It’s that time of year: spring has sprung, classes are
almost over, and all of those commitments you made to write papers three years
ago and forgot about are coming due. I am in the midst of one such effort right
now (due the end of May). It’s one of those “compare different
theories/frameworks” volumes and I have been asked to write on the Minimalist
Program (MP). After ignoring the project for a good long time, I initially
bridled against the fact that I had accepted to write anything. In order to
extricate myself from the promise, I tried to convince the editor that the
premise of the volume (that MP was a theory like the others) was false and so a
paper on MP would not really be apposite. This tantrum was rejected. I then
sulked. Finally, I decided that I would take the bull by the horns and argue
that MP, contrary to what I perceive to be the conventional view, has been
wildly successful in its own terms and that the reason for its widespread
perceived failure is that most critics have refused to accept the premises of
MP investigation. Why would they do so? There are several reasons, but the best
one (and one that might even be correct) is that the premises for MP
investigation (viz. that we know something about the structure of FL/UG and
that something resembles GB) are shaky and so the project is premature. On this
view the program is fine, it’s just that we’ve gotten a little ahead of
ourselves.
This objection should sound familiar. It is what people who
study specific languages and their Gs say about claims about FL and UG. We
don’t know enough yet about particular
Gs to address questions about FL/UG. Things are more complicated and we need
time to sort these out.
I reject this. Things are always more complicated. Time is
never right. IMO, GB is a pretty good theory and it is worth trying to see if
we can derive some of its features in a more principled way. We will learn
something even if we are not completely right about this (which is surely the
case). In other words, GB is right enough (or, many of its properties will be
part of whatever description turns out to be more accurate) and so trying to
see how to derive its properties is a worthwhile project that could tech us
something about FL/UG.
This, I should add, is the best reason to demur about MP (and as you can see, I am not sympathetic). Two others spring to
mind: (i) MP sharpens the linguistics/languistics kulturkampf and (ii) MP privileges a kind of research that is qualitatively
different from what most professionals commonly produce and so is suspect.
I have beaten both these drums in the past, and I do so
again here. I have convinced myself that the biggest practical problem for MP work is that it sharpens the contrast
between the bio/cog and the philological perspectives on language. More
specifically, MP only makes sense from the bio/cog perspective as it takes
FL/UG as the object of inquiry. FL/UG is the explanandum. If you don’t think
FL/UG exists (or you are not really interested in whether it exists) then MP will seem, at best, pointless and, at
worst, mystical omphaloskepsis. It is an odd fact of life that many find their
own interests threatened by those that do not share them. I suspect that MP’s
greatest sin in the eyes of many is that it appears to devalue their own
interest in language by promoting the study of the underlying faculty. This, of
course, does not follow. Tastes differ, interests range. But there can be
little doubt that one of Chomsky’s many vices is that by convincing so many to
be fascinated by the problems he has identified that he has robbed so many of
confidence in their own. MP simply sharpens: doing it at all means buying into
the bio-cog program. Abandon hope all languists who enter here.
Second, furthering the MP project will privilege a kind of
work distinct in style from that
normally practiced. If the aim is unification then MP work will necessarily be quite
theoretical and the relevance of this kind of work for the kinds of language facts
that linguists prize somewhat remote, at least initially. Why? Because if a
primary aim of MP is to deduce the basic features of GB from more fundamental
principles then a good chunk of the hard work will be to propose such
principles and see how to deduce the particular properties of GB from them. The
work, in other words, will be analytic and deductive rather than descriptive
and inductive. Need I mention again how little our community of scholars
esteems such work?
I we put these two features of MP inquiry together, we end
up with work that is hard core bio-mentalist and heavily deductive and
theoretical in nature. Each feature suffices to generate skepticism (if not
contempt) among many working linguists. This, at any rate, is what I argue in
the paper that I avoided trying to write.
I cannot post the whole thing (or at least won’t do so
today). But I am going to given you the intro stage setting (i.e. polemical) bits
for your amusement. Here goes, and may
you have a happy time with your own thoughtless commitments.
****
What is linguistics about? What is its subject matter? Here
are two views.
One standard answer is “language.” Call this the “languistic (LANG) perspective.” Languists
understand the aim of a theory of grammar to describe the properties of
different languages and identify the common properties they share. Languists
frequently observe that there are very few
properties that all languages have in
common. Indeed, in my experience, the LANG view is that there are almost no
language universals that hold without exception and that languages can and do
vary arbitrarily and limitlessly. LANGers assume that if there are universals,
then they are of the Greenbergian variety, more often statistical tendencies
than categorical absolutes.
