The LSA summer institute just finished last week. Here are
some impressions.
In many ways it was a wonderful experience and it brought
back to me my life as a graduate student.
My apartment was “functional” (i.e. spare and tending towards the
slovenly). As in my first grad student apartments, I had a mattress on the
floor and an AC unit that I slept under. The main difference this time around
was that that the AC unit I had at U Mich was considerably smaller than the earlier
industrial strength machine that was able to turn my various abodes into a meat
locker (I’m Canadian/Quebecois and ¯“mon pays ce n’est pas
un pays c’est l’hiver…”¯ !). In fact, this time around the AC was more like
ten flies flapping vigorously. It was ok if I slept directly under the fan
(hence the floor mattress). The
downside, something that I do not remember from my experience 40 years ago, was
that this time around, getting up out of bed was more demanding now than it was
then.
I was at the LSA to teach intro to minimalist syntax. It was a fun course to teach. There were
between 80-90 people that attended regularly, about half taking the course for
some kind of credit. To my delight, there was real enthusiasm for minimalist
topics and the discussion in class was always lively. The master narrative for the course was that
the Minimalist Program (MP) aims to answer a “newish” question: what features
of FL are peculiarly linguistic? The first lecture and a half consisted of a
Whig history of Generative Grammar, which tried to locate the MP project
historically. The main idea was that if one’s interest lies in distinguishing
the cognitively general from the linguistically parochial within FL there have
to be candidate theories of FL to investigate. GB (for the first time) provides
an articulated version of such a theory, with the sub-modules, (i.e. Binding
theory, control theory, movement, subjacency, the ECP, X’ theory etc.)
providing candidate “laws of grammar.” The goal of MP is to repackage these
“laws” in such a way as to factor out those features that are peculiar to FL
from those that are part of general cognition/computation. I then suggested that this project could be
advanced by unifying the various principles in the different modules in terms
of Merge, in effect eliminating the modular structure of FL. In this frame of
mind, I showed how various proposals within MP could be seen as doing just
this: Phrase Structure and Movement as instances of Merge (E and I
respectively), case theory as an instance of I-merge, control, and anaphoric
binding as instances of I-merge (A-chain variety) etc. It was fun. The last lectures were by far the
most speculative (it involved seeing if we could model pronominal binding as an
instance of A-to-A’-to-A movement (don’t ask)) but there was a lot of
interesting ongoing discussion as we examined various approaches for possible
unification. We went over a lot of the
standard technology and I think we had a pretty good time going over the
material.
I also went on a personal crusade against AGREE. I did this partly to be provocative (after
all most current approaches to non-local dependencies rely on AGREE in a
probe-goal configuration to mediate I-merge) and partly because I believe that
AGREE introduces a lot of redundancy into the theory, not a good thing, so it
allowed us to have a lively discussion of some of the more recondite evaluative
considerations that MP elevates.[1] At any rate, here the discussion was
particularly lively (thanks Vicki) and fun. I would love to say that the class
was a big hit, but this is an evaluation better left to the attendees than to
me. Suffice it to say, I had a good time and the attrition rate seemed to be
pretty low.
One of the perks of teaching at the institute is that one
can sit in on one’s colleagues’ classes. I attended the class given by Sam Epstein,
Hisa Kitihara and Dan Seely (EKS). It
was attended by about 60 people (like I said, minimalism did well at this LSA
summer camp). The material they covered
required more background than the intro course I taught and EKS walked us
through some of their recent research. It was very interesting. The aim was to
develop of an account of why transfer applies when it does. The key idea was
that cyclic transfer is forced in computations that result in in multi-peaked
structures that themselves result from strict adherence to derivations that
respect (an analogue of) Merge-Over-Move and feature lowering of the kind that
Chomsky has recently proposed. The
technical details are non-trivial so those interested should hunt down some of
their recent papers.[2]
A second important benefit of EKS’s course was the careful
way that they went through some of Chomsky’s more demanding technical
suggestions, sympathetically yet critically.
We had a great time discussing various conceptions of Merge and how/if
labeling should be incorporated into core syntax. As many of you know, Chomsky
has lately made noises that labeling should be dispensed with on simplicity
grounds. Hisa (with kibbitzing from Sam and Dan) walked us though some of his
arguments (especially those outlined in “Problems of Projection”). I was not
convinced, but I was enlightened.
