An experiment in open access publishing

Colin Phillips has a very interesting discussion of his three year experiment with an open access journal that he, Matt Wagers and Claudia Felser edited in the Frontiers series (here). The online journal (here) has been quite successful and Colin does something very important and timely; he reflects on what went well, what went less well and WHY. In other words, he brings some first hand empirical experience to bear on a topic that we have discussed at FoL. The whole discussion is very interesting and I strongly recommend it for those interested in the topic.

A key point that Colin makes is that there are virtues other than cost in assessing how a journal is contributing to inquiry; readership, time from submission to publication, Impact Factor all matter, in addition to cost. Moreover, he notes that, interestingly, these are all factors that can be managed better or worse depending on what seem to be easily implementable procedures.

One that seems particularly noteworthy is the apparent fact that most of the submissions are accepted. This is not entirely true for there is a per-submission vetting process that insures that most of the submissions are of a kind to be accepted. However, the fact remains that a large proportion of the papers submitted get into print. The main reason seems to be because "[a]rticles are judged only for soundness, not for impact, i.e. if your study is sound but has minimal novelty or importance it can still be accepted." This makes the reviewing process less contentious and the goal posts easier to identify and hence cuts down on reviewing gamesmanship (though that is not how Colin puts it).

Let me make one observation and again encourage you to read the whole post because it is very good.  One of the downsides of the current review process, IMO, is that it penalizes originality. How so? Well, original work is by its nature contentious and less well-formed than less original work. This is especially so when it comes to theory, where making things clear is very hard and then it is harder still to accommodate all the myriad problems that novelty will face. One way of finessing this problem is to publish most everything. This is what the above journal does (well, depending on how 'soundness' is evaluated: what makes a paper sound?). Another way is to to go the way that the old Cognition did: place your trust in editors (Mehler and Bever) with good taste and let them exercise it. As I have mentioned before, some of the greatest journals were run in this way (Keynes ran a journal as did Planck and both were outstanding). Now, I am not acquainted with Ms Felser, but I do know Colin and Matt quite well and I know them to have excellent taste in questions. So, I suspect that one reason for the success of their journal is this X factor. We need more of this. Not to replace the mainline journals, but to allow idiosyncrasy to sometimes get a hearing. We need editors that evaluate papers in terms of novelty and importance of the ideas. This is not quite impact (at least in the terms that Colin notes are relevant to this currently important metric), but it is a big deal, IMO. It can take time for a new idea to gain a foothold, but when it does, well, you can finish this sentence as well as I can.

So, look at the post. It's really thought provoking. I'd be interested to see comments on this in Colin's blog.

The SMT again

Two revisions below thx to Ewan spring a thinko, a slip of the mind.

I have recently urged that we adopt a particular understanding of the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) (here).  The version that I favor treats the SMT as a thesis about systems that use grammars and suggests that central features of the grammatical representations that they use will be crucial to explaining why they are efficient. If this proves to be doable, then it is reasonable to describe FL and the grammars it makes available as “well designed” and “computationally efficient.” Stealing from Bob Berwick (here), I will take parsing efficiency to mean real time parsing and (real time) acquisition to mean easy acquisition given the PLD.  Put this all together and the SMT is the conjecture that the grammatical format of Gs and UG is critical to allowing parsers, acquirers, producers, etc. to be very good at what they do (i.e. to be well-designed). On this view, grammars are “well designed” or “computationally efficient” in virtue of having properties that allow their users to be good at what they do when such grammars are embedded transparently within these systems.