There is a second answer to the question, one associated
with Chomsky and the tradition in Generative Grammar (GG) his work initiated.
Call this the linguistic (LING)
perspective.” Until very recently, linguists have understood grammatical theory
to have a pair of related objectives: (i) to describe the mental capacities of
a native speaker of a particular language L (e.g. English) and (ii) to describe
the meta-capacity that allows any human to acquire the mental capacities
underlying a native speaker facility in a particular L (i.e. the meta-capacity
required to acquire a particular G). LINGers, in other words, take the object
of study to be two kinds of mental states, one that grammars of particular
languages (i.e. GL) describe and one that “Universal Grammar” (UG)
describes. UG, then, names not Greenbergian generalizations about languages but
features of human mental capacity that enable them to acquire GLs.
For linguists, the study of languages and their intricate properties is useful
exactly to the degree that it sheds light on both of these mental capacities.
As luck would have it, studying the products of these mental capacities (both
at the G and UG level) provides a good window on these capacities.
The LANG vs LING perspectives lead to different research
programs based on different ontological assumptions. LANGers take language to
be primary and grammar secondary. GLs are (at best) generalizations
over regularities found in a language (often a more or less extensive corpus or
lists of “grammaticality” judgments serving as proxy).[1]
For LINGers, GLs are more real than the linguistic objects they
generate, the latter being an accidental sampling from an effectively infinite
set of possible legitimate objects.[2]
On this view, the aim of a theory of a GL is, in the first instance,
to describe the actual mental state
of a native speaker of L and thereby to indirectly circumscribe the possible legit objects of L. So for
LINGers, the mental state comes first (it is more ontologically basic), the
linguistic objects are its products and the etiology of those that publically
arise (are elicited in some way) only partially reflect the more stable, real,
underlying mental capacity. Put another way, the products are interaction effects of various
capacities and the visible products of these capacities are the combination of
their adventitious complex interaction. So the products are “accidental” in a
way that the underlying capacities are not.
LANGers disagree. For them the linguistic objects (be they
judgments, corpora, reaction times) come first, GLs being inductions
or “smoothed” summaries of these more basic data. For LINGers the relation of a
GL to its products is like the relation between a function and its
values. For a LANGer it is more like the relation between a scatter plot and
the smoothed distributions that approximate it (e.g. a normal distribution).
LINGers go further: even GLs are not that real. They are less real than UG,
the meta-capacity that allows humans to acquire GLs. Why is UG more
“real” than GLs? Because in a sense that we all understand, native
speakers only accidentally speak the
language they are native in. Basically, it is a truism universally acknowledged
that any kid could have been native
in any language. If this is true (and
it is, really), then the fact that a particular person is natively proficient
in a particular language is a historical accident. Indeed, just like the
visible products of a GL result from a complex interaction of many
more basic sub-capacities, a particular individual’s GL is also the
product of many interacting mental modules (memory size, attention, the
particular data mix a child is exposed to and “ingests,” socio-economic status,
the number of hugs and more). In this sense, every GL is the product
of a combination of accidental factors and adventitious associated capacities
and the meta-capacity for building GLs that humans as a species come
equipped with.
If this is right, then there is no principled explanation for why it is that Norbert Hornstein (NH) is
a linguistically competent speaker of Montreal English. He just happened to
grow up on the West Island of that great metropolis. Had NH grown up in the
East End of London he would have been natively proficient in another “dialect”
of English and had NH been raised in Beijing then he would have been natively
proficient in Mandarin. In this very clear sense, then, NH is only accidentally a native speaker of the
language he actually speaks (i.e. has acquired the particular grammatical sense
(i.e. GL) he actually has) though it is no accident that he speaks some native language. At least not a
biological accident for NH is the type
of animal that would acquire some GL as a normal matter of
course (e.g. absent pathological conditions) if not raised in feral isolation.
Thus, NH is a native speaker of some
language as a matter of biological necessity. NH comes equipped with a
meta-capacity to acquire GLs in virtue of the fact that he is human
and it is biologically endemic to humans to have this meta-capacity. If we call
this meta-capacity the Faculty of
Language (FL), then humans necessarily have an FL and necessarily have UG,
as the latter is just a description of FL’s properties. Thus, what is most real about language is that any human
can acquire the GL of any L as easily as it can acquire any other. A
fundamental aim of linguistic theory is to explain how this is possible by describing the fine structure of the
meta-capacity (i.e. by outlining a detailed description of FL’s UG properties).
