What's the difference between a linguist and a languist?

It has been made vivid to me (thx JB) that the languist/linguist distinction that I have often invoked has been taken to reflect a disregard for GGers who study Gs in detail. This was not how what I intended. Rather I wanted the languist/linguist distinction to demarcate two different attitudes concerning the primary object of linguistic inquiry. Let me elaborate a touch.

Languists take the fundamental object of inquiry to be language. For a languist, languages are ontologically primary and their cognitive underpinnings secondary, the latter being (pale?) reflections of the surface properties of the former.

Just the opposite for linguists. In particular, linguists understand language to be (at best) an idealization (one generally defined by army/navy size).[1] What’s real is the G of the individual speaker (though the idealization (i.e. literally false assumption) that every “language” has the same underlying “G” is a standard, useful one), and such inquiry aims at descriptive adequacy (i.e. describing that G that the native speaker of the relevant language has internalized).

Putting this another way: languists take surface facts and patterns to exhaust all there really is and so not attending to them amounts to not doing science. Why? Because the generalizations one finds within and across languages are at best ontologically secondary and at worst simple fabrications/distortions. What’s real are the surface facts, the generalizations being abstractions over these. For languists these generalizations are a bit like averaging, they loose information. This is a good place to think of Greenberg Universals.

For linguists, in contrast, underlying patterns reflecting grammatical structure are the name of the game. Where, for languists the primary ontological reality lives on the linguistic surface, for the linguist it is at most a hint of what is really going on below. Importantly, the linguist assumes that G organization is often obscured at the surface, or even hidden by surface forms. Coherence for the linguist is to be found at the abstract level, not at the surface. In this sense what’s ontologically primary is the hidden unobserved (and directly unobservable) underlying structure, the surface patterns being merely the visible forms, the footprints, of this underlying reality. Gs are real and so describing Gs is real. The lingusitic tokens one hears or sees are porducts of this underlying reality and so are ontologically secondary.

Note that saying that that surface forms/patterns are ontologically secondary does not imply that they are epistemologically so.  Assuming that mental structures are more ontologically basic than visible forms is simply to say that the former cause the latter. All GGers believe that Gs are casually more fundamental than sentences for every GGer believes that sentences are the products of Gs, not the other way around. Languists take the opposite view. Visible patterns are real. Gs are causally secondary in being abstractions of these surface patterns.[2]

Thus, for the linguist the ontological bed rock is the mentally represented G, not the surface forms that are their products. Here’s a good place to think of Chomsky Universals.

Given this version of the distinction, as I see it, virtually every GGer is a linguist for virtually all work in GG centers on the structure of Gs.  Languists, unfortunately, are everywhere with us. Here’s a possible surprise (not): languists tend to be Empiricists and linguists are necessarily Rationalists (whether they know this or not and whether they care or not (which many, sadly, do not)). It’s a short step from thinking that what’s real is the visible surface data to the view that linguistic competence is largely a matter of correctly mirroring what one “sees.” Similarly, the step from studying the properties of underlying Gs to the conclusion that FL has non-trivial structure is also short.

Second to last point: languists can do useful work, but for this work to be useful to linguists it will almost always need to be reinterpreted in Gish terms. Again, think of how GGers understand the importance of Greenberg Universals; they are interesting to the degree that they can tell us something about the underlying structures of Chomskyan Universals. Put another way: they are targets of explanation, the goal being to explain these patterns in terms of fundamental properties of FL/UG.

Last point: just as being a languist does not preclude one from doing useful work, being a linguist does not guarantee that one’s research is interesting. Higher order commitments can be useful in guiding research especially if self-consciously attended to. However, as I’ve noted many times before: science is hard and there are no sure fire methods. Too bad eh?

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[1] Here’s a project for the numerically inclined E-languist: calculate the navy+army size necessary to take a dialect to a language. A good follow-up study would calculate the breakeven point between an idiolect and a dialect. Have fun.

[2] As noted below, languists tend to be Empiricists and as Jerry Fodor has noted, Empiricists tend to confuse metaphysics and epistemology, or, at the very least, treat the epistemologically accessible as the metaphysically basic. This is precisely what GGers deny given their primary interest in descriptive adequacy, viz. the description of a native speakers actual G.

The Generative Blues

The second major theme of the Athens’ conference was really a lament: “Wo is me;  Generative research is widely misunderstood by the lay public, the scientific public, university administrators, my parents, my kids and even the occasional stray dog or cat. What to do, what to do.” In Athens, this cri de coeur was almost as universal as Principle C, cutting across most countries and departments (though as you will see below, there were a few outliers). The problem seems most serious in Europe, but it also extends to the US and Canada, and a good deal of time at the conference was spent in decrying this state of affairs and discussing what if anything could be done about this.  Indeed, the last session of the get-together was dedicated to this topic. David Pesetsky captured the gloomy tone in a reprise of his LSA speech from a couple of years ago still redolent with the smell of sack cloth and ashes.

