How I spent my summer vacation

Like all avid GGers, I spend part of my summer vacation rereading some of the greatest hits.  This year, this included rereading Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (CILT). If you haven’t done so recently, you should go out and read it (again) now, before the BBC series comes out on public TV. It is a fantastic little book and very timely for it lays out more clearly than anything else I know what the original GG enterprise took the central questions of interest to be. It is worth knowing what these were (and still are) for it helps prevent energetically chasing off in the wrong direction in pursuit of answers to questions of dubious utility.  In other words, knowing what you are interested in, what the research questions are, helps you to avoid wasting time. Remember: those things not worth doing are not worth doing well. And, there are many too many things that are really not worth doing. I will mention one such enterprise below that seems to have recently stirred the tea post tempestuously once again. 

This said, back to CILT. The book starts with a short important chapter on the goals of ling theory: what are the things we want to explain? Chomsky points to two central questions: (i) Linguistic Creativity: how do competent speakers go (in various kinds of uses (e.g. production, comprehension)) from utterances to structural descriptions of those utterances and (ii) The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition: how do kids/acquirers go from primary linguistic data to their acquired generative grammars.  These are the two questions we want to answer and this involves limning the fine structure of Gs and FL/UG. More abstractly CILT provides the following two important mnemonic diagrams.

(1)  utterances à A à structural description

(2)  PLD          à B à generative grammar

A is a place-holder for (at least) a particular G and B for the theory of FL/UG.  The aim of inquiry is to describe the innards of A and B.  Or as Chomsky puts it:

The perceptual model A is a device that assigns a full structural description D to a presented utterance U, utilizing in the process its internalized generative grammar G, where G generates a phonetic representation R of U with the structural description D…The learning model B is a device which constructs a theory G (a generative grammar G of a certain langue) as its output on the basis of primary linguistic data (e.g. specimens of parole) as input…We can think of general linguistic theory as an attempt to specify the character of device B. We can regard a particular grammar as, in part, an attempt to specify the information available in principle (i.e. apart from limitations of attention, memory, etc.) to A that makes it capable of understanding an arbitrary utterance, to the highly non-trivial extent that understanding is determined by the structural description provided by the generative grammar. (26)

Thus G and FL are seen as causally relevant factors in explaining various kinds of performances; normal discourse and acquisition. The aim of linguistics is to describe these two mechanisms, which causally contribute to these two kinds of “behavior,” (i.e. talking and language acquisition).

What is the empirical criterion of adequacy for the two cases? The relevant measure of evaluation for the first is that it “correctly describes the linguistic intuition of the speaker” (26). Note the singular intuition! What we call linguistic intuitions reflect a speakers grammatical intuition (i.e. the sense of his/her language). That’s why they are important. But the thing we want our theory of G to match is the singular, the plural being interesting to the degree that it reveals this. We return to this anon.

The relevant measure for evaluating proposals about (2) are that the Gs B selects correspond to “the speakers’ linguistic intuition, in the case of particular languages” (27). Thus, the adequacy of B is judged in relation to how good the Gs it selects are in describing a native speaker’s actual grammatical intuition (i.e. the mental structures that underlie linguistic facility).

The aim, then, is to describe the features of real cognitive objects, either Gs that speakers actually have and procedures for constructing these Gs that speaker’s come equipped with. These are the objects of inquiry and what linguistic theories should aim to model.

Why does Chomsky take these as the two central problems? Because of two basic very big and very obvious facts. The first, and the one that he hammers again and again in CILT, is the fact of linguistic creativity, by which Chomsky intends the following:

…a mature native speaker can produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a language, the class of sentences with which we can operate fluently is so vast that for all practical purposes (and, obviously, for all theoretical purposes), we may regard it as infinite. (7)

So, the fact of linguistic creativity implicates mastery of a recursive procedure  (aka a G) that is used by native speakers in understanding and producing utterances. And the fact that Gs are required to explain this creativity means that a native speaker must acquire such a G in order to be fluent. So, the aim of linguistics is to describe these Gs and explain how they are acquired.

Chomsky also notes a second interesting capacity that G knowledge endows a native speaker with: the “ability to identify deviant sentences and, on occasion, to impose an interpretation on them” (7).

As we all know, this second capacity (aka: native speaker linguistic intuitions) has proven to be an excellent window into the structure of a native speakers language specific capacity. The generative enterprise has relied on this capacity to probe the structure of G and FL. It is what licenses GGs reliance on linguistic intuitions (note the ‘s’ here) as guides to the structure of linguistic intuition (note the absence of an ‘s’). So, Gs explain (in part) how linguistic creativity is possible and their structure can be probed by querying native speakers’ evaluations of the acceptability and interpretation of products of these Gs.

