circuit+walker

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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"Colonel" Cody was one of the most colourful and controversial characters in aviation history. He dressed as a cowboy, frequently rode a horse, and appeared on the music-hall stage as a sharpshooter. Cody lived in England from 1896 and became a British subject in 1909. He wrote a melodrama, The Klondyke Nugget, which was first performed in 1898, with Cody as the villain and his wife as the heroine. It was a great success and Cody made enough money to indulge in his hobby of flying large kites. Several man-lifting kites were being developed in the mid-1890s, primarily for military observation purposes. Captain B.S.F. Baden-Powell built multiple hexagonal kites in England, while Lawrence Hargrave, in Australia, developed a very successful boxkite. Cody's man-lifting kites were so good that the British Government engaged him to supply kites, and act as an instructor with the Royal Engineers at the Balloon Factory, Farnborough. Cody's kites were rather like a box-kite with wings and, indeed, some were virtually tethered gliders. In 1905 a Royal Engineer reached a record height of 2,600 ft (790 m) in one of Cody's kites. While at Farnborough, Cody assisted with the construction of the experimental airship "British Army Dirigible No. 1", later known as Nulli Secundus. Cody was on board for the first flight in 1907. In the same year, Cody fitted an engine to one of his kites and it flew with no one on board; he also built a free-flying glider version. He went on to build a powered aeroplane with an Antoinette engine and on 16 October 1908 made a flight of 1,390 ft (424 m) at Farnborough; this was the first real flight in Britain. During the following years, Cody's large "Flying Cathedral" became a popular sight at aviation meetings, and in 1911 his "Cathedral" was the only British aeroplane to complete the course in the Circuit of Britain Contest. In 1912 Cody won the first British Military Aeroplane competition (a similar aeroplane is preserved by the Science Museum, London). Unfortunately, Cody and a passenger were killed when his latest aeroplane crashed at Farnborough in 1913; because Cody was such a popular figure at Farnborough, the tree to which he sometimes tethered his aeroplane was preserved as a memorial.

Later, there was a great controversy over who the first person to make an aeroplane flight in Britain was, as A.V. Roe, Horatio Phillips and Cody had all made hops before October 1908; most historians, however, now accept that it was Cody. Cody's title of'Colonel' was unofficial, although it was used by King George V on one of several visits to see Cody's work.

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   1) Grammar as Analogous to a Scientific Theory

   I think that the failure to offer a precise account of the notion "grammar" is not just a superficial defect in linguistic theory that can be remedied by adding one more definition. It seems to me that until this notion is clarified, no part of linguistic theory can achieve anything like a satisfactory development.... I have been discussing a grammar of a particular language here as analogous to a particular scientific theory, dealing with its subject matter (the set of sentences of this language) much as embryology or physics deals with its subject matter. (Chomsky, 1964, p. 213)

   2) Native Speakers and Their Grammar

   Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of his language are necessarily accurate. (Chomsky, 1965, p. 8)

   3) The Reduction of Transformation Rules In a Science of Grammar

   Much effort has been devoted to showing that the class of possible transformations can be substantially reduced without loss of descriptive power through the discovery of quite general conditions that all such rules and the representations they operate on and form must meet.... [The] transformational rules, at least for a substantial core grammar, can be reduced to the single rule, "Move alpha" (that is, "move any category anywhere"). (Mehler, Walker & Garrett, 1982, p. 21)

   4) The Relationship of Transformational Grammar to Semantics and to Human Performance

   he implications of assuming a semantic memory for what we might call "generative psycholinguistics" are: that dichotomous judgments of semantic well-formedness versus anomaly are not essential or inherent to language performance; that the transformational component of a grammar is the part most relevant to performance models; that a generative grammar's role should be viewed as restricted to language production, whereas sentence understanding should be treated as a problem of extracting a cognitive representation of a text's message; that until some theoretical notion of cognitive representation is incorporated into linguistic conceptions, they are unlikely to provide either powerful language-processing programs or psychologically relevant theories.

   Although these implications conflict with the way others have viewed the relationship of transformational grammars to semantics and to human performance, they do not eliminate the importance of such grammars to psychologists, an importance stressed in, and indeed largely created by, the work of Chomsky. It is precisely because of a growing interdependence between such linguistic theory and psychological performance models that their relationship needs to be clarified. (Quillian, 1968, p. 260)

   5) The Terminologies of Formal Grammar

   here are some terminological distinctions that are crucial to explain, or else confusions can easily arise. In the formal study of grammar, a language is defined as a set of sentences, possibly infinite, where each sentence is a string of symbols or words. One can think of each sentence as having several representations linked together: one for its sound pattern, one for its meaning, one for the string of words constituting it, possibly others for other data structures such as the "surface structure" and "deep structure" that are held to mediate the mapping between sound and meaning. Because no finite system can store an infinite number of sentences, and because humans in particular are clearly not pullstring dolls that emit sentences from a finite stored list, one must explain human language abilities by imputing to them a grammar, which in the technical sense is a finite rule system, or programme, or circuit design, capable of generating and recognizing the sentences of a particular language. This "mental grammar" or "psychogrammar" is the neural system that allows us to speak and understand the possible word sequences of our native tongue. A grammar for a specific language is obviously acquired by a human during childhood, but there must be neural circuitry that actually carries out the acquisition process in the child, and this circuitry may be called the language faculty or language acquisition device. An important part of the language faculty is universal grammar, an implementation of a set of principles or constraints that govern the possible form of any human grammar. (Pinker, 1996, p. 263)

   6) The Theory of Grammar

   A grammar of language L is essentially a theory of L. Any scientific theory is based on a finite number of observations, and it seeks to relate the observed phenomena and to predict new phenomena by constructing general laws in terms of hypothetical constructs.... Similarly a grammar of English is based on a finite corpus of utterances (observations), and it will contain certain grammatical rules (laws) stated in terms of the particular phonemes, phrases, etc., of English (hypothetical constructs). These rules express structural relations among the sentences of the corpus and the infinite number of sentences generated by the grammar beyond the corpus (predictions). (Chomsky, 1957, p. 49)