I really shouldn’t treat this lightly, especially what’s happening in Europe. Our Greek colleagues told us a story that sounded right out of Monty Python. It appears that several years ago some enterprising GGers wrote a textbook which came to be used by Greek high school students. The book noted that (Modern) Greek had a five vowel system. This apparently differed from Ancient Greek, which had a seven vowel system. Well, one day these GGers woke up to find themselves accused of having stolen two vowels from the Greek language and that this showed that they were either ignorant buffoons who were inexpert in linguistics or, even worse, traitors trying to demean the Greek language, the Greek state, and the Greek people. These stolen vowels (much like some stolen marbles), it was said, threatened the very foundations Greek civilization. Now, if this sounds too funny for words, I was assured that it was not a joke.  In fact, we foreigners closely watched our Greek hosts and colleagues to assure ourselves that this was not an elaborate hoax (recall, the Greeks were the ones to “discover” the Trojan horse). In fact, what actually happened was even worse. The attacks, it seems, threatened to become violent. Nonetheless, the Greek linguists came to the support of their fellows and the government did not give in to this idiocy. Nonetheless, damage was done. The events were appalling in every way, even if barely believable.

So, there is no question that things are bad for GGers in some places, and so it is reasonable that the issue of what can be done was a topic many wanted addressed. Interestingly, much of the discussion started with self-criticism. Many agreed that GGers have done a bad job explaining themselves to both the general public and our scientific colleagues. We accused ourselves of some insularity and criticized the theory for being too opaque. We also pointed to profound public ignorance and wondered out loud about how to put the grammar back into grammar school and how to get more Pinkers and Jackendoffs and Bakers and Yangs onto the NYT best sellers lists.

It was all very bracing in a self-flagellating sort of way, but I am skeptical that much can be done on the very large national stage (be it high schools or the NYT), at least in the short to medium run. Nor do I believe that it would do much good. I have expressed this skepticism before here, so what follows is partly reprise.

High school physics and biology courses have not prevented widespread climate science denial and anti-evolution sentiments. Everyone knows that smoking kills and sickens but this has not prevented intelligent people from smoking (especially in Europe). The fact that being overweight is debilitating has not caused even the scientifically inclined to stay on the slimmer side. So knowing the truth is only so effective and, to add some anecdotal evidence, UMD has been running outreach programs with a local high school and I have been told that the benefit of this for the high schoolers  was a lot less clear than the benefit the outreach had for the grad students recruited to implement the effort (more on this below).

Before I am accused of being overly negative here, let me switch directions and suggest some practical things that I believe we can do that can have a more immediate positive impact. I suggest that the target of any effort should be university administrators, our academic colleagues and the academics in disciplines closest to our own.  Here are some concrete suggestions:

1.     Regularly eat lunch with colleagues in other departments. Lunch is where academics discuss what they do. This will give you an opportunity to educate your colleagues about what GG does and why it is interesting. I should add, that it is important to be interested (or at least apparently sincere fake interest) in what these colleagues do for the discussion will go nowhere if it intended to just be a snow job.

2.     Another excellent place to meet colleagues and impress them is on university committees. Everyone hates these. I know that I did and do. However, these are venues for impressing colleagues and that can have an immediate impact on how they perceive you, your work and your department. Not surprisingly, if someone thinks you are reasonable and bright then they will tend to think that the work you do is less likely to be BS and that the work you don’t approve of more likely to be. University committees are where colleagues size one another up and serving on them well can further the fortunes of a linguistics department very quickly. Oh yes, the people you meet in this way can also serve as lunch partners (see 1).

3.     Go to colloquia in other departments that are related to what you as linguists do. This means colloquia in psychology, cog sci, CS, hearing and speech science, second language departments, typology talks etc. etc. etc. I personally think that the first four are especially important for these are often important departments at the university.  Going there and defending GG when attacked or when misinformation is presented is very effective. People will believe that what they hear is likely correct unless someone contradicts it. You need to be there to do so. Of course you should be polite and reasonable etc. But above all be clear that if someone says something that is patently false or very misleading make sure that it becomes clear that you think that it is patently false or very misleading. Moreover, going to such talks is important for making university contacts. Though not that common, it is even possible to influence what your colleagues think about GG if you talk to them (again, see 1 and 2 above). However, at the very least, it is critical that misinformation be identified and your dissent registered.

