Zompist Bboard Again

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 11:26 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 4:19 pmI'm wary of this kind of analysis, mostly because unlike other constituents, the presumed basic elements are inaccessible by transformation.

Sure, but you're not generally free to move whatever constituents you want however you want. E.g., you can't move "book" from inside "the book" (*Whatᵢ did you read the ___ᵢ?), but presumably you think of "the" and "book" as being put together in syntax.

But other transformations can get at "book", e.g. anaphors: "I have a red book and you have a green one."

I suppose the main conceptual gain is that you can say things like: the reason why analytic and synthetic causatives have the same semantics is that they have the same underlying syntactic structure.

Well, arguably they don't. Where they contrast, synthetic causatives are looser, e.g. allowing much more indirect causation.

Of course you get arguments of other sorts too. It's a big simplicity gain if you can treat word-building in syntax with minimal additional stipulation. And if you've accepted (for example) that an incorporated noun got prefixed to the verb in syntax, it's easy to conclude that a tense marker that's prefixed to the noun+verb combination also gets added by syntax.

It goes the other way round for me: a T node is ancient in syntax. It's an essential part of the clever (though wrong) Syntactic Structures analysis, and it's hard to do English syntax without it. I'm much less convinced it's a good idea in (say) Quechua. Or Mandarin.

I haven't read Baker so I can't comment on that.

As for simplicity in general, it's worth looking at other theories to see how much simplicity you can get with different assumptions. Valence and arguments are far simpler in Relational Grammar and in Word Grammar. Cullicover & Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax gets by with no transformations at all, instead placing more work on the semantic side. (Plug: these are covered in my book. Or for an overview that's not me, cf Van Valin, "An Introduction to Syntax".)

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jul 07, 2019 12:40 am But other transformations can get at "book", e.g. anaphors: "I have a red book and you have a green one."

You could be right about that, though it doesn't really look like a case of movement, and I'm not sure what else "transformation" could mean in this context.

Well, arguably they don't. Where they contrast, synthetic causatives are looser, e.g. allowing much more indirect causation.

Yeah, though the distinctions cross-cut---English "make" causatives are as direct as you could want, for example. So you couldn't appeal to a difference between being put together in the lexicon and being put together in syntax to explain the difference direct and indirect causatives.

As for simplicity in general, it's worth looking at other theories to see how much simplicity you can get with different assumptions. Valence and arguments are far simpler in Relational Grammar and in Word Grammar. Cullicover & Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax gets by with no transformations at all, instead placing more work on the semantic side. (Plug: these are covered in my book. Or for an overview that's not me, cf Van Valin, "An Introduction to Syntax".)

Do any of these other approaches have ongoing research programs with linguists working on a wide variety of languages? (I feel like Relational Grammar must? But I haven't stumbled across much, though of course RG has been influential on other traditions.)

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Jul 07, 2019 4:25 am

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jul 07, 2019 12:40 am But other transformations can get at "book", e.g. anaphors: "I have a red book and you have a green one."

You could be right about that, though it doesn't really look like a case of movement, and I'm not sure what else "transformation" could mean in this context.

Technically, any alternation of the tree once it's generated. Chomsky's term, though his later theories put most of the work into the tree-building portion (using constraints) than earlier ones did.

Well, arguably they don't. Where they contrast, synthetic causatives are looser, e.g. allowing much more indirect causation.

Yeah, though the distinctions cross-cut---English "make" causatives are as direct as you could want, for example. So you couldn't appeal to a difference between being put together in the lexicon and being put together in syntax to explain the difference direct and indirect causatives.

As I said, the distinction exists where types of causatives constrast, and so far as I know it's always in the direction I mentioned. Which is hard to explain in purely structural terms!

Do any of these other approaches have ongoing research programs with linguists working on a wide variety of languages? (I feel like Relational Grammar must? But I haven't stumbled across much, though of course RG has been influential on other traditions.)

