Hubert Haider and Henk van Riemsdijk had a terrific idea.
Inspired by Hilbert they decided to put together a book that identifies
interesting open questions in syntax. In the original invite, Hubert and Henk suggested
that syntacticians revive the lost art of posing interesting questions:
Some are particularly talented for
asking, some are specifically talented for answering. We tend to restlessly
thrust answers upon our scientific
community. But – more often than not – questions
would have been even more welcome than answers.
Why not share questions?
Let’s try the possible, namely repeating in linguistics what David Hilbert dared for mathematics with his famous 23
problems.[1]
His questions ranged greatly in topic and precision, but most of them have been
propounded succinctly & precisely enough to facilitate a clear answer;
compare for instance Hilbert’s 20th problem.[2]
To aid thought, Hubert and Henk proposed some
well-formedness conditions on good Hilbertian questions (I elaborate a little
on their guidelines below):
Precision must be the aim. Even if facts are
occasionally cloudy, the questions should be crystal clear. A commenting
paragraph will be necessary for most of the questions and references to
literature. Surely, you are aware of the saying: Even a fool
can ask more questions in five minutes than twelve wise syntacticians
can answer in their life time.
Here is your task if you are willing to take up the challenge:
Select up to four of the following
categories and submit one syntactic[3] question for each of the categories
chosen.
i. Generalization that holds of cross-linguistic
facts. In other words, formulate what
should become known as “Y’s
generalization” or “Y’s problem” (with Y as the variable for your name).
ii. Generalization over facts of a particular language (=
language-specific case of (i.)).
iii. Theoretical issue: a novel theoretical
claim
iv. Your favourite
question: “The question I always wanted
to find the answer for, …”
Hubert and Henk’s brainchild was quickly adopted in conception.
The two asked a ton of linguists (this is a lot, btw) if they would participate
and they received a rousing response, or at least a lot of intellectual IOUs.
However, if the responders were like me, this was a lot like agreeing to attend
a conference two years in advance (meaning, as reality set in and the work
required became clear, you became less and less enthusiastic). The end of the
story is that fewer delivered on their implied promises than Hubert and Henk had
hoped and so they decided to kill the project. Here’s where Faculty of Language
(FoL) comes in.
On reading their last note (more than a little
disappointment there) I asked if they would be interested in pursuing this
project in a more “stately” manner. Rather than shooting for 100 good questions
all at once, we run this as a blog project and we allow the questions to
accumulate over blog-time. This would allow the questions to be solicited
sequentially. Deadlines would be avoided and people could decide to contribute
after seeing how this thing was done. After all, nothing similar within
linguistics have ever been tried[4]
and, IMO, Hilberts good at asking good, timely, answerable questions are not
that thick on the ground, not even in the very talented pool of syntacticians.
So, the good news. Hubert and Henk decided to relocate the
project onto FoL. They will still manage the content (with some help from me). We
hope that those that Hubert and Henk solicited earlier to contribute will still
play and submit their favorite open questions. However, we’d like to open this
up to anyone out there that wants to
contribute. All the questions will be vetted, but I hope that all readers of
FoL will feel free to propose questions for general consideration. To make this
manageable, I propose that no submission be more than 4 pages. Please submit in
a standard format (e.g. Word) as this makes editing and posting easier.
An important addition: we also propose opening up the scope so
that questions from any domain of
generative linguistics are invited. So phonologists, computationalists, psycho
types (both parsing and acquisition), semanticists, morphologists and, of
course, syntacticians are ALL welcome to submit. The only restriction is that
these be questions that fit comfortably within the generative tradition. Hubert,
Henk and I will review these and decide what to go with. I am sure we will ask
for outside advice as well.
Now many of you may be thinking that this is actually a
pretty tough kind of paper to write. I agree. So I thought I’d end here by
mulling over the questions: what makes a problem Hilbertian? The short answer
is, it’s complicated. Here’s a longer answer.
As you all know, Hilbert was not a linguist. He was a
mathematician (and a pretty good guy apparently. I heard that the reason that
all mathematicians wear their sandals with socks is that Hilbert wore his
sandals with socks. I also read that he was Emmy Noether’s champion (he got her
into the PhD program and found her a job (though not a great one given her
obvious talents) at a time when being “feminist” was not at all fashionable in
German academic circles). Now, I need not observe that linguistics is not math.
The most obvious difference is that linguistics is an empirical discipline so
that it will be very hard to specify a question that will get a dispositive
answer. There are no such questions in the sciences.
However, that said, there are questions that can get close
to being Hilbert like. These will tend to be based on theoretical assumptions
and will probe features of their conceptual structure. Such theory-facing
questions can be pretty cleanly formulated. So, do not resist the temptation to
formulate questions making pretty hefty theoretical background assumptions.
These kinds of questions come in at least two flavors.
