Comment by suddenlybananas
1 day ago
It's so clear that Norvig knows so little about linguistics as a subject, I mean the suggestion that English is "kinda" a pro-drop language like Spanish is just unserious. There's this kind of lazy criticism of generative work where people hear the vague idea of a theory and critique without even seriously reading anything about it. These are facts that generativists are perfectly aware of and have explanations for.
It's sort of like criticising Galileo's putative experiment about dropping two balls from the leaning tower of Pisa by pointing out that a feather indeed falls slower than a iron ball.
He never made claim that English is kinda a pro-drop language. His argument that it's easy to make a binary statement that Spanish is a pro-drop language and English is not, but reality is messy. He shows counter example in English, might not be common, nothing is stopping English from evolving like that. No matter the rules, trying to describe natural languages with rules always breaks down, the exception just grows. I think his argument was well presented, we can't brush off probabilistic models because we don't understand it all when they work so well. This essay is 15 years old way before the LLMs of today. It would be interesting to see his additional take on it.
My point is that is not at all a counter example. It is left-edge deletion which is a distinct phenomenon which has been studied since the 70s. It might look like pro-drop to a naive person but it is fundamentally different. For example, you can delete plenty of things on the left edge that _aren't_ pronouns and you can't delete pronouns if they're not on the left-most edge. These are things that don't occur in pro-drop languages where you can always exclude the pronoun.
do you want a cracker -> you want a cracker?
I think he is dumb -> * I think is dumb
It's a lazy dismissal from someone who doesn't know the relevant facts.
I agree with you that the criticism of government & binding theory is lazy. However, it is not too far off from how people actually criticize it, wrt. giving example after example that G&B simply handles inelegantly (particularly wrt. Principle C). It is not a nice theory, and that is why no one believes in it anymore. Despite it being deep in every linguist's bones...