On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 11:01:55 -0700 Galen Seitz <[email protected]> dijo:
>I was going to put this on the plug-talk list for John to chew on, but >since the subject came up here... > >You Are Not a Parrot ><https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html> Too much to chew on simply and easily. And it's anglo-centric, meaning that it ignores features from non-Indo-European languages, e.g., polysynthetic languages, and even agglutinative languages. To my mind there are two points of focus in linguistics: 1) Traditional linguistics: Syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology 2) Discourse analysis: How we react to conversation. (2) is way harder to deal with. An example might be a classroom at PSU with multiple cameras to record instruction while teaching English to speakers of other language, in order to analyze the teacher-student interactions to improve their communication. Analyzing conversation is not a simple process; far more complex than other aspects of linguistics. Linguists involved in (2) are also well versed in (1), because it is considered the basis of linguistics, plus they had to study (1) on the way to their doctorates. Yet, incorrect discourse expressions can render misunderstanding, even while syntactically accurate: a) She discovered the answer. Who discovered the answer? A syntactician would simply render this utterance as a legal expression under the rules of English. A discourse analyst would want to know who 'she' is; was the person referred to earlier, was she the subject of a previous conversation, etc. I belong with the (1) linguists, but as a writer I find the work of (2) linguists very useful.