It is worth noting that the second capacity does not follow from the fact that speaker’s possess Gs. This could have been true without it being true that speakers could usefully reflect on G products. Speakers could have used Gs to speak and understand without having reliable linguistic intuitions useful for probing this capacity.

Chomsky discusses skepticism regarding such judgment data in chapter 3. Not surprisingly he concludes that it’s the best thing we’ve got and that “[w]e neglect such data at the cost of destroying the subject” (56). However, as Chomsky noted in CILT such judgments are not “sacrosanct and beyond any conceivable doubt” (56). Some such data might be bad (as any data in any area might be). We can firm it up by looking for “consistency among speakers of similar backgrounds” as well as “for a particular speaker on different occasions” (56). In other words, such data as a class are fine, though particular instances are reasonably challenged.

Chomsky notes a second important check on the reliability of such data. I call it the proof-of-the-pudding test: “The possibility of constructing a systematic and general theory” also matters. Theory tests data just as much as data tests theory. With 60 years of hindsight we can conclude that such data has been very useful and reliable precisely because the theories built on it have proven to be remarkably insightful.

So, CILT picks out two central questions for linguistic investigation and explains why they should be cynosures of further inquiry. Moreover, he outlines the kind of data that is relevant in pursuing these questions. Moreover, and most famously, in chapter 2 he outlines what he takes to be the relevant measures of theoretical adequacy; observational, descriptive and explanatory.  Let’s turn to this next.

Chomsky identifies three levels of adequacy for grammatical description: (i) observational adequacy, (ii) descriptive adequacy and (iii) explanatory adequacy.

Observational adequacy is “the lowest level” and is achieved “if the grammar presents the observed primary data correctly” (29). As Chomsky is quick to point out (see his note 1) what constitutes the relevant observable data is not at all straightforward. One measure of relevance involves the “possibility for a systematic theory.” Moreover, in an important sense, what linguists are looking for are data that bear on linguistic structure and so good data is that which are sensitive to these structures. Sadly, however, linguistic structure is not itself observable and is only accessible to a speaker only via an utterance that embodies it. Some utterances are good windows into these structures and so judgments based on these are generally useful (that’s why quite often unacceptability is a better window into G than acceptability). But some are not. Useful data allows one to infer grammatical structure from its effects in the visible utterance, and what data does this is not always obvious. As Chomsky puts it:

The problem of determining what data is valuable and to the point is not an easy one. What is observed is often neither relevant nor significant, and what is relevant and significant is often very difficult to observe, in linguistics no less than…anywhere in science.

What’s a descriptively adequate description? It’s one that “gives a correct account of the linguistic intuition of the native speaker, and specifies the observed data (in particular) in terms of significant generalizations that express the underlying regularities in the language” (28). So, a descriptively adequate description will enumerate the properties of that G that the speaker has internalized. Given that Gs are recursive rules systems, they will (implicitly) embody regularities characteristic of the language they generate. 

Last of all we get to explanatory adequacy. Theories of grammar achieve this level if  they provide “a general basis for selecting a grammar that achieves he second level of success over other grammars consistent with the relevant observed data that do not achieve this level of success” (28).  Explanatory adequacy is a predicate of theories of FL. Descriptive adequacy is a predicate of Gs. Explanatorily adequate FLs are those that derive descriptively adequate Gs relative to some specification of PLD. As is clear, issues of descriptive and explanatory adequacy are intimately intertwined with considerations of both bearing on the adequacy of each. Like it or not, claims about descriptive adequacy commit hostages to explanatory adequacy no less than do claims about the latter for the former. Given the close connection between explanatory adequacy and Plato’s Problem and the PoS issues that surround it, Chomsky’s vision of linguistics demands that these concerns be at the center of every linguist’s attention (sad to say, IMO, this is hardly the case nowadays).

Chapter 2 does a very nice job operationalizing these notions in the context of linguistic theory circa the early to mid 60s. There is still lots to learn by reading these discussions (especially, IMO, the section on levels of adequacy in semantics).  It is also worth carefully re-reading section 2.4 where Chomsky sums up the discussion of the importance of the measures. Here is his blunt assessment (52):

…three levels of adequacy have been sketched…Of these, only the levels of descriptive and explanatory adequacy (and ultimately on the latter) are of sufficient interest to justify further discussion.

