If God is in the details then Evans fills a badly needed gap in the literature

If God is in the details, Vyvyan Evans’ writings on generative linguistics are profane. What follows is a little illustrative example and how bad the arguments are.

As mentioned before (see here, here, and here), Evans, like many before him, seems to have difficulty understanding the concept of a universal as used by generative grammarians of the Chomsky stripe. Evidence? Consider this discussion of the wh-island constraint (76-7 in his book; in a chapter entitled “Are There Linguistic Universals?”). Evans illustrates the constraint using the following contrasting English examples:

(1)  a. Where did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her

b. * Where did the supermodel say whether the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her

Evans argues that typological considerations prove that the contrast above cannot be attributed to a universal “rule” because it fails to hold in “other Indo-European languages such as Italian and Russian.”

Let me start with what may seem a persnickety comment: The wh-island constraint is not often thought of as a “rule” but as a condition on rules. This may sound like an innocuous distinction, but it actually isn’t. It reflects what I think is the basic underlying confusion permeating Evans’ discussions: the inability to distinguish Greenberg Universals (which aim to describe surface patterns) and Chomsky Universals (which aim to describe the generative properties of Gs and FL).  The former are intended to be surface true, the latter cannot be. While there is a direct relationship between a surface pattern and a rule in the case of Greenberg Universals, no such direct relation exists in the second.  Thus, as a matter of logic, it takes more than a review of contrasting surface patterns to debunk a Chomsky universal. It requires a discussion of the rules that generate said surface forms (i.e. a discussion of the generative procedures (i.e. Gs)). As we shall see, Evans’ discussion is entirely oblivious to this, and this makes his critique entirely worthless, as will become clear as we proceed.

So, let’s return to Evans’ discussion. What’s the “invalid” universal rule that Evans aims to debunk? It’s the following: A wh-word cannot intervene between the two clauses in a question. What’s the problem according to Evans? In some languages [Italian and Russian-NH], “a wh-word can intervene between the two clauses in a question” (77). So, according to Evans the universal rule says “no intervening wh-words between clauses in questions” and Italian and Russian allow such intervening wh-words. Thus, the universal rule is invalid.  In other words, by examining the surface forms in three different languages Evans concludes that a proposed universal, motivated by English data, is not universal after all.

Evans’ argument here is very instructive.  For it fails in almost every way imaginable, as I will show. But before deconstructing it, let me start by saying that there is nothing wrong at looking at more than one language to investigate linguistic universals.[1] Generativists do this all the time. As David Pesetsky notes here  even big bad Chomsky thinks that this is a very good thing to do (Evans seems loath to concede this point despite his evident misquotation (please take a look at the Facebook discussion linked to above. This is really egregiously bad behavior on Evans’ part)). So, the idea that cross linguistic investigations are relevant to establishing universal properties of Gs and FL is as close to a truism as there is today among practicing generativists.  However, if you do this, you need to do this right, and, sad to say, Evans’s discussion is seriously defective. Let’s count the ways.

First, as already noted, Evans’ criticism understands the universal to be one about surface forms (viz. can a wh-word intervene between “two clauses in a question”). Sadly, as it stands, this is an incorrect description of the relevant phenomenon. How do I know? Because sentences like (2) are fine in English even though “a wh-word intervenes between two clauses in a question”:

(2)  Who did the supermodel ask whether the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her

The correct description of the phenomenon Evans is interested in requires fixing where the wh comes from and this requires more than mere surface description. In particular, it requires determining the underlying source of the wh-word (i.e. roughly its DS-position). The generalization that covers (1) and (2) is that it the wh that is sentence initial cannot hail from the embedded clause. Note that in (1b) the sentence is only unacceptable if where is querying the getting-off. The sentence is fine if we are questioning where the saying occurred.  So the structure that is ungrammatical is (3a) (corresponding to (1a)) with the indicated trace annotating the relevant illicit dependency while (3b) and (3c) are fully grammatical.[2] This is why the matrix reading of (1b) where where modifies the saying is fully acceptable. I leave as an exercise for you (and Evans) to explain why (2) is also fine and fully acceptable (hint: note where the trace of where sits in (3c)).

(3)  a. Where₁ did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off the train t₁ to meet her

b. Where₁ did the supermodel say t₁ that the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her

c. Who₁ did the supermodel ask t₁ whether the window cleaner had to get off the train to meet her

So, first conclusion, Evans’ discussion does not really describe the data correctly and furthermore to do the English data descriptive justice requires looking at more than the surface (string) features of the sentence. We need, at least, sound-meaning pairs to get the data described correctly and this requires some conception of underlying form, something that is not string visible. This is what good typological work currently does and Evans’ discussion does not.