One particularly attractive virtue of this interpretation (for me) is that I understand how I could go about empirically investigating it.  I confess that this is not true for other versions of the SMT that talk about neat fits between grammar and the CI interface, for example. So far as I can tell, we know rather little about the CI interface and so the question of fit is, at best, premature. On the other hand we do know a bit about how parsing works and how acquisition proceeds so we have something to fit the grammar to.[1]

So how to proceed? In two steps I believe. The first is to see if use systems (e.g. parsers) actually deploy grammars in real time, i.e. as they parse. Thus, if it is true that the basic features of grammatical representations are responsible for how (e.g.) parsers manage to efficiently do what they do then we should find real time evidence implicating these representations in real time parsing. Second, we should look for how exactly the implicated features manage to make things so efficient. Thus, we should look for theoretical reasons for why parsers that transparently embody, say, Subjacency like principles, would be efficient.  Let me discuss each of these points in turn.

There is increasing evidence from psycho-ling research indicating that real time parsing respects grammatical distinctions, even very subtle ones.  Colin Phillips is a leader in this kind of work and he and his (ex) students (e.g. Brian Dillon, Matt Wagers, Ellen Lau, Dave Kush, Masaya Yoshida) have produced a body of work that demonstrates how very closely parsers respect grammatical conditions like islands, c-command, and local binding domains. And by closely I mean very closely.  So, for example, Colin shows (here) that online parsing respects the grammatical conditions that license parasitic gaps. So, not only do parsers respect islands, but they even treat configurations where island effects are amnestied as if they were not islands. Thus, parsers respect both the general conditions that grammars lay down regarding islands and the exceptions to these general conditions that grammars allow. This is what I mean by ‘close.’

There is a recent excellent demonstration of this from Masaya Yoshida, Lauren Ackerman, Morgan Purier and Rebekah Ward (YLPW) (here are slides from a recent CUNY talk).[2] YLPW analyzes the processing of backward sluicing constructions like (1):

(1)  I don’t recall which writer, but the editor notified a writer about a new project

There is an ellipsis “gap” right after which writer that is redeemed by anchoring it to a writer in the following sentence. What YLPW is looking to determine is whether the elided gap site is sensitive to online parsing effects. YLPW uses a plausibility effect as probe as follows.

First, it is well known that a wh in CP triggers an active search for a verb/gap that will give it an interpretation. ‘Active’ here means that the parser uses a top down predictive process and is eagerly looking to link the wh to a predicate without first consulting bottom information that would indicate the link to be ill-advised. YLPW show that the eagerness to “fill a gap” is as true for implicit gaps within ellipsis sites as it is for “real” gaps in regular wh sentences.  YLPW shows this by demonstrating a plausibility effect slowdown in sentences like (2a) parallel to the ones found in (2b):

(2)  a. I don’t remember which writer/which book, but the editor notified a writer about a new book

b. I don’t remember which writer/which book the editor notified GAP about a new book

When the wh is which book then there is a significant pause at notified in both sentences in (2), as contrasted with the same sentences where which writer is the antecedent of the gap.  This is because parsers, we know, greedily try and relate the wh to the first syntactically available position encountered and in the case of which book the wh is not a plausible filler of the gap and the attempted filling results in a little lingering about the verb (*notify this book about…). If the antecedent is which writer no such pause occurs, for obvious reasons.  The plausibility effect, then, is just a version of the well-known filled gap effect, with a little semantic kicker to add some frisson. At any rate, the first important discovery is that we find the same plausibility effect in both (2a) with the gap inside a sluiced ellipsis site, and (2b) where the gap is “overt.”

The next step is to see if this plausibility/filled gap effect slowdown occurs when the relevant antecedent for the sluiced ellipsis site is inside an island. It is well known that ellipsis is not subject to island restrictions. Thus, if the parser cleaves tightly to the distinctions the grammar makes (as the SMT would lead us to expect) then we should find plausibility slowdowns except when the gap is inside an ellipsis site for the latter are not subject to island restrictions [and so should induce filled gap/plausibility effects (added: thx Ewan)].  And that’s exactly what YLPW find. Though plausibility effects are not found at notified in cases like (3) they are found in cases like (4) where the “gap” is inside a sluice sight.

(3)  I don’t remember which book [the editor who notified the publisher about some science book] had recommended to me

(4)  I don’t remember which book, but [the editor who notified the publisher about some science book] recommended a new book to me

This is just what we expect from a parser that transparently embeds a UG like grammar that treats movement but not ellipsis as a product of (long) movement.

The conclusion: it seems that parsers make just the distinctions that grammars make when they parse in real time, just as the SMT would lead us to expect.

So, there is growing evidence that parsers transparently embed UG like grammars.  This readies us for the second step. Why should they do so?  Here, there is less current research that bears on the issue. However, there is work from the 80s by Mitch Marcus, Bob Berwick and Amy Weinberg that showed that a Marcus style parser that incorporated grammatical features like Subjacency (and, interestingly, Extension) could parse sentences efficiently (effectively, in real time).  This is just what the doctor ordered. It goes without saying (though I will say it) that this work needs updating to bear more directly on the SMT and minimalist accounts of FL. However, it provides a useful paradigm of how one might go about connecting the discoveries concerning online parsing with computational questions of parsing efficiency and their relationship to central architectural features of FL/UG.

The SMT is a bold conjecture. Indeed, it is likely false, at least in fine detail. This does not, however, detract from its programmatic utility.  The fact is that there is currently lots of research that can be understood as bearing on its accuracy and that fruitfully brings together work in syntax, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.  The SMT, in other words, is a terrific hypothesis that will generate fascinating work regardless of its ultimate empirical fate.  That’s what we want from a research program and that’s something that the Strong Minimalist Thesis is ready to deliver. Were this all that the Minimalist Program provided, it would have been enough (dayenu!). There is more, but for the nonce, this is more than enough. Yay, for the Minimalist Program!!!

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[1] Let me modulate this: we know something about some other parts, see here for discussion of magnitude estimation in the visual domain. Note that this discussion fits well with the version of the SMT deployed here precisely because we know something about how this part of the visual system works. We cannot say as much about most of the other parts of CI. Indeed, we don’t really know how many “parts” CI has.

[2] They are running some more experiments, so this work is not yet finished. Nonetheless, it illustrates the relevant point well, and it is really fun stuff.

DTC redux

Syntacticians have effectively used just one kind of probe to investigate the structure of FL, viz. acceptability judgments. These come in two varieties: (i) simple “sounds good/sounds bad” ratings, with possible gradations of each (effectively a 6ish point scale ok, ?, ??, ?*, *, **), and (ii) “sounds good/sounds bad under this interpretation” ratings (again with possible gradations). This rather crude empirical instrument has proven to be very effective as the non-trivial nature of our theoretical accounts indicates.[1] Nowadays, this method has been partially systematized under the name “experimental syntax.” But, IMO, with a few important conspicuous exceptions, these more refined rating methods have effectively endorsed what we knew before. In short, the precision has been useful, but not revolutionary.[2]

In the early heady days of Generative Grammar (GG), there was an attempt to find other ways of probing grammatical structure. Psychologists (following the lead that Chomsky and Miller (1963) (C&M) suggested) took grammatical models and tried to correlate them with measures involving things like parsing complexity or rate of acquisition. The idea was a simple and appealing one: more complex grammatical structures should be more difficult to use than less complex ones and so measures involving language use (e.g. how long it takes to parse/learn something) might tell us something about grammatical structure. C&M contains the simplest version of this suggestion, the now infamous Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC). The idea was that there was a transparent (i.e. at least a homomorphic) relation between the rules required to generate a sentence and the rules used to parse it and so parsing complexity could be used to probe grammatical structure.

Though appealing, this simple picture can (and many believed did) go wrong in very many ways (see Berwick and Weinberg 1983 (BW) here for a discussion of several).[3] Most simply, even if it is correct that there is a tight relation between the competence grammar and the one used for parsing (which there need not be, though in practice there often is, e.g. the Marcus Parser) the effects of this algorithmic complexity need not show up in the usual temporal measures of complexity, e.g. how long it takes to parse a sentence. One important reason for this is that parsers need not apply their operations serially and so the supposition that every algorithmic step takes one time step is just one reasonable assumption among many. So, even if there is a strong transparency between competence Gs and the Gs parsers actually deploy, no straightforward measureable time prediction follows.

This said, there remains something very appealing about DTC reasoning (after all, it’s always nice to have different kinds of data converging on the same conclusion, i.e. Whewell’s consilience) and though it’s true that the DTC need not be true, it might be worth looking for places where the reasoning succeeds. In other words, though the failure of DTC style reasoning need not in and of itself imply defects in the competence theory used, a successful DTC style argument can tell us a lot about FL. And because there are many ways for a DTC style explanation to fail and only a few ways that it can succeed, successful stories if they exist can shed interesting light on the basic structure of FL.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I have been reading some reviews of the early DTC literature and have come to believe that its demonstrated empirical “failures” were likely oversold. And second, it seems that the simplicity of MP grammars has made it attractive to go back and look for more cases of DTC phenomena. Let me elaborate on each point a bit.

First, the apparent demise of the DTC. Chapter 5 of Colin Phillips’ thesis (here) reviews the classical arguments against the DTC.  Fodor, Bever and Garrett (in their 1974 text) served as the three horsemen of the DTC apocalypse. They interned the DTC by arguing that the evidence for it was inconclusive. There was also some experimental evidence against it (BW note the particular importance of Slobin (1966)). Colin’s review goes a very long way in challenging this pessimistic conclusion. He sums up his in depth review as follows (p.266):

…the received view that the initially corroborating experimental evidence for the DTC was subsequently discredited is far from an accurate summary of what happened. It is true that some of the experiments required reinterpretation, but this never amounted to a serious challenge to the DTC, and sometimes even lent stronger support to the DTC than the original authors claimed.

In sum, Colin’s review strongly implies that linguists should not have abandoned the DTC so quickly.[4] Why, after all, give up on an interesting hypothesis, just because of a few counter-examples, especially ones that when considered carefully seem on the weak side? In retrospect, it looks like the abandonment of the strong hypothesis was less a matter of reasonable retreat in the face of overwhelming evidence than a decision that disciplines occasionally make to leave one another alone for self-interested reasons. With the demise of the DTC, linguists could assure themselves that they could stick to their investigative methods and didn’t have to learn much psychology and psychologists could concentrate on their experimental methods and stay happily ignorant of any linguistics. The DTC directly threatened this comfortable “live and let live” world and perhaps this is why its demise was so quickly embraced

by all sides.

This state of comfortable isolation is now under threat, happily.  This is so for several reasons. First, some kind of DTC reasoning is really the only game in town in cog-neuro. Here’s Alec Marantz’s take:

...the “derivational theory of complexity” … is just the name for a standard methodology (perhaps the dominant methodology) in cognitive neuroscience (431).

Alec rightly concludes that given the standard view within GG that what linguists describe are real mental structures, there is no choice but to accept some version of the DTC as the null hypothesis. Why? Because, ceteris paribus:

…the more complex a representation- the longer and more complex the linguistic computations necessary to generate the representation- the longer it should take for a subject to perform any task involving the representation and the more activity should be observed in the subject’s brain in areas associated with creating or accessing the representation or performing the task (439).

This conclusion strikes me as both obviously true and salutary, with one caveat. As BW has shown us, the ceteris paribus clause can in practice be quite important.  Thus, the common indicators of complexity (e.g. time measures) may be only indirectly related to algorithmic complexity. This said, GG is (or should be) committed to the view that algorithmic complexity reflects generative complexity and that we should be able to find behavioral or neural correlates of this (e.g. Dehaene’s work (discussed here) in which BOLD responses were seen to track phrasal complexity in pretty much a linear fashion or Forster’s work finding temporal correlates mentioned in note 4).

Alec (439) makes an additional, IMO correct and important, observation. Minimalism in particular, “in denying multiple routes to linguistic representations,” is committed to some kind of DTC thinking.[5] Furthermore, by emphasizing the centrality of interface conditions to the investigation of FL, Minimalism has embraced the idea that how linguistic knowledge is used should reveal a great deal about what it is. In fact, as I’ve argued elsewhere, this is how I would like to understand the “strong minimalist thesis,” (SMT) at least in part. I have suggested that we interpret the SMT as committed to a strong “transparency hypothesis” (TH) (in the sense of Berwick & Weinberg), a proposal that can only be systematically elaborated by how linguistic knowledge is used.

Happily, IMO, paradigm examples of how to exploit “use” and TH to probe the representational format of FL are now emerging. I’ve already discussed how Pietroski, Hunter, Lidz and Halberda’s work relates to the SMT (e.g. here and here). But there is other stuff too of obvious relevance: e.g. BW’s early work on parsing and Subjacency (aka Phase Theory) and Colin’s work on how islands are evident in incremental sentence processing. This work is the tip of an increasingly impressive iceberg. For example, there is analogous work showing that that parsing exploits binding restrictions incrementally during processing (e.g. by Dillon, Sturt, Kush).

This latter work is interesting for two reasons. It validates results that syntacticians have independently arrived at using other methods (which, to re-emphasize, is always worth doing on methodological grounds). And, perhaps even more importantly, it has started raising serious questions for syntactic and semantic theory proper. This is not the place to discuss this in detail (I’m planning another post dedicated to this point), but it is worth noting that given certain reasonable assumptions about what memory is like in humans and how it functions in, among other areas, incremental parsing, the results on the online processing of binding noted above suggest that binding is not stated in terms of c-command but some other notion that mimics its effects.

Let me say a touch more about the argument form, as it is both subtle and interesting. It has the following structure: (i) we have evidence of c-command effects in the domain of incremental binding, (ii) we have evidence that the kind of memory we use in parsing cannot easily code a c-command restriction, thus (iii) what the parsing Grammar (G) employs is not c-command per se but another notion compatible with this sort of memory architecture (e.g. clausemate or phasemate). But, (iv) if we adopt a strong SMT/TH (as we should), (iii) implies that c-command is absent from the competence G as well as the parsing G. In short, the TH interpretation of SMT in this context argues in favor of a revamped version of Binding Theory in which FL eschews c-command as a basic relation. The interest of this kind of argument should be evident, biut let me spell it out. We S-types are starting to face the very interesting prospect that figuring out how grammatical information is used at the interfaces will help us choose among alternative competence theories by placing interface constraints on the admissible primitives. In other words, here we see a non-trivial consequence of Bare Output Conditions on the shape of the grammar. Yessss!!!

We live in exciting times. The SMT (in the guise of TH) conceptually moves DTC-like considerations to the center of theory evaluation. Additionally, we now have some useful parade cases in which this kind of reasoning has been insightfully deployed (and which, thereby, provide templates for further mimicking). If so, we should expect that these kinds of considerations and methods will soon become part of every good syntactician’s armamentarium.

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[1] The fact that such crude data can be used so effectively is itself quite remarkable. This speaks to the robustness of the system being studied for such weak signals should not be expected to be so useful otherwise.

[2] Which is not to say that such more careful methods don’t have their place. There are some cases where being more careful has proven useful. I think that Jon Sprouse has given the most careful thought to these questions. Here is an example of some work where I think that the extra care has proven to be useful.

[3] I have not been able to find a public version of the paper.

[4] BW note that Forster provided evidence in favor of the DTC even as Fodor et. al. were in the process of burying it. Forster effectively found temporal measures of psychological complexity that tracked the grammatical complexity the DTC identified by switching the experimental task a little (viz. he used an RSVP presentation of the relevant data).

[5] I believe that what Alec intends here is that in a theory where the only real operation is merge then complexity is easy to measure and there are pretty clear predictions of how this should impact algorithms that use this information. It is worth noting that the heyday of the DTC was in a world where complexity was largely a matter of how many transformations applied to derive a surface form. We have returned to that world again, though with a vastly simpler transformational component.

Acceptability Judgements

As many of you know, there has been a debate in the literature lately about the reliability of acceptability judgements as used by linguists. We (i.e. me) use rather informal methods in our data collection. It often amounts to little more than asking a dozen or so colleagues about a given sentence contrast, e.g. how does A sound compared to B, can A have interpretation A'?  At any rate, the reliability of these kinds of data gathering methods has been questioned, with the suggestion that the whole Generative enterprise is an insubstantial house of cards built on sand without a leg to stand on.  Last week in Potsdam, there was a workshop dedicated to the question of understanding acceptability judgements and Colin Phillips, one of the presenters, circulated his slides to the UMD department at large. The slides review a large number of different kinds of judgement studies and conclude that the dad from laymen and experts by and large support the conventional linguistic wisdom as regards these data in the vast majority of cases (roughly the conclusion that Sprouse and Almeida and Schutze have come to as well) to a very high degree of reliability. The compendium of results covers 1770 subjects in over 50 different kinds of experiments. Interestingly, the aim of this work was not to test the reliability of judgements but to norm materials for other kinds of psycho-linguistic investigations. The money slides are #31-#33, which consolidate the relevant findings. The rightmost column, a ordered pair of a number and a Yes/No, e.g. 35 Yes, indicate the size of the number of testees and whether the results coincide with the standard wisdom, for which, as indicated, there is a pretty good support.

Just as interesting are the cases where the support is not as robust. These tend to involve pronominal binding data (which, I have no trouble believing are more problematic based on my own judgements much of the time). Yet more interesting is that the data gets cleaner depending on the type of judgement demanded. It seems that forced choice (it's good vs it's bad) data yields the cleanest results (this is both in Colin's slides and was independently noted by Sprouse and Almeida in some of their work), cleaner than the magnitude estimation or 7 point rating scale measures that are all the rage now.

At any rate, Colin's slides are worth looking at and it is to be hoped that the other papers/materials that were presented in Potsdam can be soon made available to us all.

One FInal Time into the Breach (I hope): More on the SMT

The discussion of the SMT posts has gotten more abstract than I hoped. The aim of the first post discussing the results by Pietroski, Lidz, Halberda and Hunter was to bring the SMT down to earth a little and concretize its interpretation in the context of particular linguistic investigations.  PLHH investigate the following: there are many ways to represent the meaning of most, all of which are truth functionally equivalent. Given this, are the representations empirically equivalent or are there grounds for arguing choosing one representation over the others. PLHH propose to get a handle on this by investigating how these representations are used by the ANS+visual system in evaluating dot scenes wrt statements like most of the dots are blue. They discover that the ANS+visual system always uses one of three possible representations to evaluate these scenes even when use of the others would be both doable and very effective in that context. When one further queries the core computational predilections of the ANS+visual system it turns out that the predicates that it computes easily coincide with those that the “correct” representation makes available. The conclusion is that the one of the three representations is actually superior to the others qua linguistic representation of the meaning of most, i.e. it is the linguistic meaning of most.  This all fits rather well with the SMT. Why? Because the SMT postulates that one way of empirically evaluating candidate representations is with regard to their fit with the interfaces (ANS+visual) that use it. In other words, the SMT bids us look to how grammars fit with interfaces and, as PLHH show, if one understands ‘fit’ to mean ‘be transparent with’ then one meaning trumps the others when we consider how the candidates interact with the ANS+visual system.

It is important to note that things need not have turned out this way empirically. It could have been the case that despite core capacities of the ANS+visual system the evaluation procedure the interface used when evaluating most sentences was highly context dependent, i.e. in some cases it used the one-to-one strategy, in others the ‘|dots ∩ blue| - |dots ∩ not-blue|’ strategy and sometimes the ‘|dots ∩ blue| - [|dots| - |dots ∩ blue|]’ strategy.  But, and this is important, this did not happen. In all cases the interface exclusively used the third option, the one that fit very snugly with the basic operations of the ANS+visual system. In other words, the representation used is the one that the SMT (interpreted as the Interface Transparency Thesis) implicates. Score one for the SMT. 

