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:

Case & agreement: beware of prevailing wisdom

Someone recently told me a (possibly apocryphal) story about the inimitable Mark Baker. The story involves Mark giving a plenary lecture somewhere on the topic of case. To open the lecture, possibly-apocryphal-Mark says something along the following lines:

Those of you who don't work on case probably have in your heads some rough sketch of how case works. (e.g. Agree in person/number/gender between a designated head and a noun phrase, resulting in that noun phrase being case-marked.) What you need to realize is that basically nobody who actually works on case believes that this is how case works.

Now, whether or not this is really how it all went down, possibly-apocryphal-Mark has a point. In fact, I'm here to tell you that his point holds not only of case, but of agreement, too.

In one sense, this situation is probably not all that unique to case & agreement. I'm sure presuppositions and focus alternatives don't actually work the way that I (whose education on these matters stopped at the introductory stage) think they work, either. The thing is, no less than the entire feature calculus of minimalist syntax is built on this purported model of case & agreement. [If you don't believe me, go read "The Minimalist Program" again; you'll find that things like the interpretable-uninterpretable distinction are founded on the (supposed) behavior of person/number/gender and case (277ff.).] And it is a model of case & agreement that – to repeat – simply doesn't work.

So what model am I talking about? I'm really talking about a pair of intertwined theories of case and of agreement, which work roughly as follows:

1. there is a Case Filter, and it is implemented through feature-checking: each noun phrase is born with a case feature that, were it to reach the interfaces (PF/LF) unchecked, would cause ungrammaticality (a.k.a., a "crash"); this feature is checked when the noun phrase enters into an agreement relation with an appropriate functional head (T⁰, v⁰, etc.), and only if this agreement relation involves the full set of nominal phi features (person, number, gender)
2. agreement is also based on feature-checking: the aforementioned functional heads (T⁰, v⁰, etc.) carry "uninterpretable person/number/gender features"; if these reach the interfaces (PF/LF) unchecked, the result is – you guessed it – ungrammaticality (a.k.a., a "crash"); these uninterpretable features get checked when they are overwritten with the valued person/number/gender features found on the noun phrase

Thus, on this view, case & agreement live in something of a happy symbiosis: agreement between a functional head and a noun phrase serves to check what would otherwise be ungrammaticality-causing features on both elements.

From the vantage point of 2016, however, I think it is quite safe to say that none of this is right. And, in fact, even the Abstractness Gambit (the idea that (1) and (2) are operative in the syntax, but morphology obscures their effects) cannot save this theory.

What follows builds heavily on some of my own work (though far from exclusively so; some of the giants whose shoulders I am standing on include Marantz, Rezac, Bobaljik, and definitely-not-apocryphal Mark Baker) – and so I apologize in advance if some of this comes across as self-promoting.

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Let's start with (1). Absolutive(=ABS) is a structural case, but there are ABS noun phrases that could not possibly have been agreed with, living happily in grammatical Basque sentences. How do we know they could not possibly have been agreed with (not even "abstractly")? Because we know that (non-clitic-doubled) dative arguments in Basque block agreement with a lower ABS noun phrase, and we can look specifically at ABS arguments that have a dative coargument. (Indeed, when the dative coargument is removed or clitic-doubled, morphologically overt agreement with the ABS – impossible in the presence of the dative coargument – becomes possible.)

So if an ABS noun phrase in Basque has a dative coargument, we know that this ABS noun phrase could not have been targeted for agreement by a head like v⁰ or T⁰ (because they are higher than the dative coargument). Notice that this rules out agreement with these heads regardless of whether that supposed agreement is overt or not; it is a matter of structural height, coupled with minimality. The distribution of overt agreement here serves only to confirm what our structural analysis already leads us to expect.

And yet despite the fact that it could not have been targeted for agreement, there is our ABS noun phrase, living its life, Case Filter be damned. [For the curious, note that this is crucially different from seemingly similar Icelandic facts, which Bobaljik (2008) suggests might be handled in terms of restructuring. That is because whether the embedded predicate is ditransitive (=has a dative argument) or monotransitive (=lacks one) cannot, to the best of my knowledge, affect the restructuring possibilities of the embedding predicate one bit.]

