Alec Marantz on the goals and methods of Generative Grammar

I always like reading papers aimed at non-specialists by leading lights of a specialty. This includes areas that I have some competence in. I find that I learn a tremendous amount from such non-technical papers for they self consciously aim to identify the big ideas that make an inquiry worth pursuing in the first place and the general methods that allow it to advance. This is why I always counsel students to not skip Chomsky's "popular" books (e.g. Language and Mind, Reflections on Language, Knowledge of Language, etc.).

Another nice (short) addition to this very useful literature is a paper by Alec Marantz (here): What do linguists do? Aside from giving a nice overview of how linguists work, it also includes a quick and memorable comment on Everett's (mis)understanding of his critique of GG. What Alec observes is that even if one takes Everett's claims entirely at face value empirically (which, one really shouldn't) his conclusion that Piraha is different in kind wrt the generative procedures it deploys from a language like English. Here is Alec:

His [Everett's, NH] analysis of Pirahã actually involves claiming Pirahã is just like every other language, except that it has a version of a mechanism that other languages use that, in Pirahã, limits the level of embedding of words within phrases.

I will let Alec explain the details, but what is important is that what he points out is that Everett confuses two very different issues that it is important to keep apart: what are the generative procedures that a given G deploys and what are the products of that procedure. Generative grammarians of the Chomsky stripe care a lot about the first question (what are the rule types that Gs can have). What Alec observes (and that Everett actually concedes in his specific proposal) is that languages that use the very same generative mechanisms can have very different products resulting. Who would have thunk it!

At any rate, take a look at Alec's excellent short piece. And while you are at it, you might want to read a short paper by another Syntax Master, Richie Kayne (here). He addresses  terrific question beloved by both neophytes and professionals: how many languages are there. I am pretty sure that his reply will both delight and provoke you. Enjoy.

Mendivil-Giro cleans the Augean stables

I am delighted to be writing this very short post advertising a very nice paper. It has appeared in the Journal of Linguisticsbut is available on lingbuzz (here). The paper is aptly entitled Is Universal Grammar ready for retirement? A short review of a longstanding misinterpretation. The author is Jose-Luis Mendivil-Giro (MG) (put in appropriate diacritics on the vowels). Here is the abstract:

In this paper I consider recent studies that deny the existence of Universal Grammar (UG), and I show how the concept of UG that is attacked in these works is quite different from Chomsky’s, and thus that such criticisms are not valid. My principal focus is on the notions of “linguistic specificity” and of “innateness”, and I conclude that, since the controversy about UG is based on misinterpretations, it is rendered sterile and thus does unnecessary harm to linguistic science. I also address the underlying reasons for these misunderstandings and suggest that, once they have been clarified, there is much scope for complementary approaches that embrace different research traditions within current theoretical linguistics.

The paper reads quickly and is surprisingly judicious and generous without being conciliatory.  Readers will note that I have made similar points far less charitably in FoL. MG surmises that the reason for the multiple confusions he identifies lies in the perfectly reasonable fact that different people are (or can be) interested in different issues relating to the wide ranging concept of ‘language.’ Perhaps. There are indeed different people interested in different things and given the complexity of the phenomena we categorize under the term ‘language.’ Further, MG is right to think that these different approaches are complementary rather than incompatible. FoL has made exactly this point several times. However, I believe that MG is being far too generous with GGs critics. I doubt that MG has correctly identified the source of the confused discussion in the literature. And one reason I believe this is that MG’s point has been made repeatedly over the last 60 years to absolutely no avail. GGers have generally bent over backwards conceding that there is room for non-GG style work in investigating the myriad properties that language knowledge and use have. What GG has insisted upon is that it’s own style of work addresses real questions and provides legitimate answers to these questions. Critics have repeatedly rejected this, as MG’s own excellent review of the literature amply demonstrates. So, if there is a confusion (or “misinterpretations”), it is rabid, and not traceable to mere differences to tastes in scientific questions. It has deeper roots. 

Ok, let me say it: the difference really lies in two incompatible conceptions of what science consists in, especially as regards the mental/behavioral sciences. The Empiricism/Rationalism (E/R) divide is the one that I have in mind, but as I have discussed it endlessly on FoL I will not go over it again here. Suffice it to say, that ifone is an Eist then GG is basically muddleheaded confusion. It cannotbe right and so its results need notbe considered. Consequently, if GG’s critics were largely Eish, it would explain the depth of their misunderstanding and their congenital inability to resist confusion/misinterpretation. 

Here’s what I mean. The tenor of many (most?) of the critiques as MG notes hardly ever go into any detail concerning specific GG proposals. As MG notes this results in critiques that are overwhelmingly dumb. The sheer ignorance of the critical discussion is wondrous to behold. The critics that MG cites and discusses really appear to know nothing at all and many (most?) completely ignore everything that GG has discovered over 60 years of research. MG notes this, and seems a bit disoriented by the fact that the main culprits seem so blithely uninformed. And it is not just one or two. They are alllike this, from Chater and Christiensen to Tomasello, Everettt, Levinson etc. etc. etc. Their critiques are really useless (and many times based on simple equivocation (I am talking to you Everett!), even if they contain a grain of truth or two (though color me very skeptical, I have been told that Tomasello’s stuff has someinteresting points) that are worth preserving given a reasonable conception of the enterprise. These kinds of “misunderstanding” are best explained methodologically. The critics don’t go into the details because they don’t believe the problem is one of detail. It is one of principle. The GG enterprise is faulty because its Rish presuppositions are untenable. If you believe this (and these people do, really!), then it is no wonder that they don’t do a deep dive into the details and confront what GGers take to be their most significant contributions.

 In other words, for the critics, the problem is the GG belief that a reasonable view of language would root the research program in an Rish vision of science in general and the mental/behavioral sciences in particular. The critics, being Eish, reject this, and as the divide between E and R conceptions is wide, we can identify its basic unbridgeability as the underlying source of the shockingly shoddy criticisms that MG so ably surveys. Given this, I am far less hopeful than MG is that “there is a glimmer of hope” (p. 23) that these disagreements will be resolved in a rational manner.[1]They cannot be for the very idea of what is the right form of “rational” inquiry is what is being debated.

I have other quibbles with the paper. For example, I found the discussion of reduction and emergence in section 3 somewhat confusing in that it mixes up two different questions: how do linguistic claims get cashed out in wetware? and are linguistic primitives reducible to those of other cognitive domains? These are different questions (as I am sure MG knows) but the paper seems to run them together. The question of FL’s linguistic “specificity” relates more to the second than the first. Of course, if we assume that cognition supervenes on brains and brains are made up of regular biological material then linguistic objects, dependencies and principles even if very linguistically sui generiswill live in biological tissue of these brains. Where else?[2]

However, that is not, nor has it ever been the relevant issue. The question has always been whether the FoL is cognitively independent. To put this crudely in “program” talk: is the FoL program just cobbled together from routines extant in other domains of animal cognition or does it require its own specific features (primitives, subroutines, addressing mechanisms etc.). One might imagine that FL is a kind of Rube Goldberg device assembled from bits and pieces of other available cognitive faculties. This is a possibility. However, I personally doubt it, and the Merge Hypothesis (i.e. that Merge is the linguistically specific sauce that one needs to add to general cognitive and computational powers to yield FL) does as well, though it limits the specificity to this one small operation. 