Second problem: Evans’ discussion gets the facts wrong even allowing for the first adjustment. The contrast he claims to hold between English on the one hand and Italian/Russian on the other does not hold in questions.  Sentences analogous to (1) with structure (3a) are unacceptable in Italian/Russian too. Question formation in both languages appears to yield unacceptability when extracting one question ­wh over another question wh.[3] What Evans probably meant to report is that the wh-island condition fails to appear in the Italian analogues of (4):

(4)  The book that John asked whether to review

This was first noted by Rizzi in his justly celebrated paper on island effect variations. Rizzi noted that wrt relativization (not question formation) it appears to be possible to extract the relative operator out of the embedded question with acceptable results.  As Grimshaw noted not long afterwards, examples like (4) also seem pretty acceptable in English, so Rizzi’s noted contrast between the two languages might be inaccurate (I for example find (4) quite acceptable).  At any rate, this is the kind of counterexample to the wh-island constraint that Generativists started studying in the mid 1980s. Research led to a proposal that largely saved the universal principle. We return to this in a moment, but first another problem with Evans’ set up of the discussion.

Note that in the example in (4) the head of the relative clause controls an argument position inside the relative (the object of review). In the examples in (1), where is an adjunct. There are well known differences between arguments and adjuncts as they relate to islands, viz. adjuncts are far more susceptible to the wh-island condition than arguments are. Thus, (5) is considerably less acceptable than (4) (again with the head modifying the place of the interview (viz. roughly, a relativized version of “John asked whether to interview MD in NYC):

(5)  ?*The city that/where John asked whether to interview Moby Dick

So, Evans’ illustrative examples are triply unfortunate: they mis-describe the typological contrast (questions are uniform across the three cited languages wrt unacceptability), they mis-describe the generalization (the underlying source of the wh is critical), and they focus on the wrong cases as the contrast of interest emerges largely with argument extraction, adjuncts being more recalcitrant and quite uniform in their behavior cross-linguistically.

This noted, let’s put these details aside and simply assume that Evans’ discussion does not go off the rails from the get go (though it does and this should tell you something about whether Evans’ criticism is serious (which, of course it isn’t) given that even the simple description of the generalization it “debunks” is so inaccurate), though It should make you wonder how trustworthy the critic is if he can’t get the basic descriptive facts right.

Ok, where are we? We have a purported difference between English on the one hand versus Italian (and Russian) on the other concerning extraction out of embedded questions in relative clauses. Does this debunk the universal as Evans’ discussion claims? Not really. The whole discussion, as I noted, was initiated by Rizzi in the context of grounding Ross-like Island generalizations more deeply in a more general theory of locality.[4] Here’s a slightly ahistorical reconstruction.

Rizzi noted the contrast between English and French regarding extraction out of wh-islands. He offered an explanation for this that preserved an important linguistic universal (the subjacency condition) by allowing the category of bounding nodes to differ across Gs (CP and DP for Italian, TP and DP for English).  Given this parametric variation, both English and Italian (and Russian) Gs obeyed the same universal subjacency condition (i.e. movement across more than a single bounding node is illicit in all Gs). In other words, the relevant generalization due to Rizzi is that there exists a universal structural condition on movement that is not in any way undermined by the observed differences between Italian and English that Rizzi reported. As you can see, this universal is very abstract (it relates to G processes and structures, not output forms) and cannot be contested by citing surface differences the way that Evans’ discussion does.[5]

In short, even when corrected for the evident mis-descriptions, Evans’ discussion is simply irrelevant to what generative grammarians have understood universals to be. Thus, Evans’ discussion is just another example of the confusion rampant in his writing between structural universals of the Chomsky variety (that have to do with properties of Gs and FL) and surface typological universals of the Greenberg variety (that mainly describes the string properties of surface forms). And this is a very big deal. It indicates that Evans’ discussions (aside from indicating a lack of fluency with the relevant literature) is simply beside the point logically. His criticisms miss the mark because they are not targeted at the right concept of universal.

Let me put this another way: Evans writes as if differing typological patterns are in and of themselves problems for the generative conception of universals. But this is to misunderstand what a grammatical universal is. It is not the description of patterns in the data, but principles of grammatical organization (descriptions of generative procedures). In other words, though Greenberg universals can be relevant to evaluating Chomsky universals, it takes a lot of grammatical work to relate them. Evans’ argument does not do any of this work. Why? Because it fails to recognize the difference between the two kinds of universals and hence fails to understand what is logically required to show that a Chomsky (grammatical) is incorrect. This makes Evans’ critique similar to Emily Litela’s confusion about “soviet jewelry” (here), though Emily’s misunderstanding is far more amusing (and, deliberate, unlike Evans’ critique).

