In her first Baggett lecture, Barbara Partee raised an
interesting question: why does Chomsky seem ill disposed towards semantics?[1] I’m going to address this question here,
though obliquely. To avoid exegetical concerns, I will try to channel Chomsky
and answer a related question: what are my
problems with semantics? You are not the
only ones that find this bait and switch disappointing. Even I find the swap downward
sloping. However, maybe this will help: over
the years, I have drenched myself with Chomsky’s writings on this issue and
though I will almost certainly misrepresent his
views what I will say, I believe, is Chomskyish
if not 100% pure Chomsky. It goes
without saying that I hold him personally responsible for any missteps in the exposition
that follows. I would also like to add that I talked about the stuff below with
Paul Pietroski and Bill Idsardi and so whatever you don’t like that isn’t
Chomsky’s fault is almost certainly theirs.
So with this much CYA, let’s get on with the post! Warning, it’s a bit
long.
I have three reasons for being semantically cynical.
First, semantics has an odd relation to what I take to be
the central project of Generative Grammar; the investigation of and limning of
the fine structure of UG (see here). This project takes the object of inquiry
to be I-language and so is necessarily internalist (see here). The first problem with semantics is that
practitioners conceive of the discipline as necessarily not internalist. Two ur-texts for this enterprise are Lewis’s General Semantics and Language and Languages. These two texts define semantics as an externalist
enterprise. In the first paper, Lewis excoriates “markarese” approaches to
semantics precisely because they are internalist and eschew the semantic project of establishing
referential dependencies between markarese features and mind external denotata.[2] Lewis insists that semantics without
language-world referential links is just not semantics, hence markarese,
whatever else it might be cannot be
semantics. In the second paper, Lewis defends the position that languages
are more basic than I-languages (i.e. grammars) and that the features of the
latter are ontologically secondary to those of the former (see here). Grammars, being in the head, are not what
semantics is about. One virtue of
Barbara’s lectures is that they make it clear that the Lewis perspective on the
semantics enterprise is still a (the?) dominant conception, when semanticists
think about these questions at all.[3]
In making his argument against markarese, Lewis was adopting
a conventional view of what semantics is, a theory of the relation between
representations and their external denotata. This adopts the well known
tri-partite partition of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. At any rate, if
semantics is the theory of referential relations between “words and objects”
then internalist semantics is not semantics and if your interest is in UG and
I-languages then this referential conception of semantics is not obviously relevant.[4]
Chomsky occasionally throws a bone to this kind of work and
moots an internalist re-interpretation of the dominant model theoretic
technology. However, there is also a line of argument where he suggests deeper
problems with this kind of inquiry: the proposed idealization either misses the
central facts or is technically superfluous.
Let me discuss these points in turn.
Wrong idealization: what distinguishes human language from
other kinds of animal communication systems is precisely the looseness of the relation
between lexical signs and their multiple open textured “denotata.” As Chomsky
has repeatedly emphasized, it is not at all clear what terms in a natural
language refer to. Does ‘London’ pick out a spatio-temporal local? If so how we coherently consider the
possibility that it burn down, it move 45 miles down the Thames and it get rebuilt. Maybe, ‘London’ refers to some kind of functionally
organized entity, say the organization of buroughs and towns that make up
greater London. But if this is what
‘London’ denotes how can London be 100 miles in circumference and densely
populated. What’s true about ‘London’ is
true for books (musical compositions, essays etc.), which can be both physical
objects (concreta) and notional ones (abstracta), and for terms like ‘average
men,’ (which can have 2.5 children) ‘temperatures,’ (which can be 90 and
rising) and almost any other word that one thinks of carefully. This vast
polysemy marks natural language lexemes and distinguishes them from what we see
in other animal communication systems, where in fact a crude kind of immediate
referentiality is de rigeur. Chomsky reinforces this point here by contrasting
human and animal communication systems:
Maybe we don’t know the right
things, but everything that is known about animal thought and animal minds is
that the analogues to concepts…do happen to have a reference-like relation to
things. So there is something like a word object relation. Every particular monkey call is associated
with a particular internal state, such as “hungry” or a particular external
state, such as “There are leaves moving up there so run away.” [referring to a
large survey by Gallistel Chomsky continues]…Animal communication is based on
the principle that internal symbols have a one-to-one relation to some external
even or an internal state. But that is
simply false for human languages-totally (25).
Conclusion: the loose fit between words/concepts and things
in human linguistic systems as contrasted with the strong fit witnessed in animal
systems speaks to the inappropriateness of notions like ‘reference’ in semantic
theories interested in human linguistic practice. Referential theories abstract
away from precisely those features of human systems that make them
distinctively human, and that’s not good. So to the degree that we have a rough
understanding of what a reference relation might look like, our use of language
doesn’t display it!
There is a second line of argument, one that concentrates on
the fact that it is of no obvious utility.
His argument here is by analogy with a model theoretic “phonology.”
Let us suppose that LI [linguistic
item NH] has no I-sound but P-denotes
some object that is external to the person; call it the phonetic value PV of LI…and suppose some computation on PVs yields
the linguistic component of the sound of E, PV(E). PV could be something about
the noises associated with the utterances…of E as circumstances vary...; a construction
from motions of molecules, perhaps. The proposal could be elaborated by taking
PV to be determined by social and physical factors of various kinds…
The
proposal leaves all problems where they where, adding a host of new ones. We
understand nothing more about the relation of E to its external manifestations.
The account of communication and other processes is worthless…
Chomsky then extends the analogy to the semantic interface
and notes that it that it too doesn’t “advance” our understanding, as it
“merely restate[s]” the original problems. Setting up this kind of referential
story teaches us “nothing about how expressions are used and interpreted.”
(177-8). In sum, referential theories of
meaning are either deeply misleading or of no utility, at least if one’s interest is in
understanding how meaning works in I-languages or its roots (if any) in UG.
Third: one answer to Chomsky’s polysemy examples relies on
conceding that human lexical items are severely polysemous and to manage this
fact by introducing disambiguating indices.
This too is unattractive for two reasons.
First, there appears to be no upper bound on the number and
kinds of indices relevant to determining how we are to interpret an
expression. Aside from the simple
indices like time, place and interlocutors, one’s hopes, dreams, ambitions,
disappointments etc are all potentially relevant in getting a fix on what a
term is supposed to refer to in a given context. The problem is not that we cannot fix
relevant parameters given a context,
but there is no plausible suggestion of what the relevant parameters are and
how to fix them across contexts. What we find are not theories of indices but
examples with no reason to think that the list of relevant indicial parameters
is anywhere near complete or completeable.
Second, the polysemy problem goes to the very heart of the
system once one considers that the same expression can bind distinct variables
and give them different referents. Chomsky has provided many examples: "The
book that weighs twenty bounds is inspiring" (physical object in relative clause
and abstract one in main clause), " The
temperature which is now 90 is rising quickly" (value in relative, function is
matrix), " John
ate (some) lamb last night that was grass fed/slaughtered in the kosher style
(mass in matrix, count in relative clause)."
In these examples the two variables relate to the same
antecedent yet receive distinct denotations. It appears that the polysemy is
not resolved but carries all the way to the interpretation of the various bound
variables, a problem that assigning separate indices for each interpretation of the antecedent will exacerbate, not ameliorate.
I have reviewed three reasons that syntacticians like me are
skeptical about the semantic enterprise as currently practiced. They all boil
down to the same point: they don’t appear to reveal much about the structure of
UG and actually presuppose a vision of the linguistic enterprise antithetical
to the one that places the structure of UG and I-language as its object of
inquiry. Someone once suggested a verbal
distinction to me that is useful here. Linguists are people who study FL/UG
and the properties of I-langauge. Languists are people who study
language. Syntacticians are linguists,
semanticists languists. Linguists are skeptical that notions like 'language' pick out scientifically manageable objects of inquiry. Langusits think grammars are suspicious abstracta. Not surprisingly
the two groups have trouble understanding each other. Thanks to Barbara Partee for making
it clearer to me why this is so.
[1]
Indeed, he considers the possibility that “natural language has only syntax and
pragmatics” semantics existing “only in the sense of “the study of how this
instrument whose formal structure and potentialities of expression are the
subject of syntactic investigation, is actually put to use in a speech
community…” More pointedly, there is no “provision for … “the central semantic
fact about language,…that it is used to represent the world,” because it is not
assumed that language is used to represent the world, in the intended sense.”
(See here p. 132). In other words, Chomsky believes that the abstraction to a
semantic level of analysis, which isolates a reference relation as the
fundamental feature, is misguided.
[2]
The specific target of criticism was a proposal developed by Fodor and Katz but
their theory was stand-in for a broad range of non-denotational theories. I
should add, the Fodor-Katz theory was, to my mind, not that terrific, but less
because it was internalist than because postulating features ad hoc does not
carry much explanatory oomph.
[3]
Barbara pointed to the last chapter of Dowty’s Word Meaning and Montague Grammar as a representative example.
[4]
Fillmore, quoted in Dowty’s book (375) makes a similar point that Dowty
rejects: Fillmore said: “…issues in semantics that have no conceivable
application to the process of comprehension cannot be very important for
semantic theory.” Fillmore suggests this
as a “relevance test” for evaluating research in semantics. Replacing ‘the
process of comprehension’ with ‘the structure of UG’ in the above pretty well
sums up my view as well. Btw,
Dowty agrees that the semantic enterprise “has in principle nothing whatsoever to do with what goes
on in a person’s head” and thus has nothing whatsoever to do with the structure
of UG. Different strokes!
