Taking Performance Seriously
نویسنده
چکیده
Thirty-five years ago, Noam Chomsky introduced the field of linguistics to new mathematical tools drawn largely from Recursive Function Theory. These were exciting tools that imparted mathematical precision, perhaps for the first time in the history of Linguistics, to the enterprise of grammar construction. The cornerstone of Chomsky’s new theoretical edifice, was the linguistic transformation, an analytic tool which led to new insights about a vast array of empirical phenomena left unanalyzed by previous linguistic traditions. As the theory of transformations developed, so did Chomsky’s conception of linguistic theory. Transformational grammar was accorded the status of a theory of idealized linguistic knowledge – linguistic competence, to be distinguished from the more general study of real language use (including matters of on-line language processing), termed linguistic performance. The relation between these two notions, as Chomsky (1965:10) has emphasized, is that “... investigation of performance will proceed only so far as understanding of underlying competence permits.” For all their initial descriptive success, however, linguistic transformations have proven rather intransigent. Psychological models based on transformational grammar, e.g. the so-called ‘derivational theory of complexity’, were discarded as their predictions failed to square with the rapidly evolving developments of transformational theory (see Fodor, Bever and Garrett (1974) for an overview). And to this day no one, to my knowledge, has ever successfully formulated methods for computing with transformational grammars of the sort linguists have proposed, especially within the realm of parsing.1
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