EFTA02491130.pdf

From: Noam Chomsky Sent: Saturday, August 1, 2015 10:30 PM To: Jeffrey E. Subject: RE: Re: Been on the road all day from the Cape to Cambridge. Along with every other car in Mass. Glad you liked the paper. Since Leonard Bernstein's Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard about 40 years ago there has been interesting work seeking structural similarities between language and at least some musical traditions, mostly western tonal. You might want to have a look. One of those doing the best work is my colleague David Pesetsky, a fine linguist and excellent musician. You're right that "reading the eyes" is a complex and fascinating topic, even extrapolating gaze, the way infants do but probably not other animals. And famously, staring into someone's eyes is far from neutral: either serious threat or real intimacy. But these are all cognitive interpretations of the (internal) output of the visual system. It could be argued that the computations involved in determining what we see are a central system, not just part of a processing system. Hard to see how to pose that as a real empirical issue that can be tested. From: jeffrey E. [mailto:jeevacation@gmail.comj Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2015 9:18 AM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: " processing" -my use of sloppy language , sorry, thanks for the great paper. music and its" understanding" , might be a closer representation to expressing a formalism that might help describe the events. it is not an either , or , it is a superposition of melody, prosody, harmony, within certain bounds that differentiate it from noise. fyi, in the paper it says the vision system is only input, .not sure that is corrrect. reading the eyes might have more to it than previously thought. On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Noam Chomsky wrote: There is a view that language is essentially a processing system. The arguments against it seem to me very power. I'll attach a recent paper about it, a contribution to a volume of essays dedicated to Jerry Fodor and focusing on his conception of language as processing (input modules). His version is far more sophisticated than the signal EFTA_R1_01612946 EFTA02491130 processing approaches that were all the rage in the 1950s, drawing from the successes of wartime technology in signal analysis and Shannon's information theory. Noam From: jeffrey E. [mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> ] Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2015 7:34 AM To: Noam Chomsky <chomsky@mit.edu Subject: Re: Re: can it be thought of as no more than signal processing. why not use the same technology that attempts to intercept communications and decode the signals and apply it to language. normally one tries to process the signals. i wonder if they put it in reverse. and processed the language in an attempt to find coherence.??? On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Noam Chomsky > wrote: There is a notion of coherence in both cases, but how to unify them, or whether it's possible, I don't really see. From: jeffrey E. [mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> ] Sent: Friday, July 31, 2015 1:33 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: what i have been calling my sense making module.. visual sense, is the image coherent. / ? why dont you ask your young friends what they think the chomsky questions should be. I will provide the reward On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote: Marr's group, as you know, studied edges, rigidity, etc. Those particular phenomena don't seem relevant to language, except indirectly (as Marr and I in fact discussed often): there must be built-in systems that enter into language processing (including determining grammatical status -- "legitimacy' — one property among many). That's what work on UG should be about. 2 EFTA_R1_01612947 EFTA02491131 Noam From: Jeffrey E. [mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> ] Sent: Friday, July 31, 2015 12:59 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: I hope you have fun at the institute. I am in santa fe. . you and i have discussed vision and edges etc rigidity etc. auto focus on a camera looks for the most contrast . is there an equivalent . first step to intuit whether a sentence is legitimate ? please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> , and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this 3 EFTA_R1_01612948 EFTA02491132 communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> , and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> , and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved please note The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> , and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved 4 EFTA_R1_01612949 EFTA02491133