This makes perfect sense given the two questions CILT highlights. If you are interested in human language, then the name of the game is ultimately to describe the properties of FL/UG. All else is interesting to the degree that it contributes to this end. Unfortunately, much current work on language seems to assume that discussions of PL/UG are at best premature and quite often little more than cow pie.  Many are happy to limit their interests to “coverage the data,” aiming primarily for observational adequacy, with some pretensions to descriptive adequacy. Chomsky has some choice remarks about this.  Here are two:

It is important to bear in mind that a grammar that assigns correctly the mass of structural descriptions (remote as this is from present hopes) would still be of no particular linguistic interest unless it also were to provide some insight onto those formal properties that distinguish a natural language from arbitrary, enumerable sets of structural descriptions. At best, such a grammar would help to clarify the subject matter for linguistic theory, just as a fourteenth century clock depicting the positions of the heavenly bodies merely posed, but did not even suggest an answer to the questions to which classical physics addressed itself. (52-3)

In other words, work that fails to at least suggest something about the structure of FL/UG is of very dubious value given the central questions of GG. A corollary suggests itself: it is always worth explicitly asking what light some piece of work tells us about FL/UG. If the answer is unclear, then this is very much worth knowing.

Here’s the second quote:

Comprehensiveness of [data, NH] coverage does not seem to me to be a serious or significant goal in the present stage of linguistic science. Gross coverage of data can be achieved in many ways, by grammars of very different forms. Consequently, we learn little about the nature of linguitc structure from the study of grammars that merely accomplish this…[I]t is only by studying the properties of gramamrs that achieve higher levels of adequacy and by gradually increasing the scope of description without sacrificing depth of analysis that we can hope to sharpen and extend our understanding of the nature of linguistic structure. (53)

I see no reason to think that we have finally reached a stage where big data work will shed much light on the structure of grammar. In fact, I would go further. I doubt that data coverage in the big data/corpus linguistic sense will ever be of linguistic interest. Why? Because it is seldom driven by the impulse of uncovering the basic properties of linguistic structure. An explanatory theory aims to uncover the basic operations and principles that descriptively adequate Gs deploy. There is no doubt that these principles interact with many other non-linguistic factors in every day speech. But if your interest is in these principles and operations, then it needs a good argument to conclude that looking at speech in the wild or lots of it will reveal what these principles are. It’s not how things proceed in the “real” sciences, so why think that this is the right way of doing linguistics? Beats me. 

One last bon mot from Chomsky: He makes an important distinction between exceptions and counter-examples. The latter are important, the former not so much, or not obviously much. A counter example is interesting because it contradicts a principle and principles are what FL/UG is all about. An exception need not. It may simply show what is already conceded, that our theories do not aim towards broad data coverage, i.e. text fidelity.  Here’s Chomsky on this:

Examples that lie beyond the scope of a grammar are quite innocuous unless they show the superiority of some alternative grammar. They do not show that the grammar as already formulated is incorrect. Examples that contradict the principles formulated in some general theory show that, to at least this extent, the theory is incorrect and needs revision. (55)

What we are interested in is the failure of principles, not in the failure of coverage.

CILT should be required reading for all GGers. From where I sit, its theoretical and methodological observations are as relevant today as they were when first written. In fact, they may be more relevant today. As a field becomes technically more sophisticated it can loose its bearings. Technique substitutes for insight. Keeping ones eyes on the central questions of interest is a useful prophylactic against this. CILT has a very clear research agenda. It has a clear target of explanation and outlines relevant criteria of success. It has the virtue of being clear about these things. If you too are interested in these fundamental questions, then nightly chanting from the pages of CILT will serve you well. 

  

More on theory (rantish)

This earlier post quoting Rob Chametzky’s typology of linguistic research generated some interesting discussion, much of it needed in my opinion. I would like to spend a paragraph or two ruminating (ranting might be more like it) on the current state of theoretical work as Rob characterizes it, and in particular, on why there appears to be so little of it. Before starting, let me reiterate that concentrating on theory is not intended to impugn the other kinds of research that linguists do. There is a lot of excellent descriptive and analytic work out there, and three cheers for that!  However, as Peggy pointed out in the comments section, theory is not generally accorded much of a hearing unless it comes from Chomsky, and, IMO, even proposals from this quarter are less well received than they once were. Why?

