[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [lojban] What's the current situation with Chomsky's grammar for Lojban?

Escape Landsome, On 30/07/2012 10:05:

Despite your remark, Linguistics still seems to live pretty much in the
'70s.  The details of theories have been worked through more thoroughly, the
relative prominence of different approaches have shifted (without any being
obliterated -- Social Science are hard to tell from Philosophy sometimes)
and the mechanical implementation of techniques has vastly improved.  But
there are still just item-and-process and item-and-arrangement vying with
one another.


There are still some theoretical linguist who cling to TG and also
old-fashioned folks who study for example old chinese or swahili,
these use TG because that's what they were taught when students, and
there is a lot of inertia in people minds.


This is not remotely an accurate picture of contemporary linguistics. No work in 70s-era TG is published nowadays. Much work in contemporary TG (Minimalism) is published.

It's of no relevance for Lojban, tho.

But today searchers in the field of Language Automated Treatment, that
is : the guys who try to make computers speak, analyse texts, resume
texts, comment on texts, and simulate human or natlang dialogues...
all of these now currently use Unification Grammars.

UG are :

-- Bresnan's Lexical Functional Grammar LFG

-- HPSG

-- GPSG

-- and also Tree-Adjoining Grammar, TAG

These UG are as much chomskyan as Laplace physics are newtonian.
There is really an epistemologic cut between them.


From the perspective of a pure linguistician (such as me) rather than a computational linguist, Minimalism does not look vastly different from LFG & HPSG/GPSG. They're all phrase-structure grammars. They all purport to offer an overarching theory of the structure of language. I don't see any great epistemological divide.

--And.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.