The sludge at the bottom of the barrel

It is somewhat surprising that Harper’s felt the need to run a hit piece by Tom Wolfe on Chomsky in its August issue (here). True, such stuff sells well. But given that there are more than enough engaging antics to focus on in Cleveland and Philadelphia one might have thought that they would save the Chomsky bashing for a slow news period. It is a testimony to Chomsky’s stature that there is a publisher of a mainstream magazine who concludes that even two national conventions featuring two of the most unpopular people ever to run for the presidency won’t attract more eyeballs than yet another takedown of Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar (GG).

Not surprisingly, content wise there is nothing new here. It is a version of the old litany. Its only distinction is the over the top nuttiness of the writing (which, to be honest, has a certain charm in its deep dishonesty and nastiness) and its complete disregard for intellectual integrity. And, a whiff of something truly disgusting that I will get to at the very end. I have gone over the “serious” issues that the piece broaches before in discussions of analogous hit jobs in the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Aeon (see here and here for example). Indeed, this blog was started as a response to what this piece is a perfect example of: the failure of people who criticize Chomsky and GG to understand even the basics of the views they are purportedly criticizing.

Here’s the nub of my earlier observations: Critics like Everett (among others, though he is the new paladin for the discontented and features prominently in this Wolfe piece too) are not engaged in a real debate for the simple reason that they are not addressing positions that anyone holds or has ever held. This point has been made repeatedly (incuding by me), but clearly to no avail. The present piece by Wolfe continues in this grand tradition. Here's what I've concluded: pointing out that neither Chomsky nor GG has ever held the positions being “refuted” is considered impolite. The view seems to be that Chomsky has been rude, sneaky even, for articulating views against which the deadly criticisms are logically refractory. Indeed, the critics refusal to address Chomsky’s actual views suggests that they think that discussing his stated positions would only encourage him in his naughty ways. If Chomsky does not hold the positions being criticized then he is clearly to blame for these are the positions that his critics want him to hold so that they can pummel him for holding them. Thus, it is plain sneaky of him to not hold them and in failing to hold them Chomsky clearly shows what a shifty, sneaky, albeit clever, SOB he really is because any moderately polite person would hold the views that Chomsky’s critics can demonstrate to be false! Given this, it is clearly best to ignore what Chomsky actually says for this would simply encourage him in articulating the views he in fact holds, and nobody would want that. For concreteness, let’s once again review what the Chomsky/GG position actually is regarding recursion and Universal Grammar (UG).

The Wolfe piece in Harper’s is based on Everett’s critique of Chomsky’s view that recursion is a central feature of natural language. As you are all aware, Everett believes that he has discovered a language (Piraha) whose G does not recurse (in particular, that forbids clauses to be embedded within clauses). Everett takes the putative absence of recursion within Piraha to rebut Chomsky’s view that recursion is a central feature of human natural language precisely because he believes that it is absent from Piraha Gs. Everett further takes this purported absence as evidence against the GG conception of UG and the idea that humans come with a native born linguistic facility to acquire Gs.  For Everett human linguistic facility is due to culture, not biology (though why he thinks that these are opposed to one another is quite unclear). All of these Everett tropes are repeated in the Wolf piece, and if repetition were capable of improving the logical relevance of non-sequiturs, then the Wolfe piece would have been a valuable addition to the discussion.

How does the Everett/Wolfe “critique” miss the mark? Well, the Chomsky-GG view of recursion as a feature of UG does not imply that every human G is recursive. And thinking that it does is to confuse Chomsky Universals (CU) with Greenberg Universals (GU). I have discussed this before in many many posts (type in ‘Chomsky Universals’ or ‘Greenberg Universals’ in the search box and read the hits). The main point is that for Chomsky/GG a universal is a design feature of the Faculty of Language (FL) while for Greenberg it is a feature of particular Gs.[1] The claim that recursion is a CU is to say that humans endowed with an FL construct recursive Gs when presented with the appropriate PLD. It makes no claim as to whether particular Gs of particular native speakers will allow sentences to licitly embed within sentences. If this is so, then Everett’s putative claim that Piraha Gs do not allow sentential recursion has no immediate bearing on the Chomsky-GG claims about recursion being a design feature of FL. That FL must be able to construct Gs with recursive rules does not imply that every G embodies recursive rules. Assuming otherwise is to reason fallaciously, not that such logical niceties have deterred Everett and friends.

