Bruce, Bill,
      I second the thanks for a great article. I admit that the 
neuroscience isn't my strength, but I am glad that this approach to 
language is not simply a philosophical one, but one that is gathering 
interest (and valididty) from neuroscience and psychology. Tomasello and 
others have looked directly at childhood language acquisition in an 
attempt to see these "usage based" patterns at work and the model seems 
to hold. There are huge implications for teaching which haven't been 
fully explored yet. It certainly weakens the argument that students 
don't need to be taught grammar because they have it as birthright.
    Construction grammar tends to direct attention to the enormous 
number of local constructions, which are certainly in between what is 
usually thought of as vocabulary or syntax if those are thought of as 
separate modules. Adele Goldberg's work is largely an argument for even 
the most general grammatical patterns as generalizations from use.  The 
presence of these lower level (more local) schema make that argument 
much easier to make. There is, from that perspective, a lexico-grammar, 
not a separate lexicon and separate grammar.
     The math in the corpus grammars does seem to be largely 
statistical. Biber et. al. look for what they call the co-occurrence of 
grammatical features and have re-examined the notion of genre from that 
perspective. The understanding would be that the language is shaped by 
what it is called on to accomplish, that it is what it is because of 
what it does. If you try to study it as an isolated formal system, you 
will miss all these insights.
     I had a long-standing conversation with a friend in artificial 
intelligence who died tragically young (actually lived longer than 
expected with cystic fibrosis.) I miss those talks. My position still is 
that computers will never "understand" human language because human 
language is deeply tied to human experience. They will never know what 
it is like to "drink the milk of human kindness" in part because they 
have never had mothers and never suckled at a mother's breast. Language 
doesn't just represent a world, but facilitates human interaction (and 
is what it is in part to allow that to happen.) The only thing a 
computer can do is construct or reconstruct form on the basis of prior 
human programming. I have never met a computer that can understand what 
I am saying in any kind of complex way. If I write something brilliant 
or something stupid, they will record the form of it letter by letter, 
word for word, but they have no way of telling the difference.
     Grammar checks recognize the passive on the basis of its formal 
realization, but they haven't figured out a way to measure its 
usefulness within a discourse context.

