Der Schauende (cross-posting)

This will not be news to those of you who had a decent mathematical education, but it was to me. After 51 years, thanks to my son Sean's science homework, I've just learned that there is a difference between precision and accuracy. Really, I had no idea...

(Accuracy, it seems, is only for realists: but even relativists can be—relatively—precise.)

Now for some catch-up.

(Same series, though mine is an earlier edition)

A few months ago, I picked off the shelf a copy of Rilke's 'Der augewählten Gedichte, anderer Teil. (I don't have the erster Teil, unfortunately). This undated Insel Verlag edition was published in Leipzig, either just before or during the War, judging from the cover, and must have belonged to my uncle Kenneth (erstwhile Professor of German at Keele University), as do all of the few decent German books I now possess—including an early copy of Hermann Paul's Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, the translation of which will be on my to-do list, probably for ever. It won't happen today, that's for sure: I taught four 90-minute classes virtually back to back, without lunch, came home and cooked dinner, helped to bathe and put the kids in bed...

...Anyway—und dann und wann ein weißer Elephant' (which isn't in this collection, but still careers around my head at least once a week)—I was at my reading of 'Der Schauende' some months ago, and thought: Wow (or some such hint at the ineffable).

What a brilliant piece.

...Wie ist das klein, womit wir ringen
Was mit uns ringt, wie ist das groß:
ließen wir, ähnlicher den Dingen,
uns so vom großen Sturm bezwingen — 
wir würden weit und namenlos.

Was wir besiegen, ist das Kleine
und der Erfolg selbst macht uns klein...

Stunning, really. Disheartening, too: after hearing these too perfect lines, writing anything—saying anything—seems only to add more junk to an already overflowing landfill.

And so I looked on YouTube for a competent rendering of the poem, and found something quite dreadful, an object lesson in how not to read anything (not even a grocery list), in how a bad performance can utterly ruin even the finest lines.

But then I looked again today
And found the poem resurrect
by Oskar Werner, a man whose name,
though t'is renowned, I never knew
Till now — and more's the shame.

[with apologies to Heine]

YouTube taketh away, but giveth, too
...und dann und wann: ein Wunder — Click to play

Was wir besiegen, ist das Kleine
und der Erfolg selbst macht uns klein...

Postscript 10/25: This evening, browsing my subscriptions on Youtube, I came across this talk by Nigel Fabb (one of the other Nigel linguists) on verse design and verse delivery, focussing on Dylan Thomas' reading of his own and other's poetry. Fascinating material, interesting ideas:

Minimalism and Semantic Syntax: Interpreting Multifunctionality in Vietnamese

Full Paper Here

Talk presented in Hanoi, May 11-12, 2013

Original Abstract
This talk is concerned with a deceptively simple question: where does sentence meaning come from? Within generative grammar, at least since the demise of Generative Semantics, the received view has been that the meaning of a sentence is exhaustively a function of the lexical elements of which it is comprised (setting aside the effects of constituency and scope). This is made explicit in the Projection Principle (Chomsky 1981), which understands syntax as a "projection of lexical properties". In subsequent Minimalist approaches (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2000), this restriction is tightened up even further by the requirement that syntactic computations operate exclusively with the lexical items introduced in the initial array (numeration): no node labels or extraneous symbols (e.g., theta-roles, indices, movement traces, levels of representation) which might contribute to sentence meaning. This does not, of course, exclude reference to abstract formal features—indeed, these are crucial to most Minimalist analyses—but it requires that such features (e.g., EPP features) are ultimately drawn from the lexicon: they are themselves lexical entries, alongside contentful, arbitrary lexical items. Whatever the theoretical advantages of this approach for delivering an extremely spare Minimalist syntax, it should be clear that it massively increases lexical complexity, leading to a multiplicity of different abstract features attaching to what are, intuitively speaking, the same lexical items. Grammatical theory is a ‘zero-sum game’: if the syntax does little or no semantic work, the burden necessarily falls on lexical specification.

In the case of languages with rich inflectional paradigms and/or an extensive inventory of phonetically-differentiated functional categories, this 'poor syntax—rich lexicon' approach makes some sense, since subtle differences in feature specification are reflected in different pronunciations that must in any case be lexically listed; e.g., English present perfect has been vs. preterite was; wh-interrogative who vs. indefinite anyone; locative vs. expletive there; nominative she vs. accusative her. However, for Vietnamese and other isolating languages, the desirability of a strict lexicalist approach is much less evident. In contrast to inflectional languages, Vietnamese does not appear to differentiate subtle meaning contrasts in the lexicon: instead, it disposes of a set of radically-underspecified 'multifunctional' items, whose semantics are determined in part—and in some instances exhaustively—by their position in phrase-structure. A clear example of this multifunctionality is offered by the modal auxiliary được (also phải), which is variously interpreted as a deontic, epistemic or abilitative modal—even as a non-modal, aspectual, particle—in different structural positions, This is illustrated in (0); see Duffield (1999), Phan & Duffield (in prep.)

