1. This chapter tries to relate conceptual coordination to Piaget's and Chomsky's theories of learning, as well as to Langacker's theory of Cognitive Grammar. Problem is one of relating two types of development processes :

   • Biological (molecular genetics/mechanistic issues)

   • Cognitive (knowledge)

     We have to view coordination processes as both the

     • carrier (vehicle) and
     • constructor of memory,

     i.e. content and assembly, in order to disentangle the dichotomy.

   Use Kauffman's theory of self-organizing processes to relate the two?

2. Piaget's transformational Processes:

   • Reflective Abstraction, and
   • Self-regulation

   are relevant to conceptual coordination. Reflective abstraction in particular can be shown to have parallels to conceptualization, as shown in Table 9.1, pg. 224.

   The second process, abstraction, fits (C's) claim that every categorization is a generalization. Piaget's main point:

   The ability to comprehend, focus, make sense in logical ways (...) develops in experience.

   [I omit further discussion of Piaget because I don't have a way to summarize it.]

3. Chomsky's Mental Physiology: provides another, competing? opposing? account of learning.

   Note: these green (deleted from print version) blocks will be my way of injecting my own opinions about things I don't agree with, or have a critique of. First problem is that I think that Clancey bases his understanding of Chomsky on older versions of Chomsky's theory, going back to 1965, 1981, etc. when now many things have changed. Second problem I have is that Chomsky's view of what goes on in language is always focused on what he calls the ideal speaker-hearer who never makes a mistake, never has a doubt about his/her intuitions about language, always knows what is grammatical and what is not, never is concerned about the social appropriateness of utterances, never thinks about grammaticality beyond the level of the sentence, and so on. Such persons, of course, do not exist. This perception of language is known as ``autonomous" theory, i.e. that language structure is independent of personal and social variables. But among `autonomous' theorists there is a tendency to lapse into treating oneself as the ideal speaker-hearer, i.e. the intuitions of the `speaker who doesn't exist' can be found by consulting one's own intuitions. One doesn't go out and get data, one sits in one's office in the linguistics department. and consults one's own brain. Result: Chomsky's perception of language is not based on empirical observation of language behavior, or even empirical observation of neural activity, but on his own (admittedly brilliant) ideas and intuitions about how language must be structured. Because Clancey only consults the earlier writings of Chomsky, there is an overemphasis in Clancey on the notion that grammar is transformational when in fact the earlier emphasis on this notion has been largely abandoned. What happened was that everybody and his brother went out and began proposing (a) elaborate "deep structures" for the simplest utterances, and (b) elaborate transformations to derive these deep structures and convert them into (c) surface structures. People, Chomsky included, began to have doubts about these elaborate abstract structures, wondering (e.g) how young children could even begin to learn them. The elaboration of vast complicated deep structures and transformations also meant that the goal of proposing some kind of underlying universal grammar became more elusive: languages were just too different. Result: elaborate deep structures and transformations were abandoned, and the goal was to find a way to get to the complexity and great difference that we find on the `surface' of natural languages, but derive it somehow from some finite, small number of universal features. Some people (former transformational/generativists, such as Langacker) abandoned this line of theorizing altogether, but among the true believers (loyal to Chomsky), the emphasis became one of proposing generative grammars, that generated all the grammatical sentences of the language, but also generated some that were ungrammatical. These needed to be filtered out, so what had to be proposed them was a filtration of interpretive system, which were different for different languages, and would get rid of the weird sentences that the grammar would generate, but were not appropriate. (This was also thought to take care of the social and other 'appropriateness' problems.) Cognitively, this interpretive component bothers many people (incl. me) because it means that we are constantly judging the grammaticality or appropriateness of a vast number of ungrammatical sentences generated by our internal grammars. Many people feel there must be some other way to handle this.

   Clancey's view of what Chomsky is saying is given in the first quote on pg. 226. (About the only part of this that most people would still accept is the idea that nouns, verbs, etc. are `likely to prove universal deep-syntactic categories of human languages'). Another claim is that grammars etc. consist of or are based on meaning-independent processes, i.e. that they operate at a deep level without meaning, and meaning is assigned later by the interpretive component. [This is also problematical for many.]

   Clearly Chomsky's theory won early adherents among the techie community because (as Clancey says) "it was determined that transformational grammars could be formulated as augmented transition networks (ATNs)." The generativity part of this is still accepted by many, but not the emphasis on transformational grammar. (See fn. 2, pg. 226).

   Not clear to me whether Clancey is waffling about Chomsky on pg. 227, when he says that Chomsky's view is controversial (true) and maybe misunderstood (also possibly true, but maybe not always). In the opposing view (e.g. Langacker 1986, theory of cognitive grammar ) patterns are representations of experienced expressions:

   Grammar is not a distinct level of linguistic representation, but reduces instead to the structuring and symbolization of conceptual content...

   Lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a continuum of symbolic units, divided only arbitrarily into separate "components"---it is ultimately as pointless to analyze grammatical units without reference to their semantic value as it is to write a dictionary which omits the meanings of its lexical units. (pp. 1-2)

   Clancey lists the three options as some kind of continuum or spectrum:

   • Piaget's position: general, uniform learning principles;
   • Chomsky's position: meaning-general, linguistic mechanism;
   • Langacker's position; conceptual patterns.

   Langacker's claim: linguistic structure is not autonomous or meaning-general, and does not involve an inherited language organ but rather is conceptually constructed as a generalization of actual utterances. [ i.e., it is based on experience: children develop language from the input they get. ]

   "Conceptualization [...] encompasses novel conception as well as fixed concepts; sensory, kinesthetic, and emotive experience; recognition of immediate context (social, physical, linguistic); etc. Pg. 3.

