Dale notes in "English composition", aptly:
"Carnap says in this passage [from the seminal 1927 Aufbau] that the correlation he is identifying would be "very complicated" for just that reason. With Chomsky (1957), Syntactic Structures, there certainly suddenly seemed real hope that a syntax for natural language was, ultimately, achievable."
Grice and Warnock, for example, were pretty proud that by 1958, perhaps, this booklet with Mouton, "Syntactic Structures", was, of all books, the one chosen by J. L. Austin for his "Saturday mornings" for a couple of sessions.
Grice will go on to say that TWO people influenced him most. (In "Reply to Richards"). Intead of "Otto Jesperson" (Jerspersen really, but the typo is perhaps the transcriber's), he rather goes for Chomsky --. The other is Quine.
So, it may be safe to say that Grice then shared that hope with Chomsky. By 1967 he is already referring to the "Herculean task" that syntax may prove to be.
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Very interesting. Thank you J. L.
ReplyDeleteWill try to locate actual source. Warnock, "Saturday mornings" is a gem here -- it has been reprinted in Warnock, "Language and morality". Warnock goes on to expand a bit on Austin's method of 'reading' in those 'reading sessions'.
ReplyDelete"Not the paragraph, but the sentence!"
Chapman provides further illustration. Some of them pretty patronising, seeing that Chapman's background is linguistic rather than philosophic (She holds a PhD from Newcastle, under Burton-Roberts -- and teaches English (not composition) at Liverpool. She quotes from bits of papers that Grice used to provide schemata for some of the surface-structure of this or that sentence.
That Play-Group was a delight, it seems. It would be fun for Austin to spend some time with "Chomsky". I think they had spent some time with the 'abstract' notion of a 'game' and the idea that "logic" was a game, which was just a matter of rules one had to follow. Thus, Mrs. Grice (as reported by Chapman) recalls how her husband would spend a whole term or two with his grown-up colleagues at Oxford (they met at St. John's, too) filling bits of paper with dots and crosses, in something like look a game (Austin's "Symbolo", indeed -- which Grice compares to "Woof 'n' Proof". -- Reply to Richards).
This reference to Otto may merit a blog post of its own!