Minimalist Angst

I'm trying to write the introduction to a new monograph on Vietnamese: to do this, unfortunately, I have to make sense of current Minimalism. This is not easy, even for those more talented than I am, but—given that the subtitle of the work will be An Alternative Minimalist Analysis of Vietnamese Phrase Structure—I have no choice but to give it a shot. Here is an informal reflection on the topic, some parts of which I may be able to use:

'I must say that, like many people, I find a lot of Minimalist writing exceptionally dense. This may be for good reason—and it may just be too hard for me—but I have a sense that it's unnecessarily obscure and convoluted, and that much of the difficulty stems from two considerations: first, that Minimalism, up to 1999 at least, was a reductionist programme aiming to dismantle what was viewed as its too complex predecessor. Yet if the general spirit of Minimalism is correct, we shouldn't have gone there in the first place. Early minimalism reads more like a set of suggestions to Linux users on how to debug Windows 95. To which the appropriate response might well be: why bother? One possible reason is that this reductionism was early Minimalism's only real raison d'etre, and for many people this still seems to be the case: GB wasn't obviously broken on the empirical side of things, and certainly Minimalism has done little to improve or expand empirical coverage, so the main justification for it seems to have been an exegetical house-keeping exercise aimed at simplification for its own sake. (I'm reminded of a university friend of mine, now a distinguished philosophy professor, who dismantled a Mini engine, and put it back together in working order leaving out about 20 redundant components. He found this result immensely satisfying, as it may have been, but it didn't really extend his engineering knowledge, or come to that, make a better car: indeed, the redundancy may have been engineered in).

Leaving the analogy before it quickly collapses, I'll move to the second consideration as to why I think Minimalism is so hard, namely, because there is no consensus on which empirical facts it is supposed to derive. Indeed there is little consensus of whether it should have any empirical coverage at all with respect to end-state grammars. This uncertainty has had particularly deleterious consequences for language acquisition research, such that, as far as I can make out, no-one is doing empirical Minimalist studies of the acquisition of syntax. Rather, the language acquisition field has fragmented into two groups: on the one hand, those who continue to do GB-style acquisition, but call it "Minimalist" (as the new cover term for generative), and on the other, those like Stephen Crain, Andrea Gualmini and others for whom post LF-semantics is the new syntax. The uncertainty has also led researchers like Culicover (who I think makes some excellent headway in trying to cut to the chase, or better, finding some chase to cut to) to draw such distinctions as that between "Abstract" and "Concrete Minimalism". Personally, I'm not optimistic that Minimalism has a future in the language acquisition area until someone clearly spells out what it's supposed to do or explain. Moves, such as the ploy critiqued in Atkinson (2001), in which previously syntactic phenomena are dumped into PF (faute de mieux) are again reminiscent of the strong UG lobby in SLA, where mismatches between native-speaker and L2 learners were previously written off as due to processing errors or pragmatics. If it really has no empirical teeth, or even empirical aspirations, Mainstream Minimalism not likely to win over many voters in the long term.'

If you have any thoughts on this rant, please let me know.

Mea Culpa

This is the first in an occasional series where I'll try to put down some more general thoughts about the work I've been engaged in these last 20 years or so. I'll start with this observation about language acquisition, which can be found in the introductory chapter to my 1995 monograph on Irish:

"The goal of determining the precise nature of Universal Grammar is externally constrained in two ways. First, as we have mentioned, there is the fact that first language acquisition is uniformly successful (barring pathology) and that it is also astonishing rapid; by the age of four at the latest, children show clear evidence of having acquired all of the major grammatical properties of their particular language."

There is nothing particularly controversial about this assertion in the context in which it was made, namely, in a book by a generative syntactician for other generative syntacticians. I don't know if I believed it then, or whether I just followed the prevailing rhetoric, but one thing is certain: it sits uneasily, to say the least, with the following quote from a commentary I wrote last year, and which has just appeared in Second Language Research. (Notice, incidently, the change from we to I: I'm not sure if this reflects greater humility or arrogance, and in what direction—most likely, I'm more comfortable in defending my own position, now, whatever others may say.)

"As someone who spends the greater part of his time in first language research, I am continually struck by the optimism displayed by second language researchers about young children’s language abilities. For the fact is that—barring a very few precocious exceptions—children do not perform like little adults either in terms of spoken language comprehension and production, or with respect to their performance in judgment tasks. Instead, they behave (unsurprisingly!) like children, deviating in a variety of interesting and systematic ways from the adults around them. Pace Hawkins, there is simply no empirical evidence for the claim that ‘children…acquire all the major structures of their language by the age of three-and-a –half [my emphasis: NGD]’; nor am I aware of any first language researcher who has advanced such a claim."

Oh dear. In a discipline that values consistency over credibility almost every time, this is very bad news, and, at least, a indictment on my own lack of scholarship. The puzzling thing is, though, that in spite of the clear contradiction, I don't really feel that I've taken a u-turn, to use political commentators' favourite metaphor. Instead, what is of interest is what such assertions are in (rhetorical) service of. Let me explain. In the passage that follows the latter (2009) quote, I wrote quite carefully:

"There is of course evidence supporting the view that children show sensitivity to subtle abstract constraints of the adult target grammar considerably in advance of their own productive capacities, and that they project far beyond the input in ways that are consistent with nativist explanations, but those are entirely different matters."

They are, but the two are often conflated. All, I think, that most generativists intend by making such sweeping claims about acquisition is to refer to the mismatch between young children's language production and their capacity to make adult-like discriminations between well-formed and syntactically deviant utterances: i.e., that "children [are able to] project far beyond the input in ways that are consistent with nativist explanations." Having thus pointed the reader into the rhetorical flow of nativism, we then set about our own analyses, largely ignoring the general acquisition issues from there on. For this claim about projection to be legitimate, it doesn't have to be true that children have mastered the adult grammar by the age of three, four or five or indeed any age up to adulthood: even though early emergence of grammatical knowledge is considered to be one of the hallmarks of innateness (Crain 1991), it doesn't follow that late emergence runs against innateness; what matters, as Crain & Pietroski (2001) point out is the way in which the developmental trajectory is constrained...

I suspect now that the source of the difficulty is a failure adequately to distinguish between the capacity to "create grammar" and the capacity to "learn language". The only person I know of to clearly articulate the difference between these two with respect to theories of Universal Grammar is Wolfgang Klein, whose presentation will receive the attention it deserves in this monograph I'm supposed to be getting on with...