Honesty compels us (me!) to admit that, to date, no minimalist account has managed to eliminate all operations rather than Merge in accounting for well established features of FL. So, to date, there is reason to think that there is more to the UG parts of FL than just Merge.[3]So whereas the Minimalist Program’s ambitions are alive and well, to date, there is still quite a bit of air between the hopes and the results. And to date, there is good reason to think that FL has quite a bit more UG in it than the standard advertising supposes. This is not a serious problem for the program, but it is worth keeping in mind when we advertise the ambitions given that the program is not exactly in its infancy anymore (it’s a robust 25 years old).

I have other quibbles as well, but enough really. MG has written a terrific paper which makes some very useful points (e.g. I love the discussion in section 4 a lot and his discussion of Tomasello, Everett and Chater and Christiansen are excellent). The paper should be widely read and I hope that it helps change the discussion to a more reasonable one. It shoulddo this. But even if it fails to blunt the overwhelming stupidity of the common critiques, it is a very good paper for insidersto read. I suspect that nowadays many GGers do not really care for the larger cognitive biological issues that once animated the field. This makes it hard to properly rebut the many claims that GG is dead that abound in the popular press. MG’s paper is a good starting point for those interested in reclaiming the cognitive/biological roots of the GG enterprise.

That said I am going to end on a pessimistic note. Despite MG’s excellent discussion, I doubt it will much change the discussion for the reasons outlined above. We are entering a new age of Eism (Deep Learning and Big Data being conspicuous signs of this), and not just in otherareas of cognition.  Its allure is alive in linguistics as well. The idea that FL exists and has special features and that it is a proper object of linguistic study is, IMO, actually taken to be rather quaint within linguisticcircles. GGers with a cognitive bent should not only worry about the barbarians at the gate, the horse has been dragged within the city limits. Let’s hope that MG’s reasonable discussion can redirect this tide, but I am not counting on it.

Last point, I was delighted to see that a major journal published MG’s paper. I could not imagine this appearing in today’s Cognitionor LIor NLLT. Kudos to the Journal of Linguistics.  

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[1]Of course, that said, one should always be ready to integrate useful findings from those one disagrees with, even deeply. Those grains of truth are (perhaps) worthwhile.

[2]Though who knows, maybe there really is mind stuff. The belief that there is isn’t is largely a matter of faith.

[3]Indeed, an interesting paradox, IMO, of much contemporary Minimalist work is that it is not Merge that does most of the Grammatical heavy lifting. Rather the prime grammatical operation is AGREE and the long distance feature checking that accompanies it. I-Merge is a very secondary feature of most contemporary accounts and nobody had bothered to consider how linguistically specific the properties of AGREE are. To the degree that they are not, this is a problem for the idea that onlyMerge is linguistically proprietarty. Ditto with the features of the basic lexical atoms. Their idiosyncrasies have been well discussed by Chomsky. To the degree that they remain, there is more to UG than Merge.

Evo Lang; a comment on logical distance

In a previous post, I outlined the three kinds of gaps that fuel PoS arguments. I also noted that one of the gaps (the one that focuses on utterances as imperfect exemplars of sentences in that they are subject to the exigencies that afflict (enhance?) all performances) was less serious than the other two in that it can likely be bridged using generic statistical techniques that can be applied to “raw” data to regiment it, scrub it, and normalize it. Despite its relative marginality for PoS claims, this kind of data degeneracy is often the focus of lots of empirical investigation claiming to refute the supposition that it is particularly poor, or misleading, or incomplete. Motherese, it is often retorted, is actually mostly well-formed, smoothly uttered, and even helpful intonationally. This kind of retort is (sometimes tacitly, sometimes not) used to support the claim that there is no real PoS problem because the data is quite clean and therefore the degeneracy problem is not serious and given that the data is good and clean, wholesome even, there is no reason to doubt that it is sufficient to guide an LAD to its G. What the previous post argued is that even if correct (which, frankly I doubt, but let’s be concessive[1]) it is completely irrelevant for there are two other gaps that have little to do with the quality of the data and this is where the real power of PoS arguments lie.

That’s what the earlier post argued at length so why am I regurgitating the points again here? Not to reiterate the main claim (though repetition is the soul of insight (or at least belief fixation)), but to observe that, in a curious sense, providing a thorough catalogue of problems for E(mpiricist) approaches to G acquisition serves to obscure the most important part of the argument. How so? It provides critics of the PoS a weak supposition on which to concentrate its fire which, if even partially successful (again, I am skeptical, but…) serves to move the argumentative focus away from the strong arguments (having to do with data deficiency, not degeneracy) and allow for a very premature declaration that there is no PoS problem at all. So, being thorough and exhaustive drops bread crumbs that Eish Hansel and Gretels eagerly gather thereby allowing them to get lost in a forest of irrelevancies.[2]  And the reason I mention this is that the same kind of poor argumentative behavior infects many Evo Lang discussions, which is what I want to concentrate on today by discussing a particularly obtuse piece that appeared in Aeon penned, by you guessed it, Dan Everett, entitled Did Homo Erectus Speak (henceforth DHES (here)).[3]

The goal of DHES is to argue for the Continuity Thesis. This is roughly the idea that current human linguistic facility is qualitatively identical to what our ancestors (and indeed other animals) have. So what we have is just like what they have but more so. Here is DHES (p.2):

…the ‘leap’ to language was little more than a long series of baby steps, requiring no mutations, nor any complex grammar. In fact, the language of erectus would have been every bit as much a ‘real language’ as any modern language.

The main argument for this conclusion is that Homo Erectus (Erectus (E) to friends and family) already spoke a language largely like ours and thus, our linguistic capacity has been gradually evolving for millions of years. Here is DHES (p. 2):

To discover the answers to these questions, we need to travel back in time at least 1.9 million years ago to the birth of Homo erectus, as they emerged from the ancient process of primate evolution. Erectus had nearly double the brain size of any previous hominim, walked habitually upright, were superb hunters, travelled the world, and sailed to ocean islands. And somewhere along the way they got language. Yes, erectus. Not Neanderthals. Not sapiens. And if erectus invented language, this means that Neanderthals, born more than a million years later, entered a world already linguistic.

