Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
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Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#2Referenced (and unfortunately gated) article from the source: http://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/the-origins-of-speech/
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#3How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#4How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
Generative linguistics is largely discredited these days. It has been out of fashion for a little while, but the last few years have seen studies that more concretely disprove it.
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#5How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
Generative linguistics is largely discredited these days. It has been out of fashion for a little while, but the last few years have seen studies that more concretely disprove it.
As a generative linguist I don't really see this. Popular perceptions fluctuate, but the field is still carrying on more or less the same. Nothing in particular has been discovered in the past few years that would give anyone cause to abandon generative linguistics.
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#6How is Chomsky perceived on the field of linguistics today? My impression was that his theories are well respected, but recently I've come across several people dismissing his work as outdated and even wrong. Not sure whether this is just an attempt by people to denigrate him because of his political beliefs though.
Generative linguistics is pretty isolated these days... chugging along but using a set of methodologies and premises that are pretty far removed from the rest of academia. Generative linguistics generally had trouble in two key areas 1) first language acquisition (where increasingly ornate innate machinery is needed to explain how kids arrive at the 'right' grammar) and 2) language processing, where the structural representations were never great at predicting processing difficulty, nor implementable in a machine. Consequently, these two fields have long been in psychology (and the reason I'm a psych graduate student, of all things!), and draw heavily on statistics cognitive science, NLP and in the latter case, information theory.
Chomsky is brilliant, no doubt, and critically showed the world how much latent structure there is in language. However, he is IMHO pretty wrong in thinking that this latent structure can't be learned (e.g. inferring a probabilistic context-free grammar).
One thing to be said for generative linguistics is that a whole lot of super-interesting phenomena have only been characterized within specific generative frameworks--language documentation and psycholinguistic research can only progress with a formal system in which language can be rigorously characterized. So one of the huge projects in the future will be translating the 50+ years of research into the formalisms in the modern computer science / statistical NLP / Bayesian cognitive science / learning-centric developmental psychology stack.
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#7Anyone have a link to a non-gated version of the original?
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generative linguistics is largely discredited these days. It has been out of fashion for a little while, but the last few years have seen studies that more concretely disprove it.
As a generative linguist I don't really see this. Popular perceptions fluctuate, but the field is still carrying on more or less the same. Nothing in particular has been discovered in the past few years that would give anyone cause to abandon generative linguistics.
I feel like people who make claims like the above are a bit divorced from reality. What would have usurped it as the reigning theory of syntax? OT Syntax? Maybe some sort of extension of DM (itself a spawn of generative ideas)...? Functionalist approaches are still a thing, but I don't think they're any more in vogue than they were 20 years ago.
NLP/Comp Ling is another story entirely, of course, as are semantics, pragmatics, experimental ling, phono pursuits, etc. But for hard syntactic theory I don't think the generative ling is going anywhere.
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generative linguistics is largely discredited these days. It has been out of fashion for a little while, but the last few years have seen studies that more concretely disprove it.
As a generative linguist I don't really see this. Popular perceptions fluctuate, but the field is still carrying on more or less the same. Nothing in particular has been discovered in the past few years that would give anyone cause to abandon generative linguistics.
I think this is the prevailing view within linguistics departments (with a few exceptions). Statistical NLP, machine learning, computational anthropology, developmental psychology, etc. are all increasingly reliant on the non-generative work coming out of psycholinguistics and child language acquisition (Levy, Jaeger, Gibson, Wasow, Tomasello, Lieven, Bannard if you want some names).
Re: Tom Wolfe takes on linguistics
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a generative linguist I don't really see this. Popular perceptions fluctuate, but the field is still carrying on more or less the same. Nothing in particular has been discovered in the past few years that would give anyone cause to abandon generative linguistics.
I think this is the prevailing view within linguistics departments (with a few exceptions). Statistical NLP, machine learning, computational anthropology, developmental psychology, etc. are all increasingly reliant on the non-generative work coming out of psycholinguistics and child language acquisition (Levy, Jaeger, Gibson, Wasow, Tomasello, Lieven, Bannard if you want some names).
I don't think there's much of a shift there. You're talking about fields which never had much of a connection with generative linguistics, and where there's no logical reason to think that results in generative linguistics should be particularly relevant or helpful. (Who ever thought that Barriers would have anything to tell us about computational anthropology?)
Generative linguistics is in fact increasingly relevant to NLP, since people are moving towards more complex language models. That's not to say that cutting edge research in syntax is going to be helpful to people trying to solve practical NLP problems, but by the same token, string theory isn't much use if you're trying to build a bridge. It tends to be the basic and well-established results within a field that have useful applications outside it.