4.     Senior syntacticians have, IMO, done a poor job teaching our grad students how to speak about what they do to non-professionals, or even to other linguists not in their immediate research areas. This, however, is very important. This means learning how to tell a story and how to relate technical results to larger themes. Grad students should be constantly encouraged and challenged to explain their ideas to others that are not similarly engaged in the same domain of research. They too should be encouraged to have lunch with grad students in other departments. They should be encouraged to explain what they do to parents, friends, non-linguistic lovers, waiters they run into, bartenders and bus drivers. Being able to tell a story to intelligent lay people will have benefits beyond advancing the politics of the field (though it does this too). Explaining what you do so that a non-expert can understand it sharpens your own understanding of what you are doing.  I would go further. If someone cannot explain what they are doing to a non-expert, their work is either not grounded in a real idea, they don’t understand what they are up to scientifically, or it is mere technology (and I do mean “mere”). Thus, developing and exercising your story telling skills should be part and parcel of every grad student’s educational experience. As in all things, some will be better than others, but every smart grad student (and really, nowadays, are there that many other kinds?) can get good at this if s/he practices, and the only useful practice involves doing it again and again.

5.     Faculty must model these skills for students. So they/we too need to visibly engage in this process of explaining what we do to non-experts and elaborating the big general issues that animate inquiry in GG. Develop a 2 minute, 5 minute, 30 minute, 60 minute spiel. Figure out how to relate what you do to big issues. I have always found GG’s links to cognition to be a sure winner, but I am sure that there are many good stories to tell. An added benefit, if faculty does this regularly, they will be better placed to help students acquire this skill as well.

6.     Think if inviting university big shots to the department to find out about what it does. Showcase grad students. In our experience at UMD, the higher ups love this. Note, it is also nice for grad students and it will give then a further incentive to sharpen their story telling skills (see 5).

7.     When others come to give talks in your department colloquium, try asking at least one fairly general question (here’s an example: “Why is what you told us interesting?”). It will soon become widely known that invited speakers will be asked to explain themselves at least once in simple terms.  This will be very valuable pedagogically, both for the field’s leading lights and for the students (i.e. the upcoming leaders) that rub shoulders with them. There is no doubt that for specialist talks within linguistics departments, god is in the details. I am not asking that such talks be dumbed down and avoid technical issues. However, if we want students to take seriously that they be able to isolate what is generally interesting in their own work, then we need to show that we think that this is a general virtue, one that we even hold esteemed colleagues to.

8.     We should encourage all departments to financially support the NSF LSA initiative to get linguistic stuff into the science press (see here for details). I know for a fact that many large departments are NOT doing this. I believe that failing to join this initiative should disqualify free riders from every bitching in public about the terrible state of GG. C’mon people. Especially big department people (like MIT, Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, U Wash, U Chicago, U Conn, U Del, Cornell, NYU to name a few conspicuous shirkers).

Not everyone can do everything on this list. Nor should they for doing any of it can be time consuming. It might mean giving up some research time. However, if you really think that the survival of GG is at stake (and I sometimes wonder whether the complaining is just a form of social bonding) then we can all do something. Moreover, I can testify from our experience at UMD that the things I’ve listed above can work. Truth be told, we at UMD are doing pretty well. Rose Marie Dechaine told me that the same was true at UBC and Jonathan Bobaljik said the same for U Conn. So, schmoozing and lunching and story telling and committee-serving helps, and can help fast. That said, none of this will be effective unless there is carry through. As Rose Marie said at then end of the session dedicated to these concerns, the real advice is pick something (be judicious for you can’t do everything) and DO IT. Most of these things are not that unpleasant (though some are, university committees UGH!). But the trick is to do something regularly. And if we do this, it can have a big effect pretty quickly. Not next week quickly, but in 5 years quickly, and that, I think, is the very best we can hope for.

Another Follow-Up on Athens

Following Norbert's example, I would like to talk a little bit about my experience at the Athens workshop. As you might recall, I was rather sceptical after reading the vision statements that much good would come out of all of this. A week later, my evaluation is more nuanced.

First of all, let me say that I can't think of any other syntax conference I've been to that has been that much fun. The format of brief panel presentations followed by one hour discussions worked incredibly well, much to my own surprise, and the range of topics that were touched on was very diverse (Gillian has a great summary on her blog). That said, I can't shake the feeling that most of the issues people worried about are ultimately small potatoes and that nobody was inclined to really question the foundations of the field, not even as a thought experiment to demonstrate their usefulness. I suppose that puts me in what Gillian calls the Grumpy camp, though I prefer to think of it as a healthy predilection for permanent improvement through criticism. Anyways, let's talk a bit about why all the nice discussions won't bring about any of the changes the field needs, even those everybody in Athens agreed on.

Some juicy questions we'd like to have answers to

The Athens confab ended with suggestions for future questions we should address. As I was looking back over some old files I had I found one that was a list for myself of such questions, ones that I thought would be worth thinking about. Some were bigger, some smaller, but all seemed to me worth trying to tie down, or at least domesticate.  I reviewed this list in light of the discussion in Athens and I throw them out for your delectation and rumination. IMO, some of these questions are more blue sky than others. Some, I believe, even have plausible answers right now, but none that are definitive. Others  will need conceptual work to turn them into real questions. Nonetheless, the Athens get-together stimulated me to finally release this list, the combination of late night musings on my part, some good lunches with colleagues and discussions/proposals at Athens. Please feel free to add and elaborate.

