiane Salles, a Brazilian graduate student, discovered in the course of her thesis research that, contrary to Everett’s claims, speakers in the Pirahã villages have no trouble at all with nested possessor constructions.
This is how our field actually works. Ideas about language, like ideas about anything else, lead to predictions that can be tested, thereby advancing knowledge. We, as Everett’s critics, participated in that process. In his article, Wolfe repeatedly calls my coauthors and me “the truth squad,” apparently intending this as an insult. But to the extent that our paper and its successors have brought some clarity to an otherwise muddy discussion, it is a label that we wear proudly."
David Pesetsky
Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Mass.
Language, Chomsky - Everett
From Harper's Magzine, the October 2016 issue
'War of Words'
"Tom Wolfe paints a florid and darkly conspiratorial picture of a decade-old discussion in linguistics, in which my colleagues and I are assigned the role of bad guys [“The Origins of Speech,” Essay, August]. The dispute concerns Daniel Everett’s assertion that Pirahã, an indigenous Brazilian language, has unique features that overturn a supposed linguistic orthodoxy attributed to Noam Chomsky. I was one of three authors of a 2009 paper that weighed in against Everett’s claims, a paper extensively discussed by Wolfe in dramatically negative terms (“a swollen corpus of objections — cosmic, small-minded, and everything in between”).
There is so much to object to in Wolfe’s narrative. There is the name-calling and over-the-top rhetoric (“Little Dan standing up to daunting Dictator Chomsky”). There are the many passages in which Wolfe purports to know my private thoughts and those of my colleagues, despite having made no effort to contact us for interviews. There is the description of my department at MIT as a den of “modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts” — contrasting, apparently, with the genuinely manly field linguistics practiced by Everett. (Many of my MIT colleagues and students are women, by the way, and some of them are fieldworkers.)
But the most important shortcoming of Wolfe’s essay is his misrepresentation of the scientific issues at stake. In a 2005 paper, Everett argued that the Pirahã language lacked subordinate clauses (“Mary said that it is raining”) and the ability to nest possessors inside of other possessors (“Mary’s canoe’s motor is big”), along with a few other properties. He further maintained that these “gaps” contradicted a theory about language that he attributed to Chomsky. Puzzled by the apparent weakness of the evidence presented for these claims and the significance alleged for them, Andrew Nevins, Cilene Rodrigues, and I decided to investigate. In his own previous papers, we found blatant counterexamples to Everett’s claims, which he had left not only unexplained but unmentioned, and we argued that many of the supposedly unique properties of Pirahã had precedents in other languages of the world.
Crucially, we also pointed out that even if Everett’s new factual claims about Pirahã were correct, they would have no bearing whatsoever on the issues that he believed his work addressed — because he misrepresented those issues. Chomsky has never proposed that every language must have subordinate clauses, nested possessors, or any other specific grammatical construction. All linguists know that languages vary in the constructions they allow and disallow, and the principles that underlie this variation constitute one of the main topics of our field. In the Science paper that Everett cited repeatedly for the assertion that every language must have subordinate clauses, Chomsky and his coauthors actually said nothing of the sort, mentioning subordinate clauses only as an illustrative example in a broader discussion of the human capacity for hierarchically organized phrase structure.
One limitation of our paper was its reliance on the published record for its data. Over the past few years, however, exciting new field research on the Pirahã language has emerged, which supports our conclusions from fresh angles. Uli Sauerland, the coordinator of Berlin’s Centre for General Linguistics, has shown with an ingenious set of on-site experiments that Pirahã speakers do in fact use and understand subordinate clauses. Raiane Salles, a Brazilian graduate student, discovered in the course of her thesis research that, contrary to Everett’s claims, speakers in the Pirahã villages have no trouble at all with nested possessor constructions.
This is how our field actually works. Ideas about language, like ideas about anything else, lead to predictions that can be tested, thereby advancing knowledge. We, as Everett’s critics, participated in that process. In his article, Wolfe repeatedly calls my coauthors and me “the truth squad,” apparently intending this as an insult. But to the extent that our paper and its successors have brought some clarity to an otherwise muddy discussion, it is a label that we wear proudly."
David Pesetsky
Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Mass.
Last edited:
Meathead
Diamond Member
Ah, I slipped and use the bare infinitive instead of the past participle. A typo really. Bye Sweetums.
Fenton Lum
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Please do go, k? We'll manage.
Fenton Lum
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There are two other posts responding to that very thing, can you locate them? They are in this thread. Still need help?
- Mar 31, 2009
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You truly fail at your woeful attempts to look intellectual. You realize we're laughing at you, right?
Fenton Lum
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- #39
Honey, I gave up on you long, long ago, have a nice weekend.
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