If you would like to read more about this, see my 2011 paper in NLLT, in particular pp. 929 onward. (That paper builds on the analysis of the relevant Basque constructions that was in my 2009 LI paper, so if you have questions about the analysis itself, that's the place to look.)

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Moving to (2), this is demonstrably false, as well. This can be shown using data from the K'ichean languages (a branch of Mayan). These languages have a construction in which the verb agrees either with the subject or with the object, depending on which of the two bears marked features. So, for example, Subj:3sg+Obj:3pl will yield the same agreement marking (3pl) as Subj:3pl+Obj:3sg will. It is relatively straightforward to show that this is not an instance of Multiple Agree (i.e., the verb does not "agree with both arguments"), but rather an instance of the agreeing head looking only for marked features, and skipping constituents that don't bear the features it is looking for. Just like an interrogative C⁰ will skip a non-[wh] subject to target a [wh] object, so will the verb in this construction skip a [sg] (i.e., non-[pl]) subject to target a [pl] object.

This teaches us that 3sg noun phrases are not viable targets for the relevant head in K'ichean. Ah, but now you might ask: "What if both the subject and the object are 3sg?" The facts are that such a configuration is (unsurprisingly) fine, and an agreement form which is glossed as "3sg" shows up in this case (so to speak; it is actually phonologically null). That's all well and good; but what happened to the unchecked uninterpretable person/number/gender features on the head? Remember, they couldn't have been checked, because everything is now 3sg. And if 3sg things were viable targets for this head, then you could get "3sg" agreement in a Subj:3sg+Obj:3pl configuration, too – by simply targeting the subject – but in actuality, you can't. [This line of reasoning is resistant even to the "but what about null expletives?" gambit: if the uninterpretable phi features on the head were checked by a null expletive, then either the expletive is formally plural or formally singular. If it is singular, then we already know it could not have been a viable target for this head; if it is plural, and it has been targeted for agreement, then we predict plural agreement morphology, contrary to fact. Thus, alternatives based on a null expletive do not work here.]

What about Last Resort? It is entirely possible that grammar has an operation that swoops in should any "uninterpretable features" have made it to the interface unchecked, and deletes the offending features. But now ask yourself this: what prevents this operation from swooping in and deleting the features on the head even when there was a viable agreement target there for the taking (e.g. a 3pl nominal)? i.e., why can't you just gratuitously fail to agree with an available target, and just have the Last Resort operation take care of your unchecked features later? The only possible answer is that the grammar "knows that this would be cheating"; the grammar makes sure the Last Resort is just that – a last resort – it keeps track of whether you could have agreed with a nominal, and only if you couldn't have are you then eligible for the deletion of offending features. Put another way, the compulsion to agree with an available target is not reducible to just the state of the relevant features once they reach the interfaces; it is obligatory independently of such considerations. You see where this is going: if this bookkeeping / independent obligatoriness is going on anyway, uninterpretable features become 100% redundant. They bear exactly none of the empirical burden (i.e., there is no single derivation in the entire grammar that would be ruled out by unchecked features, only by illicit application of the Last Resort operation).

Bottom line: there is no grammatical device of any efficacy that corresponds to this notion of "uninterpretable person/number/gender feature."

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At this juncture, you might wonder what, exactly, I'm proposing in lieu of (1-2). The really, really short version is this: agreement and case are transformations, in the sense that they are obligatory when their structural description is met, and irrelevant otherwise. (Retro, ain't it?) To see what I mean, and how this solves the problems associated with (1) and (2), I'm afraid you'll have to read some of my published work. In particular, chapters 5, 8, and 9 of my 2014 book. Again, sorry for the self-promotional nature of this.

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Epilogue:

Every practicing linguist has, in their head, a "toy theory" of various phenomena that are not that linguist's primary focus. This is natural and probably necessary, because no one can be an expert in everything. The difference, when it comes to case and especially when it comes to agreement, is that these phenomena have been (implicitly or explicitly, rightly or wrongly) taken as the exemplar of feature interaction in grammar. And so other members of the field have (implicitly or explicitly) taken this toy theory of case & agreement as a model of how their own feature systems should work.