1.     What’s a lexical atom? Are syntactic atoms the same as phonological, semantic, morphological atoms? What’s the relation between a lexical atom and a concept? What’s the relation between a lexical atom and a word?

2.     How/when do syntactic atoms enter a derivation?  Are all atoms of a piece or do they enter G operations in different ways and at different points?

3.     Is there a relatively small class of basic syntactic operations? Is so what are they? Can the class of such operations be reduced to just one or two? Are any peculiarly “linguistic”? Right now we have: Merge, Move, Bind, Agree, Probe, Lower, Obviate, Delete, Label Are all of these primitive? Are all linguistically proprietary.

4.     How transparent are the rules of the performance system and those of the competence system? Are the rules that get used in performance the same as the basic rules if such exist? Or if there are basic operations, do these compile to form larger units that are the rules that performance systems use (e.g. constructions)? Or, assuming that rules like passive are not primitives of UG, might they nonetheless be rules that the parser uses? Is some version of the DTC viable and if so what does it tell us about the primitives of the competence system?

5.     How is variation acquired? Is there enough information in the PLD to allow the attested variation to be “induced”? How much information is there in the PLD? What are the limits of the PLD (e.g. degree 0, 0+, 1)? How do kids actually use the PLD in fixing their Gs (what’s the learning path look like)?

6.     Is there a bound on possible G (syntactic) variation? P&P theories assume that there is, i.e. that there is only a finitely number of ways that Gs can vary (up to lexical difference). Is this so?  In other words, are parameter theories right?

7.     Are all parameters lexical parameters (micro vs macro variation)?

8.     Is there a universal base (Cinque) and if so what’s it’s source (e.g. is there a semantic basis for the hierarchy and if so what does this tell us about semantic primitives)?

9.     Are the assumptions behind the ideal speaker-hearer model reasonable (note: we all believe that they are literarily false)? In particular how misleading is the idea that LADs get all of their data at once, i.e. does loosening this idealization lead to qualitatively different theories of G? If not what does loosening the assumption buy us? How important is the fact that Gs are acquired incrementally to the grammatical end states attained? Does incremental learning make the acquisition problem harder or easier and if so how?

10.  Can any feature be a grammatical feature or are there limits on the kinds of features a G can have? So phi features exist. Is this a historical accident or a feature of FL? What’s the inventory of possible features? Can any feature be, in principle, grammatically recruited?

11.  What’s the role of UTAH and the thematic hierarchy in UG? G? Do we need well-defined theta roles? Do DPs always have well defined/able theta roles? Does it matter? Where does the theta hierarchy come from?

12.  Why do predicates have at most three arguments?

13.  Is there a distinction between syntactic and semantic binding or are they the “same” thing? i.e. X syntactically binds Y iff and X semantically binds Y. And if they are different are there diagnostics to tell them apart? If there are two ways to bind why are there two ways to do the same thing?

14.  How many kinds of locality conditions does UG allow (A-movement locality, Case/agreement locality, A’-locality, biding locality, thematic locality, selection locality)? Can these different notions be unified? What’s the relation, if any, between phases and minimality? Are both required?

15.  Are islands the products of G or simply complexity effects? If the former, are islands derivational or interface effects? How are they to be derived given current conceptions of locality?

16.  How are ECP effects to be integrated into the grammar given phase-based assumptions and the copy theory of movement?

17.  What’s a G? In P&P it was a vector of P values. Now?

18.  Why do Gs seem to clump into languages? Why is the space of possible Gs clumpy?

19.  What kinds of relations are grammatical? Antecedence? Agreement? Selection? Can any relation be grammaticized? Topicalization yes, but “suitable mate movement” no? Is there an inventory of basic “constructions” that Gs try to realize (an idea that Emmon Bach once mooted)?

20.  What are the phase heads and why?

21.  Are phrases labeled and if so why? Are they required by the interface (Chomsky PoP) or by Gs? What is the evidence that the interfaces need labeled structures?

22.  What is pied piping?

23.  Is movement/merge free or feature driven?

24.  Are labels endocentric or exocentric or both?

25.  What’s the semantic structure of a ling unit? Conjunction like structure a la Davidson or Function/Argument structure a la Montague? Or some of each?

26.  Is there an intrinsic bound on the PLD that kids use to fix their Gs and if there is what is it and where does the bound come from?

27.  Can Gs be ordered wrt simplicity? If so, how?  MDL, algorithmic complexity. A practical case or two to fix ideas would be very nice to have.

28.  Why are determiners conservative?

29.  Why do we have superlative ‘est’ meaning roughly ‘most’ but no analogous morpheme meaning ‘least’? I.e. ‘Biggest’ means most big (more big than the others). Why is there nothing like ‘biglest’ meaning least big (less big than the others)?

30.  What are the sources for grammatical recursion? Is merge a basic or complex operation?

31.   What’s the relation between a feature and a head? Can heads be arbitrarily large bundles of features? If not what is the upper bundling bound?

