This blog is the direct result of an article by Tom Bartlett
in the May 12, 2012 issue of the Chronicle
of Higher Education. The article reports on a “debate” pitting Chomsky
(“the discipline’s long-reigning king”) against Dan Everett (“the former missionary”
and “true-blooded Chomskyan” whose belief in God and Chomsky “had melted
away”). Everett’s claim is that Pirahã (an indigenous language spoken in
Brazil) fails to display recursion and that this conclusively demonstrates that
Chomsky’s conception of Universal Grammar (in which recursion is the defining
property) is wrong. Despite the fevered
prose (Chomsky coverage is almost always breathless) it was pretty clear to me
that given Everett’s reported views there could be no “debate” for the simple
reason that Everett’s apparent understanding of ‘Universal Grammar’ had nothing
to do with Chomsky’s (I contributed some comments on the website of the article
to this effect under ‘nhornste’). The
“debate” was based on a misunderstanding and so a simple equivocation. The article was apparently widely read and so
a success for the Chronicle, (a Chomsky take-down always makes for “good
press”) but it had virtually no substance.
It did, however, have a consequence. The “debate” led me to
appreciate how little linguistic outsiders (and even practitioners) know about
the foundations and results of the Generative Enterprise initiated by Chomsky
in the mid 1950s. This blog is an
attempt to rectify this. It will partly be a labor of hate; aimed squarely at
the myriad distortions and misunderstandings about the generative enterprise
initiated by Chomsky in the mid 1950s.
There is a common view, expressed in the Chronicle article, that Chomsky’s basic views about the nature of
Universal Grammar are hard to pin down and that he is evasive (and maybe
slightly dishonest) when asked to specify what he means by Universal Grammar
(henceforth I’ll stick to the shorter ‘UG’ for ‘Universal Grammar’). This is poodle poop!
The basic idea is simple and has not changed: Just as fish
are built to swim and birds to fly humans are build to talk. Call the faculty
responsible for this ability ‘the Faculty of Language,’ (FL for short). The aim of the generative enterprise is to
describe the fine structure of FL. The name we give to the proposed structure
is ‘Universal Grammar’; ‘universal’ because it is intended to describe the
capacity that all humans have and ‘grammar’ because grammars are compact ways
of describing the words, morphemes, phrases, and sentences of a language. Over
the years Chomsky and colleagues have made various proposals concerning the
structure of UG. It is not a daring hypothesis to propose that
natural language grammars are recursive (it follows from the easily observed fact
that there is no real upper bound on the size of a sentence) and so UG must
allow for recursive grammars. The
interesting question is not whether there is recursion but the specific nature
of the recursion that natural language grammars have. Studying the properties
of natural language grammars should, we hope, shed light on how UG is
constructed. So what’s UG? It is the
general recipe in FL that humans have to build grammars of natural
languages. What features does it have?
Well, that is, as they say, an empirical question which this blog will
discuss. But reader be warned: as the
central object of study within Chomskyan linguistics is the structure of UG and
as the field is very active the details of the description change, or at least
may appear to change to the untutored eye. I personally think that many of the
central findings are pretty secure and that later theories have been
conservative in that they have preserved the findings of earlier theories. We intend to discuss some of this in the
future.
The perspicuous reader will have noted the ‘we’ in the last
sentence. I am one of many that will be writing here. David Pesetsky is a co-conspirator. I have asked
several others to contribute as well.
The contributors disagree on many issues. However we all believe that there are no
major empirical discoveries that have invalidated the Generative approach in
linguistics initiated by Chomsky, no serious methodological failings concerning
the practice of linguists and no conceptual incoherence in the leading
assumptions upon which this practice is founded. The details are all up for grabs. The basic
perspective has more than proven its worth.
Before ending some may be wondering about the equivocation
that vitiated the “debate” in the Chronicle. Well it’s this: Chomsky’s claim is that the
distinctive characteristic of UG is that it contains recursion. This is the defining property of FL, which,
recall, is the human capacity to acquire language. This does not imply that every human language
grammar deploys recursion. It does imply that every human can learn a grammar
that is recursive. The Pirahã may not deploy recursion when speaking Pirahã
(though I should add here that Everett’s claim is likely false (c.f. Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment in
Language 2009:355-204) but Pirahã
children have no trouble learning Brazilian Portuguese (an undisputedly
recursive language) and so there is no evidence that their UGs are any different
from anyone else’s. Everett (and the Chronicle) interpreted UG to mean that every
language must have recursive structures, while what Chomsky means is that
recursion is a property of FL. Whether
Pirahã has recursion or not (and to repeat, it looks like it does) has no
bearing on whether Pirahã speakers’ UGs have it or not. This was the equivocation and this is why the
“debate” was pointless.