(((Aperols for Aurelian)))

Best summary I've seen.

In a few years, when this hype-cycle about the Spicy Autocomplete is over, people like this are going to be SO embarrassed that they were swept up in it. It's like if philosophers had come out of the woodwork circa 1999 to issue proclamations on the profundity of Pets dot Com.

The definitive post on "AI" in software engineering: uphack.io/blog/post/the-…

@haspelmath Because that perspective has been shown repeatedly to be a dead end (any finding ever associated with the Autonomy of Syntax shows this). Agreement, case, L-selection (proud of vs. angry at, etc.), gender systems. The list is endless. Is flat-earthism also a "perspective"? 🙂

@MagnusPharao @chrisinthebooks lmao touché! see?? there's a right way & a wrong way to do this 😂

@pictureofitself @chrisinthebooks Isn't this an autology?

What an utter embarrassment for everyone involved. linguistlist.org/issues/37/687/

@MagnusPharao @chrisinthebooks Remember, kids: decorum-shaming is the path of the imbecile.

@chrisinthebooks @pictureofitself It is a satisfying way to leave an annoying discussion we'd have to admit.

@MagnusPharao @chrisinthebooks He sure ain't showing it here 🤷‍♂️

@pictureofitself @chrisinthebooks Chris is one of the least ignorant people I know

@MagnusPharao @chrisinthebooks Sometimes, yes!

@pictureofitself @chrisinthebooks Language <= language use

@chrisinthebooks @MagnusPharao I'm muting you now - one of the joys of being a FORMER academic is that it's not my job to remediate your ignorance. 👋

@chrisinthebooks @MagnusPharao You seem to not understand some basic points: 1. Language ≠ Language Use Wrt "you", prag. influenced the latter not the former. 2. What *formal* means The point is precisely that "you" is *formally* plural while semantically entirely underspecified.

@chrisinthebooks @MagnusPharao number-neutral pronoun. At that point, the fact that it governs plural agreement even with a singular referent became opaque, synchronically, to speakers. Voilà: pragmatic pressure on diachrony without any pragmatic pressure on synchronic syntactic representations. 2/2

@chrisinthebooks @MagnusPharao Let me give you a concrete example that would perhaps help clarify: "You" was a purely plural pronoun, which was getting overused due to a pragmatic pressure (style/politeness). At some point, it got reanalyzed by young people acquiring the language as a 1/

@MagnusPharao but nobody has ever put forth a working semantic definition of those. in mainstream formal sem., they are both <e,t>. & of course there are nouns like "action" and verbs like "to exist" that resist the more naive attempts.

@pictureofitself At first I was thinking the way to get rid of syntax would be by simply defining nouns and verbs (etc) as semantic categories (through their semantic properties) rather than as syntactic ones, which I think might be doable? But it seems Elbourne is doing something more radical...

@MagnusPharao @chrisinthebooks This is a fair point! But it stops well short of course of the proclamations made by the workshop's participants.

@pictureofitself @chrisinthebooks It does have that, but it also has the opposite, and synchronic influence of semantics on syntax in use is necessary to produce diachronic patterns...

@MagnusPharao ok but like maybe start with the painfully obvious challenges and don't go public until you have something to say about them...? (same criticism applies, with equal force, to most everything Chomsky has had to say post-1990 or so)

@pictureofitself Skimming Elbourne just now, hadn't heard of it before. I don't think it is necessarily silly to start with the strongest possible proposition and explore where it may hold (and where it may fail). I think that is pretty much what Chomsky has done at each step (backwards).

@chrisinthebooks @MagnusPharao lol no. Syntax has endless things that are synchronically arbitrary but which can be traced to diachronic pressures (whose causal elements are often, by now, completely opaque to the naive speaker). The diachronic shifts are what is being influenced.

@MagnusPharao @pictureofitself How would diachronic influence without synchronic influence even work? A process of continuous evolution based on functional pressure requires the syntax-semantics boundary to be leaky and therefore destroys any strong autonomy assumptions.

@MagnusPharao Dude, this is organized by Elbourne's dept, & the only work cited is his book "A program for *eliminating* syntactic categories" (emph. added). Alexiadou & Sauerland's work, alluded to but not cited, is entirely eliminationist of syntax. Ramchand holds the same (silly) beliefs.

@pictureofitself "to explore ways in which the syntax of a sentence might be influenced by its semantics" doesn't sound like "fully reducible to semantics" to me

@MagnusPharao Influenced by sem-prag diachronically? Sure. Fully reducible to sem-prag in the minds of current speakers? Lmao, no. (And note: this is explicitly the hypothesis that the clowns linked above are pursuing.)

@pictureofitself I'd say the assumption of autonomy of syntax has been shown to be a dead end... and that there are tonnes of ways in which syntax is obviously influenced by semantics and pragmatics. But then I would say that, being a funcitonalist..

@MagnusPharao x.com/pictureofitsel…

@pictureofitself why?

@pictureofitself Why is this an embarrassment, rather than a worthwhile attempt to explore a particular perspective?