32.  Is their a syntax below X⁰ and if there is how does it compare to that above X⁰?

33.  Is grammaticality gradient? I.e need we assume that there are grades of grammaticality? Note we all assume that there are grades of acceptability.

34.  What’s an interface constraint? Can performance constraints (e.g. structure of memory) influence the shape of the representations of the competence system and if so how? I.e. are such general performance constraints interface constraints?

35.  Your turn….

Gillian's Blog

For FoLers that do not yet know about this, Gillian Ramchand has started a blog and has posts talking about the Athens conference. Here is the first entry and you can go from day 1-3 following the links that are there. Go and look at it. Before signing off here, let me now say a quick word about her descriptions of what I was trying to say in Athens.

I largely agree with GR's descriptions of what took place. However, I think the she over interpreted the intent of my brief for top down theory. I did not intend to say that this is the only way to generate interesting ideas, rather that this is a good way to do so and that the field as a whole is very suspicious of it. Indeed, I would say, that there is a general antipathy towards this kind of argumentation and it is held to far higher standards than are more descriptive endeavors. I also think that this is particularly unfortunate now because the field is ripe for such speculation. It is only coherent when there exist a budget of roughly good MLGs and we now have some of these. Are they perfect? No. Are they ok. Yes. We need to avoid making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Moreover, we have concrete models of how good "premature" speculation can be. Chomsky's 'On Wh Movement' is the poster child for this. The description of islands was not perfect and yet this high level synthesis did, in retrospect, provide a positive fillip for the field. There is no reason to think that the same won't be true again now.

Last point: I guess that contrary to many, including GR, I think that there are good ideas in "performance" accounts for us to start speculating about: in particular to start asking what they might mean for syntactic theories. Colin mentions some of these on GR's blog and we have produced several theses trying to integrate these considerations at UMD (see Kush's thesis for example). What I have found interesting is that it is possible to start putting these different ideas together in fruitful ways so it seems odd not to start doing this. Will this mean that syntacticians might have to learn something about memory? Sure. Is this bad? No. Isn't this the kind of reluctance that we regularly excoriate psycho types about (i.e. that they just don't want to know any syntax?). I should add that it is interesting that Luigi and me were the least skeptical about trying to get something positive out of marrying syntax with psychology and I think that this is because we've seen it done well, thus we have good paradigms to aim for (and we need more of these). There are always BAD examples of such combinations. But then there is always lots of bad everything. IMO, it is not premature to try to combine ideas from cognition with those in syntax. This may fail, but this is always true. My feeling is that the reluctance is often less intellectually rooted than it is institutionally rooted. It would expose us to new empirical challenges. Good. But this sentiment might not be widely shared and this is a potential problem. As Luigi emphasized (and I completely agree) unless we start re-establishing contact with the rest of cog-neuro the half life of linguistics will be very short and its results will be less and less relevant to the big issues of the day. That would really be too bad.

The road ahead from Athens; some scattered initial remarks

I again mis-spelled someone's name. I "called" Winnie, "Wini." It is now corrected and I am sorry. However, the misspelling allows me to once again thank Winnie for all his great work in getting the Athens gig going. Thx and sorry.

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I am currently sitting on the 6^th floor of the Athen’s Way Hotel, eating some fruit and yogurt and sipping a cup of tea. It’s a beautiful day. The Road Ahead Conference (see here) ended yesterday and I thought that I would jot down some quick comments.  Before doing so, let me take this opportunity to thank the organizers (Winnie Lechner, Marcel den Dikken, Terje Londahl, Artemis Alexiadou and Peter Svenonius) for a wonderful event. It’s been a blast and my most secure conclusion from the past three days is that if you ever get invited anywhere to do anything by any of these people GO! Thx, and I am sure that here I am not speaking just for myself but for all participants. That pleasant task out of the way, here are a few impressions. In this post I’ll talk about very general matters. In some follow up posts I’ll remark on some of the socio-political issues raised and what we might do to address them. And in some yet later posts I’ll discuss some of the stimulating questions raised and ideas mooted. So let’s start.

My overall impression, one that runs quite counter to some of the pessimism I often hear from colleagues about the state of contemporary syntax, is that intellectually speaking, we are in a golden age of syntax (though politically and sociologically, not so much (I return to this in later posts)).  What do I mean? Well, the organizers invited a very talented group of people (present company excluded, of course) doing a pretty wide cross section of syntactic work. What is very clear is that there is a huge amount of excellent work being done on a wide variety of languages on a wide variety of topics. Typology and morpho-syntax are particularly hot areas of current interest, but syntacticians (in the wide sense meaning those with a good knowledge of syntactic theory and methods) are also heavily involved in “conjunctive” areas such as syntax + language acquisition, syntax + language impairment/disorders, syntax + processing, a.o. As a result, we now know more about the details and overall architectures of more grammars and have better models of how this grammatical knowledge arises and is put to use in more areas than ever before.  Don’t get me wrong: it is clear to all that there is a tremendous amount that we still do not know, even about fundamental issues, but to someone like me, who has been doing this stuff (or at least listening to people who do this stuff) for the last 40+ years, it is clear how much we have learned, and it is very very impressive.