0. a. Ông Quang được mua cái nhà.
        prn Q. can buy cl house
        ‘Quang was allowed to buy a house.’

    b. Ông Quang mua được cái nhà.
        prn Q. buy can cl house
        ‘Quang has bought (was able to buy) a house.’

    c. Ông Quang mua cái nhà được.
         prn Q. buy cls house can
         ‘Quang is able to buy a house/Quang may possibly buy a house.’

Other examples will be discussed directly. This multifunctionality suggests a radically different, though equally austere, conception of Minimalism: Minimalist Lexicalism (see also Marantz 2005, Borer 2007). The corollary of this, of course, is Semantic Syntax: meaning inheres in, and is read off of, syntactic representations. In this talk, then, I elaborate an alternative Minimalist thesis: I argue that it is elucidating to introduce a limited amount of meaning into syntax, maintaining that this can be done without resurrecting Generative Semantics.

It's not my problem (with Chomsky)

(For linguists only, probably, this one)

 

First, we had Humboldt’s Problem, then Plato’s, then Descarte’s, then Broca’s. Along the way, there was Orwell’s Problem. Now we have Darwin’s Problem.

I have been a card-carrying generativist for over twenty years—though I have to confess that I stopped paying the (figurative) dues somewhere around 1998—and remain reasonably loyal to the general spirit of the program. Yet I have to ask:

 “Why (the [your favourite expletive here]) is it always somebody else’s problem?”

As the father of a pre-teen, the prospect looms of hearing this rhetorical ploy on a near-daily basis (albeit the ‘owners’ of my son’s problems are likely to be more humble souls than the Greatest Figures in Western Thought, namely, his parents, his teachers, his siblings, his school-friends, in that order). Coming from a petulant adolescent, it is something I suppose I have to thole; but as an escapable part of mature generativist discourse, this stock device is wearing my patience pretty thin.

Or is it just me (my problem)?

PS. Don’t get me started on the shameless misappropriation of Kepler, Galileo and Einstein in other acolytic work.

Why can't we talk to each other?: Why can't we listen?

In a very thoughtful review of Fritz Newmeyer's Language Form and Language Function, Martin Haspelmath (2000) poses the (partially rhetorical) question Why can't we talk to each other? which is also the title of the piece. The "we" in question are formalists* and functionalists, who—despite the best efforts of linguists like Newmeyer and Haspelmath—seem locked in a Middle East-style conflict without compromise or meaningful concession. One of the reasons for non-talking, Haspelmath proposes, is that our fundamental goals are incompatible. This may be so, but I think there is a simpler explanation: a conversation requires listeners as well as talkers, and we just don't listen.

Let me climb off the fence for a change, to make clear which kind of non-listening I'm referring to.

Recommended Reading 1

Over the last few months, quite a few of you have been kind enough to read some of the other posts on this site. Today, I have no particular axe to grind, though I'm mindful of the other pieces that are still pending, including the final section of Sapir-Whorf Redux, which should appear early next week.) Instead, nach dem Motto* "Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work they are supposed to be doing that the time (Robert Benchley)," I'd like to use this piece to draw your attention to a writer and critic who—in the world of linguistics, at any rate—has been sorely neglected in recent years. This is a real pity, not just because it's a waste of everyone's time to start thinking about linguistic issues from scratch when someone else has done the groundwork, but also because he writes so well: whether scathing or complimentary, his prose is unfailingly precise and elegantly constructed.

The writer in question is George Steiner. You can find out more about him  by following this link. Rather than rehearsing that description, here are three extended quotes from Language and Silence, which I happen to have in front of me. The collection After Babel is more relevant still, but I don't have a copy to hand.

• From Humane Literacy

When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoyevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow. All great writing stems from le dur désir de durer, the harsh contrivance of spirit against death, the hope to overreach time by force of creation. 'Brightness falls from the air'; five words and a trick of darkening sound. But they have outworn three centuries. Who would choose to be a literary critic if he could set verse to sing, or compose, out of his own mortal being, a vital fiction, a character that will endure. Most men have their dusty survivance in old telephone directories (it is a mercy that these are kept at the British Museum): there is in the literal fact of their existence, less of life's truth and harvest than in Falstaff or Mme de Guermantes. To have imagined these. (Language & Silence: 21)

•  From The Retreat from the Word

The Apostle tells us that in the beginning was the Word. He gives us no assurance as to the the end.

It is appropriate that he should have used the Greek language to express the Hellenistic conception of the Logos, for it is to the fact of its Greco-Judaic inheritance that Western civilization owes its essentially verbal character. We take this character for granted. It is the root and bark of our experience and we cannot readily transpose our imaginings outside of it. We live inside the act of discourse. But we should not imagine that a verbal matrix is the only one in which the articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies such as the icon or the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is difficult to speak of these, for how should speech justly convey the shape and vitality of silence? But I can cite examples of what I mean...

...The tools of mathematical analysis transformed chemistry and physics from alchemy to the predictive sciences they now are. By virtue of mathematics, the stars move out of mythology into the astronomer's table. And as mathematics settles into the marrow of a science, the concepts of that science, its habits of invention and understanding, become steadily less reducible to those of common language.

It is arrogant, if not responsible, to invoke such basic notions in our present model of the universe as quanta, the indeterminacy principle, the relativity constant of the lack of parity in so-called weak interactions of atomic particles, if one cannot do so in the language appropriate to them — that is to say, in mathematical terms. Without it, such words are phantasms to deck out the pretence of philosophers or journalists. Because physics has had to borrow from the vulgate, some of these words seem to retain a generalized meaning; they give a semblance of metaphor. But this is an illusion. When a critic seeks to apply the indeterminacy principle to his discussion of action painting, or of the use of improvization in certain contemporary music [or of Minimalist syntax? NGD], he is not relating two spheres of experience; he is merely talking nonsense**...

• From To Civilize our Gentlemen

...[T]he student of literature now has access to and responsibility towards a very rich terrain, intermediate between the arts and science, a terrain bordering equally on poetry, on sociology, on psychology, on logic, and even on mathematics. I mean the domain of linguistics and of the theory of communication.

Its expansion in the post-war period is one of the most exciting chapters of modern intellectual history. The entire nature of language is being re-thought and re-examined as it has not been since Plato and Leibniz. The questions being asked about the relations between verbal means and sensory perception, about the ways in which syntax mirrors or controls the reality-concept of a given culture, about the history of linguistic forms as a record of ethnic consciousness — these questions go to the very heart of our poetic and critical concern. The precise analysis of verbal resources and grammatical changes, which may soon be feasible by means of computers — these may have a bearing on literary history and interpretation. We are within reach of knowing the rate at which new words new words enter a language. We can discern graphic contours and statistical patterns relating linguistic phenomena to economic, sociological changes. Our whole sense of the medium is being re-evaluated.

Let me give only two examples which are familiar to any student of modern linguistics. There is a Latin American Indian language, indeed there are a number, in which the future — the notion of that which is yet to happen — is set at the back of the speaker. The past, which he can see, because it has already happened, lies all before him. He backs into the future unknown; memory moves forward, hope backwards. This is the exact reversal of the primary co-ordinates by which we ourselves organize our feelings in root metaphors. How does such a reversal affect literature or, in a larger sense, to what extent is syntax the ever renewed cause of our modes of sensibility and verbal concept? Or take the well-known instance of the astounding range of terms — I believe it is in the region of one hundred — by which the gauchos of the Argentine discriminate between the shadings of a horse's hide. Do these terms in some manner precede the perception of the actual nuance of colour, or does that perception, sharpened by professional need, cause the invention of new words? Either hypothesis throw rich light on the processes of poetic invention and on the essential fact that translation means the meshing of two different world images, of two different patterns of human life (Language & Silence: 86-87)

Of course, there is much to disagree with in Steiner's writing. Take, for example, his easy acceptance of what might be called 'the Whorfian fallacy': his discussion of the colour terms of Argentinian gauchos immediately calls to mind the old saw about the Eskimos having a hundred words for snow (see Geoff Pullum's corrective The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax). It is also true that much of Steiner's writing reflects a near obsessive concern with the Holocaust and with Germany and the German language. As understandable as this may be, given his personal history and the immediate post-war period that informed his criticism, this concern overshadows many of his insights, at times to the point of obscurity. In spite of all this, though, one cannot help but be respectful of the scholarship, engaged by the writing, and impressed by the humanism. To read more, click on the links below, or borrow the books from your university library.





*Ill-translated by dict.cc as 'along the lines of'. One of the great things about Steiner's writing, but perhaps also a reason why he is less read than he deserves to be, is that he freely mixes French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek terms and quotations into his English writing, without pandering glosses or translations: in other words, he assumes that his reader is an educated European. Unfortunately, as he himself is painfully aware, this is simply not true, the complacent—often willful—ignorance of foreign languages among even highly educated people being one of the most unattractive features of middle-class British and American chauvinism.

**In a footnote, Steiner comes close to retracting this last comment. On balance, my own judgement is that the original assertion was correct: most analogies to physics and mathematics—in formal linguistics, at least— are more pretentious than insightful.

Defining Goals (continued)

[This is a draft excerpt from Chapter 2 of a proposed monograph on Vietnamese, in which I try to tackle some general theoretical problems. As ever, I really would appreciate comments, and will incorporate feedback in future drafts. Thank you. PS. If you wish to cite this, please reference it as Duffield, Nigel Particles and Projections in Vietnamese Syntax, draft ms., University of Sheffield.]

...Part of the difficulty here stems from an inconsistency within Chomsky’s own writings about the goals of generative theory. On the one hand, there is the notion of Explanatory Adequacy, which as just discussed asserts a direct inferential relationship between a particular analysis of some core properties of grammar and the ability of children to acquire their native language. I shall return to this notion presently. On the other hand, in separate passages (1981, 1985, 1988, etc.) Chomsky has explicitly and consistently distinguished questions about language knowledge from those of language acquisition, in terms that again should be very familiar. The following excerpt from Chomsky (1988) is representative:

(i) What is Knowledge of Language? What is in the mind/brain of the [adult native] speaker of English or Spanish or Japanese?; (ii)  How does this system of knowledge arise in the mind/brain? How is this knowledge put to use in speech (and secondary systems such as writing)?; (iii) What are the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis for this system of knowledge and for the use of this language? (Chomsky 1988: 3).

Chomsky’s “three questions”—which crucially are five—notionally distinguish epistemological from psychological or physiological concerns. As such, they have been used to demarcate separate disciplines: Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Neurolinguistics, respectively. If one takes the first of these questions (What is Knowledge of Language?) as a starting point, rather than the notion of Explanatory Adequacy, then not only does the generativist approach to theory construction become much more perspicuous, but the practice of neglecting acquisition data becomes markedly more understandable. Primarily, this is because the goal of linguistic theory can then be stated as the development of an abstract Theory of Linguistic Knowledge: a Level 1 (Computational) Theory, in the sense of Marr (1982).[i]  By definition, such a theory is at least one step removed from questions of psychological representation or process, and several more steps removed from issues of neurophysiological implementation.[ii]

Notice, however, that Chomsky implicitly identifies a Level 1 question—What is Knowledge of Language?—with what is properly a Level 2 question—namely, What is in the mind/brain of the [adult native] speaker of English or Spanish or Japanese?—implicitly treating the second as a paraphrase of the first.[iii] For Chomsky and many mainstream generativists,[iv] the identification of these two questions is natural and unproblematic, and this is the crux of the difficulty: for reasons that I suppose are once again ultimately grounded in apriori commitment to innateness, Mainstream Minimalism assumes that essentially the same grammatical knowledge is in the mind/brain of the adult speaker of any language, be it English, Spanish, Japanese…or Vietnamese, and thus that there is no theoretically interesting variation in L from one language to the next. This is explicit in the following quote:

‘In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, assume languages to be uniform, with variety restricted to easily detectable properties of utterances. (Chomsky 2001:2)’

This assumption is licensed by the identification of L (a theory of the attained knowledge of a particular language) with FL (a theory of the initial state). The following quotation is instructive:

I understand L (for me, some variety of English) to be an attained state of a genetically-determined faculty of language FL... (Chomsky, cited in Stemmer 2009).

In fact, it is reasonable to conclude from much of Chomsky’s writing that the only theoretically relevant (or interesting) properties of L are those that also properties of FL. This strict identification of L with FL constitutes a theoretical watershed of sorts for many linguistic researchers: certainly, it is one of the clearest points of divergence between the perspective adopted in this monograph and that of Mainstream Minimalism, inasmuch as I am open to the idea that many of the interesting features (including universal properties) of L are emergent properties of particular grammatical systems).[v]

To ground this discussion—which has already become unduly abstract—the question that this monograph attempts to answer is the following more explicitly stated version of Chomsky’s second question (that is, “question (1b)”):

(Leaving aside Saussurean arbitrariness), what syntactic knowledge is in the mind/brain of the adult native speaker of Vietnamese, and how does this differ from that of the grammatical knowledge in the mind/brain of the adult native-speaker of Chinese or Thai or English?

Implicit here—contrary to Mainstream Minimalist assumptions—is the suggestion that there are significant, theoretically interesting differences between the attained state of L_Viet and (as it might be) the attained state of L_English, and also the assumption that a formal theory of L can and should describe and explain those differences: that is to say, that local variation arising from linguistic experience and interaction during language development is an intrinsic property of particular theories of L, not simply a contingent property of the interfaces between an invariant syntax and an arbitrary lexicon. Ideally, the same theory should also account for the structural commonalities between L_Viet and L_English, as well as for the absence of certain types of non-occurring L’s; see, for example, Pinker & Jackendoff (2009), for discussion of this point. Absent from this question, it should be noted, is any direct reference to FL (the theory of the initial state) either as an explanatory device or as a justification for empirical inquiry.[vi]

Of course, it may turn out that there are no interesting grammatical differences between L_Viet and L_English (‘beyond Saussurean arbitrariness’), and that the formal commonalities across languages are then best explained in terms of the initial state (FL): in other words, that Chomsky’s various identifications are justified. But given this construal of the goals of linguistic theory, these become entirely distinct empirical questions of fact, not apriori assumptions. And while there may be reasons to hope—at least to those favourably predisposed to the overall generativist programme—that there are universally shared properties of attained states, it is worth noting that the results of fifty years of research into (surface) language universals have led many to the conclusion that this hope is a vain one (Evans & Levinson 2009, and supportive commentaries). Nevertheless, as discussed in Duffield (2010) and further below, this may tell us very little about FL, where I believe there are more grounds for optimism.