Btw: I use ‘putative claim’ and ‘purported absence’ to highlight an important fact. Everett’s empirical claims are strongly contested. Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (NPR) have provided a very detailed rebuttal of Everett’s claims that Piraha Gs are recursiveless.[2] If I were a betting man, my money would be in NPR. But for the larger issue it doesn’t matter if Everett is right and NPR are wrong. Thus, even were Everett right about the facts (which, I would bet that he isn’t) it would be irrelevant to his conclusion regarding the implications of Piraha for the Chomsky/GG claims concerning UG and recursion.

So what would be relevant evidence against the Chomsky/GG claim about the universality of recursion? Recall that the UG claim concerns the structure of FL, a cognitive faculty that humans come biologically endowed with. So, if the absence of recursion in Piraha Gs resulted from the absence of a recursive capacity in Piraha speakers’ FLs then this would argue that recursion was not a UG property of human FLs. In other words, if Piraha speakers could not acquire recursive Gs then we would have direct evidence that human FLs are not built to acquire recursive Gs. However, we know that this conditional is FALSE. Piraha kids have no trouble acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP), a language that everyone agrees is the product of a recursive G (e.g. BP Gs allow sentences to be repeatedly embedded within sentences).[3]  Thus, Piraha speakers’ FLs are no less recursively capable than BP speakers’ FLs or English speakers’ FLs or Swahili speakers’ FLs or... We can thus conclude that Piraha FLs are just human FLs and have as a universal feature the capacity to acquire recursive Gs.

All of this is old hat and has been repeated endlessly over the last several years in rebuttal to Everett’s ever more inflated claims. Note that if this is right, then there is no (as in none, nada, zippo, bubkis, gornisht) interesting “debate” between Everett and Chomsky concerning recursion. And this is so for one very simple reason. Equivocation obviates the possibility of debate. And if the above is right (and it is, it really is) then Everett’s entire case rests on confusing CUs and GUs. Moreover, as Wolfe’s piece is nothing more than warmed over Everett plus invective, its actual critical power is zero as it rests on the very same confusion.[4]

But things are really much worse than this. Given how often the CU/GU confusion has been pointed out, the only rational conclusion is that Everett and his friends are deliberately running these two very different notions together. In other words, the confusion is actually a strategy. Why do they adopt it? There are two explanations that come to mind. First, Everett and friends endorse a novel mode of reasoning. Let’s call it modus non sequitur, which has the abstract form “if P why not Q.”  It is a very powerful method of reasoning sure to get you where you want to go. Second possibility: Everett and Wolfe are subject to Sinclair’s Law, viz. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. If we understand ‘salary’ broadly to include the benefits of exposure in the high brow press, then … All of which brings us to Wolfe’s Harper’s piece.

Happily for the Sinclair inclined, the absence of possible debate does not preclude the possibility of considerable controversy. It simply implies that the controversy will be intellectually barren. And this has consequences for any coverage of the putative debate.  Articles reprising the issues will focus on personalities rather than substance, because, as noted, there is no substance (though, thank goodness, there can be heroes engaging in the tireless (remunerative) pursuit of truth). Further, if such coverage appears in a venue aspiring to cater to the intellectual pretensions of its elite readers (e.g. The New Yorker, the Chronicle and, alas, now Harper’s) then the coverage will require obscuring the pun at the heart of the matter. Why? Because identifying the pun (aka equivocation) will expose the discussion as, at best, titillating gossip for the highbrow, at middling, a form of amusing silliness (e.g. perfect subject matter for Emily Litella) and, at worst, a form of celebrity pornography in the service of character assassination. Wolfe’s Harper’s piece is the dictionary definition of the third option.