Likewise, our species would have emerged into a world that already had language…

And, consequently, there is little reason to think that there is anything linguistically special about us. Our capacities are identical to E’s give and take a little (very little). That’s the claim DHES advances, based on the “fact” (that DHES concedes is not widely accepted in the paleoanthropology community (p.2))[4] that E’s artifacts (“their settlements, their art, their symbols, their sailing ability, and their tools) all point to something like “an animal that can communicate via symbols.” Or, as DHES puts it: “a linguistic animal” (p. 6).

So, if E was a symbol manipulator (witness the artifacts) and was able to “transfer information by symbols” (5), then E was linguistic, i.e. graced with the same FL as us and there is no reason to assume that

…humans possess special cognitive abilities absent from the brains of all other creatures or whether, more simply, humans have language because they are smarter than other creatures (whether through higher densities of neurons, or other advantages of brain organisation). (p.6)

So what distinguishes us from other homos (and even other animals for the logic deployed leads here) is a bigger brain that is qualitatively the same as that of our ancestors but bigger and bigger gives you “language.”

Before examining the argument, you can see why DHES emphasizes and argues for E having language and the long time period separating E from us. The secret sauce of gradualist explanations is long expanses of time in which little changes can add up (see here for the definitive account). This is why DHES emphasizes the millions of years theme. The supposition seems to be that the only problem with a gradualist account of the evolution of the human FL is that it arose relatively recently (roughly 100kya) and that there is not enough time for natural selection to work its magic. So, the thinking seems to go, if DHES can show that this supposition is incorrect it implies that the continuity thesis does apply to human FL and the fact that humans speak as we do (in particular, have the kinds of Gs that we do) requires no novel cognitive architecture. It’s linguistic facility all the way down, with bigger brains adding more of the same doohickies and thingamabobs we find in smaller ones leading to an “apparent” qualitative (but in reality, merely a quantitative) change in capacity.

Now, as you can imagine, this is a very bad argument, though I concede that people like me (and perhaps Chomsky) have invited this kind of response. Chomsky has pointed out (following a pretty impressive bunch of people who think about this topic for a living (e.g. Tattersall)) that the indirect evidence for language is relatively recent. If one measures things using cultural artifacts, then the explosion of these around 50kya (rather than a handful of contentious ones further back) seems to indicate that something significant happened rather recently (not millions of years ago). If one takes such cultural artifacts to piggy back on our linguistic faculties and one takes these to prominently include the capacity to acquire Gs that generate an unbounded number of hierarchically structured interpretable objects, then one has indirect evidence for something like our kinds of Gs (Merge based ones) arising in the (relatively) recent past. If.

As I’ve noted before, this is a very indirect kind of argument for Merge, and it is not clear how much cultural artifacts implicate Merge. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the thing that goosed culture (maybe given its significance we should spell it Kultur!)[5] was hooking the system up with externalization thereby facilitating communication and the gradual build-up of retained and retainable knowledge. Who knows really. All of this is very speculative (i.e. it’s not as if there is a transparent logical entailment from elaborate burial rituals or cave paintings to hierarchical recursion). However, it is also not that important for even were this false the Evo Lang problem would remain fundamentally unaltered. Let me explain.

The hard problem for GGers is explaining how unbounded hierarchical recursion could have arisen (actually, how it actually arose is the problem, but right now would declare a small victory if we could redeem the modal). The assumption (and this is based on empirical evidence) is that there is nothing quite like it anywhere else in animal cognition. This is not to demean the powers of other animals. They really are amazing in many ways. But so far as we can tell there is nothing formally analogous to the kinds of operations and structures we regularly find in human Gs and there is no reason to believe that any other animal either uses or acquires systems with these properties. If this is true (and it is, really!), then one major Evo Lang problem is explaining how systems with this formal property could have biologically arisen in humans given that nothing like it was there before. The problem then is not a matter of temporal distance, but of logical distance. If the above correctly describes the current state of play and it is true that other animals don’t have cognitive capacities with these formal properties then explaining how these properties arose and the mental powers need to deploy them and acquire them requires not just more but also different. So what was the different and how did it happen? That’s the GG Evo Lang question.

Several comments: does this mean that this is the only EvoLang question? No, there are others and I will return to some discussed in DHES. Does this make the temporal question irrelevant? Yes and No.

Yes in the sense that the problem is more or less the same regardless of the time it took to arise. Why? Because the problem is how to get from non-recursive structural hierarchy to recursive structural hierarchy and no amount of non­-recursive hierarchy or recursive flat structure or non-recursive flat structure will get you there by adding more of it. How hierarchy arose and how, furthermore, embedded hierarchy within hierarchy ad nauseum arose is not explained by noting finite examples of hierarchy or unbounded examples of iterated beads on a string concatenations. Let me be clear: there is nothing wrong in pointing out that either of these exist in the mental repertoires of other animals, but this is not enough. There needs to be a story getting you from these non recursive hierarchical systems to the qualitatively different recursive hierarchical one we have now. No story, no proposed additional mechanism, no Evo Lang account.

And the No? Well, if FL arose (very) recently, then there would be no temptation to look for a gradualist account. So were FL of very recent vintage it would serve to block the bad (Eish) impulse to always look to the shaping effects of the environment for an explanation of anything.

Think of an analogy in the domain of language acquisition. Imagine that kids popped out speaking their native language. Does anyone think that we would be expecting Eish accounts of the process? Nope. Does anyone look for the shaping effects of the environment in explaining why kids are (normally) born with two legs and two arms, one heart, two kidneys etc.? Analogous impulses would dominate were LADs to pop out speaking their mother’s native tongue (actually I am not sure this is so, but I would hope it was). Ditto with a short evo time span and gradualist accounts. A long time span is a pre-requisite for a continuity story to even make sense. However, when you think about the issue just a little bit, even a very long time span does not bridge the logical gap, and that is the one that needs traversing.

Curiously, the problem DHES presupposes away is one that we have seen before in a slightly different venue. Piaget was a cognitive gradualist, famously claiming that logical thinking in children gradually developed in them. Jerry Fodor (in the Royaumont volume, sadly under-read nowadays) pointed out that gradually developing richer logical competence is impossible. There is no way of getting from the propositional to the predicate calculus without presupposing the resources of the latter as a precondition. This is a logical bridge too far, and it cannot be gradually navigated. The same holds true with the recursive hierarchy problem. It is not the sort of thing you get by adding more non recursive non hierarchical systems of representation. You need to add something else. The Evo Lang question is what.

DHES does not say. It does make many other points. It points to another important property of natural language, namely that its atoms are symbols and that this allows for “displacement” (i.e. not stimulus bound reference). DHES further insists (p.6) that

Symbols, not grammar, are thus the sine qua non of language. They alone guarantee communication that is displaced, that is shared by an entire community of speakers, that can be transmitted between speakers and between generations, and that can represent either abstract or concrete ideas or things.