An Aside: Taxi Drivers and the Initial State

In order to appreciate the difference in perspective that results from the dissociation of theories of the initial state (FL) from those of the attained grammatical knowledge of a particular language (L_English, L_Viet, etc), it is instructive to consider the development to steady state of other localized and specialized cognitive skills that also have a significant innate component. 

One pertinent example is human spatial memory, as it applies to navigational skills. It is uncontroversial to claim that the capacity to record spatial information about one’s environment, and to use this stored knowledge to navigate through space in daily life, is in certain crucial respects innate: all arguments that might be adduced from Poverty of Stimulus, lack of negative evidence, absence of instruction, relatively uniform success in threshold acquisition, selective neuropsychological breakdown, and so forth, apply equally to the development of spatial memory as to language, such that it is appropriate to speak of a spatial memory faculty (‘FSM’). Moreover, there is general consensus about neural localization of spatial memory: in all mammals, the hippocampus is crucially implicated in the storage and processing of memories about spatial positioning and orientation; while in humans, there is also believed to be an asymmetric involvement of neocortical structures in spatial memory, with significantly greater right hemisphere involvement in processing spatial memory (see, for example, Nunn et al, 1999).

For reasons that seem to have little to do with the intrinsic properties of the phenomena themselves, and almost everything to do with folk psychology, people strongly, if erroneously, believe that they teach their children language, but don’t believe that they (need to) teach their children to remember where their bed is, or how to find the back yard. In other words, the initial state of the FSM is of little theoretical interest to Cognitive Psychology, since its innateness is uncontentious. By contrast, what is of central interest to psychological theories of spatial memory is the characterization of the attained steady states, developmental changes in spatial memory representations, and the extent to which interaction with the environment can produce adaptive changes in cognitive representation and processing.

A dramatic example of such adapation beyond the initial state is provided by the findings of Maguire et al. (2000), who studied the neurophysiological correlates of acquired spatial navigation skills in London taxi-drivers: the researchers found that the posterior regions of the hippocampi of taxi-drivers were significantly larger than those of a control group, that the anterior portions were significantly smaller; furthermore, that this physical asymmetry increased with years of taxi-driving experience. Results such as these provide striking evidence of adult adaptations in brain regions associated with spatial memory and navigation. The point of this example is that adequate theories of spatial memory, however concerned they may be with general, universal properties of this mental faculty, treat their object of inquiry as an adaptive, dynamic system of knowledge, whose character is partially determined by local environmental factors, and which is subject to theoretically interesting variation (even if this variation is ultimately constrained by biology). An adequate theory will accommodate and explain this emergent variation and identify as precisely as possible which properties of the input are able to induce adaptation in the internalized system of knowledge. A theory of spatial memory that restricted attention only to apriori or initial state knowledge, and which dismissed all subsequent development or relegated such variation to ‘legibility conditions at the interface’ would hardly be considered ‘explanatorily adequate’.[vii]

Returning to language, my judgment is that the Innateness question has led many Minimalists to a near obsessive concern with the initial state of the language faculty (FL). This obsession has antagonized, and continues to provoke, a significant segment of the Cognitive Science community. More importantly however, it has distracted attention from arguably more interesting questions about attained states and the constraints on variation in adult grammars (L). Whether one accepts the innateness and domain-specificty of the capacity for language creation linguistic—as I do—or rejects it (as do many others), should be largely irrelevant to understanding and developing theories of steady state knowledge (just as, for the most part, theories of human genetics and embryology have been irrelevant to cognitive theories of spatial memory). Dissociating FL from L, as is proposed here, and focussing attention on the latter allows one to ask much more dispassionate questions about observed commonalities and differences across I-languages, and about the design properties of theories of L, without the distraction of a set of particular ideological commitments (and the concomitant impulse to trivialize variation while accentuating apparent similarities).

[to be continued]

---

[i] It should be noted that Chomsky himself directly rejects the relevance of Marr’s levels for linguistic inquiry:

“As for Marr's famous three levels of analysis, he was concerned with input-output systems (e.g., the mapping of retinal images to internal representations). Language is not an input-output system. Accordingly, Marr's levels do not apply to the study of language, though one could adapt them to the very different problem of characterizing cognitive systems accessed in processing and production (Chomsky, cited in Stemmer 2009).”

There is much that one might take issue with here, but this is not an appropriate place for such a debate.

[ii] It is at least debatable whether Linguistic Theory—or Cognitive Psychology more generally—really has, or should aspire to, this “Level 1 status”: see Peacocke (1986a, 1986b) and commentaries, cf. Laurence (2003), Soames (2008), for discussion, or indeed, whether such a classification is relevant to linguistics at all (Chomsky denies this: see previous note). But if one assumes this to be the case, then the generative perspective on questions concerning “lower level” theories becomes much more understandable: it would seem absurd to deny that if Knowledge of Language (KOL) is mentally represented that it should not be put to use in language comprehension and production, or that it should be physiologically represented in any other part of the body than in areas of the brain associated with higher cognition: the job of the psycholinguist and neurolinguist, respectively, then comes to be to determine precisely how KOL is put to use in processing language, how it is acquired, and how it is neurophysiologically realized (i.e, Questions “two” and “three” (really, three and five)).

[iii] This move immediately recalls a different, though equally unhelpful case of “systematic ambiguity”, namely, that concerning grammar:

Using the term ‘grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity to refer, first, to the native speaker’s internally represented ‘theory of his language’ and, second, to the linguist’s account of this, we can say that the child has developed and internally represented a generative grammar in the sense described. […] we are again using the term ‘theory’ — in this case ‘theory of language’ rather than ‘theory of a particular language’ — with a systematic ambiguity to refer both to the child’s innate pre-disposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the linguist’s account of this (Chomsky 1965: 25).

[iv] Notwithstanding the prior quote from Chomsky (1975) above.

[v] An imperfect, but passable analogy here might be to theories of automobile construction in a world where car engines were sealed at the factory door: the Mainstream Minimalist assumption would be that all cars (Ferraris or Fords) are powered by precisely the same engine—whatever is built up around this core represents only superficial difference. The alternative Minimalist view assumes certain fixed and abstract initial conditions—for example, all engines might be assumed derive power through internal combustion, or to transmit power to the driveline via a transmission system: beyond these abstract design properties, the alternative Minimalist view would admit a large range of ‘locally optimal’ solutions to the problem/fact of ground propulsion.  (The principal imperfections of this analogy are of course that the car engine, unlike the language faculty, is an inorganic, manufactured construct, whose theory is largely defined by its function: as a consequence, it is physically and functionally separable from the rest of the system in which it is embedded, and shows no positive development or growth from the point of initial manufacture to ultimate scrappage. Only the most extreme nativist would claim that the latter characteristics are properties of the language faculty.)

[vi] It should be stressed that I do not consider questions about the initial state FL to be irrelevant to present concerns. On the contrary: the following stages of this discussion are intimately and directly concerned with such issues. However, the point is that I assume that there can be very different answers to the questions—What is L?, What is FL?—respectively (especially where L = L_English, arguably less so where L = L_Viet); also, that cross-linguistic grammatical differences are theoretically at least as interesting as cross-linguistic universals.

[vii] Similar remarks apply to theories of musical competence; see Duffield (2011c).

Defining Goals: Minimalist Angst (II)

[This is a draft excerpt from Chapter 2 of a proposed monograph on Vietnamese, in which I try to tackle some general theoretical problems. As ever, I really would appreciate comments, and will incorporate feedback in future drafts. Thank you. PS. If you wish to cite this, please reference it as  Duffield, Nigel Particles and Projections in Vietnamese Syntax, draft ms., University of Sheffield.

What is the goal of Linguistic Theory?

To begin, it is appropriate to consider how different linguists view the bigger picture: the overarching goals of grammatical theory. In a recent review article,[i] Cedric Boeckx, a leading advocate and practitioner of Mainstream Minimalism, responds to (frequently levied) criticisms that the framework is imprecisely formalized and hence inadequate for grammatical description, as follows:

…the goal of the generative enterprise in linguistic theory is not to decide whether natural languages can be studied in terms of sets, proofs or models. The idea expressed in Chomsky (1957) that it is possible to bifurcate the set of sentences into the grammatical and ungrammatical and define theoretical adequacy on the basis of that distinction was quickly abandoned.[ii] Instead, as is made extremely clear in the first chapter of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965), the goal of linguistic theory, once firmly placed in a cognitive, and ultimately biological, setting, is to give an account of how children are able to acquire their native languages. In such a setting, talk of models, proofs or sets is largely irrelevant (Boeckx 2006, [emphasis mine]).

To anyone familiar—and in agreement—with Chomsky’s more general writing on linguistics over the past 30 years, this response may appear unexceptionable: it is certainly a predictable reiteration of the ‘party line’ on Explanatory Adequacy. Undeniably, these comments highlight the valid point that a scientifically interesting theory of language should have more ambitious goals than to provide a formally precise description of the grammatical structures of a particular language (even though this is a formidable—and some would claim, largely unanswered—challenge: see amongst others, Johnson & Lappin 1999, Seuren 2004, Blevins 2009). No-one could claim that the Chomskyan programme, from Aspects through GB to current Minimalism, has been short on ambition: there can be few more exciting or complex scientific projects than to understand the nature of the human language faculty or to explain children’s capacity to acquire their native language: what Pinker (1994: Chapter 1) terms ‘an instinct to acquire an art.’ 

