Meaning Comes First

Note: This post continues a discussion of the book Creating Language by Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater. For previous posts see here, here and here. Books are a time for making yourself clear, so I have to shake my head a bit as I find myself wondering about an author’s fundamentals. For instance, Christiansen and Chater never say so directly, and I can hardly believe it, but they seem to go along with the Chomskyan view that form comes before meaning. Traditional scholars assumed that the form of a sentence reflected the speaker’s meaning and rhetorical touches. Then Chomsky came along and imagined a sentence being generated by phonological rules, followed by syntactical rules, followed by semantic rules. Meaning, in this theory, brings up the rear. This view leads to some deep problems such as occurs in the following sentences: (1) Bob shocked me by slapping himself hard on the cheek. (2) Bob shocked me by slapping his wife hard on the cheek. As the generativists see it, sentence (1) takes much more computational power than sentence (2). The difficultyis that in sentence (1) Bob and himself mean the same thing. When generating a normal sentence, e.g., #(2), you produce a tree that contains noun1 (Bob), noun2 (me), noun3 (his wife), and noun4 (cheek). But in sentence (1) noun1 and noun3 refer to the same person. So how does the generator know where to put the name and where to put the reflexive pronoun? You might make it as a rule that the reflexive prono...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs