Linguists tend to publish for other linguists. And this is
fine. However, it was not always so. There was a time when linguists saw
themselves as part of a larger cog-psy community and published in venues
frequented by non-linguists.
Cognition
was a terrific venue for such work and it enabled linguistic discoveries to
influence debates about the nature of mind (and, occasionally, even the brain).
However, even in these golden years very few linguists published in the leading
general science journals and this had
the effect of segregating our work from the scientific mainstream. Books like
Pinker’s
The Language Instinct were
effective conduits to the larger scientific community, but really nothing gains
scientific street cred like publishing in the big three peer reviewed high
impact journals like
Science, Nature and
PNAS. Moreover, as readers of FoL
know, I believe that the single best way to politically advance linguistics and
protect it economically is to disseminate our results to our fellow scientists.
So, with this as prelude, I am delighted to note a paper that has yesterday
appeared in
PNAS of that ilk. The
paper (
here)
has three authors: Chung-hye Han, Julien Musolino and Jeff Lidz (HML). Aside
from being very GFL (i.e. “good for linguistics”) that such things are being
published in
PNAS it’s also a very
good paper that I heartily recommend you take a look. It even has the virtue of
being a mere 6 pages (a page limit we should encourage our own journals to try
to approximate). So what’s in it? Here is a quick précis with some comments.
The paper argues that FL requires that speakers adopt (at
least in the unmarked case) a single
G when exposed to PLD. The reasoning for this conclusion is based on a novel
Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) argument. What makes it novel is that the paper
outlines how a particular kind of variation
can be driven by properties of FL. Let me explain.
The standard PoS argument looks at invariances across Gs and shows how these can be accounted for with
some or another proposed innate feature of FL. Variation among Gs is then
attributed to the differential inductive effects of the Primary Linguistic Data
(PLD). What HML shows is that this same
logic allows FL to accommodate some G
variation just in case the PLD is insufficient to fix a G parameter in the LAD
(aka language acquisition device (i.e. kid)). In such cases, if FL requires an LAD to construct a single
G for given PLD, then we expect to find variable Gs in a population of
speakers with the following three key features: (i) Speakers exhibit
variability wrt a certain set of (relatively recondite) grammatical phenomena,
(ii) This variability is attested between but not within speakers, and (iii)
The variability is independent between speakers and parents. Let me say a word
about each point.
As regards (i), this is the fact HML discovers (actually
this possibility is first described in an earlier 2007 HML paper). HML shows
that in Korean the height of the verb explains scope of negation effects. These
effects are quite obscure and verb height cannot be induced from the inspection
of surface forms as they can be in languages like French and English. In effect
HML shows argues (IMO, shows) that “children’s acquisition of this knowledge
[viz. the scope facts, NH]…is not determined by any aspect of
experience…because the experience of the language learner does not contain the
necessary environmental trigger” (1).
As regards (ii), HML shows that the variation is consistent
within speakers across different negative constructions and over time. In other
words, once a LAD’s G fixes the position of a verb (and with it negation) it
fixes it there consistently.
As regards (iii), the G variation in the population is
effectively random. It is not possible to predict any speaker’s positioning of
the verb by examining the Gs of parents (or, for that matter, anyone else). In
other words, as there is no data that could fix where the verb sits in a Korean
G then the fact that it gets fixed is a product of the structure of FL and so
we expect random variation.
This is a very clever argument. Note, that it directly
supports the logic of general PoS
arguments without assuming G invariance of the output. Or, to put this another
way: PoS arguments generally proceed from invariant properties of Gs to features
of FL. HML notes that it is consistent with PoS logic that there be variation so long as it is random. The fact that
one can find such cases further strengthens PoS logic.
The paper has two other virtues, IMO, more directly relevant
to syntactic theory.
First, it provides a model of the kinds of things that
syntacticians keep asking for. Syntacticians keep asking whether psycho-ling
results can help choose between various alternative syntactic proposals. In
principle the answer is, of course, yes. However, paradigms of this are hard to
find. HML provides an example where a psycho-ling result could be close to
dispositive. The relevant syntactic
alternatives hail from the earliest days of Minimalism when V raising was a hot
topic of inquiry.