Yes, but whether you'll see them cited I don't know. The Minimalist papers I've seen (only a small sampling) tend to cite earlier non-Minimalist papers rather than entirely non-Chomskyan ones. It can be hard to compare ideas across frameworks, though it's worth the effort.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Jul 07, 2019 9:41 pm

Well, arguably they don't. Where they contrast, synthetic causatives are looser, e.g. allowing much more indirect causation.

Yeah, though the distinctions cross-cut---English "make" causatives are as direct as you could want, for example. So you couldn't appeal to a difference between being put together in the lexicon and being put together in syntax to explain the difference direct and indirect causatives.

As I said, the distinction exists where types of causatives constrast, and so far as I know it's always in the direction I mentioned. Which is hard to explain in purely structural terms!

Haspelmath has a more precise statement of the situation, and a discussion of what's behind it.

A possible point for re-read is that do-replacement can get at the inner [read the book] phrase: What did you re-do?. Of course it can also replace the whole phrase: What did you do?, and the answer to the first question probably can't omit the re- without sounding a little odd.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 12:33 am From everything I've heard about linguistic theories, I personally have come to dislike theory as a whole. All in all, most likely, every theory (properly speaking, hypothesis) is wrong, so it is probably best to assume from the outset that any given theory is wrong. Theories tend to make all so many assumptions about languages that there are almost certainly natural languages which do not obey what they claim as ironclad truth, and unless there is a theory that can account for all natural languages, it is probably not worth even considering such a theory.

Really, the theories themselves are models, and just like any scientific model they necessarily simplify and make assumptions.

Nerulent wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 4:29 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 12:33 am From everything I've heard about linguistic theories, I personally have come to dislike theory as a whole. All in all, most likely, every theory (properly speaking, hypothesis) is wrong, so it is probably best to assume from the outset that any given theory is wrong. Theories tend to make all so many assumptions about languages that there are almost certainly natural languages which do not obey what they claim as ironclad truth, and unless there is a theory that can account for all natural languages, it is probably not worth even considering such a theory.

Really, the theories themselves are models, and just like any scientific model they necessarily simplify and make assumptions.

Well yes. It just happens that I prefer modeling actual languages where the actual languages come first and the model comes second over creating a model and expecting languages to conform to it.

Nerulent wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 4:29 pm A possible point for re-read is that do-replacement can get at the inner [read the book] phrase: What did you re-do?. Of course it can also replace the whole phrase: What did you do?, and the answer to the first question probably can't omit the re- without sounding a little odd

That's really interesting! I'm not quite sure it works though. Consider a dialog:

A: I re-read the book so I could understand it better.
B: Huh? What did you re-do?

We could say "do" is an anaphor for "read the book", where "re-" is added to both sides. But this doesn't work with other "do" sentences:

*I re-read the book and so re-did John.
*John says he re-read the book but I think he only pretended to re-do so.
*You re-read that book and you can be proud of what you re-did.
*I re-read Aspects; I bet you couldn't re-do that.

So really, the question is why the first dialog works at all! I'm tempted to say it's lexical (we happen to have verbs reread and redo, and the latter is more general semantically). That is, maybe it's parallel to

A: He uttered the words of doom.
B: Huh? What did he say?

FWIW, I don't think it works with "undo":

A: I unsealed the crypt to free the demon.
B: ?You undid what?

All of those "re-do" examples seem fine except for the ones saying "re-did"
"re-did John" sounds like he had sex with John for a second time.

And the undid example seems fine to me as well.

I agree with Zomp that those re-do examples don't work and that it's lexical. The undid example seems okay to me though.

Hm, my grammaticality judgments all align with Zomp's.

Does anybody know in what languages that have a marked split between imperfective and perfective forms of a verb, the imperfective is the marked form, while the perfective is unmarked?

Creoles?

In Slavic languages, I think you get both, depending on the specific verb (for some verbs, it's the perfective that's marked; for others, it's the imperfective).

Raholeun wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 1:52 pm Does anybody know in what languages that have a marked split between imperfective and perfective forms of a verb, the imperfective is the marked form, while the perfective is unmarked?

English.