And lest you think I have constructed a straw-man, let me end with an example. If you follow my own work, you know that I have been involved in a debate or two recently where my position has amounted to "such and such phenomenon X is not reducible to the same mechanism that underlies agreement in person/number/gender." What strikes me about these debates is the following: if A is the mechanism that underlies agreement, these (attempted) reductions are not reductions-to-A at all; they are reductions-to-the-LING-101-version-of-A (e.g. Chomsky's Agree), which – to paraphrase possibly-apocryphal-Mark – nobody who works on agreement thinks (or, at least, nobody who works on agreement should think) is a viable theory of agreement.

Now, it is logically possible that a feature calculus that was invented to capture agreement in person/number/gender (e.g. Agree), and turns out to be ill-suited for that purpose, is nevertheless – by sheer coincidence – the right theory for some other phenomenon (or set of phenomena) X. But even if that turns out to be the case, because the mechanism in question doesn't account for agreement in the first place, there is no "reduction" here at all.

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.

Derivation Trees and Phrase Structure

Another snow day, another blog post. Last week we took a gander at derivation trees and noticed that they satisfy a number of properties that should appeal to Minimalists. Loudmouth that I am I took things a step further and proclaimed that there is no good reason to keep using phrase structure trees now that we have this shiny new toy that does everything phrase structure trees do, just better. Considering the central role of phrase structure trees, that's a pretty bold claim... or is it?

Two More Things about Minimalist Grammars

My intro post on Minimalist grammars garnered a lot more attention than I expected. People asked some damn fine questions, some of which I could not fully address in a single comment. So let's take a closer look at two technical issues before we move on to derivation trees next week (I swear, Norbert, we'll get to them soon).

Minimalist Grammars: The Very Basics

Oh boy, it's been a while... where did we leave off? Right, I got my panties in a twist over the fact that a lot of computational work does not get the attention it deserves. Unfortunately the post came across a lot whinier and accusatory than intended, so let's quickly recapitulate what I was trying to say.

Certain computational approaches (coincidentally those that I find most interesting) have a hard time reaching a more mainstream linguistic audience. Not because the world is a mean place where nobody likes math, but because 1) most results in this tradition are too far removed from concrete empirical phenomena to immediately pique the interest of the average linguist, and 2) there are very few intros for those linguists that are interested in formal work. This is clearly something we computational guys have to fix asap, and I left you with the promise that I would do my part by introducing you to some of the recent computational work that I find particularly interesting on a linguistic level.¹

I've got several topics lined up --- the role of derivations, the relation between syntax and phonology, island constraints, the advantages of a formal parsing model --- but all of those assume some basic familiarity with Minimalist grammars. So here's a very brief intro to MGs, which I'll link to in my future posts as a helpful reference for you guys. And just to make things a little bit more interesting, I've also thrown in some technical observations about the power of Move...

Publication Blues

Get a bunch of syntacticians in a room and it’s not long before they begin to regale each other (and themselves) with titillating tales of publishing porn:

Do you know that it took me two and half years to get that paper into LI? You should see these absurd reviews that I got from NLLT, two say publish and one guy says reject and the editor doesn’t see that his comments are full of S*&$. Language why would anyone publish there?  They hate theoretical linguistics!! Cognition got the people I was criticizing to review the paper and they sank it! I got a review from Syntax longer than the paper I submitted, and most of it just missed the point.

You can add your own favorite vignettes, I am sure.  What surprised me this weekend is to discover that publishing porn is not restricted to syntax or even linguistics but extends quite broadly across academia (see below). I had always thought that the disgruntlement arose because of the dearth of journal outlets for publishing in syntax. The big three -LI, NLLT and Syntax- have relatively few pages between them. Language doesn’t (won’t?) publish hard-core theoretical syntax for love or money (btw, this is quite odd as the professional society journals in economics, philosophy, physics etc. are where the newest stuff is showcased. Language, in contrast, is the last place to look for new cutting edge syntax (or, from the little that I can tell, semantics or phonology)). Limited pages probably matter.