Nevertheless, what is remarkable about the way in which the generative notion of Explanatory Adequacy has come to be defined, at least to sceptics of the generative enterprise—and especially to researchers involved in child language development—is the obvious disconnect between the rhetoric and stated rationale of mainstream generativism  on the one hand, and its empirical concerns, on the other. If “the goal of linguistic theory…is [in fact] to give an account of how children are able to acquire their native languages…” then the naïve observer might expect the core research agenda of Minimalism to be devoted to empirical issues in language acquisition research: for example, to determining what all children end up knowing about their language, and when they come to know it; to investigating the extent of true convergence on common grammatical principles (something that is assumed, but rarely tested); to explaining and reconciling the tension between the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition—how it is that children project beyond the variable input to which they exposed to achieve relatively uniform and highly sophisticated grammatical knowledge—and the Developmental Problem—giving an account of how and why children’s early comprehension and production diverges from that of adults (see Atkinson 1990, cf. O’Grady 1995); to understanding the relationship between grammatical knowledge and language processing in language development, and so forth. 

There are, of course, researchers both within and outside the generativist camp whose empirical work addresses precisely these kinds of questions: leading advocates of a generativist approach to language acquisition include Barbara Lust, Stephen Crain, Nina Hyams, Colin Philipps, Tom Roeper, William Snyder, Kenneth Wexler and their students and co-workers; significant alternative perspectives have been also offered by Elizabeth Bates, Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Elena Lieven, William O’Grady, Mark Seidenberg, Dan Slobin and Michael Tomasello, amongst many others. However, the point is that acquisition research, far from driving developments in Minimalist theorizing, is usually regarded as (at best) being tangential to theoretical concerns.[iii] Perhaps the clearest indication of this neglect is the dearth of reference to (or use of) any empirical data from language acquisition in almost all of the core technical literature (e.g., Chomsky 1993, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002): where acquisition data are advanced, it is generally only in the service of rhetorical theoretical arguments about the utility of negative evidence and/or Poverty of the Stimulus.

From one perspective, of course, this neglect is unsurprising: if one takes the innateness of language (I-language) to be a fact apriori, there is no logical reason to be concerned with the vagaries of E-language development. Moreover, it follows from innateness that there is little reason to investigate individual differences in development or grammar attainment (aside from pathological ones) nor, indeed, to be greatly concerned with cross-linguistic differences in language structure: from a Mainstream Minimalist perspective, innateness implies universality, hence surface structural differences are treated as peripheral to I-language, as “interface properties” at best, or as E-language properties.[iv] To draw on a frequently used analogy: if one is interested in understanding the genetic basis of avian flight, the developmental and cross-species differences between humming-birds, sparrows and eagles are probably of limited interest, fascinating though they may be to amateur birders, ethologists, or veterinary surgeons: see Marr (1982).[v]

Upon reflection though, there are significant difficulties with this line of argument. The of these is the obvious point that not everyone accepts claims of apriori Knowledge of Language (and the concomitant notion of instantaneous acquisition; see Chomsky 1975, Dresher 1999, cf. Weinberg 1990, Penner & Roeper 1998):[vi] even those, like myself, who are willing to entertain innateness as an hypothesis, generally prefer to use the theory to generate and test relevant empirical predictions against a representative sample of language data—for example, using syntactic theory to try to uncover contentful (see below) formal universals, or to probe the relationship between proposed parameters of grammatical variation and the steady-state grammars of particular languages, or, within the field of first language acquisition, to explore the independence of grammatical knowledge from uncontroversially learned properties of lexical knowledge (cf. Bates & Goodman 1987)—rather than to take innateness as a starting point for empirical inquiry.

A significant problem here is that the standard characterization of explanatory adequacy conflates two quite separate research questions, viz. (i), determining the nature of the human language faculty (FL), and (ii), explaining children’s capacity to acquire their native languages (instances of L). Though these are intimately related—and though it may be reasonable to suppose under a particular presentation of the argument that understanding the first question is prerequisite for progress with the second—the issues are logically and empirically separable.[vii] This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that it is possible to hold contrary positions with respect to the innateness of the two capacities—indeed, for there to be distinct empirical ‘facts of the matter’. For example, it may turn out that Knowledge of Language is part of our biological endowment, but that the capacity to deploy this knowledge to acquire a particular grammar is not—or rather, is not domain-specific, as generative theory generally insists: see e.g., Anderson & Lightfoot (2002). Alternatively, it could be that the capacity to acquire language is innately given and domain-specific,[viii] but that the steady-state grammatical systems that are actually acquired (L_English, L_french, L_chichewa, etc.) are externally determined, internalized theories of linguistic behavior, which are partly—or even largely—unconstrained by biological or domain-specific cognitive factors. Indeed, Chomsky (1975) considers such an idea quite plausible:

I have been assuming that UG suffices to determine particular grammars (where again, a grammar is a system of rules and principles that generates an infinite class of sentences with their formal and semantic properties). But this might not be the case. It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind. If so, the language faculty itself provides only an abstract framework, an idealization that does not suffice to determine a grammar (Chomsky 1975: 41) [emphasis mine: NGD].