   Points:

   • grammar and lexicon on a continuum of conceptualization

   • all linguistic patterns derive from (i) semantic, phonological and symbolic structures that occur overtly in linguistic expressions; or, (ii) structures that are schematic for us in (i); and (iii) categorizing relationships involving the structures in (i) and (ii).

   • This rules out arbitrary descriptive things, such as dummy elements, contentless features, abstract underlying structures that are very different, e.g. passives from actives.

   • Clancey: Langacker's sketch fits the perspective of neural map activation and composition. (Quote pg. 228 about tree-structures, transformations etc.)

     But here Clancey gets confused: he seems to favor what Langacker says ("relationships conceptually constructed in the past are organizing new utterances; previous sequences are being reactivated, generalized, and are operating on different levels of abstraction. etc. etc.") But then Clancey says that "all is captured by transformational grammar." Langacker would deny this, many others would deny this, and even Chomsky would have doubts. The word is generative, not transformational .

   • Now Clancey goes on to characterize Chomsky's claims:

     • Linguistic ability reflects an evolutionary development of the brain and its physical properties, not just ... learning. [hs: Okay, humans are different from apes etc.]

     • Linguistic ability reflects a specialization of biological function, just as in other physical processes. [hs: Okay, but how come this so-called linguistic "organ" doesn't show up in one place in the brain, but in many different locations? How is it different from growing feet instead of wings? Chomsky used to use the example of 'bipedal gait' i.e. walking upright, using same 'organs' as other animals, but different gait. ]

     • Conceptualization is more than sensorimotor coordination, and is not just linguistic; but semantics can't be understood without it. [hs: Then quotes Chomsky as saying it should be possible for conceptual system to be intact and functioning even if the linguistic system is not. ... [Hello? ]

     • Linguistic syntax is produced by a device ... that is general across human languages. (Chomsky 1957; could we have a more recent quote?)

     • The rules of syntax are not arbitrary descriptions of patterns, but restricted to certain structural characteristics of phrases.

       Here Clancey chides Chomsky for appearing to `accept uncritically the notion of a stored-rule mechanism.' (Chomsky quote: "Our knowledge of language is ... a system of rules and principles that enter into a capacity [to do certain things]."

       Here Clancey clearly favors Langacker, disfavors Chomsky; Clancey/Langacker want a mechanism in which 'patterns are embodied in coordinated sequences of behavior.' Thus, sequences that seem to correspond to linguistic phrases must be integrated with multimodal attention and physical coordination. But then Clancey states himself to favor Chomsky's 'mental organ and mental physiology.'

       Thus:

       • The processes of categorization, sequencing and generalization occur uniformly in normal adult humans, thus they are universal.

       • But, categorization of sequences, a.k.a. conceptualization involves additional aspects of coordination in humans, including:

         • holding active a focus detail, to include in a reconceptualization.

         • correlating multiple focus details.

         • rearranging sequences, breaking out of mere serial or habitual ordering.

         • shifting between top down and bottom up organizers.

         • Naming (i.e. reifying ) conceptualizations and then coordinating relations of names.

         • (Thus: Clancey is distinguishing between conceptualizations that distinguish cognition from mere perceptual categorization, etc. etc. and building on transformational ( sic? Not! ) grammar, would be describing Chomsky's mental organ. Chomsky (says Clancey) thus deemphasizes Piaget's sensorimotor theory of learning, because it can't explain transformational grammar. [But what if we don't accept transformational grammar? What if we consider Lakoff and Searle, whom Clancey suddenly introduces here?] Bottom line is Chomsky's (1981) notion of 'innate structures and principles' which are the essence of humans, cognitively.

           Clancey then concludes that there is value in all of these perspectives! A neural mechanism that points in direction of patterns developed in experience assembled out of self-organizing neurological processes, not (mere) words and descriptive rules.

4. Berwick's appeal to connectionism.

   [I am not competent to discuss this.]

5. Kauffman's Autocatalytic symbol strings.

   [I am not competent to discuss this, either.]

Postscript: For Chapter 10, in the discussion of `center-embedded' sentences, with the limit of three, I have been collecting examples of 'real' sentences of this sort:

• [Hopes [that the crew of a tug [that sank yesterday in the Gulf of Alaska]₃ will soon be recovered]₂ are rapidly fading.]₁

• [Reports [that the Van Gogh painting [that was stolen last month from the Louvre]₃ had appeared on the art market at an asking price of $6 million]₂ were declared to be false today by the French authorities.]₁

• [Doubts [that the validity of the hypothesis [that was proposed by the author of this book]₃ will be proven]₃ are common among theoreticians of the old school.]₁

• [The accusation [that the pilot of the plane [that crashed near Hainan Island last week]₃ was a daredevil risk-taker with a history of crazy stunts]₂ was vehemently denied by the Chinese authorities.]₁

• [A case involving a claim [that a stolen copy of the Treaty of Fontainebleau [which was declared missing from the French National Archives 12 years ago]₃ had been put up for auction at Sotheby's in 1995]₂ will soon go to trial.]₁

The example sentences Clancey cites [``The book [that the man [who hired me] wrote] deals with politics"] often give the impression that even 3 embeddings are hard to decode; it seems to me that the more fully specified they are, the easier they are to decipher. They're also more common with psychological verbs (`doubt, hope, fear, believe') or expressions derived from psych verbs (`doubts, hopes, accusations, reports').