Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Ever since [Turing's] 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' the leading approach to AI has been so-called rule-based systems or expert systems, which organize human knowledge as a collection of specific and general facts, along with inference rules to connect them." - Chomsky's approach to language?

"There is room for experiment in more and less streaming by ability and attainment..." - in Hungary, at least, we need to get away from the tyranny of the form which bundles groups of 30-40 into packages of subjects taught at the same level. The students need a more individuated relationship with the school.

"In Sweden...there has been for the last ten years a movement towards the comprehensive school which has been so successful that it now become universal" - and, since this was published, has it gone the way of the comprehensive school movement in the UK? The interesting thing is that independent schools are comprehensive in spirit, they are just massively better funded.

"The wisest course, it seems to many, is to leave the [Independent] schools alone" - most political perhaps, but if anything they are now more representative of a global elite than the British ruling class. Even so, the cult of stupid now governs the country again. They should at least pay tax on their foreign earnings.

"Time and time again it has been shown that people who lack the ability can be taught relatively complicated new methods of doing a job in quite a short time, and taught very effectively, provided that the teaching has been programmed and designed to fit their needs." - Ah, yes! The education is training paradigm. I may struggle to finish this.

"Television, tape recorders and 'immersion courses' are essential if more than a handful of people are to learn Russian - and who can doubt that hundreds of thousands of us should?" - if the Soviet Union had occupied Western Europe, we would have had to. The opposite happened, and Russian was dismantled as a lingua franca.

"Every index which is known of active participation in sport, art or amateur dramatics has risen, and there has probably never been a generation in England which has so avidly read serious books, listened to serious music, or been as politically mature or concerned as the presen one." - that's a truer measure of education, what are the statistics now?

"This is an advance over the cult of the stupid, which is still dominant in this country" - plus ca change. This is the closest he gets to advocating Education as an end in itself. Otherwise it's jobs, jobs, jobs. With the decline in manufacturing jobs, is there as much demand for technical knowledge as Vaizey foresaw?

"[Education's] share grew from 1% in 1900 to 5.5% now [1970], and ought to be 8% by 1980" - it peaked at 6.5% in1976, dropped to 4% by 2016 and now languishes at 5.5%. In Europe the Nordic countries spend significantly more.

"One of the best hopes for improving television content and reducing commericalism is "pay TV"" - I suppose that's worked out with HBO and Netflix. I don't know what content he was aiming for. For me educational channels on YouTube have been much more important.

"...the lives of most Americans have become so intermeshed with acts of consumption that they tend to gain their feelings of significance in life from these acts of consumption" - Was this fair? Is this still true? Is it peculiarly American? If it is, is that because America is country fuelled by immigration, and the migrants are pursuing the American Dream.

"Today, more than a hundred thousand talented high school graduates - certified to be college material - fail to go on to college specifically because of lack of money." - the problem today, some say, has been inverted now we have too many graduates drowning in debt.

"For example, two millenia were enough in the development from Latin to Modern Romance languages to introduce new modes of marking case, tense, aspect, modality, and subordination, and even less time was required for a similar development from Old English to present day English." - drift vs contact? The impact of literacy?

"babies do not initiate changes. Groups of interacting speakers do, especially adolescents." - consistent with the research into accent formation in Milton Keynes

"...one further motivation of grammaticalization consists of creating new usage patterns and functional categories by replicating categories from other languages."...I've been unhappy with the analogy drawn between biological and language evolution throughout this book. This discussion of replication across languages makes it clear that the analogy we should be making is not with reproduction but with viral infection

"[Newmeyer] goes on to hypothesize that..."cognition left its mark on language before communication"" - my next destination on this journey, if some animals are on layer II of grammatical evolution where are they in terms of cognition?

"Structure began to emerge when there were preferences on how to arrange existing items, which became habits, which may have turned into rules" - at least in the minds of grammarians

"We hypothesize that this was the first stage where the first phrasal structures arose, namely noun-adjective and verb-adverb constructions" - theoretically verb agreement markers for person come much later after pronound. They represent nominal meaning that is part of verb phrase? I would to see an account of this.

"And finally, we wish to reiterate that recursion is a theory-dependent notion - it is a property of a system of rules proposed rather than of the phenomenon to be studied" - perfectly encapsulates my problems with Professor Chomsky's approach.

"[Iteration] is not restricted to the noun phrase or the clause; it is also a productive mechanism of the verb phrase (e.g. He came in, sat down...)" - only if you assume subject elipsis is not taking place (He came in, [he] sat down...) This is another another example of how ambiguous simple language can be to grammatical analysis. Ellipsis is a great source of this ambiguity.

Focusing on just one aspect of grammar - subordination - and describing the ways individual languages have realised it shows the plasticity of language. But the way language contact leads to linguistic change remains on the horizon. Does the existing structure of a language limit how it can be changed by another. Norse influenced Old English because they were close; Old Welsh didn't because it wasn't?

The similarities between the grammatical achievements of animals and partially socialized humans are fascinating. But the authors don't adequately stress the far superior lexical achievements of the humans - a greater capacity to form and store concepts; nor the developmental aspect of the acquisition of grammar - the critical period hypothesis; nor has there been any discussion of 2nd language learners.

"But these gradually created a new structure, drawing on universal principles of grammaticalization" - they might be agnostic on Universal Grammar, but they definitely believe in Unviersal Grammaticalization. It might be a better way of conceptualising the grammatical relationships between all human languages.

"Grammaticalization requires a linquistic system that is used regularly and frequently within a community of speakers and is passed on from one group of speakers to another...[this excludes animals living in the wild]" - it also excludes feral children raised by animals in the wild.

"Many scientists have long felt that salt-water conversion offers the most sensible way to make use of the slumbering genie of atomic power" - Vance doesn't have an ecological bone in his body.

"...opportunities continue to open up in such service fields as travel, insurance, restaurants, hotel and motel operation..." - which with the exception of insurance damage the environment.

"Furthermore, in terms of life satisfaction, acts of consumption are no adequate substitute for acts of individual productivity" ... Prostestant work ethic, obviously not heard of alienated labour.

"Ireland, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, is outstanding among the nations of the world that have got their birth rate under control" - I thought it was emigration that eased Irish poverty, and in anycase it is outstanding because it's population peaked in the mid 19th century.

"Japan is one nation that has in recent years taken drastic and spectacular action to strike an equilibrium between its births and deaths" - and now struggles with demographic decline...

"If an automobile requires over 100 horsepower, it is too damned big and wasteful." - average car is 120 horsepower today