This latter conception of grammar acquisition is one to which many might subscribe, even beyond the generativist camp. It will also be clear that these two options do not exhaust the possibilities; many other conceptions are possible. Whatever the truth of the matter however, these are logically distinct research questions; hence, it is distracting to use one as the rationale for the other, as most mainstream generative syntacticians seem to have done recently, including Boeckx.[ix]

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[i] Review of Postal (2003) Sceptical Linguistic Essays. Oxford: OUP. For a more positive assessment of Boeckx’ commentary, see Collins (2009).

[ii] Boeckx accurately represents Chomsky’s assertion that the basis of grammatical well-formedness of sentences is not the object of inquiry, something that is explicit in the following quote:

The class [of well-formed (grammatical) expressions of L] has no significance. The concepts ‘well-formed’ and ‘grammatical’ remain without characterization or known empirical justification; they played virtually no role in early work on generative grammar except in informal exposition, or since (Chomsky 1993: 44-45).

Several authors have questioned whether this remark—the last clause especially—has any basis in fact. As Geoff Pullum observes, uncompromisingly:

The concept of grammaticality not only played a role in early generative grammar, but the role it played was that of being the only data considered relevant in linguistics…the claim that the concept of grammaticality played no role in early generative grammar is certainly an untruth (Pullum 2006: 139 [Emphasis mine]).

In fact, both quotations contain independently valid statements.  Pullum is surely correct to say that the concept of grammaticality has always played a crucial role in generative theory construction and practice, from Aspects to the present day (however poorly the notion may be understood (Chomsky 1977, Allen & Seidenberg 1999). At the same time, Chomsky’s (and Boeckx’s) assertion is correct—in a very narrow, almost legalistic, sense—to the extent that grammaticality is taken to refer to classes or extensional sets of well-formed vs. ill-formed sentences: at least since Chomsky (1981), it has been clear that such sets of sentences belong to ‘E-language’, which Chomsky rejects as a legitimate, or even coherent, object of inquiry. Nevertheless, what is important is the set of mental states (Knowledge of Language) that occasions grammaticality, or rather, underlies the capacity to give “grammaticality judgments” about core data: it seems perverse to deny that this capacity has always been central to generative theorizing or practice (or indeed that to think that it should not be).

[iii] (It should be) needless to say that there is nothing original about this observation: since the beginning of generative theory, not only psycholinguistics, psychologists and developmentalists and typologists, but also dissenting voices within the generativist camp have repeatedly criticized the failure to incorporate—or even acknowledge—the results of empirical investigations of grammatical phenomena from other sources: see Eysenck (1984), Cutler (2005), or the following well-known quote from Tom Roeper, cited in Newmeyer (1983), Featherston (2007):

‘when psychological evidence has failed to conform to linguistic theory, psychologists have concluded that linguistic theory was wrong, while linguists have concluded that psychological theory was irrelevant (Roeper 1982).’

[iv] As discussed below, the change from GB to Minimalism marks a significant change in imperviousness of core syntax to external language-particular factors, including word order.

[v] From this perspective, one might as well conclude that penguins and chickens ‘know’ how to fly (“I-flight”), or that whales know how to walk (“I-walk”), even though subsequent evolutionary changes have left them unable to implement this knowledge (“E-locomotion”).  Though such a conclusion may seem absurd to many, it is a logically consistent and rational one, reflecting an attitude that is, I think, not so distant from many syntacticians’ views on grammatical competence.

[vi] For example, Dresher (1999) writes: 

‘The early stages of acquisition, during which the grammars of language learners are most idiosyncratic and most different from the target adult language, have no effect upon the grammar eventually acquired. As far as the final result goes, these stages can be ignored for purposes of the logical problem of language acquisition, and acquisition is as if it were instantaneous.’

Contrast this with Weinberg (1990: 165): 

‘As is well known, current work in generative grammar makes the major idealization of instantaneous acquisition, the assumption that there is no ordering relationship between pieces of linguistic knowledge. This assumption is assuredly false.’ See Ayoun (2005) for alternative discussion.

[vii] Not everyone accepts this logical priority, of course: see, for example, Seidenberg & MacDonald (1999): 

Instead of asking how the child acquires competence grammar, we view acquisition in terms of how the child converges on adult-like performance in comprehending and producing utterances. This performance orientation changes the picture considerably with respect to classic issues about language learnability, and provides a unified approach to studying acquisition and processing (Seidenberg & MacDonald 1999: 570).

[viii] A capacity variously labeled Language Acquisition Device (LAD), the “language organ”, Faculty of Language (FL) etc.: see below.

[ix] To use a social science analogy, to claim that the goal of linguistic theory is to explain child language acquisition is not unlike claiming that the goal of economic theory is to explain the poverty gap in capitalist societies: whether intentional or not, the rhetorical significance of referencing a vulnerable social group (young children, the poor, respectively) should not be underestimated.

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.