🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 7, 8:11 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Sep 7, 7:09 am, "Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in messagenews:1189133690.355293.289220@r29g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> > On Sep 6, 6:00 pm, "Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in

> > >> > And thus whatever it is "behaviorism" has to say about "verbal
> > >> > behavior" is thus also of little or no interest to linguists.
>
> > >> But what Skinner had to say about VB was of interest to Chomsky. Wasn't
> > >> Chomsky a linguist?
>
> > > Well, _someone_ had to point out that what Skinner had to say about
> > > that was not of interest to linguists!
>
> > But that isn't what Chomsky said. Chomsky said Skinner was wrong, and that
> > the principles were inadequate, not that explaining individual "speech acts"
> > (to avoid technical terminology) was of no interest. Did you ever even read
> > the review?
>
> Er, "speech act" is a technicat term. Emerging from J. L. Austin's
> *How to Do Things with Words* (1962), one of the founding documents of
> the branch of linguistics known as "pragmatics."
>
> I was thinking of taking it with me to the doctor's office this
> morning. I've never had a reason to read it before.

So I did. And when I got back, I printed the MacCorquodale attempt at
a reply, eleven years later.

What Chomsky said in 1959 is thoroughly unexceptionable today, though
doubtless it was baffling in its time. (He appended to it an outline
-- perhaps the first published outline; _Syntactic Structures_ covered
only a small part of it  -- of his program for linguistics). All he
does is show that Skinner's notion of language is absurdly simple-
minded: Skinner doesn't even know that such a thing as syntactic
structure exists. One of the things Chomsky and his early students
investigated was the things that one _can't_ say -- "sentences" that
would appear to be perfectly reasonable ways to say things, but that
simply don't occur and, when uttered, are perceived to be distinctly
odd.

What M'CQ has to say (I struggled through the first ten pages and
skimmed the other seven) is utterly bankrupt. Principally, he assumes
what he intends to prove; but also, eleven years on, he had every
opportunity to examine Chomsky's published work (notably *Aspects of
the Theory of Syntax*, 1965) to get some idea of the complexity of
language; which already by 1970 was searching for ways to simplify,
simplify, simplify the mental machinery involved -- the simplicity he
himself desiderates.

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