At 08:39 2002-05-01 -0400, Tolkin, Steve wrote: >In fact the small pieces of KM that are worthwhile are based on a variety >of techniques: mostly statistical natural language processing (This is not >a mainstream part of linguistics for many years, because it does not pay >any attention to even grammar.
You allude to the concept of "mainstream linguistics". My experience in linguistics points quite strongly to one conclusion: it just doesn't matter what is supposedly "mainstream" linguistics, if there even is such a thing. For example, the fact that the formalists manage to crank out more grad students and articles than functionalists do, says nothing about who's right, since the approaches are incommensurate. In short, scholarship (much less academia) is not a democracy, any more than religion is. -- Sean M. Burke http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
