Aye, but isn't Mark claiming that if you extend (1) beyond a certain degree, you forget what you said, and the model should capture this?
If not, then I wonder what counts as a long range dependency that the model shd exclude.
WG imposes no absolute limits on how far fillers can be from gaps. And it imposes no absolute limits on the length of parent--dependent relations.
--And.
Richard Hudson, On 26/06/2008 21:14:
> Dear And and Mark,
>
> I wondered whether to comment on this, so here goes. Long-distance dependencies
> are reduced in WG to a series of local dependencies, so there's not in fact any
> particular load on memory. For example:
> (1) What do you think Mary told me that she'd heard Bill is planning to do.
> 1. /What/ depends on /do/, so it's one of the latter's properties and it's no
> further than /do/ is from /think/.
> 2. /what/ depends on /think/, so ... /told./
> 3. /what/ depends on /told/, so .... /heard/.
> and so on. No need for anything like a stack with unlimited capacity: just the
> ability to remember the last few (3 or 4) words. I suppose the same is true of
> any 'hopping' analysis of extraction.
>
> Best wishes, Dick
>
>>> WG, of course, allows very long range dependencies.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, and I think I've complained to Dick about that. :)
>>
>> The underlying reason for this constraint is that the short-term
>> activation of nodes is called short-term for a reason: the activation
>> decays over time. A very-long-range dependency is of little use if you've
>> forgotten the first part by the time you've gotten to the second part. So
>> scientific models of syntax should limit the range of dependencies in a
>> way that fails to be falsified by empirical data.
>>
>>
>
> --
>
> Richard Hudson, FBA. Emeritus Professor, University College London
>
> * My web page: www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
> * Why I support the academic boycott of Israel:
> www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm#boycott
> * My latest book: /Language Networks. The New Word Grammar/
>
>
>
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