Note that the argument puts together various strands: it relies on specific knowledge on how the ANS+visual system functions. It relies on specific proposals for the meaning of most and given these it investigates what happens when we put them together. The kicker is that if we assume that the relation between the linguistic representation and what the ANS+visual system uses to evaluate dot scenes is “transparent” then we are able to predict[1] which of the three candidate representations will in fact be used in a linguistic+ANS+visual task (i.e. the task of evaluating a dot scene for a given most sentence[2]).[3]

The upshot: we are able to use information from how the interface behaves to determine a property of a linguistic representation.  Read that again slowly: PLHH argue that understanding how these tasks are accomplished provides evidence for what the linguistic meanings are (viz. what the correct representations of the meanings are). In other words, experiments like this bear on the nature of linguistic representations and a crucial assumption in tying the whole beautiful package together is the SMT interpreted along the lines of the ITT. 

As I mentioned in the first post on the SMT and Minimalism (here), this is not the only exemplar of the SMT/ITT in action. Consider one more, this time concentrating on work by Colin Phillips (here). As previously noted (here), there are methods for tracking the online activities of parsers. So, for example, the Filled Gap Effect (FGE) tracks the time course of mapping a string of words into structured representations.  Question: what rules do parsers use in doing this. The SMT/ITT answer is that parsers use the “competence” grammars that linguists with their methods investigate. Colin tests this by considering a very complex instance: gaps within complex subjects. Let’s review the argument.

First some background.  Crain and Fodor (1985) and Stowe (1986) discovered that the online process of relating a “filler” to its “gap” (e.g. in trying to assign a Wh a theta role by linking it to its theta assigning predicate) is very eager.  Parsers try to shove wayward Whs into positions even if filled by another DP.  This eagerness shows up behaviorally as slowdowns in reading times when the parser discovers a DP already homesteading in the thematic position it wants to shove the un-theta marked DP into. Thus in (1a) (in contrast to (1b), there is a clear and measurable slowdown in reading times at Bill because it is a place that the who could have received a theta role.

(1)  a. Who did you tell Bill about

b. Who did you tell about Bill

Thus, given the parser’s eagerness, the FGE becomes a probe for detecting linguistic structure built online. A natural question is where do FGEs appear? In other words, do they “respect” conditions that “competence” grammars code?  BTW, all I mean by ‘competence grammars’ are those things that linguists have proposed using their typical methods (one’s that some Platonists seem to consider the only valid windows into grammatical structure!)?  The answer appears to be they do. Colin reviews the literature and I refer you to his discussion.[4]  How do FGEs show that parsers respect grammatical structure? Well, they seem not to apply within islands! In other words, parsers do not attempt to related Whs to gaps within islands. Why? Well given the SMT/ITT it is because Whs could not have moved from positions wihin islands and so they are not potential theta marking sites for the Whs that the parser is eagerly trying to theta mark. In other words, given the SMT/ITT we expect parser eagerness (viz. the FGE) to be sensitive to the structure of grammatical representations, and it seems that it is.

Observe again, that this is not a logical necessity. There is no a priori reason why the grammars that parsers use should have the properties that linguists have postulated, unless one adopts the SMT/ITT that is. But let’s go on discussing Colin’s paper for it gets a whole lot more subtle than this. It’s not just gross properties of grammars that parsers are sensitive to, as we shall presently see.