Page limits also make editors lives more troublesome. To live with the restrictions the editorial decision is not ‘take the good ones, reject the bad’ but ‘take these good papers and not those.’ Couple this with the fact that IMHO there is a lot of good syntax being done and the result is that there have to be arbitrary ways of managing the flow.  One way of doing this is restricting submissions (e.g. the one-paper-under-review-at-a-time policy at LI). Another is queu management (e.g. the long lag time between submission-review-resubmission-re-review-…-acceptance-publication). A third is content management (e.g. the dearth of debate in the pages of the journals, a policy that frees up space). 

Editors also face the “herding cats” problem.  I don’t know about you, but reviewing papers is not my favorite pastime. I know that this is important and a contribution to the field and important for people’s careers yada, yada, yada. But…you can fill in the rest, I suspect.  Part of this results from the expectations people have of reviews.  They are “supposed” to be long and very detailed and very thorough. Even typos! Rather than expecting a judgment about the relevance or importance of the paper with a review of the central argument (something that would be about 1-2 pages long), the reviewer is expected to effectively write a reply, moreover a reply that won’t be published.  There is, I am sure, a lot of interesting discussion being carried out furtively in the review process that deals with interesting (because though contentious) issues that really should be public but never will be.  

To add to the burden, papers are typically very long. In the past natural experiments occasionally emerged that permitted one to measure paper-bloat (this is no longer possible as most journals will not publish previously aired work, even conference proceedings).  Sometimes a paper that first appeared as a conference proceeding was subsequently reissued in more elaborated form as a journal article.  To my hazy recollection, the more detailed paper often failed to convey the basic idea as clearly as the 15 page conference paper did.  There is a kind of “defensive” linguistics that lards many papers, no doubt the result of the thorough vetting process, which serves to obscure the main idea. It sometimes seems like a paper cannot simply leave a problem knowingly unsolved and still expect the paper to make the printed page.  This results in “explanation creep” that often muddies a relatively clear main theme, to the detriment of the insight the paper offers.

There is one final problem, though I cannot tell how endemic it is.  I have occasionally gotten the impression that reviewers like to make sure that papers that gore their favorite oxen don’t see the light of publishing day.  I cannot tell how widespread it is, but I doubt that it is negligible.  Let me relate an anecdote: I was once asked to review a MS for a pretty prestigious press. I read the MS and found myself unconvinced. However, I also concluded that the direction being taken, though not one that I found congenial, represented a common perspective was well done given this perspective and deserved an airing. My review said as much, as well as including some more detailed critical points mainly for the author’s interest. I was contacted by the editors and asked if I thought the MS deserved publication. As my first sentence was something to the effect that this MS should be published as it represented an important perspective on timely matters I was a bit surprised. I was told that it was clear that I disagreed with the ideas and remained unconvinced by the arguments so why would I recommend publication?  I found this odd. Is the standard of publication whether the MS persuades the reviewer that it is true?  I hope not. That is a very high bar. Interesting, ok, provocative, sure, makes you think, check.  But true? Really true?  Nope, too much to ask.

So given all of this what would gruntle me?  I really don’t know, which is partly why I am writing about this here; you know, generate some chatter about the problem, discover that my mood is largely dyspepsia and that I should stop with the fried chicken and anchovy pizza.  Here are some minor proposals:

·      Limit all paper submissions to NELS length 15 2-space pages

·      Limit all reviews to 2 pages

·      Penalize late reviewers (say, deny publication in the journal for some period)

·      Consider ways of migrating all journals to the web where page numbers won’t matter and do so in a PLOS like open format

·      Have a more active editorial board, one that solicits and recommends MS for publication rather than just reviewing adventitious submissions

These are relatively conservative changes that could be implemented relatively quickly. 