Maybe DHES is right. As I’ve noted before, Chomsky agrees that there is something interestingly different about the atoms of human language wrt their semantic properties. But even were this is so (which it likely is), it doesn’t answer the GG question of how the kind of recursive hierarchy we find in human Gs (and that humans with FLs can all acquire) arose. In other words, even if we agree with DHES concerning the importance of atomic symbols as one key feature of human language (which, as I’ve noted many times before, Chomsky has highlighted often in the past) unless DHES shows us how symbolic terminals leads to recursive hierarchy, we have not progressed on the GG question.[6] And though the GG question is not the only question, it is one important one given that one of the distinctive features of human language is that it is G based (see here for recognition by some of the biologically informed that being G based is indeed a critical feature of human language).

So the big problem with DHES is its failure to recognize the logical problem the GG facts present. I say this because it appears to suppose that one explains how the capacity of interest arose by showing a chart that tracks its progression. The chart is on p. 7 and has arrows pointing from one kind of representational format to another. So, indices begat icons which begat symbols which via duality of patterning begat compositionality, which begat linearity, which begat hierarchy, which finally begat recursion. All very impressive, but for the fact that DHES says nothing about how all this begetting took place (DHES leaves out all the salacious prurient detail). How exactly does linearity begat hierarchy and hierarchy begat recursion? All DHES tells us is that it does. Or more accurately (pp. 9-10. I have quoted the parts where “the miracle happens” as the old New Yorker cartoon put it).

Once you have a set of symbols and a linear order agreed upon by a culture, you have a language.

That is really all there is to it, though of course most languages become more complex over time….

All of the embellishments of grammar such as hierarchical structures, recursion, relative clauses and other complex constructions are secondary, based on a slot-filler arrangement of and composition of symbols, in conjunction with cultural conventions and general principles of efficient computation…

Thus, once cultures and symbols appear, grammar is on the way...

So DHES does nothing to advance the GG question, except avoid saying anything about it while appearing to address it.

Before ending, let me admit that it might be that I am somewhat unfair to DHES. There are times when it appears that its interest is not engaging the Evo Lang question as GG poses it but in addressing another question: does a recursively hierarchical G have more expressive power than one without such a G? Note, that this is not the GG question and, to my knowledge, this has not been a question that has occupied my GG community. However, if this is the question that interests DHES, then it seems either irrelevant to, or problematic for, the standard Evo Lang question of how our G systems and the capacity to acquire them arose. Say that the two kinds of Gs are not expressively the same: how does this help answer the question of how our FL arose? Say they have the same expressive power, then why did we evolve an FL that could acquire Gs with unbounded hierarchy even though, by assumption, these add nothing to the “expressive power” of language? Again, it really does not advance the Evo Lang question of interest (which, to repeat, does not mean that this is the only question of interest).

Let me end here. DHES is a very messy piece and I think I know why. It really wants to argue that there is no Evo Lang problem of the kind GG (actually Herr Chomsky) poses because what we see all rose gradually over a very long period of time in small incremental steps. The problem is that DHES nowhere suggests how these steps could have been taken and how they could have added up to what we now have. How does one get from flat systems to hierarchical ones to recursively hierarchical ones? How does one get from strongly referential terminals (Chomsky’s observations concerning animal communication systems) to those that allow for pretty radical displacement? What mental changes are required to allow this kind of symbol or representational format to arise? What kind of mental changes are required to get from linear to unboundedly hierarchical? These are hard questions, and maybe we will never be able to answer them. But better to fail to answer a real question then fail to see what the question is.

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[1] I hereby preemptively apologize to Jerry Fodor who wisely counciled against ever conceding anything even for the sake of argument. I am sinning here, I know.

[2] And yes I know that they did not pick up their own crumbs and get themselves lost, but the metaphor got away from me.

[3] His work really is the gift that keeps on giving, your one stop shopping venue for largely irrelevant arguments intended to buttress insupportable arguments. I am starting to think that DE is doing this all as public service for the enlightenment of the young. Master the non-sequiturs in the core DE oeuvre and you’ve seen through all (or at least many of) the non-sequiturs you are likely to encounter in the vast irrelevant anti- Chomsky literature. Like I said, an invaluable resource (sorta like the role that Piaget’s work played in early developmental psych work. Work through the many failures of logic there and you end up with modern developmental cognition of the Carey-Spelke variety (i.e. the good stuff)).

[4] Though I am not suggesting that this should be held against the view. Experts have been known to be wrong before, and for all I know E had some linguistic skills. That is not the issue, as I show below. The issue is how similar E’s capacities were to our own.

[5] The ‘K’ is also in honor of the fact that I’m posting from Germany where I am scheduled to give a talk that I stupidly agreed to give months ago sure that I would never have to do this as I would be lucky enough to be hit by a bus but my luck has turned and here I am in Stuttgart. So Kultur it is!

[6] DHES might be making a point that I am sympathetic to: that if one is interested in how Kultur arose, then the fact that Gs are recursively hierarchical is less important than that they deploy symbols closely semantically tied to the 4Fs. In other words, for communicative purposes, displacement might be critical and for Kultur communication. might be. This does not eliminate the GG question concerning recursive hierarchy, but it suggests that it contends that it is not the sine qua non of Kultur. I don’t know if this is right, but it might be for all I know. Like I’ve said before, given a simple ‘N V N’ template and 25,000 Ns and 15,000 Vs allows you to say a hell of a lot of things, maybe enough to sail the oceans and leave behind fancy artifacts.

Tragedy, farce, pathos

Dan Everett (DE) has written once again on his views about Piraha, recursion, and the implications for Universal Grammar (here). I was strongly tempted to avoid posting on it for it adds nothing new of substance to the discussion (and will almost certainly serve to keep the silliness alive), beyond a healthy dose of self-pity and self-aggrandizement. It makes the same mistakes, in almost the same way, and adds a few more irrelevancies to the mix. If history surfaces first as tragedy and the second time as farce (see here) then pseudo debates in their moth eaten n-th iteration are just pathetic. The Piraha “debate” has long since passed its sell-by date. As I’ve said all that I am about to say before, I would urge you not to expend time or energy reading this. But if you are the kind of person who slows down to rubberneck a wreck on the road and can’t help but find the ghoulish fascinating, this post is for you.

The DE piece makes several points.

First, that there is a debate. As you all know this is wrong. There can be no debate if the controversy hinges on an equivocation. And it does, for what the DE piece claims about the G of Piraha, even if completely accurate (which I doubt, but the facts are beyond my expertise) has no bearing on Chomsky’s proposal, viz. that recursion is the only distinctively linguistic feature of FL. This is a logical point, not an empirical one. More exactly, the controversy rests on an equivocation concerning the notion “universal.” The equivocation has been a consistent feature of DE’s discussions and this piece is no different. Let me once again explain the logic.

Chomsky’s proposal rests on a few observations. First, that humans display linguistic creativity. Second, that humans are only accidentally native speakers of their native languages.