Furthermore, it is also clear that we live in a time where all kinds of syntactic work can be fruitfully pursued. What do I mean by “all”?  Well, there are roughly three kinds of syntactic investigations: (i) there is work on the structure of particular Gs, (ii) there is work on the structure of UGs based on work of particular Gs and (iii) there is work on the structure of FL/UG based on the particulars of UG. (i) aims at careful description of the Gs of a given language (e.g. how does agreement work in L, how are RCs formed? How does binding work?). (ii) aims to find the features that delimit the range of possible Gs in part by distilling out the common features of particular Gs. (iii) aims to simplify UG in part by unifying the principles discovered by (ii) and in part by relating/reducing/unifying these features with more general features of cognition and computation.  All three kinds of work are important and valuable. And though I want to plead specially for (iii) towards the end, I want to be very very very clear that this is NOT because I disvalue (i) or (ii) or that I think that (iii) like work is inherently better than the others. I don’t and never did. My main take-away from Athens is that there has never been a better time to do all three kinds of work. I will return to a discussion of (iii) for I believe the possibility of doing it fruitfully is somewhat of a novelty and the field has not entirely understood how to accommodate it. But I return to this. First the other two.

Let’s start with (i). If your heart gravitates towards descriptive endeavors, there are many many entirely unexplored languages out there waiting for your skills, and there are now well developed methods and paradigms ready for you to apply (and modify). Indeed, one of the obvious advances GG has made has been to provide a remarkably subtle and powerful set of descriptive techniques (based of course on plenty of earlier theory) for uncovering linguistically (i.e. grammatically) significant phenomena. Typologists who fail to avail themselves of this technology are simply going to mis-describe the individual languages they investigate,[1] let alone have nothing to say about the more general issues relating to the variety of structures that natural languages display.[2]

Similarly if your interests are typological you are also in luck. Though there are many more language families to investigate, many have been looked at in great detail and Generative linguists have made a very good start at limning the structural generalizations that cut across them. We now have mapped out more properties of the grammar of case and agreement (at both the specific and general levels) of more languages than ever before. We have even begun to articulate solid mid level generalizations that cut across wide swaths of these languages (and even some language families) enabling a more sophisticated exploration of the parametric options that UG makes available. To me, someone interested in these concerns but not an active participant in the process, the theoretical speculations seemed extremely exciting (especially those linking parameter theory to language change and language acquisition). And though the trading relation between micro vs macro variation has not yet been entirely sorted out (and this impression may be an optimistic appraisal of the discussions I (over)heard) it is pretty clear that there is a thoughtful research agenda about how to proceed to attack these big theoretical issues. So, Generative Syntax (including here morpho-syntax) in this domain is doing very very well. 

Concerning (ii): A very nice outcome of the Athens get-together was the wide consensus regarding what Amy Rose Deal dubbed “Mid-Level Generalizations” (MLG). I have frequently referred to these as the findings of GB, but I think that MLGs is a better moniker for it recognizes that these generalizations are not the exclusive property of any specific research tradition. So though I have tried to indicate that I consider the differences between GB and LFG and HPSG and TAG and… to have been more notational than notional, I adopt ARD’s suggestion that it is better to adopt a more neutral naming convention so as to be more inclusive (does this count as PC?). So from now on, MLGs it is!  At any rate, there is a pretty broad consensus among syntacticians about what these MLGs are (see here for a partial enumeration, in, ahem GB terms). And this consensus (based on the discovery of these MLGs) has made possible a third kind of syntactic investigation, what I would dub pure theoretical syntax (PTS).[3] Now, I don’t want to raise hackles with this term, I just need a way of distinguishing this kind of work from other things we call “theory.” I do not mean to praise this kind of “theory” and demean the other. I really want to just make room for the enterprise mentioned in (iii) by identifying it.

So what is PTS? It is directed at unifying the MLGs. The great example of this in the GB tradition is Chomsky’s unification of Ross’s island effects in “On Wh Movement” (OWM).[4] Chomsky’s project was made feasible by Ross’s discoveries of the PLGs we (after him) call “islands.” Chomsky showed how to treat these apparently disparate configurations as instances of the same underlying system and in the process removed the notion of construction from the fundamental inventory of UG. This theoretical achievement in unification led to the discovery of successive cyclicity effects, to the discovery that adjuncts were different from arguments (both in how they move and how porous they are) and to the discovery of novel locality effects (the ECP and CED in particular).