So, here’s the bottom line of our little illustration: Evans’ specific “criticism” of the work on wh-island effects in generative grammar is deeply misguided. How deep? Well, the discussion wins the junk argument trifecta: it is inadequate descriptively, theoretically and logically. In other words, this is intellectual garbage, pure and simple. His discussion here is not serious and the charitable should simply ignore it.  I would have done so myself (indeed, I really want to ignore it) had it remained justly obscure. But it did not. Rather, Evans’ critique has come to fill a badly needed hole in the literature.[6] If only that hole were still unfilled. Make sure you mention this to anyone that suggests otherwise.[7]

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[1] I should add, perhaps playing into Evans’ hands, that I personally do think that one can argue for universals based on investigations of a single G (note, G, not language). This is what POS arguments do all the time. Of course, no single argument need be dispositive and it is always worth finding other kinds of evidence for a proposed universal. But logically speaking, investigating one G in depth can serve to ground a universal, not unlike studying just one organisms in depth, say the fruit fly or e-coli or pea plants, can serve to ground biochemical or genetic generalizations that hold across many phyla.

[2] Structures are ‘grammatical’ or not, sentences are ‘acceptable’ or not. Linguists explain unacceptability in part via the grammaticality of the structures they supervene on. But the two notions are distinct and must be kept conceptually separate.

[3] Of course, whether these derivations are ungrammatical in Italian/Russian Gs is a further question.

[4] I say “Ross-like” as Ross himself did not think that the wh-island condition was a true island. It was added by Chomsky later on based on the mechanics of the theory of subjacency.

[5] There are other accounts for exceptions to wh-island effects involving the number of “escape” hatches in a given G. Reinhart initiated this line of analysis and it is still much with us (under the name of ‘phase edges’). At any rate, this line of inquiry also preserved the subjacency condition by parameterizing the number of “escape” hatches in CP a given G allows.

[6] I comment I heard attributed to a review by Quine. Great line!

[7] Last point: the wh-island condition has been widely discussed in the generative literature. Exactly how to formulate it is still subject to lots of discussion.  The above is not intended to defend nor debunk it. My sole intention has been to show that whatever the right answer turns out to be, Evans’ kinds of considerations are conceptually incapable of furthering the discussion.

The verdict is in regarding Evans' book

Ok, the verdict is in. remember when I wondered (here) if Alun Anderson accurately reported the content of Vyvyan Evans’ book (The Language Myth))? Well he did! It seems that Evans actually made the arguments Anderson attributes to him. How do I know? Norbert must have read the book, you are thinking. Nope. Easier. Evans outlines his views here and it is actually as confused and uninformed as Anderson’s review suggests. In fact, it may even be worse than Anderson’s review suggests.  This paper has no clue. Not even a scintilla of one. The piece is less than unenlightened, it is aphotic. And it is precisely for this reason that I cannot recommend Evans' short paper highly enough. It is a pedagogue's dream. How so?

Well first it is very short. In fact, it’s hard to believe that someone could cram so much misunderstanding into so short a format. Clearly Evans does have talent. It is so replete with the standard confusions that one need send an eager student no further than to this short piece for an example of the kinds of conceptual errors critics of GG seem drawn to (here a nice metaphor of moths and flames seems called for, but I will show strength of literary character and resist). This short piece exhibits every possible mistake. It’s a godsend. Moreover, because it is both short and so replete with misinformation, there is really no need to ever buy the book (so don't!). It is inconceivable that the book could possibly provide more illustrative examples of miscomprehension than is packed into this dense eight pages. So both cheap and serviceable. Perfect.

BTW, those thinking of using this material for teaching purposes (and I am not joking, you really should consider making criticism of these views part of the graduate degree process (even undergrads would benefit)) might also consider using Anderson’s excellent review. It too, as I indicated previously, is thoroughly misguided and misinformed, bit sometimes it’s nice to have two versions of the same song.

As I’ve already (pre)reviewed the Evans' material in the earlier post on Anderson’s reviewed, I will only add a few cursory remarks here:

1.     The confusion between Greenberg and Chomsky Universals is evident throughout. It’s amazing how hard this simple distinction has been for critics to grasp. But this piece is not only conceptually myopic, it is also intellectually lazy. Here’s a piece of critical etiquette: If one wants to sink the GG ship one needs to go after the trophy cases. There are many of these in GG and they are not hard to find. However the observation, yet again, that languages really really look different is not one of these. We know. We’ve always known. We even have GGers who have worked on (gasp!) Salish. So when making a case, discuss the serious work. Failure to do so is a sure fire indicator that nothing of interest has been discussed.