The first observation is manifest in the fact that, for example, a native speaker of English, can effortlessly use and understand an unbounded number of linguistic expressions never before encountered. The second is manifest in the observation that a child deposited in any linguistic community will grow up to be a linguistically competent native speaker of that language with linguistic capacities indistinguishable from any of the other native speakers (e.g. wrt his/her linguistic creativity).

These two observations prompt some questions.

First, what underlying mental architecture is required to allow for the linguistic creativity we find in humans?  Answer 1 a mind that has recursive rules able to generate ever more sophisticated expressions from simple building blocks (aka, a G). Question 2: what kind of mental architecture must a such a G competent being have? Answer 2: a mind that can acquire recursive rules (i.e a G) from products of those rules (i.e. generated examples of the G). Why recursive rules? Because linguistic productivity just names the fact that human speakers are competent with respect to an unbounded number of different linguistic expressions.

Second, why assume that the capacity to acquire recursive Gs is a feature of human minds in general rather than simply a feature of those human minds that have actually acquired recursive Gs? Answer: Because any human can acquire any G that generates any language. So the capacity to acquire language in general requires the meta-capacity to acquire recursive rule systems (aka, Gs).  As this meta-capacity seems to be restricted to humans (i.e. so far as we know only humans display the kind of recursive capacity manifested in linguistic creativity) and as this capacity is most clearly manifest in language then Chomsky’s conjecture is that if there is anything linguistically specific about the human capacity to acquire language the linguistic specificity resides in this recursive meta-capacity.[1] Or to put this another way: there may be more to the human capacity to acquire language than the recursive meta-capacity but at least this meta capacity is part of the story.[2] Or, to put this another way, absent the human given (i.e. innate) meta-capacity to acquire (certain specifiable kinds of) recursive Gs, humans would not be able to acquire the kinds of Gs that we know that they in fact do acquire (e.g. Gs like those English, French, Spanish, Tagalog, Arabic, Inuit, Chinese … speakers have in fact acquired). Hence, humans must come equipped with this recursive meta-capacity as part of FL.

Ok, some observations: recursion in this story is principally a predicate of FL, the meta-capacity. The meta-capacity is to acquire recursive Gs (with specific properties that GG has been in the business of identifying for the last 50 years or so). The conjecture is that humans have this meta-capacity (aka FL) because they do in fact display linguistic creativity (and, as the DE paper concedes, native speakers of non-Piraha do regularly display linguistic creativity implicating the internalization of recursive language specific Gs) and because the linguistic creativity a native speaker of (e.g.) English displays could have been displayed by any person raised in an English linguistic milieu. In sum, FL is recursive in the sense that it has the capacity to acquire recursive Gs and speakers of any language have such FLs.

Observe that FL must have the capacity to acquire recursive Gs even if not all human Gs are recursive. FL must have this capacity because all agree that many/most (e.g.) non-Piraha Gs are recursive in the sense that Piraha is claimed not to be. So, the following two claims are consistent: (1) some languages have non-recursive Gs but (2) native speakers of those languages have recursive FLs. This DE piece (like all the other DE papers on this topic) fails, once again, to recognize this. A discontinuous quote (4):

 If there were a language that chose not to use recursion, it would at the very least be curious and at most would mean that Chomsky’s entire conception of language/grammar is wrong….

Chomsky made a clear claim –recursion is fundamental to having a language. And my paper did in fact present a counterexample. Recursion cannot be fundamental to language if there are languages without it, even just one language.

First an aside: I tend to agree that it would indeed be curious if we found a language with a non-recursive G given that virtually all of the Gs that have been studied are recursive. Thus finding one that is not would be odd for the same reason that finding a single counter example to any generalization is always curious (and which is why I tend not to believe DE’s claims and tend to find the critique by Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues compelling).[3] But, and this is the main take home message, whether curious or not, it is at right angles to Chomsky’s claim concerning FL for the reasons outlined above. The capacity to acquire recursive Gs is not falsified by the acquisition of a non-recursive one. Thus, logically speaking, the observation that Piraha does not have embedded clauses (i.e. does not the display one of the standard diagnostics of a recursive G) does not imply that Piraha speakers do not have recursive FLs. Thus, DE’s claims are completely irrelevant to Chomsky’s even if correct. That point has been made repeatedly and, sadly, it has still not sunk in. I doubt that for some it ever will.

Ok, let’s now consider some other questions. Here’s one: is this linguistic meta-capacity permanent or evanescent? In other words, one can imagine that FL has the capacity to acquire recursive Gs but that once it has acquired a non-recursive G it can no longer acquire a recursive one. DE’s article suggests that this is so for Piraha speakers (p. 7). Again, I have no idea if this is indeed the case (if true it constitute evidence for a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) but this claim even if correct is at right angles to Chomsky’s claim about FL. Species specific dedicated capacities need not remain intact after use. It could be true that FL is only available for first language acquisition and this would mean that second languages are acquired in different ways (maybe by piggy backing on the first G acquired).[4] However so far as I know, neither Chomsky nor GG has ever committed hostages to this issue. Again, I am personally skeptical that having a Piraha G precludes you from the recursive parts of a Portuguese G, but I have nothing but prejudicial hunches to sustain the skepticism. At any rate, it doesn’t bear on Chomsky’s thesis concerning FL. The upshot: DE’s remarks once again are at right angles to Chomsky’s claims so interesting as the possibility it raises might be for interesting issues relating to second language acquisition, it is not relevant to Chomsky’s claims about the recursive nature of FL.

A third question: is the meta-capacity culturally relative? DE’s piece suggests that it is because the actual acquisition of recursive Gs might be subject to cultural influences. The point seems to be that if culture influences whether an acquired G is recursive or not implies that the meta-capacity is recursive or not as well. But this does not follow.  Let me explain.

All agree that the details of an actual G are influenced by all sorts of factors, including culture.[5] This must be so and has been insisted upon since the earliest days of GG. After all, the G one acquires is a function of FL and the PLD used to construct that G. But the PLD is itself a function of what is actually gets and there is no doubt that what utterances are performed is influenced by the culture of the utterers.[6] So, that culture has an effect on the shape of specific Gs is (or should be) uncontroversial. However, none of this implies that the meta-capacity to build recursive Gs is itself culturally dependent, nor does DE’s piece explain how it could be. In fact, it has always been unclear how external factors could affect this meta-capacity. You either have a recursive meta-capacity or you don’t. As Dawkins put it (see here for discussion and references):

… Just as you can’t have half a segment, there are no intermediates between a recursive and a non-recursive subroutine. Computer languages either allow recursion or they don’t. There’s no such thing as half-recursion. It’s an all or nothing software trick… (383)

Given this “all or nothing” quality, what would it mean to say that the capacity (i.e. the innately provided “computer language” of FL) was dependent on “culture.”? Of course, if what you mean is that the exercise of the capacity is culture dependent and what you mean by this is that it depends on the nature of the PLD (and other factors) that might themselves be influenced by “culture” then duh! But, if this is what DE’s piece intends, then once again it fails to make contact with Chomsky’s claim concerning the recursive nature of FL. The capacity is what it is though of course the exercise of the capacity to produce a G will be influenced by all sorts of factors, some of which we can call “culture.”[7]

Two more points and we are done.