Someone at the conference (I cannot recall who) mentioned that Chomsky’s work here was apparently un-motivated by empirical concerns. There is a sense in which I believe this to be correct, and one in which it is not. It is incorrect in that Ross’s islands, which were the target of Chomsky’s efforts at unification, are MLGs and so based on a rich set of language specific data (e.g. *Who did you meet someone who likes) which hold in a variety of languages. However, in another sense it was not. In particular, Chomsky did not aim to address novel particular data beyond Ross’s islands. In other words, the achievement in OWM was the unification itself. Chomsky did not further argue that this unification got us novel new data in, say, Hungarian. Of course others went on to show that whatever Chomsky wanted to do the unification had empirical legs. Indeed, the whole successive cyclicity industry starting with Kayne and Pollock on stylistic inversion and proceeding through McCloskey’s work on Irish, Chung’s on Chamorro, Torrego’s on Spanish and many many others was based on this unification. However, Chomsky’s work was theoretical in that its main concern was to provide a theory of Ross’s MLGs and little (sic!) more.

Indeed, one can go a little further here. Chomsky’s unification had an odd consequence in the context of Ross’s work. It proposed a “new” island that Ross himself extensively argued against the existence of. I am talking, of course, about Wh-islands, which Ross found to be highly acceptable, especially if the clausal complement was non-finite. Chomsky’s theory had to include these in his inventory despite Ross’s quite reasonable empirical demurrals (voiced regularly ever since) because they followed from the unification.[5] So, it is arguable (or was at the time), that Chomsky’s unification was less empirically adequate than Ross’s description of islands. Nor was this the only empirical stumble that the unification arguably suffered. It also predicted (at least in its basic form) that who did you read a book about is ungrammatical, which flies in the face of its evident acceptability.  We now know that many of these stumbles led to interesting further research (Rizzi on parameters for example), but it is worth noting that the paper, now a deserved classic, did not emerge without evident empirical problems.

Why is it worth noting this? Because it demonstrates a typical feature of theoretical work; it makes novel connections, leading to new kinds of research/data but often fails to initially (or even ever) cover all of the previously “relevant” data. In other words, unification can incur an apparent empirical cost. Its virtue lies in the conceptual ties it makes, putting things together that look very different and this is a virtue even if some data might be initially (or even permanently) lost. And this historical lesson has a moral: theoretical work, work that in hindsight we consider invaluable, can start out its life empirically hobbled. And we need to understand this if we are to allow it to thrive. We need slightly different measures for evaluating such work. In particular, I suggest that we look to this work more for its ‘ahaa’ effects than for whether it covers the data points that we had presupposed, until its emergence, to be relevant.

Let me make this point a slightly different way. Work like (iii) aims to understand how something is possible not how it is actually. Now, of course to be actual it is useful to be possible. However, many possible things are not actual. That said, it is often the case that we don’t really see how to unify things that look very different, and this is especially true when MLGs are being considered (e.g. case theory really doesn’t look much like binding theory and control does has very different properties from raising). And here is where theory comes in: it aims to develop ways of seeing how two things that look very different might be the same; how might they possibly be connected. I want to further observe that this is not always easy to do.  However, by the nature of the enterprise, the possible often only coarsely fits the actual, at least until empirical tailoring has had a chance to apply. This is why a some empirical indulgence is condign.

So you may be wondering why I got off on this jag in a post about the wonders of the Athens’ conference. The reason is that one of the things that make this period of linguistics such a golden age is that the large budget of MLGs the field seems to recognize makes it ripe for the theoretically ambitious to play their unificational games. And for this work to survive (or even see the light of day) will require some indulgence on the part of my more empirically conscious colleagues. In particular, I believe that  theoretical work will need to evaluated differently (at least in the short and medium run) from the two other kinds of work that I alluded to above, where empirical coverage is reasonably seen as the primary evaluative hurdle.

More specifically, we all want our language particular descriptions and MLGs to be empirically tight (though even fashioning MLGs some indulgence (i.e. tolerance for “exceptions”) is often advisable), elegance be damned. But we want our theories to be simple (i.e. elegant and conceptually integrated and natural), and it is important to recognize that this is a virtue even in the face of empirical leakage. Given that we have entered a period where good theory is possible and desirable, we need to be mindful of this or risk crushing theoretical initiative altogether.[6]

As you may have guessed, part of why I write the last section was because the one thing that I felt was missing at Athens was the realization that this kind of indulgence is now more urgent than ever. Yours truly tried to argue the virtues of making Plato’s Problem (PP) and Darwin’s Problem (DP) central to contemporary research. The reaction, as I saw it (and I might be wrong here), was that such thinking did not really get one very far, that it is possible to do all theoretical work without worrying about these inconclusive problems. It seemed to me that to the degree that PP was acknowledged to be important, it struck me that the consensus was that we should off load acquisition concerns to the professionals in psych (though, of course, they should consult us closely in the process). The general tone seemed to be that eyeballing a proposal for PP compatibility was just self-indulgence, if not worse. The case of DP was even worse. It was taken as too unspecified to even worry about and anyhow general methodological concerns for simplicity and explanation should prove robust enough without having to indulge in pointless evolutionary speculation of the cursory variety available to us.

