A derivation "towards LF"? Hardly. (Lessons from the Definiteness Effect.)

A while ago, I took part in a very interesting discussion over on Linguistics Facebook. The discussion was initiated by Yimei Xiang, who was asking the linguistics hivemind for examples that demonstrate how semanticists and syntacticians approach certain problems differently. I chimed in with a suggestion or two; but the example that I find most compelling came from Brian Buccola, who brought up the Definiteness Effect.

At first approximation, the Definiteness Effect refers to the fact that low subjects in the expletive-associate construction allow only a subset of the determiners that are allowed in canonical subject position (the observation goes back to Milsark's 1974 dissertation):

(1) There was/were {a/some/several/*the/*every/*all} wolf/wolves in the garden.

Now, I must admit I'm not as familiar as I should be with the semantic literature on this topic. What I do know is that there is a long tradition (going back to Milsark himself) of attributing this effect in one way or another to "existential force." The idea is that sentences like (1) assert the existence of a wolf/wolves who satisfy the predicate in the garden, and that we should seek an explanation of the Definiteness Effect in terms of the (in)compatibility of the relevant determiners with this assertion of existence.

This is plainly wrong, as we will see shortly. But since this is an unusually narrow thing to be writing about on Norbert's blog, let me say a bit more about why I think this is an interesting/illuminating test case.

There's a persistent intuition, which has pervaded work within the Principles & Parameters / Government & Binding / Minimalist Program tradition, whereby syntax is a derivation "towards LF." In other words, insofar as syntax has a telos, that telos is assembling a structure to be handed off to (semantic) interpretation. The other interface, externalization to PF, is something of an "add-on." (See, for instance, this call for papers, which takes this (supposed) asymmetry between LF and PF as its point of departure.)

Now, the general claim that LF has a privileged role might be correct regardless of what we find out about the true nature of the Definiteness Effect in particular. But the only way I can envision reasoning about the general claim is by looking carefully at a series of test cases until a coherent picture emerges. With that in mind, it is interesting to consider the Definiteness Effect precisely because it looks, at first blush, like an instance where semantics is "driving the bus": a semantic property (the interaction of existential force with a certain class of determiners) dictates a syntactic property (where certain noun phrases can or cannot go). What I'd like to show you is that this is not actually how the Definiteness Effect works.

The crucial data come from Icelandic (I know, try to contain your shock). One important way in which Icelandic differs from English is that the element that will move to subject position, in the absence of an expletive or some other subject-position-filling element, is simply the structurally closest noun phrase – regardless of its case. To see why this matters, let's start with a sentence like (2). This sentence behaves the same in Icelandic as it does in English, but it forms the baseline for the critical case, later on.

(2) There seems to be {a/*the} wolf in the garden.

In ex. (2), the noun phrase [DET wolf] is part of the infinitival complement to seem, rather than in post-copular position as it is in (1). But the semantics-based explanation of the Definiteness Effect cannot afford to treat the similarity between (1) and (2) as a coincidence if it has any hope of remaining viable, and so whatever one says about "existential force" in (1) must extend to [DET wolf] in (2).

Now consider sentences of the form in (3), an English version of which is given in (4):

(3) EXPL seems [DET1 experiencer (dative)] to be [DET2 thing (nominative)] in the garden.

(4) There seems to the squirrels to be {a/*the} wolf in the garden.

The semantics-based explanation must now extend the same treatment to [DET2 wolf] in (4). But here's where things start to go awry. In Icelandic, it is not DET2 that is subject to the Definiteness Effect in a structure like (3); the restriction in Icelandic affects DET1, while DET2 can be whatever you want.

Here's some Icelandic data showing this, from Sigurðsson's (1989) dissertation:

In exx. (14a-b) we see that, in the absence of a dative experiencer, Icelandic behaves like English (cf. (2), above): the Definiteness Effect applies to the nominative subject of the embedded infinitive. In exx. (15a-b), however, we see that when there is a dative experiencer (mér me.DAT), it is the experiencer that is subject to the Definiteness Effect, whereas the nominative subject of the experiencer can now be definite (barnið child.the.NOM) even while remaining in its low position.

Where does this leave the semantics-based explanation? Insofar as "existential force" is responsible for the Definiteness Effect, it has to be the case that existential force shifts from the downstairs subject to the dative experiencer only when the experiencer is present (cf. (14b) vs. (15a)), and only in Icelandic (not in English; cf. (4) vs. (15a)). This seems to me like a reductio ad absurdum of the "existential force" approach.