Colin consider gaps within two kinds of complex subjects. Both prevent direct extraction of a Wh (2a/3a), however, sentences like (2b) license parasitic gaps while those like (3b) do not:

(2)  a. *What₁ did the attempt to repair t₁ ultimately damage the car

b. What₁ did the attempt to repair t₁ ultimately damage t₁

            (3) a. *What₁ did the reporter that criticized t₁ eventually praise the war

                 b. *What did the reporter that criticized t₁ eventually praise t₁

So the grammar allows gaps related to extracted Whs in (2b) but not (3b), but only if this is a parasitic gap.  This is a very subtle set of grammatical facts.  What is amazing (in my view nothing short of unbelievable) is that the parser respects these parasitic gap licensing conditions.  Thus, what Colin shows is that we find FGEs at the italicized expressions in (4a) but not (4b):

(3)  a. What₁ did the attempt to repair the car ultimately …

b.   What₁ did the reporter that criticized the war eventually …

This is a case where the parser is really tightly cleaving to distinctions that the grammar makes. It seems that the parser codes for the possibility of a parasitic gap while processing the sentence in real time.  Again, this argues for a very transparent relation between the “competence” grammar and the parsing grammar, just as the SMT/ITT would require.

I urge the interested to read Colin’s article in full. What I want to stress here is that this is another concrete illustration of the SMT.  If grammatical representations are optimal realizations of interface conditions then the parser should respect the distinctions that grammatical representations make. Colin presents evidence that it does, and does so very subtly. If linguistic representations are used by interfaces, then we expect to find this kind of correlation. Again, it is not clear to me why this should be true given certain widely bruited Platonic conceptions. Unless it is precisely these representations that are used by the parser, why should the parser respect its dicta?  There is no problem understanding how this could be true given a standard mentalist conception of grammars. And given the SMT/ITT we expect it to be true. That we find evidence in its favor strengthens this package of assumptions.

There are other possible illustrations of the SMT/ITT.  We should develop a sense of delight at finding these kind of data. As Colin’s stuff shows, the data is very complex and, in my view, quite surprising, just like PLHH’s stuff. In addition, they can act as concrete illustrations of how to understand the SMT in terms of Interface Transparency.  An added bonus is that they stand as a challenge to certain kinds of Platonist conceptions, I believe.  Bluntly: either these representations are cognitively available or we cannot explain why the ANS+visual system and the parser act as if they were. If Platonic representations are cognitively (and neurally, see note 3) available, then they are not different from what mentalists have taken to be the objects of study all along. If from a Platonist perspective they are not cognitively (and neurally) available then Platonists and mentalists are studying different things and, if so, they are engaged in parallel rather than competing investigations. In either case, mentalists need take heed of Platonist results exactly to the degree that they can be reinterpreted mentalistically. Fortunately, many (all?) of their results can be so interpreted.  However, where this is not possible, they would be of absolutely no interest to the project of describing linguistic competence. Just metaphysical curiosities for the ontologically besotted.

[1] Recall, as discussed here, ‘predict’ does not mean ‘explain.’

[2] Remember, absent the sentence and in specialized circumstances the visual system has no problem using strategies that call on powers underlying the other two non-exploited strategies. It’s only when the visual system is combined with the ANS and with the linguistic most sentence probe that we get the observed results.

[3] Actually, I overstate things here: we are able to predict some of the properties of the right representation, e.g. that it doesn’t exploit negatively specified predicates or disjunctions of predicates.

[4] Actually, there are several kinds of studies reviewed, only some of which involve FGEs. Colin also notes EEG studies that show P600 effects when one has a theta-undischarged Wh and one crosses into an island. I won’t make a big deal out of this, but there is not exactly a dearth of neuro evidence available for tracking grammatical distinctions.  They are all over the place. What we don’t have are good accounts of how brains implement grammars. We have tons of evidence that brain responses track grammatical distinctions, i.e. that brains respond to grammatical structures. This is not very surprising if you are not a dualist. After all we have endless amounts of behavioral evidence (viz. acceptability judgments, FGEs, eye movement studies, etc.) and on the assumption that human behavior supervenes on brain properties it would be surprising if brains did not distinguish what human subjects distinguish behaviorally. I mention this only to state the obvious: some kinds of Platonism should find these kinds of correlations challenging. Why should brains track grammatical structure if these live in Platonic heavens rather than brains?  Just asking.