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Marantz - What do linguists do? [0802ceef]

papers, languages/linguistics

  • Syntax is at the core of generative grammar

  • sentences of a language as a sequence of units that re-occur

    • can be sounds, roughly represented by words (letters as a semiotic of sounds)
    • what separates a word salad (sentence with no meaning) and a sentence with meaning?

    • are human languages finite state languages, aka those generated from finite state grammars? - chomsky

      • separators of phrases (commas and words) cannot be replaced without losing meaning, but we can insert additional phrases in between without losing original meaning

  • however, does chomsky operate on only made up sentences? We can infinitely nest variables and sentences, but does this map nicely back to human language?

    • which lends to a rules based analysis, but we can move beyond the rules based analysis and speakers can produce and understand sentences they haven't heard before

      • every finite corpus of setnences represents an accidental sampling of utterances
      • which means the rules can be used to project future sentences
  • do linguists largely predict data they don't have, based on rules they can't verify?

  • computational people vs linguists

    • "linguistic enterprise is about the knowledge of language that underlies everything that a speaker does with their language"
    • computational people typically have a very specific use case of language (e.g. parsing a web query)

  • anthropology vs linguistics

    • what is the relationship between culture and language?

    • marantz argues that the language itself is a bad lens to analyze culture

      • for Piraha by Everett, Marantz thinks that culutral constraints cannot explain behavior that strictly adheres to the constraints, a study of cultural constraints requires you to think on the boundaries and what transgresses the constraints
  • argues that lingusits are cognitive neuroscientists, who operate at many levels of abstractions