Why do I judge Wolfe’s article so harshly? Because he quotes Chomsky’s observation that Everett’s claims even if correct are logically irrelevant. Here’s the full quote (39-40):

“It”—Everett’s opinion; he does not refer to Everett by name—“amounts to absolutely nothing, which is why linguists pay no attention to it. He claims, probably incorrectly, it doesn’t matter whether the facts are right or not. I mean, even accepting his claims about the language in question—Pirahã—tells us nothing about these topics. The speakers of this language, Pirahã speakers, easily learn Portuguese, which has all the properties of normal languages, and they learn it just as easily as any other child does, which means they have the same language capacity as anyone else does.”

A serious person might have been interested in finding out why Chomsky thought Everett’s claims “tell us nothing these topics.” Not Wolfe. Why try to understand issues that might detract from a storyline? No, Wolfe quotes Chomsky without asking what he might mean. Wolfe ignores Chomsky's identification of the equivocation as soon as he notes it. Why? Because this is a hit piece and identifying the equivocation at the heart of Everett’s criticism would immediately puncture Wolfe’s central conceit (i.e. heroic little guy slaying the Chomsky monster).

Wolfe clearly hates Chomsky. My reading of his piece is that he particularly hates Chomsky’s politics and the article aims to discredit the political ideas by savaging the man. Doing this requires demonstrating that Chomsky, who, as Wolfe notes is one of the most influential intellectuals of all time, is really a charlatan whose touted intellectual contributions have been discredited. This is an instance of the well know strategy of polluting the source. If Chomsky’s (revolutionary) linguistics is bunk then so are his politics. A well-known fallacy this, but not less effective for being so. Dishonest and creepy? Yes. Ineffective? Sadly no.

So there we have it. Another piece of junk, but this time in the style of the New Journalism. Before ending however, I want to offer you some quotes that highlight just how daft the whole piece is. There was a time that I thought that Wolfe was engaging in Sokal level provocation, but I concluded that he just had no idea what he was talking about and thought that stringing technical words together would add authority to his story. Take a look at this one, my favorite (p. 39):

After all, he [i.e. Chomsky, NH] was very firm in his insistence that it [i.e. UG, NH] was a physical structure. Somewhere in the brain the language organ was actually pumping the UG through the deep structure so that the LAD, the language acquisition device, could make language, speech, audible, visible, the absolutely real product of Homo sapiens’s central nervous system. [Wolfe’s emphasis, NH].

Is this great, or what! FL pumping UG through the deep structure. What the hell could this mean? Move over “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” we have a new standard for syntactically well-formed gibberish. Thank you Mr Wolfe for once again confirming the autonomy of syntax.

Or this encomium to cargo cult science (37):

It [Everett’s book, NH] was dead serious in an academic sense. He loaded it with scholarly linguistic and anthropological reports of his findings in the Amazon. He left academics blinking . . . and nonacademics with eyes wide open, staring.

Yup, “loaded” with anthro and ling stuff that blinds professionals and leaves neophytes agog. Talk of scholarship. Who could ask for more? Not me. Great stuff.

Here’s one more, where Wolfe contrasts Chomsky and Everett (31):

Look at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair. He could have passed for a ranch hand or a West Virginia gas driller.

Methodist son of a cowboy rather than the son of Russian Askenazic Jews infatuated with political “ideas long since dried up and irrelevant,” products “perhaps” of a shtetl mentality (29). Chomsky is an indoor linguist “relieved not to go into the not-so-great outdoors,” desk bound “looking at learned journals with cramped type” (27) and who never left the computer, much less the building” (31). Chomsky is someone “very high, in an armchair, in an air conditioned office, spic and span” (36), one of those intellectuals with “radiation-bluish computer screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts” (31) never deigning to muddy himself with the “muck of life down below” (36). His linguistic “hegemony” (37) is “so supreme” that other linguists are “reduced to filling in gaps and supplying footnotes” (27).

Wowser. It may not have escaped your notice that this colorful contrast has an unsavory smell. I doubt that its dog whistle overtones were inaudible to Wolfe. The scholarly blue-pallored desk bound bookish high and mighty (Ashkenazi) Chomsky versus the outdoorsy (Methodist) man of the people and the soil and the wilderness Everett. The old world shtetl mentality brought down by a (lapsed) evangelical Methodist (32). Trump’s influence seems to extend to Harper’s. Disgusting.

That’s it for me. Harper’s should be ashamed of itself. This is not just junk. It is garbage. The stuff I quoted is just a sampling of the piece’s color. It is deeply ignorant and very nasty, with a nastiness that borders on the obscene. Your friends will read this and ask you about it. Be prepared.

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[1] Actually, Greenberg’s own Universals were properties of languages not Gs. More exactly, they describe surface properties of strings within languages. As recursion is in the first instance a property of systems of rules and only secondarily a property of strings in a language, I am here extending the notion Greenberg Universal to apply to properties all Gs share rather than all languages (i.e. surface products of Gs) share.

[2] Incidentally, Wolfe does not address these counterarguments. Instead he suggests that NPR are Chomsky’s pawns who blindly attack anyone who exposes Chomsky’s fallacies (see p.35).  However, reading Wolfe’s piece indicates that the real reason he does not deal with NPT’s substantive criticisms is that he cannot. He doesn’t know anything so he must ignore the substantive issues and engage in ad hominem attacks. Wolfe has not written a piece of popular science or even intellectual history for the simple reason that he does not appear to have the competence required to do so.

[3] It is worth pointing out that sentence recursion is just one example of recursion. So, Gs that repeatedly embed DPs within DPs or VPs within VPs are just as resursive as those that embed clauses within clauses.

[4] See Wolfe’s discussion of the “law” of recursion on 30-31. It is worth noting that Wolfe seems to think that “discovering” recursion was a big deal. But if it was Chomsky was not its discoverer, as his discussion of Cartesian precursors demonstrates. Recursion follows trivially from the fact of linguistic creativity. The implications of the fact that humans can and do acquire recursive Gs are significant. The fact itself is a pretty trivial observation.

Evans-Levinson: the sound and the fury

I confess that I did not read the Evans and Levinson article (EL) (here) when it first came out. Indeed, I didn’t read it until last week.  As you might guess, I was not particularly impressed. However, not necessarily for the reason you might think. What struck me most is the crudity of the arguments aimed at the Generative Program, something that the (reasonable) commentators (e.g. Baker, Freidin, Pinker and Jackendoff, Harbour, Nevins, Pesetsky, Rizzi, Smolensky and Dupoux a.o.) zeroed in on pretty quickly. The crudity is a reflection, I believe, of a deep seated empiricism, one that is wedded to a rather superficial understanding of what constitutes a possible “universal.” Let me elaborate.

EL adumbrates several conceptions of universal, all of which the paper intends to discredit. EL distinguishes substantive universals from structural universals and subdivides the latter into Chomsky vs Greenberg formal universals. The paper’s mode of argument is to provide evidence against a variety of claims to universality by citing data from a wide variety of languages, data that EL appears to believe, demonstrate the obvious inadequacy of contemporary proposals. I have no expertise in typology, nor am I philologically adept. However, I am pretty sure that most of what EL discuss cannot, as it stands, broach many of the central claims made by Generative Grammarians of the Chomskyan stripe. To make this case, I will have to back up a bit and then talk on far too long. Sorry, but another long post. Forewarned, let’s begin by asking a question.