2.     There is a difference between two oft used metaphors for describing innate structure: (i) UG is a blueprint, (ii) UG is an operating system. The difference between the two caused quite a bit of confusion within biology almost as much as it is doing in linguistics (or so I remember Gould telling us in his discussion of the homunculus problem). Blueprints invite the search for Greenberg Universals (every house has 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, a kitchen and a foyer: find them!). Operating systems not so much. Windows is not OS, though they can do many of the same things, they are different systems with different formal requirements. In particular, there are few surface indications of what operating system you are using. In contrast, it is actually quite easy to tell whether some set of blueprints are those of the apartment/house/building you are looking at (I speak from some personal experience here). The GG conception of UG is more like operating system than blueprint. But really we don’t need these metaphors anymore (or at least we should not rest content with them): UG is a function that given PLD yields Gs. Your job, Mr Phelps, should you agree to take it, is to describe the fine structure of this function. In so doing GGers have discovered some very subtle features of this function and critics, to be serious, must address them in detail. Though I am a big fan of hand-waving (especially on sultry summer days) it generally fails to advance the topics of interest. Evans piece is an excellent illustration of this truism.

3.     All the same non-Chomskys make their appearance. Everett is cited (yet again) as showing that Gs need not be recursive and so disconfirming UG and Tomasello is trotted out to represent the idea that a penchant for co-operative behavior is all we need to get human language.  Starlings are schlepped out to argue that one finds recursion in non-humans and Neanderthals make an appearance to testify language facility pre-dating homo sapiens. All of this asserted with nary a hint of skepticism (or apparent knowledge that each one of these claims has been contested and all are likely to be false). Wouldn’t it be nice sometime if someone (e.g. Tomasello, Evans, Anderson) explained to anyone how it is that a penchant for co-operation yielded island effects or the ECP or Principle C, or …you get it. I understand that many other species display quite a bit of co-operative behavior without appearing to be grammatically competent. There is a simple reason why accounts purporting to explain the intricacies of language based on co-operation are never forthcoming, and a moments reflection tells us what this is: there is no route from the former to the latter that does not need to engage with the exactly the questions that Evans begs. And this is evident throughout: just like Anderson, faithful describer of his views, Evans prefers to abstract away from facts and arguments enjoying instead the broad oh-my-god-how-nutty-this-all-looks summary conclusions.

4.     Did I say ‘competent’ above? Here’s another great feature of the Evans’ piece. He seems not to understand the competence-performance distinction as he keeps talking about “speech” rather than linguistic competence. Evidence for the former is not in and of itself evidence for the latter. Birds “speak” but are not syntactically competent. Not even starlings.

5.     Oh yes, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis makes its gradualist appearance here to argue against the emergence of an FL about 100 kya (where is Gould now that we really need him) as does the assertion that being non-localized in the brain (there is no “spot specialized just for language” indicates that the idea that there is a language module is over the top.  I assume that similar reasoning could show us that there is no electrical system in a car. After all it is everywhere.

There is a lot more in this slender cornucopia of misapprehension and I could go on, but you should enjoy this yourself.  I recommend this short précis of Evans work to all looking for a paper to hand out to a class that concisely embodies all the mistakes that it is possible to make about the Chomsky program in GG. Though appalling, the piece is very useful.

One last exhortation: linguists should make it their business to loudly criticize this junk at every opportunity. It is getting wide distribution. I got it from Aeon and it was picked up in The Browser. It has just the ingredients to make it big: another one of those Chomsky-has-been-proven-wrong memes that seem so popular. So, criticize this in all venues, especially where non-linguists gather. Consider it part of your linguistic public service.

Quotational dyslexia: Thank you Masked Man

One of the dilemmas in dealing with really bad stuff is trying to figure out whether the gross misunderstanding is a product of ignorance or malice.  This is a particularly difficult decision to make in   the case of Vyvyan Evans' oeuvre as the work is both deeply misinformed (as I and others have argued in detail see here, here, here, here, here) and, apparently, very dishonest.

How is it dishonest? Well, it seem that Evans has a very difficult time quoting accurately. In fact, his quoting habits seem to regularly transmute the claims being made into their exact opposite. This is demonstrated in detail in an anonymous comment on Evans' blog (here). I quote in full:

It's very peculiar this war of quotations, as if science worked by quotes. But be that as it may, your quotes are not real.

Evans purporting to quote Chomsky wrote:

"A plausible assumption is that the principles of language are fixed and innate" [Chomsky 2000: 122]. Chomsky then says: "For example, evidence from Japanese can be used (and commonly is used) for the study of English; quite rationally, on the well-supported empirical assumption that the languages are modifications of the same initial state" [Chomsky 2000: 102, New Horizons in the Study of Language].