Peggy offers one very plausible hypothesis: that it is “easier to evaluate analytical work,” which “adopts some premises, applies them within a domain, and analyzes the outcome.” How so? Well because “[t]heoretical work involves examination of premises, and it's much more difficult to convince people that their premises are wrong than to convince them that such-and-such data can be analyzed within their (perhaps slightly amended) premises.” Peggy’s observations express Kuhn’s old observation that “normal science” is, well, the norm, and it generally accepts and adapts given theoretical conceptions rather than challenges them. So, in this regard, theory within linguistics is no different from theory anywhere else.[1] 

However, I am not fully convinced of this. Here’s why. Rob notes that theory itself rests on meta-theory and meta-theory concerns itself both with general methodological concerns (simplicity, consistency, relation to other theories etc.) and with domain specific adequacy conditions.  In the domain of linguistics, the first general methodological concerns have been made prominent within recent minimalist theory, the hard part being how to concretize the methodological concerns in the particular setting of linguistics (e.g. when is a proposal “simpler” or “more elegant” or “less redundant” than another?). Rob illustrates domain specific meta-theory with Chomsky’s differentiating theories that are observationally, descriptively and explanatorily adequate. These meta-theoretical desiderata, especially the third, are where theory lives. I believe that the field has sometimes forgotten this.[2] And if it has, then the dearth of theory should be unsurprising. What then are the large meta-theoretical issues that drive theory?

The first one, which traces back to what Chomsky likes to call “the earliest days of Generative Grammar,” is Plato’s problem (PP). The second, is of more recent vintage, and has been dubbed “Darwin’s Problem” (DP).[3] A theory attains explanatory adequacy (EA) when it can deduce the attested Gs in combination with a specification of the PLD. A theory can be EA+ (‘+’ = ‘beyond’) if the principles the EA theory postulates are ones that did (or at least, plausibly could have) arisen in humans. The PP, DP duo raise theoretical questions all by themselves for they pull in opposite directions; PP feeling comfortable with a richer more linguistically specific FL while DP happier with a poorer less linguistically specific FL. Reconciling this tension is a worthy theoretical project all by itself.

Note that both PP and DP are based on two big, and IMO, hardly contestable facts: viz. (1) that any human can acquire any language in a pretty short time and in pretty much the same way regardless of the language at issue when exposed to PLD of that language, and (2) that human language capacity emerged at some time in the recentish past from ancestors that were not language endowed the way we are. These big facts are (two of) the fixed points of our linguistic meta-theory, and in terms to which theory should be addressed.  This meta-theoretical background places demands both on proposed analyses concerning the structure of particular Gs and on the structure of FL/UG. And it is precisely these demands that allow for the evaluation of proposals somewhat independently of whether they are analytically (in Rob’s sense) sound. In other words, aside from specific familiar linguistic data (e.g. that ‘flying planes can be dangerous’ is ambiguous) that we use to evaluate a given proposal, there is also the question of whether a given proposal can be argued to be acquirable/evolvable. Respect for theory starts with taking these meta-theoretical demands seriously. IMO, our sensitivity to these concerns is currently inappropriately low.

Why do I say this? Here’s some anecdotal evidence for this judgment.

First, I think that many practitioners of the syntactic arts misperceive what the object of inquiry is. If asked: “what does linguistics study?” many will answer: “language.” But language is not the object of study, at least for generative linguists. The faculty of language (FL) is. FL in combination with other cognitive faculties leads to language behavior, utterances, perceptions, plays, movies, etc.  But these products are not the primary object of inquiry despite the fact that studying language behavior, both in the wild and in more artificial settings (e.g. acceptability judgments), has been a good place to find data that bears on the structure of FL. This noted, the goal of generative grammar has never been to describe or regiment language (in fact, many generativists, me included, do not believe that languages are natural kinds and so not appropriated targets of study) but to describe the fine structure of FL.  Now here’s the kicker: if one thinks that the target of inquiry is language, then the theoretical considerations that PP and DP lead to will not seem particularly germane to the enterprise. To address PP and DP we need to advert to the structure of FL and this involves considerations that go beyond covering the data that linguists primarily rely on to make their analytical arguments. Thus, if language replaces FL as the research topic then PP and DP won’t loom so large with the consequence that theory will seem pointless and, thus, not surprisingly, it’s pursuit will be undervalued.

I believe that this shift from FL to language as the cynosure of linguistic inquiry has gotten greater of late. Here’s some anecdotal evidence. There once was a time when the first intro chapter of virtually every thesis in syntax began with a discussion of the logical problem of language acquisition (aka PP) and ended with a concluding chapter considering what the technically meaty chapters 2-5 had implied about UG and Plato’s problem. One might argue that this was mere window dressing and that the formulations and discussions were very pro forma. To a degree, I would agree with this. However, the required discussion (even if cursory) pointed to a (tacit) recognition that the details in the middle were in service of the larger questions driving the field and this served to legitimate these questions and the theory that lives on them.

