Cakes, Damn Cakes, and Other Baked Goods

As promised in my previous post, here's Omer's reply to my musings on derivations and representations.

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In a recent post on this blog, Thomas Graf addresses the derivationalism vs. representationalism debate---sparked (Thomas' post, that is) by my remarks in the comments section of this post.

Thomas notes, among other things, that literally any derivational formalism can be recast representationally. For example, one could take the set of licit derivational operations in the former model, and turn them into representational well-formedness conditions on adjacent pairs of syntactic trees in an ordered sequence. (Each tree in this ordered sequence corresponds, informally, to an intermediate derivational step in the former model.) As best I can tell, this translatability of any derivational formalism into representational terms is not even debatable; I certainly wouldn't argue this point.

The Cake is a Lie

In the comments section to Norbert's final remarks on Chomsky's lecture series, Omer Preminger laments the resurrection of representational devices in Minimalism, which started with Chomsky (2004) "Beyond Explanatory Adequacy". I originally took Omer to argue against representational approaches on two levels:

1. They are fundamentally flawed regarding both competence (bad empirical coverage) and performance (no plausible parsing model).
2. Phase-theory is ill-motivated and doesn't get the job done.

After a short email conversation with Omer it actually became clear that this is not an accurate reflection of his views, which he will summarize in a guest post within the next few days summarizes in this follow-up post. Still, now that we've got those two claims laid out in front of us, let's assess their soundness.

I've got no qualms with the second claim. The motivation and empirical use of phases has frequently been criticized in the literature, and phases don't fare any better from a computational perspective. The memory reduction argument for phases is hogwash, phases have no discernible effect on generative capacity (neither weak nor strong), and they do not simplify the learning problem. Norbert captures the state of affairs ever so succinctly: Phases don't walk the walk [...] the rhetoric is often ahead of the results.

The first claim, on the other hand, I can't get behind at all. For one thing, it's a typical case of the cake fallacy: Every cake I've made in my life has been horrible, thus all cakes are horrible (and I'm more of a muffins guy anyways). Even if linguists haven't come up with any good representational models so far --- which I think many syntacticians would emphatically disagree with --- that doesn't mean the approach as such is intrinsically inferior to derivational ones. Now I can already see the flurry of posts about how theory construction is also a probabilistic process where previous failures of specific types of analysis make them less preferable, that the existence of a working representational account is moot if we can't find it, yada yada yada. Step back from your keyboards everyone, I'm actually not interested in arguing this point. My real worry is much more basic. The first claim implies, as is commonly done in linguistics, that there is a meaningful difference between representational and derivational accounts. Well, it turns out that this specific cake is a lie.

Derivation Trees and Phrase Structure

Another snow day, another blog post. Last week we took a gander at derivation trees and noticed that they satisfy a number of properties that should appeal to Minimalists. Loudmouth that I am I took things a step further and proclaimed that there is no good reason to keep using phrase structure trees now that we have this shiny new toy that does everything phrase structure trees do, just better. Considering the central role of phrase structure trees, that's a pretty bold claim... or is it?

Derivation Trees: Syntacticians' Best Friend?

Usually I would have been busy today bringing the excitement of parts of speech and phrase structure rules to a group of surprisingly energetic students --- some of them take the train all the way from NYC, which according to my calculations means that they have to get up around 5:30 in the morning. But at least today they get to sleep in, as the roads and tracks are covered in this weird, cocaine-colored substance that has been pestering us east coast residents for quite a while now and has even found its way south to Georgia. So classes are canceled, and I'm sitting at home with a glass of milk and a habitual desire to talk about syntax. Good thing there's tons of stuff I haven't told you about Minimalist grammars yet, starting with derivation trees.