I commend you for giving page numbers, but have noticed that the quote that you introduce with "Chomsky then says" has a page number earlier than the quote that precedes it? This is a frankenquote that you concocted to suit your polemical purpose. And if you actually go back and read what Chomsky wrote, once again, as in the famous Facebook thread, it turns out he said the exact opposite of what you attribute to him. This is clear, for example, by simply reading the sentences that precede your second quote "For example, evidence from Japanese can be used (and commonly is used) for the study of English; quite rationally, on the well-supported empirical assumption that the languages are modifications of the same initial state":

Chomsky actually wrote:

"Only if we keep to the radical translation paradigm or some other arbitrary constraint is evidence restricted to the use of sentences by the speaker (or some selected community). Approaching the topic as in the sciences, we will look for all sorts of evidence. For example, evidence from Japanese can be used (and commonly is used) for the study of English; quite rationally, on the well-supported empirical assumption that the languages are modifications of the same initial state.

Does this sound like a claim "that Universal Grammar can be investigated, in principle, by study of just a single language" (your words)? I don't think so, and I don't think anyone who bothers to read the text could think so. It is in fact part of an argument against the philosopher Quine, and an argument specifically in favor of using all sorts of evidence from multiple sources.

The quote that you place first comes from a totally different chapter on a different topic. You included the little bit that reads "a plausible assumption is that the principles of language are fixed and innate", as supposed support for your claim that Chomsky thinks we can study just one language. But let's look at the actual context, which is all about the lessons we could only have learned by studying multiple languages in detail. Yes, he begins with your snippet "a plausible assumption is that the principles of language are fixed and innate", but here's the rest of the same sentenceand the rest of the paragraph:

Chomsky actually wrote:

, and that variation is restricted in the manner indicated. Each language, then, is (virtually) determined by a choice of values for lexical parameters: with one array of choices, we should be able to deduce Hungarian; with another, Yoruba. This principles-and- parameters approach offers a way to resolve a fundamental tension that arose at the very outset of generative grammar. As soon as the first attempts were made to provide actual descriptions of languages 40 years ago, it was discovered that the intricacy of structure is far beyond anything that had been imagined, that traditional descriptions of form and meaning merely skimmed the surface while structuralist ones were almost irrelevant. Furthermore, the apparent variability of languages explodes as soon as one attends to facts that had been tacitly assigned to the unanalyzed “intelligence of the reader.” To attain “descriptive adequacy,” it seemed necessary to give very intricate accounts, specific to particular languages, indeed to particular constructions in particular languages: complex rules for relative clauses in English, for example. It was, however, obvious that nothing of the sort could be true. The conditions of language acquisition make it plain that the process must be largely inner-directed, as in other aspects of growth, which means that all languages must be close to identical, largely fixed by the initial state. The major research effort since has been guided by this tension, pursuing the natural approach: to abstract from the welter of descriptive complexity certain general principles governing computation that would allow the rules of a particular language to be given in very simple forms, with restricted variety.

In other words, what Chomsky is actually saying is that the program of figuring out what if anything is the content of UG could not even get off the ground if we had not studied a variety of languages in detail, which created the "tension that "the major research effort" initiated by Chomsky's work has been guided by! Once again, the exact opposite of the sentiment that you claim he is expressing in this passage.

Now lets turn to supposed Chomsky quote 2 -- the one in which he supposedly disavows "innateness". Brilliant work! You cut his last sentence off in the middle, to make him yet again sound like he's saying the opposite from what you claim. You quote Chomsky as follows:

Evans quoting Chomsky wrote:

“I am alleged to be one of the exponents of this [innateness] hypothesis, perhaps even the arch criminal. I have never defended it and have no idea what it is supposed to mean…people who are defenders of ‘the innateness hypothesis’ do not…even use the phrase.”

Except there's no period at the end of this in the original. Instead, the sentence (the very same sentence!) continues as follows:

"because there is no such general hypothesis; rather, only specific hypotheses about the innate resources of the mind, in particular, its language faculty. General arguments against some unformulated “innateness hypothesis” have no bearing on actual hypotheses about innateness, in the case of growth of language and conceptual systems or other forms of physical growth."

What Chomsky actually wrote thus makes your snide continuation ("This revelation might, in fact, come as a shock to many of Chomsky’s adherents, who may have been forgiven for thinking that Universal Grammar was, indeed, about innateness") utterly wrong and irrelevant. What Chomsky was actually writing is exactly what Adger tried to explain to you in comments on your previous post.

Finally for amusement, it's also interesting to check up on your supposed quote from Boeckx about Chomsky's "Galilean style":

Evans supposedly quoting Boeckx wrote:

"In his 2006 book, Linguistic Minimalism, Cedric Boeckx has praised this approach, dubbing it “the majestic Galilean perspective”

At this point it will come as no surprise that Boeckx didn't write this colourful phrase. He is actually quoting two well-known anti-Chomskyans, Jackendoff and Culicover, waxing sarcastic. They are the ones who coined and used this phrase, which therefore appears in quotation marks in Boeckx's text.