I would like to end with a few words on a more radical proposal that caught my eye.  It’s called “A Rant on Refereeing.” It suggests that we dump reviewing altogether as it has become a way of stifling the circulation of ideas rather than promoting them. There are several linked papers (here, here, here) that are also worth reading, some in favor some not. The main idea is that web based circulation of papers should replace the refereed journal format and that there are ways of managing the downsides (how to assure quality (answer: no magic bullet even in journals), how to finesse the promotion and tenure role of reviewed publications (answer: letters will be more important), how readers will find what’s “important” (answer: not easy but aggregate sites will naturally arise to organize the paper flow) etc.  It is very provocative and if you are interested in these issues I suggest you take a look.

Ok, enough: I am curious about what others think about these things, so if you are inclined, let me know.

Aspects of Aspects

I am delighted to join Norbert and a host of great linguists as a contributor to this blog.  One reason I have been a "silent partner" so far is that I was doing a bit of moonlighting for another blog - created by MIT Press to celebrate its 50th anniversary.  For that blog, they commissioned a series of short pieces (by a variety of people) about the books they have published over the past half century. One of the most important of these (to any linguist, at least) was Chomsky's 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.  

As my inaugural contribution to Faculty of Language (great name, by the way, Norbert!), MIT Press has given me permission to reprint my posting about Aspects (first posted here).  Here goes ...

Rereading Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax almost a half-century after its 1965 publication, I found myself equally startled by two contradictory observations: how breathtakingly modern this book remains, and how old-fashioned it has become.

Aspects was actually the second book by Chomsky to revolutionize the study of language. It was preceded in 1957 by Syntactic Structures, which showed how a small set of formal tools could provide a simple model for astonishingly complicated facts about English syntax (most of which had gone unnoticed until then). Thanks to a glowing review in the journal Language, Syntactic Structures was widely read. Overnight, Chomsky’s “transformational grammar” became an area of intensive research. The pace of discovery was extraordinarily rapid. Paper after paper presented brand-new discoveries about syntax, prompting many hotly debated revisions of the basic model.
But what was this new field actually all about? Why should we care about the best description of a group of verbs, or the position of an adjective? It was Aspects that offered some answers—so compelling and incisive that they continue to ground our research to this very day. Aspects set the following goals for linguistics:

1. Language makes “makes infinite use of finite means” (a phrase from Humboldt that Aspects made famous). The right theory of language “must describe the processes that make this possible.”

2. The minute one examines the facts of language, one is struck by the incredible complexity of linguistic phenomena—yet every normally developing child masters this complexity at a very young age, effortlessly. Compounding the puzzle is the inescapable fact of linguistic diversity. Languages differ enormously (different vocabulary, different word orders, a different array of constructions) yet any child can acquire any one of them. The right theory of language must therefore be “sufficiently rich to account for acquisition of language, yet not so rich as to be inconsistent with the known diversity of language.”

3. The devil is in the details. The right theory of language must be “perfectly explicit”—what Chomsky called a “generative grammar.” As in any science, linguistic hypotheses must predict, and therefore explain, the facts.

These are the goals that most of us in linguistics pursue to this very day, hence the breathtakingly modern feel of this great book. At the same time, although Aspects was the first work to articulate the central tension between the ease of language acquisition (explainable if much of language is innate) and linguistic diversity (explainable if much of language is not innate), and though Chomsky spent many pages “eating his own dog food,” by working out the details—I am also struck by how many of these details have been superseded and replaced by newer, better ideas.

But this is actually the most important sign of success, not failure, for Aspects. The fact is, in 1965 very little was known about how children actually acquire language, and almost nothing was known about the extent and limitations of cross-linguistic diversity in syntax. In the wake of Aspects, the last half-century of linguistics has been marked by an enormous explosion of knowledge in both domains. And just as Aspects teaches us, this means that the details of our “perfectly explicit” theory had to change to match our new knowledge—with Chomsky himself in the forefront of many of these developments. The greatest works in science contain a timeless core, but if they are worth anything at all, they also contain the seeds of their own obsolescence—because the greatest works are those that launch a living field, and living fields do not stand still. So it is with Aspects.

This post first appeared here.  Reposted with permission of MIT Press.