First, there is a source for the confusion in DE’s papers (and it is the same one I have pointed to before). DE’s discussion treats all universals as if Greenbergian. Here’s a quote from the current piece that shows this (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to uncover the Greenbergian premise):

The real lesson is that if recursion is the narrow faculty of language, but doesn’t actually have to be manifested in a given language, then likely more languages than Piraha…could lack recursion. And by this reasoning we derive the astonishing claim that. Although, recursion would be the characteristic that makes human language possible, it need not actually be found in any given language. (8)

Note the premise: unless every G is recursive then recursion cannot be “that which makes human languages possible.” But this only makes sense if you understand things as Greenberg does. If you understand the claim as being about the capacity to acquire recursive Gs then none of this follows.

Nor are we led to absurdity. Let me froth here. Of course, nobody would think that we had a capacity for constructing recursive Gs unless we had reason to think that some Gs were so. But we have endless evidence that this is the case. So, given that there is at least one such G (indeed endlessly many), humans clearly must have the capacity to construct such Gs. So, though we might have had such a capacity and never exercised it (this is logically possible), we are not really in that part of the counterfactual space. All we need to get the argument going for a recursive meta-capacity is mastery of at least one recursive G and there is no dispute that there exists such a G and that humans have acquired it. Given this, the only coherent reason for thinking a counterexample (like Piraha) could be a problem is if one understood the claim to universality as implying that a universal property of FL (i.e. a feature of FL) must manifest itself in every G. And this is to understand ‘universal’ a la Greenberg and and not as Chomsky does. Thus we are back to original sin in DE’s oeuvre; the insistence on a Greenberg conception of universal.

Second, the piece makes another point. It suggests that DE’s dispute with Chomsky is actually over whether recursion is part of FL or part of cognition more generally. Here’s the quote (10):

…the question is not whether humans can think recursively. The question is whether this ability is linked specifically to language or instead to human cognitive accomplishments more generally…

If I understand this correctly, it is agreed that recursion is an innate part of human mental machinery. What’s at issue is whether there is anything linguistically proprietary about it. Thus, Chomsky could be right to think that human linguistic capacity manifests recursion but that this is not a specifically linguistic fact about us as we manifest recursion in our mental life quite generally.[8]

Maybe. But frankly it is hard to see how DE’s writings bear on these very recondite issues. Here’s what I mean: Human Gs are not merely recursive but exhibit a particular kind of recursion. Work in GG over the last 60 years has been in service of trying to specify what kind of recursive Gs humans entertain. Now, the claim here is that we find the kind of structure we find in human Gs in cognition more generally. This is empirically possible. Show me! Show me that other kinds of cognition have the same structures as those GGers have found occur in Gs.  Nothing in DE’s arguments about Piraha have any obvious bearing on this claim for there is no demonstration that other parts of cognition have anything like the recursive structure we find in human Gs.

But let’s say that we establish such a parallelism. There is still more to do. Here is a second question: is FL recursive because our mental life in general is or is our mental life in general recursive because we have FL.[9] This is the old species specificity question all over again. Chomsky’s claim is that if there is anything species special about human linguistic facility it rests in the kind of recursion we find in language. To rebut this species specificity requires showing that this kind of recursion is not the exclusive preserve of linguistically capable beings. But, once again, nothing in DE’s work addresses this question. No evidence is presented trying to establish the parallel between the kind of recursion we find in human Gs and any animal cognitive structures.

Suffice it to say that the kind of recursion we find in language is not cognitively ubiquitous (so far as we can tell) and that if it occurs in other parts of cognition it does not appear to be rampant in non-human animal cognition. And, for me at least, that is linguistically specific enough. Moreover, and this is the important point as regards DE’s claims, it is quite unclear how anything about Piraha will bear on this question. Whether or not Piraha has a recursive G will tell us nothing about whether other animals have recursive minds like ours.

Conclusion? The same as before. There is no there there. We find arguments based on equivocation and assertions without support. The whole discussion is irrelevant to Chomsky’s claims about the recursive structure of FL and whether that is the sole UGish feature of FL.[10]

That’s it. As you can see, I got carried away. I didn’t mean to write so much. Sorry. Last time? Let’s all hope so.

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[1] Here you can whistle some appropriate Minimalist tune if you would like. I personally think that there is something linguistically specific about FL given that we are the only animals that appear to manifest anything like the recursive structures we find in language. But, this is an empirical question. See here for discussion.

[2] Chomsky’s minimalist conjecture is that this is the sole linguistically special capacity required.

[3] Indeed such odd counterexamples place a very strong burden of proof on the individual arguing for it. Sometimes this burden of proof can be met. But singular counterexamples that float in a sea of regularity are indeed curious and worthy of considerable skepticism. However, that’s not my point here. It is a different one: the Piraha facts whatever they turn out to be are irrelevant to the claim the FL has the capacity to acquire recursive Gs. As this is what Chomsky has been proposing. Thus, the facts regarding Piraha whatever they turn out to be are logically irrelevant to Chomsky’s proposal.

[4] This seems to be the way that Sakel conceives of the process (see here). Sakel is the person the DE piece cites as rebutting the idea that Piraha speakers with Portuguese as a second language behave. That speakers build their second G on the scaffolding provided by a first G is quite plausible a priori (though whether it is true is another matter entirely). And if this is so, then features of one’s first G should have significant impact on properties of one’s second G. Sakel, btw, is far less categorical in her views than what DE’s piece suggests. Last point: a nice “experiment” if this interests you is to see what happens if a speaker is acquiring Portuguese and Piraha simultaneously; both as first Gs. What should we expect? I dunno, but my hunch is that both would be acquired swimmingly.

[5] So, for example, dialects of English differ wrt the acceptability of Topicalization. My community used it freely and I find them great. My students at UMD were not that comfortable with this kind of displacement. I am willing to bet that Topicalization’s alias (i.e. Yiddish Movement) betrays a certain cultural influence.

[6] Again, see note 4 and Sakel’s useful discussion of the complexity of Portuguese input to the Piraha second language acquirer.

[7] BTW, so far as I can tell, invoking “culture” is nothing but a rhetorical flourish most of the time. It usually means nothing more than “not biology.” However, how culture affects matters and which bits do what is often (always?) left unsettled. It often seems to me that the word is brandished a bit like garlic against vampires, mainly there to ward off evil biological spirits.

[8] On this view, DE agrees that there is FLB but no FLN, i.e. a UGish part of FL.

[9] In Minimalist terms, is recursion a UGish part of FL or is there no UG at all in FL.