Maybe one such snipped and mangled quote could be put down to human error. But so many? Again and again and again?

Plentiful "errors" in quotation ("again and again and again") bespeak very bad faith.

Fortunately the Sophie's Choice I noted at the outset that one is often required to make need not be exclusive. Evans' work can be both misinformed and dishonest and it is quite evident now that it has successfully ticked off both boxes.

Two more things: I have gone after Evans' work repeatedly in FOL, The scandal of his published work goes beyond the work itself. The bigger scandal is that Cambridge University Press (Yes, CUP, the CUP!!) published this junk.  How did this get through?  I thought that CUP was a quality press and that it vetted and reviewed its projects. That's certainly what we tell our APT committees during promotion and tenure. But the Evans case suggests that what may once have been true is no longer true. It appears that "review" now means "would it make money?" rather than "can the contents pass the smell test?"CUP has embarrassed itself with this book and it owes Generative Grammar an apology. I would recommend one of the Japanese kind where the head of the linguistics section asks for our forgiveness and also immediately disowns the work. But don't hold your breath. There is money in this sort of junk, (there is always sales in debunking Chomskyan linguistics) and don't expect a university press, even a "venerable" one, to throw away a money making opportunity just because it's doing so via junk. As Upton Sinclair once (apparently) said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Ditto for University Presses and Sales. Sad.

Last, I want to end with a BIG thank you to Anonymous. Whoever you are, you did important work. Cleaning out the Augean Stables is never anyone's idea of fun. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting so that the rest of us don't have to.

Here we go again (and again, and again)

God there’s a lot of junk out there. And by ‘junk’ I don’t just mean poorly done and pointless, for even shoddy aimless research can enlighten inadvertently. What I mean is stuff that looks serious and is taken seriously by the scientific punditry but is so completely ignorant and off base that it makes you dumber if you read it. I say this to warn you not to read this review of a book by one Vyvyan Evans called The Language Myth. The review is by one Alun Anderson (what’s with this weird spelling? Vyviyan? Alun? Though maybe someone called ‘Norbert’ is in no position to asperse). As I have not read the book, I will just comment on the review. For Mr. Evan’s sake, I hope that Mr. Anderson has failed to understand what Mr. Evans actually wrote. If he got Evans right, then the book is likely a waste of time. But, as I said, I have not read it (and I am not sure that I will) so I will concentrate on the review. 

The review has that breathless “excited” quality that all tracts heralding an impending conceptual “revolution” trade in: [1]

After reading The Language Myth, it certainly looks as if a major shift is in progress, one that will open people’s minds to liberating new ways of thinking about language.

What’s the novelty? Well, you can guess: the Chomsky-Fodor-Pinker (Andersen’s triad, presumably following Evans) view that language is an “instinct” is just plain wrong, a “myth” that has swept the popular imagination (were it so!).[2] The myth, it is claimed, is based on the “way that children effortlessly learn language just by listening to the adults around them, without being aware explicitly of the governing grammatical rules.” This observation led Chomsky (and Pinker (his publicist (boy I’m sure that will go down great with Steve!)) and Fodor, another dupe) to argue that there is “a module in the mind… waiting to be activated…when an infant encounters language. The rules behind language being built into the genes.” This is not any particular grammar, but a “universal grammar, capable of generating the rules of any of the 7000 or so languages that a child might be exposed to, however different they might appear.”[3]

That’s the myth. As I assume that Andersen does not challenge the above description concerning the ease with which kids acquire a natural language (though I cannot be sure, maybe he does), I assume that the “myth” that needs exposure concerns the existence of an innate capacity, highly developed (indeed likely unique) to humans, that underlies their linguistic proclivities.

Now read a certain way, this is not necessarily a bad précis of the modern Chomsky version of GG.  Human children bring to the task of acquiring and deploying a language special species-specific skills that enable them to do what other clever animals cannot, i.e. acquire and use a natural language. There are arguments to the effect that some (or much) of this capacity is linguistic specific (though how much is currently a topic of debate), but given the obvious difference between human capacities wrt language and that of anything else we know of, the supposition that there is something special about us when it comes to language is hardly one of those going-out-on-a-long-thin-limb sort of assumptions. Indeed, I would go further, everyone assumes something analogous for the obvious fact remains that nothing does language like humans do, and on the pretty standard assumption, that what we are mentally capable of has something to do with our mental capacities, the fact that we can do language easily and nothing else does it at all implies that we have some mental capacities that other animals (and plants and rocks) do not. This is not an exciting view. And to say that humans have a language acquisition device is, at least minimally, to observe that this fact is obvious and needs explaining.