Cast your mind back to the earliest days of the Minimalist
Program (MP), indeed all the way back to 1995 and the Black Book. Chapters 2
and 3 presented alternative theories of V raising. The chapter 2 theory (see
138ff) basically provided a theory in which French (where Vs overtly raise to
T) is the unmarked case and English (where V does not overtly raise) is the
marked one. The markedness contrast is argued to be a reflection of a leading
MP idea (viz. economy). The idea is that overt raising involves fewer
operations than overt lowering plus LF raising so an English G is less
economical than a French one as a matter of FL principle (not UG incidentally,
but FL) for it uses more elaborate derivations in getting V to T.
The cost accounting changes in chapter 3 (roughly 195-198)
where English “procrastinating” Gs are the unmarked case. The idea is that LF
operations without PF effects are more economical than ones that result in PF
“deletions” (an idea, btw, that lingers to the present in current MP accounts
that take Gs to relate meanings with
sound). This requires rethinking how syntactic morphemes are licensed
(checking) and how they enter derivations (fully featurally encumbered), but
given this and some other assumptions French overt raising in the chapter 3
theory is less grammatically svelte than covert V to T, and hence less
preferred.
HML bears directly on these two theories and argues that
they are both wrong. Were the chapter 2 story right then we would
expect that all Korean Gs assigned
Korean Vs high positions. Were the chapter 3 theory right they would all have
low positions. The fact that both are available and equally so argues that neither option is better than the other.
This leaves open the question of what theory allows both Gs to be equally
available (see below). I suspect that a single cycle theory with copy deletion
can be made to work, but who knows. Now that HML has shown that both are
equally fine, we know that neither of the earlier stories can possibly be
correct. Note that this does not mean that the HML account is inconsistent with
any markedness view of V raising. This brings me to the second virtue of the
HML story. It raises an interesting theoretical question.
So far as I know, there is currently no G story for why it
is that LADs need choose a singly G for V raising. The data are quite clear
that this is what happens, but
why
this is required is theoretically unclear. Thus, HML raises an interesting grammatical
question: what is it about FL/UG that forces a choice? I can imagine some
answers having to do with how complex the lexicon is and that having functional
heads that
optionally assign features
to V in one of two ways is more costly than having one that does it only one
way. This might have the desired effects if judiciously worked out. However,
this then predicts that some Gs, mixed Gs, will be more costly than uniform Gs.
This, in effect, makes English the marked case again given the fact that English
Gs raise
be and
have (and maybe modals) but not more “lexical” verbs.
At any rate, none of this is a theory, but the HML data raise an interesting
theoretical question as well as closing off two reasonable prior alternatives.
So it serves as a nice example of how psycho work can impact syntactic theory.
Let me end with one more point. Unlike much publicity
concerning linguistics, the HML work offers an excellent example of what
linguistics has achieved. This exploits real linguistic advances to make its
scientifically interesting point. And this is in contrast to lousy ways of
advertising our linguistic wares. One reaction to the invisibility of
linguistics in the general scientific culture has been to try to co-opt
anything “languagy” to promote linguistics. The word of the year competition at
the LSA is an excellent (sad) example.
The idea seems to be that this kind of thing
garners media attention and that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I
could not disagree more. The word of the year has nothing to do with linguistics,
nothing to do with the serious advances GG has made, and relies on no
expert/professional knowledge that linguistics brings to the scientific table.
As such it does nothing to advertise our scientific
bona fides. It’s, IMO, crap.
And using it to advance the visibility of linguistics is both
counterproductive and dishonest. I don’t know about you, but scientific
overreach (aka, scientism) makes my teeth hurt. This should not be what a
professional linguistics organization (the LSA) should be doing to promote
linguistics.
What should it be doing?
Advertising work like HML, i.e. making this kind of work more widely accessible
to the general scientific community. This is what I had hoped the LSA
initiative (noted
here)
was going to do. To date, so far as I can tell, this hope has not been
realized. Instead we get words of the year and worse (see
here).
It’s almost like the LSA is embarrassed by work in real linguistics. Too bad,
for as HML indicates, it can sell well.
So, read the HML paper and advertise it to scientific colleagues
outside linguistics proper. It is both interesting in itself and good publicity
for what we do. It’s real linguistics with a broader reach.