The first kind of question is asks can we get there from here? In other words, given such and such
assumptions is it possible to model
this and that effect and if so how. So, for example, given phases can we model
islands and if so how (the answer, btw, is yes, but not in any interesting
manner so far as I can tell). Note saying that it can be done, does not mean that it should be. Nor need the answer be always positive. It is useful to
discover that you can’t get there form here too. Such questions can be crisply
stated and answered precisely because they are theory-facing. Whether the
answers are also true or identify the right way to go is still a very open
question. But, I believe that there are many questions of this kind still out
there and that are worth posing.
A second flavor involves unification of our axioms. So
Chomsky asked if we could unify structure building and movement and answered
yes (hint: via a certain conception of merge). I’ve asked how to unify movement
and control (I concede this has gathered less praise than Chomsky’s, but them’s
the breaks). Again, it is important to separate the question of whether this can be done (and how) from the question
of whether this should be done (i.e. do
the empirical facts warrant the unification).
Note that both kinds of questions can be supplemented with
suggestions of how to test whether the proposals have empirical legs. This kind
of addendum is very welcome. So, for example, something along the lines of:
Question Q can be tested by looking for Gs with property P. If this can be specified as well, you have
hit the Hilbert jackpot.
Of course, these are not the only questions interesting to
GGers. There are many others. But, they
are harder to state as crisply. Nor should we expect them to be. I’ve asked a
few of them on this blog (e.g. Why Morphology?). One asked as a reply to Hubert
and Henk’s last letter by Maria Rita Manzini is: Do we want late or early
lexical insertion? Here, framing the problem crisply so that it will be
answerable is quite a bit harder, involving both theoretical and empirical
considerations, with the latter being more prominent. However, these are great
questions, the challenge being to ask them in more than one sentence.[5]
At the risk of going too far out on a limb (go ahead and cut
it, see if I care) here are some diagnostics for a Hilbertian question in GG:
1. It
builds on something that we know a lot about both empirically and
theoretically, i.e. we have lots of relevant facts and interesting analytic
attempts to explain them.
2. The
question implicates (bears on, has consequences for) one of the leading ideas
of GG (bears on some MP question, or Plato’s Problem, or some basic assumed
feature of our theoretical apparatus (e.g. bears on what a movement rule might
be, or what a derivation is or…)).
The first desideratum should make it possible to ask a
question that’s not too vague. The second indicates that we have a question
that is worth asking and answering. So, it would be great if any submission
included a clearish exposition of the problem and a little discussion of why
the problem is interesting.
That’s it. Take my above comments as suggestions on how to
proceed, nothing more. I am sure that there are many other ways of approaching
this, as your submissions will show us.
Oh one more thing. What to call the series? I was thinking
“Generative Hilberts.”
Why this? Because ‘Hilbert’ sounds a bit like ‘Filbert,’
which is a nut (hazelnut actually and they are delicious!!). Nuts are very
nutritious, are good for hoarding, taste great and need cracking. So are good
questions.
Henk suggested ‘Tharl,’ short for “Towards a Hilbertian
Agenda for Research in Linguistics.” ‘Tharl’ sounds like the name of an often
angry Norse God that requires constant care and feeding to prevent his going on
a dangerous rampage. In other words, a good name for inspiring you to send in a
constant stream of questions.
For now, I will leave the series name open. Let me know if
you have any suggestions.
Before ending, I want to again thank Hubert and Henk for
having initiated this project and for agreeing to move it to FoL while continuing
to help manage it. I also hope that you all agree to play. Hubert and Henk are
right to point out that questions are often as (if not more) important to a
vibrant field than answers. Let me add that comments to posted questions are
very welcome and, I believe, important. If they are like comments generally
posted on FoL they should allow the questions to be significantly sharpened and
clarified, to the benefit of us all. Personally, I am greatly looking forward
to this. Let the questioning begin!
[1] David Hilbert (1900): Mathematische
Probleme. In: Nachrichten der Königlichen Gesellschaft der
Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, mathematisch-physikalische Klasse 3:253–297. Göttingen. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
[2] “Do all
variational problems with certain boundary conditions have solutions?” The question is resolved.
[3] Of course, this includes the interfaces with phonology, semantics, and
pragmatics (information structure),
and brain & processing issues in relation with psycho-, neuro- and
biolinguistics.
[4] This
is not quite true. As you all know, great minds think alike. If you take Henk
and Hubert as adding up to one Newton, then they had their Leibniz in Andrea
Moro. He ran a Hilbert like questions in ling conference in Pavia November of
last year. Here’s the link: http://www.iusspavia.it/eng/news.php?id=531&menu=menu-news.html
As should be
clear, when three such distinguished people have the same kind of idea, the
time is ripe to pursue it.
I believe that today’s problems are yesterday’s
mysteries, and I am not talking about last year’s, but, say, 100 or 200 years
ago. From this perspective I would not be adverse to also including mysteries
that we would like to see transformed into problems as soon as possible.
SO,
all you mysterians out there wishing to push us towards enlightenment are more
than invited to contribute as well.
Very nice initiative. How do we send our questions? Is there an email address?
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