🚀 go-pugleaf

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote in message 
news:1189191791.027037.214690@d55g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> 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:

He did no such thing, since what he wrote about has little or nothing to do 
with what Skinner wrote.

>Skinner doesn't even know that such a thing as syntactic
> structure exists.

On the contrary, Skinner spends a great deal of time talking about it, 
especially Chapter Thirteen: Grammar and Syntax as Autoclitic Processes.

>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.

Yeah, how could a view based on exposure to, and reinforcement of, REAL 
utterances ever explain why algorithmically-generated ones seem "odd"?


>
> What M'CQ has to say (I struggled through the first ten pages and
> skimmed the other seven) is utterly bankrupt.

Good "argument."

>Principally, he assumes
> what he intends to prove;

Another good "argument."

> 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;

The Wikipedia entry under Verbal Behavior" is not perfect, but you should at 
least give it a look. It is clear that you have no clue about what Skinner 
has said about anything.

which already by 1970 was searching for ways to simplify,
> simplify, simplify the mental machinery involved -- the simplicity he
> himself desiderates.

"Mental machinery"? Isn't such machinery powered by Pixies and Unicorns 
running in wheels?

Best Regards,
Glen

>
> ***
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>