Happily, in the third week, Chomsky himself came and
discussed these issues in EKS’s class.
The idea he proposed therein was that phrases require labels at least when transferred to the CI
interface. Indeed, Chomsky proposed a labeling algorithm that incorporated
Spec-Head agreement as a core component (yes, it’s back folks!!). It resolves labeling ambiguities. To be slightly less opaque: in {X, YP}
configurations the label is the most prominent (least embedded) lexical item
(LI) (viz. X). In {XP, YP} configurations there are two least embedded LIs
(viz. descriptively, the head of X and the head of Y). In these cases,
agreement enters to resolve the ambiguity by identifying the two heads (i.e. thereby making them the same).
Where agreement is possible, labeling is as well. Where it is not, one of the
phrases must move to allow labeling to occur in transfer to CI. Chomsky suggested that this requirement for
unambiguous labeling (viz. the demand that labels be deterministically
computed) underlies successive cyclic movement.
To be honest, I am not sure that I yet fully understand the
details enough to evaluate it (to be more honest, I think I get enough of it to
be very skeptical). However, I can say that the class was a lot of fun and very
thought provoking. As an added bonus, it brought me and Vicki Carstens together
on a common squibbish project (currently under construction). For me it felt
like being back in one of Chomsky’s Thursday lectures. It was great.
Chomsky gave two other less technical talks that were also
very well attended. All in all, a great two days.
There were other highlights. I got to talk to Rick Lewis a
lot. We “discussed” matters of great moment over excellent local beer and some
very good single malt scotch. It was as part of one of these outings that I got
him to allow me to post his two papers here.
One particularly enlightening discussion involved the interpretation of the
competence/performance distinction. He proposed that it be interpreted as
analogous to the distinction between capacities and exercisings of
capacities. A performance is the
exercise of a capacity. Capacities are never exhausted by their
exercisings. As he noted, on this
version of the distinction one can have competence
theories of grammars, of parsers, and of producers. On this view, it’s not that
grammars are part of the theory of competence and parsers part of the theory of
performance. Rather, the distinction marks the important point that the aim of
cognitive theory is to understand capacities, not particular exercisings
thereof. I’m not sure if this is exactly what Chomsky had in mind when he
introduced the distinction, but I do think that it marks an important
distinction that should be highlighted (one further discussed here).
Let me end with one last impression, maybe an inaccurate
one, but one that I nonetheless left with.
Despite the evident interest in minimalist/biolinguistic themes at the
institute, it struck me that this conception of linguistics is very much in the
minority within the discipline at large. There really is a
linguistics/languistics divide that is quite deep, with a very large part of
the field focused on the proper description of language data in all of its vast
complexity as the central object of study. Though, there is no a priori reason why this endeavor should
clash with the biolinguistic one, in practice it does.
The two pursuits are animated by very different aesthetics,
and increasingly by different analytical techniques. They endorse different conceptions of the
role of idealization, and different attitudes towards variation and complexity.
For biolinguists, the aim is to eliminate the variation, in effect to see
through it and isolate the individual interacting sub-systems that combine to
produce the surface complexity. The trick on this view is to find a way of
ignoring a lot of the complex surface data and hone in on the simple underlying
mechanisms. This contrasts with a second conception, one that embraces the
complexity and thinks that it needs to be understood as a whole. On this second
view, abstracting from the complex variety manifested in the surface forms is
to abstract away from the key features of language. On this second view, language IS variation,
whereas from the biolinguistic perspective a good deal of variation is noise.
This, of course, is a vast over-simplification. But I sense that
it reflects two different approaches to the study of language, approaches that
won’t (and can’t) fit comfortably together. If so, linguistics will (has) split
into two disciplines, one closer to philology (albeit with fancy new
statistical techniques to bolster the descriptive enterprise) and one closer to
Chomsky’s original biolinguistic conception whose central object of inquiry is
FL.
Last point: One thing I also discovered is how much work running
one of these Insitutes can be. The organizers at U Michigan did an outstanding
job. I would like to thank Andries Coetze, Robin Queen, Jennifer Nguyen and all
their student helpers for all their efforts.
I can be very cranky (and I was on some days) and when I was, instead of
hitting me upside the head, they calmly and graciously settled me down, solved
my “very pressing” problem and sent me on my merry way. Thanks for your efforts,
forbearance and constant good cheer.
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