Re:Give it to Hoshi (Score 1)

The way I see it: suppose Chomsky's Universal Syntax turns out to be not innate to human brain structure, but to the very essence of communication. Meaning: if you're going to communicate something, all the forms you're going to be able to do it in will conform to a fairly basic set of ground rules and all the intricacies of natural languages are simply icing on the cake, as it were. If you figure out what that Universal Syntax is (sorry, I forgot the exact term he used - it's been a while, and my university education was in Dutch), you can feed that into a computer and teach it to reduce all phonemes from a given language to it. Then you can have the computer expand the basic message back into coherent communication in another language using the same basic rules. Its sad that the only thing that non-linguists can refer to about linguistics is the Chomsky drek. Actual language use is far different than the idealized competence model that the minimalists assume (oh those pesky problem utterances are um, well they are just some small exceptions, yeah thats it. besides we only need to show results with 3 or 4 examples right?). Forgetting about the theoretical inadequacies, the at best dubious innateness proposal, how about looking at an approach that respects actual linguistic data. The Chomskyan model doesn't make any particularly compelling argument for a universal model and most researchers in this area focus on very limited sets of phenomona and make no particular attempt at broad coverage. Note that the proposal compares statistical approaches with the simple ASR style grammars, neither of which come anywhere close to a linguistic/explanatory model. The proposal pitches for a practical, data driven approach. What may feasibly come out of this is a somewhat more sophisticated equivalent of a table lookup of common phrases (with variations) and some reasonable constraints for the ASR engine. Not to mention the ASR problems inherent for a battlefield, or any, device with ONE language and a SMALL grammar. People don't seem to realize just how limited current speech rec technology is.