Before moving on, it is worth observing that despite their
different interests LINGers and LANGers can co-exist (and have co-existed) quite
happily and they can fruitfully interact on many different projects. The
default assumption among LINGers is that currently the best way to study GLs is to study its products as they
are used/queried. Thus, a very useful way of limning the fine structure of a
particular GL is to study the expressions of these GLs.
In fact, currently, some of the best evidence concerning GLs comes
from how native speakers use GLs to produce, parse and judge
linguistic artifacts (e.g. sentences). Thus, LINGers, like LANGers, will be
interested in what native speakers say and what they say about what they say.
This will be a common focus of interest and cross talk can be productive.
Similarly, seeing how GLs vary can also inform
one’s views about the fine structure of FL/UG. Thus both LINGers and LANGers
will be interested in comparing GLs to see what, if any,
commonalities they enjoy. There may be important differences in how LINGers and
LANGers approach the study of these commonalities, but at least in principle,
the subject matter can be shard to the benefit of each. And, as a matter of
fact, until the Minimalist Program (MP) arose, carefully distinguishing LINGer
interests from LANGer interests was not particularly pressing. The
psychologically and philologically inclined could happily live side by side
pursuing different but (often enough) closely related projects. What LANGers
understood to be facts about language(s), LINGers interpreted as facts about GLs
and/or FL/UG.
MP adversely affects this pleasant commensalism. The strains
that MP exerts on this happy LING/LANG co-existence is one reason, I believe,
why so many GGers have taken a dislike to MP.
Let me explain what I mean by discussing what the MP research question
is. For that I will need a little bit of a running start.
Prior to MP, LING addressed two questions based on two
evident rationally uncontestable facts (and, from what I can tell, these facts
have not been contested). The first fact is that a native speaker’s capacities
cover an unbounded domain of linguistic objects (phrases, sentences etc.).
Following Chomsky (1964) we can dub this fact “Linguistic Creativity” (LC).[3] dI’ve already adverted to the second fact:
any child can acquire any GL as easily as any other. Let’s dub this
fact “Linguistic Promiscuity” (LP). Part of a LINGers account for LC postulates
that native speakers have internalized a GL. GLs consist
of generative procedures (recursive rules) that allow for the creation of
unboundedly complex linguistic expressions (which partly explains how a native
speaker effortlessly deals with the novel linguistic objects s/he regularly
produces and encounters).
LINGers account for the second fact, LP, in terms of the UG features
of FL. This too is a partial account. UG
delineates the limits of a possible GL.
Among the possible GLs, the child builds an actual one in response
to the linguistic data it encounters and that it takes in (i.e the Primary
Linguistic Data (PLD)).
So two facts, defining two questions and two kinds of
theories, one delimiting the range of possible
linguistic expressions for a given language (viz. GLs) and the other
delimiting the range of possible GLs
(viz. FL/UG). As should be evident, as a practical matter, in addressing LP it
is useful to have to hand candidate generative procedures of specific GLs.
Let me emphasize this: though it is morally certain that humans come equipped with a FL and build GLs it is
an empirical question what properties
these GLs have and what the fine structure of FL/UG is. In other
words, that there is an FL/UG and that it yields GLs is not
really open for rational debate. What is open for a lot of discussion and is a very hard question is exactly
what features these mental objects have. Over the last 60 years GG has made
considerable progress in discovering the properties of particular GLs
and has reasonable outlines of the overall architecture of FL/UG. At least this
is what LINGers believe, I among them. And just as the success in outlining
(some) of the core features of particular Gs laid the ground for discovering
non-trivial features of FL/UG, so the success in liming (some of) the basic
characteristics of FL/UG has prepared the ground for yet one more question: why
do we have the FL/UG that we have and not some other? This is the MP question.
It is a question about possible
FL/UGs.
There are several things worth noting about this question.
First, the target of explanation is FL/UG and the principles that describe it.
Thus, MP only makes sense qua program of inquiry if we assume that we know some
things about FL/UG. If nothing is known, then the question is premature. In
fact, even if something is known, it might be premature. I return to this anon.
Second, the MP question is specifically about the structure
of FL/UG. Thus, unlike earlier work where discussions of languistic interest can be
used to obliquely address LC and LP, the MP question only makes sense from a
LING perspective. It is asking about possible FL/UGs and this requires taking a
mentalistic stance. Discussing languages and their various properties had
better bottom out in some claim about FL/UG’s limits if it is to be of MP
relevance. This means that the kind of
research MP fosters will often have a different focus from that which has come
before. This will lead LANGers and LINGers to a more obvious parting of the
investigative ways. In fact, given that MP takes as more or less given what linguists and languists have
heretofore investigated as basic, MP is not really an alternative to earlier
theory. More specifically, MP can’t be an alternative
to GB because, at least initially, MP is a consumer of GB results.[4]
What does this mean?
