The correlations between Elman's and Harris' work seem to be quite strong. This implies that the models and analysis techniques that Elman has been developing might prove very useful for linguistic structuralists. ELman, himself, seems to have become a methodological structuralist. Given that Harris' work implies a realist position [KURODA], Elman may not be too upset being characterized as a neo-structuralist.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank Walt Savitch for many stimulating discussions concerning the subject matter of this paper. I would like to further thank Savitch for helpful critical comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
NOTES
1. The following comments by Fodor and Pylyshyn indicate their strong feeling that connectionism should be considered an implementation theory for classical cognitive theories.
... many of the arguments for Connectionism are best construed as claiming that cognitive architecture is implemented in a certain kind of network (of abstract "units"). Understood this way, these arguments are neutral on the question of what the cognitive architecture is. ... [FODOR88, pg.64]
... the implementation, and all properties associated with the particular realization of the algorithm that the theorist happens to use in a particular case, is irrelevant to the psychological theory; only the algorithm and the representations on which it operates are intended as a psychological hypothesis. ... Given this principled distinction between a model and its implementation, a theorist who is impressed by the virtues of Connectionism has the option of proposing PDP's as theories of implementation. But then ... these models are in principle neutral about the nature of cognitive processes. In fact, they might be viewed as advancing the goals of Classical information processing psychology by attempting to explain how the brain (or perhaps some idealized brain-like network) might realize the types of processes that conventional cognitive science has hypothesized. [FODOR88, pg.65]
2. Harris says the following about relative clauses:
English has a set of pronounings from which are derived all the modifiers in the language -- attributive adjectives, relative clauses, adverbs and PN phrases, and also subordinate clauses. All of these originate in relative clauses. The relative clause is a "secondary" sentence S2 connected by [a] semicolon to a "primary" sentence S1, where a word in S2 is reduced to a wh-pronoun on the grounds that it is the same as a word (the 'host') in S1. The wh-pronouning is carried out primarily on a word that is first in S2 (in many cases because of its front positioning as in section 3.11 [pp.109-115: Bill spoke to John; John knew Bill well --> Bill spoke to John; Bill John knew well]), when S2 has interrupted S1 (3.13 [pp.116-117: Bill spoke to John; Bill John knew well --> Bill -- Bill John knew well -- spoke to John]) immediately after the host. In this situation the two words that are the same are most often next to each other as in Bill -- Bill John knew well -- spoke to John --> Bill, whom John knew well, spoke to John. Although some of the sentences with front positioning may seem uncomfortable when standing alone, they are natural when interrupting a primary sentence after the same word as they placed in front position. [HARRIS82, pp.120-121]
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