I actually agree with some version of each of these points. Linguists cannot explore the fine details of PP without indulging in some psychology requiring methods not typically part of the syntactician’s technical armamentarium.[7] And, I agree that right now what we know about evolution is very unlikely to play a substantive role in our theorizing. However, PP and DP serve to vividly bring before the mind two important projects: (i) that the object of study in GG is FL and its fine structure and (ii) that theoretical unification is a virtue in pursuing (i). PP and DP serve to highlight these two features, and as these are often, IMO, lost sight of, this is an excellent thing.

Moreover, at least with PP, it is not correct that we cannot eyeball a proposal to get a sense of whether it will pass platonic muster. In fact, in my experience many of the thoughtful professionals often get their cues regarding hard/interesting problems by first going through simple the PoS logic implicit in a standard syntactic analysis.[8] This simple PP analysis lays the groundwork for more refined considerations. IMO, one of the problems with current syntactic pedagogy is that we don’t teach of our students how to deploy simple PoS reasoning. Why? Well, I think it’s because we don’t actually consider PP that important. Why? Well the most generous answer is that it is assumed that all th work we do already tacitly endorses PP’s basic ideals and so worrying PP to death will not get us very much bang for the buck. Maybe, but being explicit really does make a difference. Explicitly knowing the big issues what the big issues are really is useful. It helps you to think of your work at one remove from the all important details that consume you. And it can even serve, at times, to spur interesting kinds of more specific syntactic speculation. Lastly, it’s the route towards engaging with the larger intellectual community that the Athens conference indicated so many feel detached from.

Personally, I think that the same holds true with DP. I agree that we are not about to use the existing (non-existing) insights from the evolution of cognition and language to ground type (iii) thinking. But, I think that considering the Generative project in DP terms enlarges how we think about the problem. In fact, much more specifically, it was only with the rise of the Minimalist Program (MP) in which DP was highlighted and stressed as PP had been before that the virtues of the unification of the MLGs rose to become a central kind of research project. If you do not go “beyond” explanatory adequacy there is no pressing reason for worrying about how our UGs fit in with other domains of cognition or general features of computation (if indeed they do). PP shoves the learnability problem in our faces and doing so has led us to think constructively about Chomsky Universals and how they might be teased out of our study of Gs. Hopefully, DP will do the same for cleaning up FL/UG: it will, if thought about regularly, make it vivid to us that unifying the modules and seeing how these unified systems might relate to other domains of cognition and computation is something that we should try to tease out of our understanding of our versions of UG. 

I should add that doing this should encourage us to start forcefully re-engaging with the neuro-cognitive-computational sciences (something that syntacticians used to do regularly but not so much anymore). And if we do not do this, IMO, linguistics in general and syntax in particular will not have a bright future. As I said in Athens, if you want to know about the half life of a philological style of linguistics, just consider that the phrase “prospering classics department” is close to being an oxymoron. That way lies extinction. So we need to reengage with these “folks” (ah my first Obamaism) and both PP and DP can act as constant reminders of the links that syntax ought to have with these efforts.

Ok, enough. To conclude: Intellectually, we are in a golden age of linguistics (though we made need to manage this a bit so as to not discourage PTS). However, it also appears that politically things are not so hot. Many of the attendees felt that GG work is under threat of extinction in many places. There was animated discussion about what could be done about this and how to better advertise our accomplishments to both the lay and scientific public. We discussed some of this here, and similar concerns were raised in Athens. However, it is clear that in some places matters are really pretty horrid. This is particularly unfortunate given the intellectual vigor of generative syntax. I will try and say something about this feature in a following post.

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[1] Jason Merchant made this point forcefully and amusingly in Athens.

[2] I suspect that some of the hostility that traditional typology shows towards GG lies in the inchoate appreciation GG has significantly raised the empirical standards for typological research and those not conversant with these methods are failing empirically. In other words, traditional typologists rightly fear that they, not their subject matter, is threatened with obsolescence. To my mind, this is all very positive, but, for obvious reasons, it is politically terrible. Typologists of a certain stripe might be literally fighting for their lives, and this naturally leads to a very hostile attitude towards GG based work.

[3] Yes, I also see the possibility of a PTSD syndrome (pure theoretical syntax disorder).

[4] Continuing a project begun in “Conditions on Transformations” and ending with Barriers.

[5] Though see Sprouse’s work which provides evidence that wh-islands show the same super additivity profile as other islands.

[6] I will likely blog on this again in the near future if all of this sounds kind of cryptic.

[7] Though this is changing rapidly, at least at places like the University of Maryland.

[8] I’d like to thank Jeff Lidz for showing me this in spades. I sat in on his terrific class, the kind of class that every syntactician (especially newly minted syntacticians) should do.