Monday, October 14, 2024

Hinton on Chomsky

First Reactions (Interview with Adam Smith)

October 8, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-icD_KmvnnM 

(5:20)

“So there is a whole school of linguistics that comes from Chomsky that thinks that its complete nonsense to say that these things understand. That they don’t process language at all in the same way as we do. I think that school is wrong. I think it’s clear now that neural nets are much better at processing language that anything ever produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics. But there is still a lot of debate about that, particularly among linguists.”

CBMM10 Panel: Research on Intelligence in the Age of AI

November 20, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg-w_n9NJIE 

(38:30)

“So there’s this crazy guy at MIT called Chomsky who has been claiming it’s all innate. We know now that doesn’t have to be the case. And Chomsky’s whole view of language is kind of crazy when you look back on it because language is about conveying meaning. Its’ about conveying stuff. And Chomsky kind of ignored that aspect of it. It is as if you wanted to understand what a car is, and for all of us, understanding a car would mean – a large part of it would be understanding how the engine works that makes it go, but you can imagine someone saying ‘no’, ‘no’. The thing about cars is to understand why it is you get three-wheeled cars and four-wheeled cars, but you never get a five-wheeled car. And that is what we need to understand about cars. And that seems to me like Chomsky’s theory of language. He wanted to understand why certain syntactic constructions aren’t possible. And as far as I can see, he did everything he could to avoid the basic issue of how does language mean. And I think these large language models have put an end to that. Not in Chomsky’s mind, but in more or less everybody else’s mind.”


Syntax and Semantics (humorous)

Semantics pushed herself out of her recliner, after a lazy morning reading through her favorite novel, ‘Montague and his Discontents’. Her muscles felt stiff, and she felt the need for a brisk walk outside. There were little drops still hitting the window panes, but it was bound to clear up soon. So she jumped up and grabbed the leash.

Saturday, October 5, 2024

A Smuggling Approach to HXPS

Abstract: This squib argues that Heavy XP Shift (HXPS) is to be analyzed as smuggling (in the sense of Collins 2005): The shifted constituent moves to Spec FocP, followed by vP movement smuggling the external argument around the focused constituent.

A Smuggling Approach to HXPS


Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Implicit Arguments for Dummies

In this post, I summarize my recent MIT Press monograph for non-linguists. 

Collins, Chris. 2024. Principles of Argument Structures: A Merge-Based Approach. MIT Press, Cambridge. 

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Back to Cornell (September 25-27 2024)

In this post, I write down some of my thoughts and observations on returning to Cornell to give a talk, after almost two decades away. It is loosely based on my Facebook posts.

Friday, September 27, 2024

Cornell Talk Video (September 26 2024): A Merge-Based Approach to Argument Structure

Here I post the handout and videos for my Cornell talk. I don't know how long the videos will stay posted, so you should download them as soon as possible. This talk covers the same material as the Yushan Salon talk, but it is considerably more polished.

Cornell Talk Announcement 

Handout

part 1
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oPLqPM3uPS09Ue0IyFryBQrSRarMoEO-/view?usp=sharing

part 2
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TlvyLDJDl3ZYOk0_Ew53EDlW9ViBjn51/view?usp=sharing

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

On the origin of the term ‘implicit argument’ (Tom Roeper)

 On the origin of the term ‘implicit argument’

Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

Sept 21,2024