An analogy might help. Think of the relationship between
thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The laws of thermodynamics are grist
for the stats mechanics mill, the aim being to derive the thermodynamic
generalizations in a more principled atomic theory of mechanics. The right way
to think of MP and early theory is in the same way. Take (e.g.) GB principles
and see if they can be derived in a more principled way. That’s one way of
understanding the MP program, and I will elaborate this perspective in what
follows. Note, if this is right, then just as many thermodynamical accounts of,
say, gas behavior will be preserved in a reasonable statistical mechanics, so
too many GB accounts will be preserved in a decent MP theory of FL. The
relation between GB and MP is not that between a true theory and a false one,
but a descriptive theory (what physicists call an “effective” theory) and a
more fundamental one.
If this is right, then GB (or whatever FL/UG is presupposed)
accounts will mostly be preserved in MP reconstructions. And this is a very
good thing! Indeed, this is precisely what we expect in science; results of
past investigations are preserved in later ones with earlier work preparing the
ground for deeper questions. Why are
they preserved? Because they are roughly correct and thus not mimicking these results (at least approximately) is excellent
indication that the subsuming proposal is off on the wrong track. Thus, a sign
that the more fundamental proposal is worth taking seriously is that it recapitulates earlier results and thus a
reasonable initial goal of inquiry is to explicitly aim to redo what has been done before (hopefully, in a more
principled fashion).
If this is correct, it should be evident why many might
dismiss MP inquiry. First, it takes as true what many will think contentious
and tries to derive it. Second, it doesn’t aim to do much more than derive
“what we already know” and so does not appear to add much to our basic
knowledge, except, perhaps, a long labored (formally involved) deduction of a
long recognized fact.
Speaking personally, my own work takes GB as a roughly correct description of FL/UG. Many who work on refining UGish
generalizations will consider this tendentious. So be it. Let it be stipulated that at any time in any inquiry things are more
complicated than they are taken to be. It is also always possible that we
(viz. GB) got things entirely wrong. The question is not whether this is an
option. Of course it is. The question is how seriously we should take this
truism.
So, MP starts from
the assumption that we have a fairly accurate picture of some of the central
features of FL and considers it fruitful to inquire as to why we have found these features. In other words, MP
assumes that time is ripe to ask more fundamental questions because we have
reasonable answers to less fundamental questions. If you don’t believe this
then MP inquiry is not wrong but footling.
Many who are disappointed in MP don’t actually ask if MP has
failed on its own terms, given its own assumptions. Rather it challenges the
assumptions. It takes MP to be not so much false as premature. It takes issue
with the idea that we know enough about FL/UG to even ask the MP question. I believe that these objections are misplaced.
In other words, I will assume that GBish descriptions of FL/UG are adequate enough (i.e. are right enough) to start
asking the MP question. If you don’t buy this, MP will not be to your taste and
you might be tempted to judge its success in terms of your interests rather
than its own questions.
[1]
There are few more misleading terms in the field than “grammaticality
judgment.” The “raw” data are better termed “acceptability” judgments. Native
speakers can reliably rank linguistic objects with regard to relative
acceptability (sometimes under an interpretation). These acceptability
judgments are, in turn, partial reflections of grammatical competence. This is
the official LING view. LANGers need not be as fussy, though they too must
distinguish data reflecting judgments in reflective equilibrium from more
haphazard reactions. The reason that LANGers differ from LINGers in this regard
reflects their different views on what they are studying. I leave it to the
reader to run the logic for him/herself.
[2]
The term set should not be taken too
seriously. There is little reason to think that languages are sets with clear
in/out conditions or that objects that GLs generate are usefully
thought of as demarcating the boundaries of a language. In fact, LINGers don’t
assume that the notion of a language
is clear or well conceived. What LINGers do assume is that native speakers have
a sense of what kinds of objects their native capacities extend to and that
this is an open ended (effectively infinite) capacity and that is (indirectly)
manifest in their linguistic behavior (production and understanding) of
linguistic objects.
[3]
Here’s Chomsky’s description of this fact in his (1964:7):
…a mature native speaker can
produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other
speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most
of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new
sentences; once we have mastered a language, the class of sentences with which
we can operate fluently is so vast that for all practical purposes (and,
obviously, for all theoretical purposes), we may regard it as infinite.