There is a much simpler, syntax-based alternative to all of this. The Definiteness Effect can be accounted for if any DP headed by a strong determiner must attempt to move to subject position (even 'the garden' in (1-2, 4) must attempt to do so!). The rules on what can actually successfully move to subject position in different languages are different, and, consequently, the question of which noun phrases can and cannot be definite in-situ will have different answers in different languages, too.

Another thing to note is that the expletive plays no role, here. The ungrammatical variants of (1-2, 4, 14, 15), showing the Definiteness Effect, all have expletives in them. But if your language happens to allow other things – e.g. an adjunct like 'today' – to occupy the preverbal subject position, you can get the same effect with no expletive at all. Here's some more Icelandic data, this time from Thráinsson (2007), showing this:

On the syntactic approach to the Definiteness Effect sketched above, what these data mean is that adjuncts get to move to preverbal subject position only if no nominal has done so; meaning if there is a nominal that must attempt movement to subject position (as all nominals headed by strong determiners must do), and which is in a position where such an attempt would be successful (e.g. allir kettirnir all cats.the.NOM in (6.52d)) – it preempts any adjunct from being able to move there. Definiteness Effect sans expletives.

So the narrow take-home message is that the Definiteness Effect has nothing to do with "existential force." What does this mean for the relation between syntax and semantics? Obviously, weak and strong determiners do differ semantically; that is a truism. But a noun phrase will not exhibit the Definiteness Effect unless it is a position where it is a candidate for movement-to-subject. And which positions these are is a matter that is subject to morphosyntactic variation of a kind that has nothing to do with semantics. Basically, some noun phrases bear a diacritic that forces them to try to move to subject position; whether they bear this diacritic or not seems to be grounded in an interpretive property (strong vs. weak determiners); but whether they succeed in moving or not seems to have no effect on their interpretation (see, e.g., barnið child.the.NOM in (15a), happily interpreted as definite in its low position). The Definiteness Effect, then, is not about semantics except insofar as the presence of the diacritic [+must try to move to subject position] is semantically grounded. Hardly a derivation "towards LF"; the diacritic must be present on the relevant determiners to begin with, before (the relevant part of) the derivation even starts.

What are the consequences of this for the broader question concerning LF as the telos of the derivation? In one sense, not much: this is but one case study; so it turns out that the Definiteness Effect does not match the relevant profile of LF-as-telos. It just means one less entry in the relevant column. Not exactly earth-shattering, there. But in another sense, I think the profile of the Definiteness Effect is the norm, not the exception: syntax pays attention to some (interestingly, not all) semantic distinctions, but it in no way "serves" those distinctions. Definite noun phrases don't move "in order to achieve a definite interpretation" – they just move or don't move (perhaps in a way that depends on their definiteness and the morphosyntactic properties of the language in question), and then they are interpreted however they are interpreted, regardless of where they ended up. I've argued that the exact same thing is true of the relation between specificity and Object Shift. And I suspect that the same is true of almost every single case in which it looks like syntax "serves" interpretation: it is an illusion. There are certain syntactic features that are interpretively grounded (definiteness, specificity, plurality, person features, etc.); and these features can drive certain syntactic operations. But what the syntactic derivation is doing is not constructing a representation that more closely matches the target interpretation. It's doing its own thing. Sometimes this will line up with semantic properties of the target interpretation – like "existential force" – but in those narrow instances where it does, it's really something of an accident. The next time someone tells you that syntax is about constructing "meaning with sound," take it with a boulder of salt.

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UPDATE: As some commenters (esp. Ethan Poole over on facebook, and David Basilico down here in the comments) have pointed out, the data in (14-15) are confounded in some non-trivial ways. I was attempting to be cute and show that the essential observations have been around for close to 30 years – which I still believe to be true – but I now see that it would also have been helpful to include some less confounded data. In service of this, here is some data from my own 2014 monograph that hopefully demonstrates the same points more clearly:

On string-acceptability vs. the availability of interpretations, and the "this is the reading therefore this is the structure" gambit

This post is intended as an intellectual provocation. It is the strongest version of a thought I've had knocking around in my head for quite a few years now, but not necessarily a version that I'd be willing to formally defend. Therefore, I urge readers not to lose sight of the fact that this is written in a blog; it is as much an attempt at thinking "out loud" and engaging in conversation as it is an attempt to convince anyone of anything. [Norbert has helped me think through some of these things, but I vehemently absolve him of any responsibility for them, and certainly of any implication that he agrees with me.]

My point of departure for this discussion is the following statement: were the mapping from phonetics to phonology to morphology to syntax to semantics to pragmatics isomorphic – or even 100% reliable – there would be little to no need for linguists. Much of the action, for the practicing linguist, lies precisely in those instances where the mapping breaks down, or is at least imperfect. That doesn't mean, of course, that the assumption that the mapping is isomorphic isn't a valid null hypothesis; it probably is. But an assumption is not the same as a substantive argument.