Nowadays, any similar discussion is hard to find. Indeed, I would go further, the very idea that one’s analytics deserve even cursory consideration in terms of the more encompassing framework concerns is considered sort of quaint. There’s lots of concern of how syntax interfaces with semantics or phonology, lot’s of worries about how structures proposed in language A compare to those in B. But there is relatively little overt worry about PP or DP.

Here’s a question for my senior colleagues: How many times have you asked in a public venue (e.g. at a thesis defense or at a talk), or even over beer, how some proposal you’ve been talking about (with such and such principles and this and that parameters) could be acquired? How many of you in teaching about grammatical variation stop and concentrate on how some rather subtle difference/parameter one is interested in (e.g. the (purported) difference between English and Romance wrt extraction out of weak WH islands) could have been acquired/set? I agree that this is not the only kind of question worth asking and I agree that an analysis might be valuable even in the absence of an answer to this kind of question, but in my recent experience, we act as if this really doesn’t matter at all, which is why such questions are never raised. Indeed, I suspect that many believe that such questions are either BS or are more properly addressed to our psycho-ling colleagues or both (and yes this does suggest a certain kind of unattractive attitude not uncommon to syntacticians).

I would add that in my experience linguists tend to be hostile to theoretical innovation. This is manifest in two ways.

First, we really don’t like having multiple routes to the same conclusion. In other fields, it is considered interesting to reach the same end in two different ways. So there are myriad proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, and all are considered to be of interest. Why? Why would a novel proof still be publishable (and published)? Because it is not only interesting that a certain fact is true (viz. the square of the hypotenuse...) but it is equally (maybe more) interesting how different concepts link together to demonstrate this.[4] Linking concepts together is what theory is all about and the reluctance of linguists to prize this kind of thing betrays a lack of interest in theoretical work.

Second, the field has a severe “historical bias.” What I mean by this is that we demand that later proposals surpass in empirical coverage earlier proposals in order to get a hearing. But why? Why should a newcomer be required to do better than a senior citizen? In fact, let’s go one step further, why shouldn’t a newcomer be given some empirical slack?[5] After all, most of the proposals we prize have been augmented over time to increase their empirical range, so why demand of a new proposal that it cover all the ground of the venerable ancestor and more? Isn't this just a way of making it impossible for new ideas to breathe? And doesn’t this attitude indicate that what we really care about is that the data points be covered rather than how they are covered? And doesn’t this reflect an instrumental conception of theory?

So, in sum, not only do we often act as if having two ways of thinking about a problem is intellectually abhorrent, we often act as if theoretical novelty is (or should be) a punishable offense, novel theory being acceptable only if it brings in its train wider empirical coverage. 

So, that’s why I think that linguists don’t really prize theory, and that’s too bad. It’s unfortunate because it reflects the fact that we have turned away from the foundational questions of the discipline, from the big facts and questions that, IMO, are the problems of deepest interest. Theory is not the only kind of inquiry worth doing, but it has its place and we should once again recognize this. How? Here’s an easy first step: next time you hear a talk or read a paper, ask yourself how the proposal put forward bears on the structure of FL and what kind of light it sheds on PP and/or DP, our two great meta-theoretical questions.

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[1] Interestingly, for this to take place so readily there must be an assumption that what data are relevant to a proposal is easy to determine without committing theoretical hostages. I am not sure that this is always the case. So a chunk of the controversy surrounding the movement theory of control (something that I am relatively familiar with) hangs on whether certain observations (e.g. partial control) are reflected in syntactic representations or not.  It is not clear that this kind of dispute is a purely data dispute however.

[2] Alex C makes a similar point in the comments section, though he embroiders it in ways I would not.

[3] Actually both were big questions posed at the start of the Generative enterprise. However, as a matter of fact, PP was central to the discussion since (at least) Aspects while DP became important only with the advent of the Minimalist Program. There are good reasons for this (viz. that DP was not really worth discussing until we had some candidate principles of UG). However, right now, both PP and DP are important meta-theoretical framework questions.

[4] Indeed, the route to the conclusion is often more interesting than the conclusion itself. I recall the following (not verbatim) comment from a mathematician after the four-color problem was solved via a computer crunching through all the possibilities: “I guess the problem was not as interesting as we supposed.”

[5] A point that Greg Kobele defends in his thesis.