Discovery Procedures
American structural linguistics (pre-Chomskiyan
era) tradition studied exotic languages to preserve their culture and
traditions. The linguists like Franz Boas and his followers had found that the
notions and concepts of traditional grammar (of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit) were
useless against totally new languages with no historical relation between them
and the classical languages and/or Indo-European family of languages. The study
of language to study indigenous cultures made them aware of the diversity in
human languages. According to unlimited diversity principle, their beliefs
emerged as almost opposite to traditional grammar’s somewhat universalist
beliefs. The languages were different; each language had its own way of
organizing concepts of grammar hence the grammar of each language was
different. There was no guarantee that techniques, methods or tools developed
for language will work on very next language. Thus to study the grammar of a
language a linguist had to have a number of tools (for description and
analysis). As Sampson (1980) notes, the theory of language for Descriptivists
was that there was no theory at all. Instead they believed that they were
developing ‘techniques’ of analysis without going into details of creating a
theory of language. But, as Samson (1980) argues, “any analytical technique in
any domain must depend on some assumptions about the nature of the things
analysed”.
Apart from this contradiction of
having a theory of language or not having a theory of language, they didn’t
have any mechanism to select or reject the best technique or ‘discovery
procedure’ to analyse a given chunk of language. “They approached alternative
techniques of description in a more catholic way, seeing them as alternative
tools to be pulled out of the toolbag when needed” (Sampson 1980, p.74). Thus
there was no way to measure or weigh for a method to select the best method,
often it was a matter of personal choice. As for Charles Hocket (1954 quoted in
Sampson 1980) two different methods of analysis of same linguistic phenomenon
were equal, none better than the other one, moreover he described a third
method of analysis as well which, in his view, deserved equal attention.
In later years some linguists were
compelled to devise explicit ‘discovery procedures’ which, when written as a
computer program, would enable a computer to analyse linguistic data and derive
the grammar of that language without human intervention. Harris (1951, quoted
in Sampson 1980) wrote a complete account of discovery procedures to collect
utterance and analyse them at phonemic, morphemic and (to a rather less extent)
at syntactic level. There was a tension between the ‘unlimited diversity
principle’ and ‘view that linguistics should consist of mechanical rules for
processing data into grammars’. The methods of latter view couldn’t be
successful without assuming some ‘universal features’ in all languages.
The apparent lack of a theory of
language, the inability to select most efficient method of analysis (or
‘grammar’ of a language) and the over-emphasis on diversity led to the
criticism from Chomsky (2002) and the development of ‘evaluation procedures’ in
contrast of ‘discovery procedures’.
Evaluation Procedures
For Chomsky (2002), the grammar must
meet certain external criteria of adequacy e.g. generated sentences
should be acceptable by native speaker, and condition of generality by
which a grammar of a language must be constructed out of a theory which defines
terms like ‘phoneme’ and ‘phrase’ independent of a given language, thus
opposite to the idea of ‘unlimited diversity principle’.
Chomsky (2002) outlines three
requirements from a theory of language. The theory must provide “a practical
and mechanical method for actually constructing the grammar, given a corpus of
utterances” (p.57). He calls this requirement discovery procedure, which
is the strongest demand from a theory of language.
A weaker demand is to require a decision
procedure through which a theory of language may be able to decide whether
the provided grammar is best grammar for the language from which the corpus was
collected.
A third and weakest demand would be
that theory must be able to tell us which grammar is better, if a corpus and
two grammars G1 and G2 are given. He calls this requirement evaluation
procedure. In Chosmky’s view, the descriptivists require the most strongest
of these three procedures, which in his view is unreasonable to require from a
theory of language i.e. to ask it more than a practical evaluation procedure
for grammars.
In his view – by demanding
‘evaluation procedures’ instead of ‘discovery procedures’ from a theory – “a
number certain problems that have been the subject of intense methodological
controversy simply do not arise” (p.56), e.g. the problem of inter-dependence
of levels. While working to create discovery procedures, the descriptivists
assume that levels are interdependent and thus they cannot go beyond phonemic
and morphemic levels due to unsolved problems which their discovery procedure
cannot deal with at this current level. But by abandoning this higher level
requirement, the inter-dependency problem can be ignored and syntactic theory
can be advanced which was otherwise being ignored. As grammar of a language is
a complex system of interconnections, and other linguists’ (descriptivists)
beliefs about it “has been nurtured by a faulty analogy between the order of
development of linguistic theory and the presumed order of operations in
discovery of grammatical structure” (p.59).
Conclusion
Concluding the discussion, it can be
safely said that Chomsky’s proposal was a major methodological advancement
which led to a rather unified and universal theory of language. His ideas
provided an independent status to syntax which was previously ignored by the
descriptivists. Thus the advancement of a syntactic theory in turn could
provide some ideas to solve the un-resolved problems at the phonemic and
morphemic level.
References
Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. Schools
of Linguistics: Competition and evolution. Hutchinson: London, Melbourne,
Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg.
Chomsky, Naom. 2002. Syntactic
Structures. 2nd Edition. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin, New York.