What are Generative Universals (GUs) about?  They are intended to be in the first instance, descriptions of the properties of the Faculty of Language (FL). FL names whatever it is that humans have as biological endowment that allows for the obvious human facility for language. It is reasonable to assume that FL is both species and domain specific. The species specificity arises from the trivial observations that nothing does language like humans do (you know: fish swim, birds fly, humans speak!). The domain specificity is a natural conclusion from the fact that this facility arises in all humans pretty much in the same way independent of other cognitive attributes (i.e. both the musical and the tone deaf, both the hearing impaired and sharp eared, both the mathematically talented and the innumerate develop language in essentially the same way).  A natural conclusion from this is that humans have some special features that other animals don’t as regards language and that human brains have language specific “circuits” on which this talent rests. Note, this is a weak claim: there is something different about human minds/brains on which linguistic capacity supervenes. This can be true even if lots and lots of our linguistic facility exploits the very same capacities that underlie other forms of cognition. 

So there is something special about human minds/brains as regards language and Universals are intended to be descriptions of the powers that underlie this facility; both the powers of FL that are part of general cognition and those unique to linguistic competence.  Generativists have proposed elaborating the fine structure of this truism by investigating the features of various natural languages and, by considering their properties, adumbrating the structure of the proposed powers. How has this been done? Here again are several trivial observations with interesting consequences.

First, individual languages have systematic properties. It is never the case that, within a given language, anything goes.  In other words, languages are rule governed. We call the rules that govern the patterns within a language a grammar. For generativists, these grammars, their properties, are the windows into the structure of FL/UG. The hunch is that by studying the properties of individual grammars, we can learn about that faculty that manufactures grammars.  Thus, for a generativist, the grammar is the relevant unit of linguistic analysis. This is important. For grammars are NOT surface patterns. The observables linguists have tended to truck in relate to patterns in the data. But these are but way stations to the data of interest: the grammars that generate these patterns.  To talk about FL/UG one needs to study Gs.  But Gs are themselves inferred from the linguistic patterns that Gs generate, which are themselves inferred from the natural or solicited bits of linguistic productions that linguists bug their friends and collaborators to cough up. So, to investigate FL/UG you need Gs and Gs should not be confused with their products/outputs, only some of which are actually perceived (or perceivable).

Second, as any child can learn any natural language, we are entitled to conclude from the intricacies of any given language to powers of FL/UG capable of dealing with such intricacies.  In other words, the fact that a given language does NOT express property P does not entail that FL/UG is not sensitive to P. Why? Because a description of FL/UG is not an account of any given language/G but an account of linguistic capacity in general.  This is why one can learn about the FL/UG of an English speaker by investigating the grammar of a Japanese speaker and the FL/UG of both by investigating the grammar of a Hungarian, or Swahili, or Slave speaker. Variation among different grammars is perfectly compatible with invariance in FL/UG, as was recognized from the earliest days of Generative Grammar. Indeed, this was the initial puzzle: find the invariance behind the superficial difference!

Third, given that some languages display the signature properties of recursive rule systems (systems that can take their outputs as inputs), it must be the case that FL/UG is capable of concocting grammars that have this property. Thus, whatever G an individual actually has, that individual’s FL/UG is capable of producing a recursive G. Why, because that individual could have acquired a recursive G even if that individual’s actual G does not display the signature properties of recursion. What are these signature properties?  The usual: unboundedly large and deep grammatical structures (i.e. sentences of unbounded size). If a given language appears to have no upper bound on the size of its sentences, then it's a sure bet that the G that generates the structures of that language is recursive in the sense of allowing structures of type A as parts of structures of type A. This, in general will suffice to generate unboundedly big and deep structures. Examples for this type of recursion include conjunction, conditionals, embedding of clauses as complements of propositional attitude verbs, relative clauses etc.  The reason that linguists have studied these kinds of configurations is precisely because they are products of grammars with this interesting property, a property that seems unique to the products of FL/UG, and hence capable of potentially telling us a lot about the characteristics of FL/UG.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting that the absence of these noted signature properties in a given language L does not imply that a grammar of L is not basically recursive.  Sadly, FL seems to leap to this conclusion (443). Imagine that for some reason a given G puts a bound of 2 levels of embedding on any structure in L. Say it does this by placing a filter (perhaps a morphological one) on more complex constructions. Question: what is the correct description of the grammar of L?  Well, one answer is that it does not involve recursive rules for, after all, it does not allow unbounded embedding (by supposition).  However, another perfectly possible answer is that it allows exactly the same kinds of embedding that English does modulo this language specific filter.  In that case the grammar will look largely like the ones that we find in languages like English that allow unbounded embedding, but with the additional filter. There is no reason just from observing that unbounded embedding is forbidden to conclude that the grammar of this hypothetical language L (aka Kayardild or Piraha) has a grammar different in kind from the grammars we attribute to English, French, Hungarian, Japanese etc. speakers.  In fact, there is reason to think that the Gs that speakers of this hypothetical language have does in fact look just like English etc.  The reason is that FL/UG is built to construct these kinds of grammars and so would find it natural to do so here as well.  Of course L would seem to have an added (arbitrary) filter on the embedding structures, but otherwise the G would look the same as the G of more familiar languages. 

An analogy might help.  I’ve rented cars that have governors on the accelerators that cap speed at 65 mph.  The same car without the governor can go far above 90 mph. Question: do the two cars have the same engine?  You might answer “no” because of the significant difference in upper limit speeds. Of course, in this case, we know that the answer is “yes”: the two cars work in virtually identical ways, have the very same structures but for the governor that prevents the full velocity potential of the rented car from being expressed.  So, the conclusion that the two cars have fundamentally different engines would be clearly incorrect.  Ok: swap Gs for engines and my point is made.  Let me repeat it: the point is not that the Gs/engines might be different in kind, the point is that simple observation of the differences does not license the conclusion that they are (viz. you are not licensed to conclude that they are just finite state devices because they don’t display the signature features of unbounded recursion, as EL seems to).  And, given what we know about Gs and engines the burden of proof is on those that conclude from such surface differences to deep structural differences.  The argument to the contrary can be made, but simple observations about surface properties just doesn’t cut it.

Fourth, there are at least two ways to sneak up on properties of UGs: (i) collect a bunch and see what they have in common (what features do all the Gs display) and (ii) study one or two Gs in great detail and see if their properties could be acquired from input data. If any could not be, then these are excellent candidate basic features of FL/UG. The latter, of course, is the province of the POS argument.  Now, note that as a matter of logic the fact that some G fails to have some property P can in principle falsify a claim like (i) but not one like (ii).  Why? Because (i) is the claim that every G has P, while (ii) is the claim that if G has P then P is the consequence of G being the product of FL/UG. Absence of P is a problem for claims like (i) but, as a matter of logic, not for claims like (ii) (recall, If P then Q is true if P is false).  Unfortunately, EL seems drawn to the conclusion that PàQ is falsified if –P is true. This is an inference that other papers (e.g. Everett’s Piraha work) are also attracted to. However, it is a non-sequitur. 

EL recognizes that arguing from the absence of some property P to the absence of Pish features in UG does not hold.  But the paper clearly wants to reach this conclusion nonetheless. Rather than denying the logic, EL asserts that “the argument from capacity is weak” (EL’s emphasis). Why? Because EL really wants all universals to be of the (i) variety, at least if they are “core” features of FL/UG. As these type (i) universals must show up in every G if they are indeed universal, absence to appear in one grammar is sufficient to call into question its universality. EL is clearly miffed that Generativists in general and Chomsky in particular would hold a nuanced position like (ii). EL seems to think that this is cheating in some way.  Why might they hold this? Here’s what I think.

As I discussed extensively in another place (here), everyone who studies human linguistic facility appreciates that competent speakers of a language know more than they have been exposed to.  Speakers are exposed to bits of language and from this acquire rules that generalize to novel exemplars of that language.  No sane observer can dispute this.  What’s up for grabs is the nature of the process of generalization. What separates empiricists from rationalists conceptions of FL/UG is the nature of these inductive processes. Empiricists analyze the relevant induction as a species of pattern recognition. There are patterns in the data and these are generalized to all novel cases.  Rationalists appreciate that this is an option, but insist that there are other kinds of generalizations, those based on the architectural properties (Smolensky and Dupoux’s term) of the generative procedures that FL/UG allow. These procedures need not “resemble” the outputs they generate in any obvious way and so conceiving this as a species of pattern recognition is not useful (again, see here for more discussion).  Type (ii) universals fit snugly into this second type, and so empiricists won’t like them.  My own hunch is that an empiricist affinity for generalizations based on patterns in the data lies behind EL’s dissatisfaction with “capacity” arguments; they are not the sorts of properties that inspection of cases will make manifest. In other words, the dissatisfaction is generated by Empiricist sympathies and/or convictions which, from where I sit, have no defensible basis. As such, they can be and should be discounted. And in a rational world they would be. Alas…

Before ending, let me note that I have been far too generous to the EL paper in one respect.  I said at the outset that its arguments are crude. How so?  Well, I have framed the paper’s main point as a question about the nature of Gs. However, most of the discussion is framed not in terms of the properties of Gs they survey but in terms of surface forms that Gs might generate.  Their discussion of constituency provides a nice example (441).  They note that some languages display free word order and conclude from this that they lack constituents.  However, surface word order facts cannot possibly provide evidence for this kind of conclusion, it can only tell us about surface forms. It is consistent with this that elements that are no longer constituents on the surface were constituents earlier on and were then separated, or will become constituents later on, say on the mapping to logical form.  Indeed, in one sense of the term constituent, EL insists that discontinuous expressions are such for they form units of interpretation and agreement. The mere fact that elements are discontinuous on the surface tells us nothing about whether they form constituents at other levels. I would not mention this were it not the classical position within Generative Grammar for the last 60 years. Surface syntax is not the arbiter of constituency, at least if one has a theory of levels, as virtually every theory that sees grammars as rules that relate meaning with sounds assumes (EL assumes this too).  There is nary a grammatical structure in EL and this is what I meant be my being overgenerous. The discussion above is couched in terms of Gs and their features. In contrast, most of the examples in EL are not about Gs at all, but about word strings. However, as noted at the outset, the data relevant to FL/UG are Gs and the absence of Gish examples in EL makes most of EL’s cited data irrelevant to Generative conceptions of FL/UG.

Again, I suspect that the swapping of string data for G data simply betrays a deep empiricism, one that sees grammars as regularities over strings (string patterns) and FL/UG as higher order regularities over Gs. Patterns within patterns within patterns. Generativists have long given up on this myopic view of what can be in FL/UG.  EL does not take the Generative Program on its own terms and show that it fails. It outlines a program that Generativists don’t adopt and then shows that it fails by standards it has always rejected using data that is nugatory.

I end here: there are many other criticisms worth making about the details, and many of the commentators of the EL piece better placed than me to make them do so. However, to my mind, the real difficulty with EL is not at the level of detail. EL’s main point as regards FL/UG is not wrong, it is simply besides the point.  A lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Why this blog?

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This blog is the direct result of an article by Tom Bartlett in the May 12, 2012 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article reports on a “debate” pitting Chomsky (“the discipline’s long-reigning king”) against Dan Everett (“the former missionary” and “true-blooded Chomskyan” whose belief in God and Chomsky “had melted away”). Everett’s claim is that Pirahã (an indigenous language spoken in Brazil) fails to display recursion and that this conclusively demonstrates that Chomsky’s conception of Universal Grammar (in which recursion is the defining property) is wrong.  Despite the fevered prose (Chomsky coverage is almost always breathless) it was pretty clear to me that given Everett’s reported views there could be no “debate” for the simple reason that Everett’s apparent understanding of ‘Universal Grammar’ had nothing to do with Chomsky’s (I contributed some comments on the website of the article to this effect under ‘nhornste’).  The “debate” was based on a misunderstanding and so a simple equivocation.  The article was apparently widely read and so a success for the Chronicle,  (a Chomsky take-down always makes for “good press”) but it had virtually no substance.