If you disagree with any of this, I'd be interested to hear it; in what follows, though, I will be taking this as a given.

So here goes...

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The last 15-20 years or so have seen a trend in syntactic argumentation, within what we may broadly characterize as the GB/Principles-and-Parameters/minimalism community, of treating facts about the interpretation of an utterance as dispositive in arguments about syntactic theory.

One response that I've received in the past when conveying this impression to colleagues is that all syntactic evidence is inexorably tied to interpretation, because (i) string-acceptability is just the question of whether utterance A is acceptable under at least one interpretation, and so (ii) string-acceptability is not different in kind from asking whether A is acceptable under interpretation X versus under interpretation Y. In fact, this reasoning goes, there really isn't such a thing as string-acceptability per se, since the task of testing string-acceptability amounts to asking a person, "Can you envision at least one context in which at least one of the interpretations of A is appropriate?"

I think this is too simplistic, since as we all know, there is still a contrast between Colorless green ideas sleep furiously and *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless. But even setting that aside for now, I don't think that the fact that an utterance A has at least one interpretation should be treated (by syntacticians) on a par with the fact that it has interpretation X but not interpretation Y. The reason is that the isomorphic mapping from syntax to semantics (or vice versa, for the purposes of this discussion) is a methodological heuristic, not a substantive argument (see above).

Let's illustrate using an example from locality. Evidence about locality can be gleaned in some instances from string-acceptability alone. That (1) is unacceptable does not depend on a particular interpretation – nor does it even depend on a particular theory of what an interpretation is (i.e., what the primitives of meaning are), for that matter.

(1) *What do you know the delivery guy that just brought us?

I therefore consider the unacceptability of (1) dispositive in syntactic argumentation (well, modulo the usual caveats about acceptability vs. grammaticality, I should say). On the other hand, the fact that (2) can only be interpreted as a question about reasons for knowing, not as a question about reasons for bringing, is not the same type of evidence.

(2) Why do you know the delivery guy that just brought us pizza?

To be clear, they are both evidence for the same thing. But they are not evidence of the same kind. And the provocation offered in this post is that they should not be afforded the same status in distinguishing between syntactic theories.

For the sake of argument, suppose we lived in a world where (2) did have both interpretations, but (1) was still bad. I, as a syntactician, would first try to find a syntactic reason for this. Failing that, however, I would be content with leaving that puzzle for semanticists to worry about. (Perhaps, in this counterfactual world, my semanticist friends would conclude that elements like why can participate in the same kind of semantic relationships that regulate the interaction between the logophoric centers of various clauses? I don't know if that makes any sense. Anyway, I won't try too hard to reason about what other people might do to explain something in a hypothetical world.) More importantly, I'd keep the theory of locality exactly as it is in our world. Obviously the other world would be a less pleasing world to live in. The theory of locality would enjoy less support in this hypothetical world than it does in our world. But the support lost in this counterfactual scenario would be circumstantial, not direct; it is the loss of semantic support for a syntactic theory.

There are (at least) two things you might be asking at this juncture. First, is this distinction real? Aren't we all linguists? Aren't we all after the same thing, at the end of the day? I think the answer depends on granularity. At one level, yes, we're all after the same thing: the nature and properties of that part of our mind that facilitates language. But insofar as we believe that the mechanism behind language is not a monolith; that syntax constitutes a part of it that is separate from interpretation; and that the mapping between the two is not guaranteed a priori to be perfect, then no: the syntactician is interested in a different part of the machine than the semanticist is.

Second, you might be asking this: even if these distinctions are real, why are they important? Why should we bother with them? My answer here is that losing sight of these distinctions risks palpable damage to the health of syntactic theory. Above, I noted that in research on syntax, evidence from interpretation should take a back seat to evidence from string-acceptability. But it feels to me like way too many people are content to posit movement-to-spec-of-TargetInterpretationP (or -ScopeP) without the understanding that, as long as the evidence provided is purely from interpretation, this is really just a semantic theory expressed in syntactic terms. (One might even say it is an 'abuse' of syntactic vocabulary, if one's point were to try and provoke.) This will end up being a valid syntactic theory only to the extent that the aforementioned syntax-semantics (or semantics-syntax) mapping turns out to be transparent. But – and this is the crux of my point – we already know that the mapping between the two isn't always transparent. (As an example, think of semantic vs. syntactic reconstruction.) And so such argumentation should be treated with skepticism, and its results should not be treated as "accepted truths" about syntax unless they can be corroborated using syntactic evidence proper, i.e., string-acceptability.

My Problem with Semantics

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.

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[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!