tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9108460941383722228.post1482121476551337698..comments2023-07-19T11:51:14.533+02:00Comments on Shared Symbolic Storage: "The Pied Piper of Cambridge"?Michael Pleyerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17318686099980839847noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9108460941383722228.post-55682427338043614112008-04-17T10:09:00.000+02:002008-04-17T10:09:00.000+02:00Please note that "I" didn't intend to state any ob...Please note that "I" didn't intend to state any objection to the generativist approach. I was merely pointing out that there are people who are making such arguments. Also, I didn't mean to say that the aesthetics of tree diagrams don't appeal to em (I could make the same argument about family trees or the evolutionary "tree" and the argument would be just as vacuous). I was merely stating that there are doubts on whether they are adequate in terms of characterising the actual cognitive processes involved in parsing and producing utterances, without taking anyones side (I hope). <BR/>I do know about (to be fair,I don't claim to have fully or even partly grasped them) techncial terms such as the Uniformity of Theta-Roles Assignment, Spellout, Phi-features, etc. I wasn't implying that there is anything wrong with them because I'm unfamiliar with them (that would indeed be prepostorous)but that there are people who turned away from generativist approaches because these concepts are hard to grasp intuitively (which is much more the case in ,say, Cogntiive Linguistics, which on the other hand doesn't have formalisms as consitent and elaborate as generativism), and at first glance seem rather obscure and abstract. <BR/>I have my problems with some versions of MP, because I feel (in the approaches I know of, that is to say, e.g. Adger 2003) that the Conceptual-Intentional System, as well as the Sensori-Motor/Articulatory-Phonological System are underspecifiied, that they are inconsistent in making transparent their choices for the formalisms of category and verbal features, in first rejecting projection hierarchies because they aren't minimal and then reintroducing them, its problems in defining the phenomenon of adjunction, and inconsistencies with the use of little v.<BR/>But this doesn't lead me to say that these problems couldn't be worked out and that generativist approaches are flawed in general because, honestly, I don't really know enough about it to make such an argument.<BR/><BR/>I hope to have clarified these points<BR/>kind regards,<BR/><BR/>Michael<BR/><BR/>References:<BR/><BR/>Adger, David. 2003. Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: OUP.Michael Pleyerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17318686099980839847noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9108460941383722228.post-20011671286588727832008-04-17T01:46:00.000+02:002008-04-17T01:46:00.000+02:00Your main objection seems to be that the technical...Your main objection seems to be that the technical terms are unknown to you and the esthetics of the diagrams don't appeal to you. That's not an argument.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com