There are, of course, more interesting conclusions that one can draw and that have been drawn: e.g. that the mental capacities are in part sui generis, both wrt humans and to language, that the special capacity we have is qualitative not merely quantitative, that this capacity is dissociable from other cognitive capacities, etc.  Each of these further claims comes with substantial discussion and evidence, none of which Mr. Anderson seems aware of.  Or at least he doesn’t mention or address it. Why, because he thinks that Mr Evans has provided simple straightforward evidence demonstrating how nutty this nativist viewpoint is. What’s that evidence?

A key criticism is that the more languages are studied, the more their diversity becomes apparent and an underlying universal grammar less probable.

Spot the flaw (duh!). Once again the absence of Greenberg universals is used to dismiss Chomsky universals.[4] We’ve seen this before (right Mr. Everett?). And we will see it again (and, if past is prologue, again and again and again, sadly). But, to repeat (and repeat and repeat), these are very (very very) different things. A rich innate language specific mental module is consistent with a great deal of variation in the surface properties of individual languages. UG does not imply the existence of universal manifest patterns in every language. It does not even imply that all Gs must contain (some of) the same rules (e.g. there is no requirement that every language have focus movement or aux inversion or any other rule). Chomsky universals are about types of Gs (the kinds of rules/principles that they have) and to overthrow it requires showing more than some Gs have rules that others don’t or some surface patterns that others don’t.

Truth be told, however, the distinction between the two conceptions is probably not one that would concern Mr Andersen. Why not? Because he seems to know nothing at all about any work in the tradition that he sees as ready to collapse. He seems to believe that the mere existence of “free word order languages,” languages that “build sentences out of prefixes and suffixes to create giant words,” or languages that “appear not to have nouns and verbs” would be news to linguists very snugly in the Chomsky GG tradition (as if languages like Walpiri, Mohawk, Navaho and Salish were never studied and analyzed within the Chomsky GG tradition).  I’m pretty sure that the existence of the work of Ken Hale, Mark Baker, Lisa Mathewson, Julie Legate, Henry Davis, Masha Polinsky, Ben Bruening (among many many others) and the many GG inspired analyses of the Gs of these languages they have offered would be news to Mr. Andersen, something that the editors of New Scientist might have thought of before asking him to review Mr. Evans book.

But this is not all. Mr. Andersen also appears to think that genes require invariant expression, so that change and variation are inconsistent with information being genetically coded. In additiona, it seems that he believes that language change is incompatible with the claim that “grammar is laid out in the genes.” For Mr. Andersen the simple existence of language change and creolization are sufficient reason for denying that humans have a special biologically rooted affinity for language. If only we in the Chomsky tradition had realized that languages differed and changed we would never have gone down the ill-conceived nativist path we’ve taken. We would not have been seduced by the Chomsky-Fodor-Pinker myths. As I write, scales are falling from my eyes! Revolution indeed! 

And last but not least: nativists cannot say how languages carry meaning. Here Mr. Andersen is finally onto something. The problem is that he appears not to realize that nobody understands how this is done. Where meaning comes from, how symbols come to have significance is a real pisser of a problem, but, as they say, it is, at least for now, everyone’s problem. What we can say is that embedding the problem into a larger Chomsky like set of considerations has allowed some progress on some features of it (e.g. antecedence and scope have been illuminated, though what ‘dog’ and ‘know’ and ‘give’ and ‘London’ and ‘house’ mean is still pretty murky (a sign of this is that in your favorite semantic theory the meaning of a word like ‘life’ is ‘life¢’)).[5]

Mr Andersen does give us a hint of what the new age that Mr. Evans is heralding will look like. It will be firmly anchored in “embodied” cognition and empiricism (“arising directly in and from experience”) and mirror neurons (“the same bit of the brain lights up when we see or do hammering”). Yup, that’s the brave new world out there. If you ever thought that Greg Hickok’s evisceration of this mental detritus was overkill, read this junk and the send Greg a thank-you note (I’m sure he will also accept Starbuck’s or Amazon gift cards). Sadly, we will need many Greg like efforts again and again for this kind of junk seems to be both very attractive and impervious to criticism.

Let me make one more point and end. What we see in this review is the resurgence of Empiricism (E). Yes, I know you were expecting me to say this and I didn’t want to disappoint. But it’s true. It lies behind the apparent inability of so many to understand the distinction between Chomsky and Greenberg Universals. Confusing the two lies at the heart of the review (and of the similarly pundit popular work by Everett) and it is easily explained once one appreciates its E roots. What are these?