[10] There is also some truly silly stuff in which DE speculates as to why the push back against his views has been so vigorous. Curiously, DE does not countenance the possibility that it is because his arguments though severely wanting have been very widely covered. There is some dumb stuff on Chomsky’s politics, Wolfe junk, and general BS about how to do science. This is garbage and not worth your time, except for psycho-sociological speculation.

Vox cognoscenti

The thoroughly modern well informed member of the professional classes reads Vox (I do). Not surprisingly, then, Vox has reviewed Wolfe’s book to provide discussion fodder for those that frequently eat out in groups. Unlike the NYT or The Chronicle, Vox found a linguist, John McWhorter (at Columbia) to do the explaining. The review (henceforth JMR) (here) makes three points: (i) that Wolfe really has no idea what he is talking about, (ii) that GGers are arrogant and dismissive and their work (overly) baroque, and (iii) that Everett and other critics might really have a point, though (and here JM is being fair and balanced) so does Chomsky and Everett’s critics.

The biggest problem with JMR lies with its attempts to split the difference between Chomsky and his “critics.” As I’ve noted before (and the reason I put critics in scare quotes), Everett (and Vyvyan Evans who also gets a mention) have no idea what Chomsky has been claiming and so their “critiques” have little to do with what he has actually said. They thus cannot be criticisms of Chomsky’s work and are thus of little value in assessing Chomsky’s claims.

Furthermore, it is clear that these critiques are of interest to the general public and are covered by the high brow media precisely to the extent that they show that Chomsky is wrong about the nature of language, as he understand this. Indeed, this is why part of every title to every piece covering these critiques declares that Chomsky is wrong about Universal Grammar (UG). Nobody outside a small number of linguists really cares about whether Piraha embeds sentences! All the fireworks in the high-brow press are due to what Everett’s findings mean for the Chomsky program, which is precisely nothing for it rests on a simple misunderstanding of Chomsky’s claims (see here and here for recent discussion).

The sociological significance of the expansive coverage of these “critiques” given their shoddiness is another matter. It says a lot about how much our thought leaders want to discredit Chomsky’s non-linguistic views. I would go further: I doubt that our thought leaders care much about the fine structure of the Faculty of Language. But they hope that discrediting Chomsky’s scientific/linguistic project might also serve to discredit his non-linguistic ones. However, given FoL’s remit, I won’t here develop this (pretty obvious) line of speculation. Instead I will lightly review some JMR highlights and make the (by now, I hope) obvious points. 

A. JMR describes the position that Wolfe is attacking (via Everett’s work) as follows:

Wolfe’s topic is Noam Chomsky’s proposal that all humans are born with a sentence structure blueprint programmed in their brains, invariant across the species, and that each language is but a variation upon this "universal grammar" generated by an as-yet unidentified "language organ." In other words, we are born already knowing language. (2-3)

This is a very misleading way of putting Chomsky’s claims about UG. A better analogy is that there is a biologically given recipe for constructing Gs on the basis of PLD. These Gs can (and do differ) significantly. The “blueprint” analogy suggests that all Gs have the same structures, with a tweak here or there (JRM: “few “switches” that flip in the toddler’s brain”). And this suggests that finding a language with a very different G “blueprint” (Piraha say, which JRM (reporting on Everett) writes does not allow for “the ability to nest ideas inside one another” (with an example of multiple sentential embedding as illustration)) would constitute a problem for Chomsky’s FL conception as it would fail to have a key feature of UG (“the absence proves that no universal grammar could exist”). But, as you all know, this is incorrect. It is consistent with Chomsky’s views that the “blueprints” differ. What matters is that the capacity to draw them (i.e. acquire Gs) remains the same. Put more directly, JMR suggests a Greenbergian understanding of Chomsky Universals. And that, is a big no-no![1]

Now, to be honest, I sometimes had trouble distinguishing what JMR is reporting from what JMR is endorsing. However, as the whole point of the non-debate is that what Everett criticizes is at right angles to what Chomsky claims, leaving this fuzzy severely misreports what is going on. Especially when JMR reports that Chomsky “didn’t like this,” thereby suggesting that it was the content of Everett’s claim that Chomsky objected to, rather than the logic behind it. Chomsky’s primary objection was, and still is, that even if Everett is right about Piraha, it has nothing to do with GG claims about whether recursion is built into the structure of FL/UG.

This is the important point about Everett’s research, and it must be highlighted in any informative review. Once this point is firmly and clearly made one can raise secondary issues (very secondary IMO): whether Everett’s specific claims about Piraha are empirically accurate (IMO, likely not). However, this is decidedly a secondary concern if one’s interest is the relevance of Everett’s claims to Chomsky’s claims concerning the structure of FL/UG. JMR fails to make this simple logical point. Hence, whatever its other virtues, it serves to obscure the relevant issues and so to misinform.

            B. JMR writes that the “meat of the debate” revolves around “Chomskyans belief that adaptations have arisen in the brain that serve exclusively to allow speech.” This is contrasted with views that believe that “speech merely piggybacks on equipment that already evolved to allow advanced thought.”

There are some small bones to pick with this description. Thus, the issue is not speech but linguistic knowledge more generally. But let’s put this aside. Is there really a disagreement between Chomsky and his critics about how linguistically specific FoL is? I doubt it. Or, more accurately, if there is such a disagreement Chomsky’s critics have had nothing whatsoever to say about it. Why?

The question is an interesting one and, as you all know, it is the central question animating the Minimalist Program (MP). MP takes as a research question whether FoL is entirely reducible to operations and primitives of general cognition and computation or whether there is a linguistically specific residue despite FoL’s computational operations largely overlapping with general principles of computation and cognition. 

Before addressing how would one go about resolving this debate, let me observe (again) how modest the Chomskyan claim is. It does not say that every part of FoL is linguistically specific. It does not deny that language interacts with other areas of cognition, emotion or culture. It does not assert that every detail of linguistic competence or behavior is insulated from everything else we know and do. Nope. It makes the very modest claim that there is something special about language, something that humans have qua being human and that this is interesting and investigatable.

Of course, over the years linguists have made specific proposals concerning what this something special might be and have identified properties of FoL that don’t look to be easily reducible to other cognitive, computational, emotional or cultural factors. But this is what you would expect if you took the question seriously. And you would expect those that took the opposite view (i.e there is nothing linguistically special about human linguistic facility) to show how to reduce these apparent linguistically sui generis facts to more general facts about cognition, computation or whatever. But you would be wrong. The critics almost never do this. Which suggests, that there really is no serious debate here. Debate would require both sides to address the question. So far as I can tell, critics interpret Chomsky as claiming that culture, general cognition etc. have no impact on any part of language knowledge or use. They then go on to point to cases where this appears to be false. But as Chomsky never denied this, as his claim is far more modest, these observations, like those of Everett’s concerning recursion, are beside the point. To have a debate, there must be some proposition being debated. So far as I can tell, once again this is false in this particular case. Hence no debate.

