SUO: *Date 26 Feb 2002 -- Linguistic Formalisms
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
SUO WG Members,
I believe that I am rather sanguine -- in the ruddily resigned sense of the word --
about the amount of time that it will most likely take us to generate any sort
of useful product here, but one of the things that we will never have enough
time for is waiting on the SUMO kitchens to recreate the last 50 years
of formal lingustics out of the scratch that they currently find
in their intellectual and techinical larders.
There are many different schools of thought in contemporary linguistics,
but much like the situation in quantum mechanics, the preponderance of
their differences can be classified as "interpretive", while the core
of shared formalism remains fairly well invariant.
In any case, the SUMO group continues to display no interest
in the comparative analysis of these "standard" perspectives,
nor in the "standard" principles and practices that they share,
nor again in the truly novel demands of integrating these views,
where we might justly expend some creativity, but appears to be
dead set and hell bent to keep on trucking on their principle
of "anything but what is standard elsewhere" (ABWISE), as if
a standards effort should be trying to create a new school
of linguistics that nobody needs, and without information
about the schools and the standards already in place.
I really do not understand what the problem is --
the basics here are thoroughly standard already --
they have been for years -- there is a vast host
of standard monographs and textbooks that make up
the corpus of the subject. If the representation
language that they have picked out for themselves
is too much of a strait-jacket to write out axioms
and definitions of suitable complexity or subtlety,
or to think about them clearly, or to compute with
them effectively once they do, then maybe that is
telling us a thing or two about that language.
Jon Awbrey
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