It did, however, have a consequence. The “debate” led me to appreciate how little linguistic outsiders (and even practitioners) know about the foundations and results of the Generative Enterprise initiated by Chomsky in the mid 1950s.  This blog is an attempt to rectify this. It will partly be a labor of hate; aimed squarely at the myriad distortions and misunderstandings about the generative enterprise initiated by Chomsky in the mid 1950s.  There is a common view, expressed in the Chronicle article, that Chomsky’s basic views about the nature of Universal Grammar are hard to pin down and that he is evasive (and maybe slightly dishonest) when asked to specify what he means by Universal Grammar (henceforth I’ll stick to the shorter ‘UG’ for ‘Universal Grammar’).  This is poodle poop!

The basic idea is simple and has not changed: Just as fish are built to swim and birds to fly humans are build to talk. Call the faculty responsible for this ability ‘the Faculty of Language,’ (FL for short).  The aim of the generative enterprise is to describe the fine structure of FL. The name we give to the proposed structure is ‘Universal Grammar’; ‘universal’ because it is intended to describe the capacity that all humans have and ‘grammar’ because grammars are compact ways of describing the words, morphemes, phrases, and sentences of a language. Over the years Chomsky and colleagues have made various proposals concerning the structure of UG.  It is not a daring hypothesis to propose that natural language grammars are recursive (it follows from the easily observed fact that there is no real upper bound on the size of a sentence) and so UG must allow for recursive grammars.  The interesting question is not whether there is recursion but the specific nature of the recursion that natural language grammars have. Studying the properties of natural language grammars should, we hope, shed light on how UG is constructed. So what’s UG?  It is the general recipe in FL that humans have to build grammars of natural languages.  What features does it have? Well, that is, as they say, an empirical question which this blog will discuss.  But reader be warned: as the central object of study within Chomskyan linguistics is the structure of UG and as the field is very active the details of the description change, or at least may appear to change to the untutored eye. I personally think that many of the central findings are pretty secure and that later theories have been conservative in that they have preserved the findings of earlier theories.  We intend to discuss some of this in the future.

The perspicuous reader will have noted the ‘we’ in the last sentence. I am one of many that will be writing here.  David Pesetsky is a co-conspirator. I have asked several others to contribute as well.  The contributors disagree on many issues.  However we all believe that there are no major empirical discoveries that have invalidated the Generative approach in linguistics initiated by Chomsky, no serious methodological failings concerning the practice of linguists and no conceptual incoherence in the leading assumptions upon which this practice is founded.  The details are all up for grabs. The basic perspective has more than proven its worth. 

Before ending some may be wondering about the equivocation that vitiated the “debate” in the Chronicle.  Well it’s this: Chomsky’s claim is that the distinctive characteristic of UG is that it contains recursion.  This is the defining property of FL, which, recall, is the human capacity to acquire language.  This does not imply that every human language grammar deploys recursion. It does imply that every human can learn a grammar that is recursive. The Pirahã may not deploy recursion when speaking Pirahã (though I should add here that Everett’s claim is likely false (c.f. Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment in Language 2009:355-204) but Pirahã children have no trouble learning Brazilian Portuguese (an undisputedly recursive language) and so there is no evidence that their UGs are any different from anyone else’s.  Everett (and the Chronicle) interpreted UG to mean that every language must have recursive structures, while what Chomsky means is that recursion is a property of FL.  Whether Pirahã has recursion or not (and to repeat, it looks like it does) has no bearing on whether Pirahã speakers’ UGs have it or not.  This was the equivocation and this is why the “debate” was pointless.