JMR notes that dealing with the substantive question of the linguistically specificity of FoL requires getting empirically and theoretically quite technical.[2]

…without a drive-by of this rather occult framework, one can’t begin to understand the contours, tone, and current state of the debate Wolfe covers. (8)

Of course, JMR is correct. How could it be otherwise? After all, if one is arguing that the computations are linguistically sui generis then one needs to specify what these are. And, not surprisingly, these investigations can get quite technical. And JMR understands this. However, it also seems to find this offensive. Note the occult. Later on JMR says:

…from one academic generation to the next, this method [standard GG analyses:NH] of parsing language has mission-crept into a strangely complicated business, increasingly unrelated to what either laypeople or intellectuals outside of linguistics would think of as human language. It is truly one of the oddest schools of thought I am familiar with in any discipline; it intrigues me from afar, like giant squid and 12-tone classical music. (10)

Hmm. JMR clearly suggests that things have gotten too technical. A little is ok, but GGers have gone overboard. JMR seems to believe that dealing with the question about FoL’s specific fine structure should be answerable without getting too complex, without leaving the lay person behind, without technical intricacies. Imagine the reaction to a similar kind of remark if applied to any other scientific domain of inquiry. Reminds me of the Emperor’s quip to Mozart in Amadeus: Sorry Mr Mozart, too many notes!

JMR concedes that all of this extra complexity would be fine if only there was evidence for it.

The question is whether there is independent evidence that justifies assuming that speech entails these peculiar mechanisms for which there is no indication in, well, how people talk and think.

And the problem is that this independent evidence does not seem to exist; anyway, outsiders would find it peculiar how very little interest practitioners have in demonstrating such evidence. Rather, they stipulate that syntax should be this way if it is to be "interesting," if it is to be, as the literature has termed it, "robust" or "rich." Yet where does the idea that how we construct sentences must be "robust" or "rich" in the way this school approves of come from? It’s an assumption, not a finding. (13)

This is calumny. If there is one thing that linguists love to do is find empirical consequences of some piece of formal machinery. But, with this summary judgment, JMR joins the Everett/Evans camp and simply asserts that it is too much. There really are too many notes- “Split IP, Merge, phases and something called “little v”” (14). That these proposals come backed by endless empirical justification is hardly mentioned, let alone discussed. Look, I love hatchet jobs, but as JMR notes about Wolfe, even a drive-by heading to this conclusion requires more than assertion.

I suspect that JMR includes this to be able to play both sides of the fence: sure Wolfe knows nothing, but really he is somewhat right. No. He isn’t. Nor is JMR’s suggestion that there is something to Wolfe’s suspicions justified or, IMO, justifiable.

C. Then there is the linguists and their “bile” against anyone “questioning universal grammar” (16). More specifically against Everett.

On a personal note, I did not take any interest in Everett’s findings until I read the New Yorker piece, and then only because of how badly it misrepresented matters. Nor do I believe that anyone else would have noticed it much, but for the public brouhaha. Even then, had the high-brow press not used Everett’s work to denigrate my own, I would have given it a free pass. But this is not what occurred. The claim was repeatedly made that Everett’s work demonstrates that GG is wrong. Efforts to show that this is incorrect have not been greeted nearly as enthusiastically. JMR mischaracterizes the state of play. And in doing so, once again, obscures the issues at hand.

The “GGers (Chomkyans) are vitriolic” trope has become a staple of the “GG/Chomskyan linguistics is dead” meme. Why? There is one obvious reason. It allows Chomsky’s critics to shift debate from the intellectual issues and refocus them on the personal ones (i.e. to move from content to gossip). To argue against the claims GG has made requires understanding them. It also takes a lot of work because there is a lot of this kind of work out there. Saying that GGers are meanies allows one to stake the high ground without doing any of the intellectual or empirical hard work. This is not unlike political coverage one finds in the press: lots of personality gossip, very little policy analysis.

Why is JMR so sensitive? Apparently some students at some conference found what they were hearing uninteresting (18). Though, JMR notes that “most Chomkysans” are not as dismissive (19). Yet he mentions that there does exist “a current of opinion within the Chomskyan syntax orbit that considers most kinds of linguistic inquiry as beside the point” (19). So, some students are bored about anything outside their immediate interests and some linguists are dismissive. And this means what exactly? It means that GGers are vitriolic and dismissive (though most aren’t), or they could be because such dismissiveness is in the air. This is really dumb stuff, not even People Magazine level titter.

D. Towards the end, JMR notes that Everett has not really made his case concerning Piraha (25-6). Indeed, he finds the Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues rebuttal “largely convincing” and believes that it is “quite plausible that Piraha is not as quirky a language as Everett proposed” (26). Here my views and JMR’s coincide. However, to repeat, JMR’s reasonable discussion mainly serves to obscure the main issue . Let me end with this (again).

JMR, like many of the other discussions in the high-brow press frame the relevant debate in terms of whether Everett is right about Piraha embedding. This presupposes that what Everett found out (or not) about Piraha is relevant to Chomsky’s claims. Because the coverage is framed as an empirical debate, when GGers dismiss Everett’s claims they can be described as having acted inappropriately. They have failed to dispassionately consider the empirical evidence, evidence which the coverage regularly reports would undermine central tenets of Chomsky’s theory of FL/UG if accurate. But this framing is wrong. There is no empirical debate because the presupposition is incorrect. What has gotten (some) GGers hot under the collar is this mis-framing. It is one thing to be shown to be wrong. It is quite another to have people debunk views that you have never held and then accuse you of being snippy because you refuse to hold those views. I don’t dismiss Everett’s views because I fear they might be right. I dismiss these views because they are logically irrelevant to the claims I am interested in (specifically whether (some kind of) recursion is a linguistically specific feature of FL) and because every time this is pointed out the critic’s feelings get hurt. That really does boil the blood.

To end: As reviews go, JMR is not the worst. But it is bad enough. And part of what makes it bad is its apparent judiciousness. It follows the standard tropes and frames the issues in the now familiar ways, albeit with a node here and there to Chomsky and GG. But, as noted, that is the problem. It really seems to be hard for many to accept that so much contention in the press can be based on a pun (GUs vs CUs) and that the whole “debate” is intellectually vapid. But that’s the way it is. Let’s hope this is the last round for the time being.

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[1] If memory serves, Stephen Jay Gould discussed a similar problem in biology with the notion blueprint. He noted that for a long time genetic inheritance was conceived in blueprint terms. This, Gould argued, led to homoncular theories of genetic information transmission (we each had a smaller version of ourselves deep down that contained the relevant genetic pattern). This made sense, he argued, if we thought in terms of blueprints. Once we shifted to thinking in terms of codes, the homunculus theory disappeared. I have no idea where Gould made this point, but it has interesting parallels in current conceptions of UG as blueprints.

[2] I’ve discussed this issue before and noted how one might go about trying to adjudicate it rationally (see here).