Date: Wed, 04 Mar 1998 20:33:26 +0000
From: Shin Watanabe <watanabe_unity.ncsu.edu>
To: yeh_harlequin.co.uk
Subject: Interesting!!!


Dear Sir.

I think your home page is extremely interesting. I teach Japanese and Intro.
to Linguistics at North Carolina State University,  USA.  I am one of those
people who have been trained in the Chomskian tradition. ( Well,  I did not
have much choice as a graduate student. )
I am now working in the framework called Montague semantics,  which is
classified as a branch of formal semantics.  As a matter of fact,  I am 
interested in analyzing languages, not in methodologies.  For me,  theories
and technicalities are just tools to describe ideas.  

One thing which is clear to me that Chomsky's theory is not enough to 
account for many intriguing linguistics phenomena.  We,  Japanese linguists,
know many 'rules' of this language. Chomsky's theory is not so appealing to me
( Well,  I still believe a version of innateness hypothesis,  though. ), 
because it does not say anything about meanings,  while many linguistic
phenomena are to be explicated in terms of meanings ( I do not know what
'meaning' really is.) 

By the way,  I think,  Chomsky is more humble than you think he is.
I heard from people from MIT that he does not even call his theory a 'theory'.
 He says it is just a 'program'. 

Best,

Shin Watanabe