Es are comfortable with generalizations based on patterns in the data. I’ve discussed this before (here). If you believe that all generalizations are based on patterns manifest in the data then the idea that something can be a universal (e.g. structure dependence) but leaves no imprint in the (positive) linguistic data makes little sense. So, universals like ‘if L is OV then it will be OP,’ or ‘all languages distinguish Ns from Vs’ will leave induction friendly footprints in the linguistic data and are ok for Es (recall, everyone, including Es accept the idea that one needs to generalize). But other generalizations like ‘all languages obey islands,’ or ‘rules must be structure dependent,’ or ‘anaphors cannot be c-commanded by their antecedents,’ may leave little direct evidence in the positive data of a particular language (especially of one restricts data to what is expressed in naturalistic linguistic environments (viz. assumes that negative data is not relevant)). If you are an E, the only legit generalizations (aka Universals) are of the first kind. That’s why an E will find the Chomsky conception of universals close to incomprehensible, and, not surprisingly, will tend to confuse Chomsky and Greenberg universals (more accurately, will not be able to distinguish them), as in fact happens again and again and again. So if you are an E, stop it! It’s mentally stifling, and it leads to the kind of junk thinking this review embodies.

I will end here. To repeat, I have no idea if Mr. Andersen has correctly conveyed the content of Mr. Evan’s book (and I really do hope that he got it all wrong and that Mr. Evans is about to sue for liable as one can do in the UK with its unbelievably lax freedom of speech provisions).  I do know, however, that Mr. Andersen doesn’t know anything about Chomsky or Pinker or Fodor or GG or any work that has been done in the last 65 years.  Asking him to review a book on linguistics is like asking Sampson (my deceased ex-pet Porty) to review a book on animal cognition (actually, Sampson would have made fewer obviously clueless remarks). 

What’s sad is that this kind of junk finds its way into things like New Scientist. This is a venue that the scientifically interested look at to find out what’s happening in other scientific domains. I have in fact done so myself in the past. But, from now on I will be much more wary, for if this is what I find when an area I know something about is discussed, it leads me to think that New Scientist is quite untrustworthy. And that’s too bad. I really respect good popularization. It’s really hard to do it well (thx Mr. Pinker for the Language Instinct) and it is important. Sadly, it can also be done very badly. If you are looking for an excellent case study in how bad very bad can be, I know of no better example than Mr. Andersen’s review of Mr. Evan’s book.

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[1] The excitement seems to be spreading. CUP sent me this message from David Crystal "...Evans builds a compelling case that will be difficult to refute." Sounds like Andersen, which if correct does not bode well for Evans, though to repeat I have not yet read the book.

[2] The idea that language is an instinct is most clearly Pinker’s conceit. I don’t actually ever recall Chomsky or Fodor using this terms in describing FL/UG or LoT. And I think I know why. It has misleading connotations. Here’s the lexical entry for the word via Google:

An innate typically fixed pattern of behavior in animals in response toe certain stimuli

This definition does not really cover what GGers of the Chomsky stripe or LoTers of the Fodor variety have meant. First, no “fixed pattern of behavior” follows from their discussions. Remember the competence/performance distinction. Well the innate structures of FoL primarily relate to competence, not performance (i.e. what you know not what you do). Second, I’m not sure how to understand “fixed.” FL/UG constrains the class of possible Gs (some rules ok, others not), but it does not require that any given G have any particular shape (there is no requirement that rule X be included in every G). 

            What’s right about ‘instinct’ is that it is not learned, need not be conscious and is triggered by input. However, the shades of meaning the word carries can be very misleading and though I can see good advertising reasons for why Pinker used the word in his title, I can also see reasons for avoiding it.

[3] This 7k number keeps coming up. But there is no reason to think that there are 7k languages, at least if one counts these via the Gs that generate them. As Richie Kayne once said, and I completely agree, there is either one language or at least 7.125 billion (as of 2013), one for each person.  Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the set of possible languages, again if G individuated is not several orders greater. 

[4] I should have said “possible” absence of Greenberg universals. As you out there know, there appear to be some interesting Greenberg universals worth explaining, and many Chomsky inspired linguists like Cinque, Roberts, Kayne, Baker (and many others) are in the business of trying to account for them. I would be surprised if Mr Andersen knows anything about this. The blooming buzzing confusion that is the 7000 languages is enough for him. I wonder if the diversity of life or various kinds of stuff in the world would lead Andersen to conclude that there is no universal genetic code or that the periodic table is ripe for dissolution. Consistency would suggest that he would, but consistency is only the hobgoblin of petty minds, no doubt leaving Mr Andersen an exit strategy.

[5] John burgess, who is today visiting UMD and giving a talk and whose wonderful papers I’ve just started reading puts it succinctly: “There is nothing that could be called a body of accepted scientific conclusions about meaning… that workers… can draw upon and apply to their concerns” (In his “Quine, analyticity, and philosophy of mathematics”).