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From: staff@cadlab.sublink.ORG (Alex Martelli)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,misc.education
Subject: Re: Another thread gone tangential
Message-ID: <553@cadlab.sublink.ORG>
Date: 15 Dec 90 11:54:07 GMT
References: <1811@blackbird.afit.af.mil> <9237:Dec1315:28:3190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1814@blackbird.afit.af.mil> <26334:Dec1403:45:1590@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Organization: CAD.LAB, Bologna, Italia
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brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
	...
>Yes. No linguist in the last fifty years has tried to formally model
>natural language without taking semantics into account.

You know Dan, you keep making absolute assertions, and they are SO
grating.  Leonard Bloomfield only died in 1949 - that's barely over
THIRTY years, NOT fifty - and I would like you to now try and defend
the position that HE "took semantics into account"!!!  Indeed, just
to avoid injecting my personal bias I would like to quote from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica - "Bloomsfield's followers pushed even
further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that
were not based on meaning.  One of the most characteristic features
of post-Bloomfieldian American structuralism, then, was its almost
complete neglect of semantics".  I guess you'll have to grasp at
that "almost", won't you?  Or would you prefer to argue that the
structuralists, with their "discovery procedures" to be mechanically
applied to texts, were not trying "to formally model natural language"?
Please note that post-Bloomfieldian structuralism takes us fully
into the fifties, and that's definitely NOT outside "the last fifty
years".
Not that I would *AGREE* with Bloomfield and followers, mind you, but
baldly asserting, in practice, that they did not exist, and indeed
*dominate* American linguistics for a long period WELL within your
chosen 50-years limit, is tantamount to Orwellian history-rewriting.
-- 
Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 45, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) staff@cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex@am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; 
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/401.3 (home only).