Craig


On 12/14/2010 6:11 PM, Bruce Despain wrote:
>
>  Bill,
>
>  Thank you for pointing us to that great article! I think we can see
>  at once the simplicity and multiplicity of devices required to
>  characterize the elements that go into learning a language. The
>  conclusion from Bever, Sanz, and Townsend (1998) is quite quotable:
>  ‘‘The relation between pattern frequencies, semantics and syntax
>  remains the central problem of language processing. Almost any set
>  of simplifying assumptions about how to study that integration and
>  how it works is likely to be incomplete or wrong. The damn thing is
>  probably much more complex than our models will allow.’’ The
>  progress that has been made in building and implementing neural nets
>  in this regard has be very promising. Their use to model learning
>  is obvious, but their use in modelling knowledge is less obvious,
>  where memory structures come strongly into play.
>
>
>
>  Bruce
>
>
>  --- [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>  From: "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> To:
>  [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: science Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010
>  17:11:48 -0500
>
>  Bruce and Craig, et al.:
>
>
>
>  The following article might be relevant to the discussion (and it
>  has mickel sciencinesse). --- Bill Spruiell
>
>
>
> 
http://ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/hoen/Dominey_2006_DomHoenInui_JOCN_2006.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  *From:*Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>  [mailto:[log in to unmask]] *On Behalf Of *Bruce Despain
>  *Sent:* Tuesday, December 14, 2010 4:41 PM *To:*
>  [log in to unmask] *Subject:* Re: science
>
>
>
>  Craig,
>
>
>
>  You may be right about such linguists taking issue with modelling
>  techniques. I believe their position has to do with their goal of
>  modelling the cognitive faculty. They might have a problem with
>  constructing a mind out of a computer. Compare the construction and
>  performance of some of the early computers with those operated
>  today. We would say that the early designers took many "shortcuts."
>  The differences are in complexity, basically the layering and
>  interfacing of the various modules. The formal constructs needed for
>  any model can be simulated by the mind, and I believe on any
>  computer, provided it is designed with enough sophistication.
>
>
>
>  My efforts at formal languages and models have driven me to believe
>  that any field may be described with a certain set of basic tools --
>  just as the basic elements of a computer (bits) have been used to
>  model numbers and information of many kinds. Whether language is
>  autonomous or not is irrelevant to its formal modelling. In my
>  thinking the way a word is spelled (in English) is different from
>  the way it is pronounced. This tells me that there are definitely
>  two conceptual modules, otherwise, I believe, the systematic
>  conventions of spelling would be much more in line with the
>  systematic conventions of pronunciation. Yet, it is no accident that
>  IPA uses letters to represent sounds.
>
>
>
>  I do not mean to diminish the cognitive approach to language. These
>  linguists are ambitious. They have decided to back up and try again
>  without two separate modules of syntax and semantics. The
>  systematic conventions of word and morpheme arrangement correspond
>  indeed to many of the systematic conventions of the conceptual
>  patterns in the mind. For example, I have found that the modelling
>  work by computer scientists in Europe on semantic nets parallels the
>  syntactic structures of European languages, even though their
>  primitive elements are quite different. I would predict that
>  cognitive linguists will make similar models so long as they are
>  working on the more historically related cultural complexes. I do
>  not believe, however, that the differences between these two fields
>  to be modelled are so harmonic that treating them as one could be
>  advantageous. It has been a number of years for computers to adapt
>  to human cognitive activities. However, this did not result in
>  redoing the basic design elements and tools. It is hard for me to
>  accept the arguments of cognitive linguists that redoing syntax as a
>  version of semantics will increase understanding. I do not believe
>  that syntax, as it is understood by most linguists specializing in
>  it, will use semantic networks. The goal is noble, but to conquer
>  most such challenges the more fruitful strategy in the past has
>  always been to divide the problem space. My position is that the
>  same results may well come from applying a more analytic approach to
>  both syntax and semantics.
>
>
>
>
>  By the way, would you be in a position to enumerate any of the
>  principles or laws that have been discovered, formulated,
>  hypothesized, or refuted by corpus linguistics? Perhaps, one is
>  that grammar can only be measured in terms of probabilities and
>  tendencies. These are the kinds of measurements usually taken on
>  human cognitive abilities. It is interesting that people who have
>  lost part of their linguistic abilities, seem to have lost them in
>  certain characteristic chunks.
>
>
>
>  Bruce
>
>
>
>  --- [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>  From: Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask]
>  Subject: Re: science Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:23:04 -0500
>
>  Bruce, I believe most cognitive and functional linguists would take
>  issue with the idea of syntax as an autonomous formal system. They
>  also tend to take issue with a strict modular approach to language.
>  Croft and Cruse (Cognitive Linguistics, 2005) list three basic
>  hypotheses of the cognitive approach. "Language is not an autonomous
>  cognitive faculty. Grammar is conceptualization. Knowledge of
>  language emerges from language use." I think it's important to note
>  that this is not a retreat from science, but an attempt (claim) at a
>  more accurate science. One of the reasons for attractiveness of
>  corpus grammars is that they measure/explore language in use. It's a
>  more empirical approach, and it yields some surprising insights. But
>  I would challenge the notion that it's not science.
>
>  Craig
>
>
>
>  On 12/14/2010 7:09 AM, Bruce Despain wrote:
> >
> > John,
> >
> > The substitution of the words "sign" and "symbol" for the word
> > "name" does not in my mind succeed in adding to our understanding
> > of grammar, except with the following caveat. There are modules in
> > a formal grammar that comprise various approaches to language:
> > orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. Any one of
> > these dimensions of investigation may be full of signs and symbols
> > of their components.
> >
> > When we are speaking of the noun, we are talking about the word
> > (lexeme) in its linguistic or structural context. The sign or
> > symbol stands for a concept in the real world. These are terms
> > appropriate for a philosophical or mathematical discussion.
> > Indeed, you will find that the scientific approach to language in
> > its constuction of a formal model cannot do so without such
> > entities. In a formal grammar the word noun will serve as a label
> > for the sign or symbol that stands for the lexeme. But only in
> > semantics do they stand for the concepts that the symbol
> > represents. In some languages the "noun" is not the kind of part of
> > speech that it is in English. The use of the the terms of sign and
> > symbol for syntax may easliy blurs the useful distinction that can
> > be made between the multiple dimensions of linguistic
> > investigation. Schmid's work is in semantics and its interface with
> > syntax. The idea of a conceptual shell is one of the constructs
> > proposed in that module. It is a sign or symbol of the mathematical
> > model. But as a word in the title of his work, it is a (compound)
> > noun.
> >
> > Bruce
> >
> > --- [log in to unmask]
> > <mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > From: John Chorazy <[log in to unmask]>
> > <mailto:[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask]
> > <mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: science Date: Mon,
> > 13 Dec 2010 16:38:34 +0000
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----- From: Craig Hancock "I agree that
> > "person, place, or thing" is harmfully simplistic. Do you simply
> > ignore semantic definition or do you work on a more nuanced one? If
> > we grant something the status of "thing" is there a cognitive
> > dimension to that?"
> >
> > /Being somewhat elusive, abstract nouns have never been very
> > popular as objects of linguistic research. _English Abstract Nouns
> > as Conceptual Shells_ fills this long-standing gap in English and
> > general linguistics. Based on a systematic analysis of a very large
> > corpus, it introduces a conceptual and terminological framework for
> > the linguistic description of abstract nouns [...] Semantic,
> > pragmatic, rhetorical, textual and cognitive functions of abstract
> > nouns are discussed, always with reference to the empirical
> > observation and statistical analysis of the corpus data. In this
> > way, a link between the corpus method and functional and cognitive
> > theories of language is established./ Caglayan annotated
> > bibliography on Schmid, H.J "English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual
> > Shells" (2000).
> >
> > Craig - my students are pretty used to defining a noun as not a
> > name of something, but a sign or symbol of the thing itself.
> > "Craig" is a name and label used as an identifier, but Craig the
> > person is the noun. So I suppose that "proper" nouns are
> > classified as those names of the people they label. Students also
> > know that "love," albeit an abstraction, is identifiable as a noun
> > too... they recognize its empirically tested presence as a
> > phenomena in our world (your cognitive dimension mentioned above).
> > I'm surprised that the definitions of nouns mentioned so far
> > haven't included this discussion, but based on Schmid I guess this
> > is an elusive concept for some reason?
> >
> > Hope you are all doing well.
> >
> > John
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > John Chorazy English III Academy, Honors, and Academic Pequannock
> > Township High School
> >
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> > visit the list's web interface at:
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> > leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
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>
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>




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