"I promise" vs "I am promising"
"I walked" vs "I was walking"

Nerulent wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 4:29 pm A possible point for re-read is that do-replacement can get at the inner [read the book] phrase: What did you re-do?. Of course it can also replace the whole phrase: What did you do?, and the answer to the first question probably can't omit the re- without sounding a little odd.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 12:33 am From everything I've heard about linguistic theories, I personally have come to dislike theory as a whole. All in all, most likely, every theory (properly speaking, hypothesis) is wrong, so it is probably best to assume from the outset that any given theory is wrong. Theories tend to make all so many assumptions about languages that there are almost certainly natural languages which do not obey what they claim as ironclad truth, and unless there is a theory that can account for all natural languages, it is probably not worth even considering such a theory.

Really, the theories themselves are models, and just like any scientific model they necessarily simplify and make assumptions.

Can you please give an example another scientific model that you consider simplifies things and makes assumptions?

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Thu Jul 11, 2019 8:06 pm

Nerulent wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 4:29 pm A possible point for re-read is that do-replacement can get at the inner [read the book] phrase: What did you re-do?. Of course it can also replace the whole phrase: What did you do?, and the answer to the first question probably can't omit the re- without sounding a little odd.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 12:33 am From everything I've heard about linguistic theories, I personally have come to dislike theory as a whole. All in all, most likely, every theory (properly speaking, hypothesis) is wrong, so it is probably best to assume from the outset that any given theory is wrong. Theories tend to make all so many assumptions about languages that there are almost certainly natural languages which do not obey what they claim as ironclad truth, and unless there is a theory that can account for all natural languages, it is probably not worth even considering such a theory.

Really, the theories themselves are models, and just like any scientific model they necessarily simplify and make assumptions.

Can you please give an example another scientific model that you consider simplifies things and makes assumptions?

Just about any scientific model - the ideal gas is a model of real gases that doesn't get it exactly right but is near enough for some applications; medical models of humans using lab rats, which are obviously different from humans; models of climate change which can only give a range for temperature/sea level change in 100 years time, even with assumptions about how emissions will continue in the future.

These models are always being refined and improved, but with things as insanely complex as the climate or human language, they're still a way off. And in the end, no model can really be 100% perfect, because nothing is really 100% knowable and all knowledge rests on assumptions.

I just found this:

Wikipedia wrote:Ivilyuat (ʔívil̃uʔat or Ivil̃uɂat IPA: [ʔivɪʎʊʔat] or Cahuilla /kəˈwiːə/) [...]

Apparently they have a letter L̃, standing for /ʎ/, that mirrors the Spanish usage of Ñ.

The original Japanese name of the moth-looking fire bug Pokémon Volcarona is Urugamosu. This name comes from Urukanosu 'Vulcan (the ancient Roman god of fire)', with the -ka- syllable changed to -ga- because of Japanese ga 'moth', and -nosu changed to -mosu because of English "moth".

That is some serious word blending there.

Why are some "stereotypically British" surnames so much more common in the UK (or perhaps more specifically England) than in the US? Didn't any British people with such names move to the colonies back in the day?

I've heard it said that the richest and poorest families were the most likely to stay. There may be also a geographic bias. For example, we have more Irish in America than in Ireland by a wide margin because of the 1840s famine and other factors, but im not sure if America has more English than England.

I was surprised when I heard of a candidate for West Virginia senate named Don Blankenship. "What's a guy named Blankenship doing in coal country?" But apparently its a Welsh family that may have been working in the coal industry even before they moved to America.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 10:19 am Why are some "stereotypically British" surnames so much more common in the UK (or perhaps more specifically England) than in the US? Didn't any British people with such names move to the colonies back in the day?

A full quarter of the US population is ethnically German. Another sixth is Hispanic. This has a significant effect on the distribution of surnames here (not least of because many ethnic Germans ultimately anglicised their surnames).

Other factors include the adoption of surnames by the freed slave population (disproportionately skewed to a small number of English surnames borne by presidents and Southern aristocracy) and regularisation (e.g. the proportion of “Brownes” and “Smythes” is much lower in the USA).