Chomskybot

Al Filreis

The Chomskybot, which I've been using for years, recently located to a new server. So I've changed my links variously and found a renewed fascination for what it does to and with the language of Noam Chomsky. Chomskybot takes sentence parts from Chomsky's linguistics writings and organizes them into randomly formed paragraphs.

It works by what its programmer and others call the “American Chinese Menu” principle, viz. One from Column A, One from Column B. There are four sets of phrases: Initiating Phrases, Subject Phrases, Verbal Phrases, and Terminating Phrases The program, called ”Foggy,” simply selects one of each, at (pseudo-)random, and then strings them together into a sentence. Five sentences make a paragraph. Foggy never even gets down to the word level; everything is phrases, and most of the phrases don't mean much. “In this,” says the programmer, ”foggy resembles a large proportion of real language.”

Here's the Chomskyian paragraph I just read:

Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that this selectionally introduced contextual feature is not quite equivalent to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. It may be, then, that a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is unspecified with respect to an important distinction in language use. Let us continue to suppose that any associated supporting element is rather different from a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar. To characterize a linguistic level L, the descriptive power of the base component does not affect the structure of a parasitic gap construction. Suppose, for instance, that an important property of these three types of EC is to be regarded as the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol.

Now here's another:

By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, any associated supporting element is not to be considered in determining irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. Nevertheless, the descriptive power of the base component appears to correlate rather closely with the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial does not affect the structure of problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that an important property of these three types of EC does not readily tolerate an abstract underlying order. Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction cannot be arbitrary in a descriptive fact.

June 12, 2011

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Noam Chomsky

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

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ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.