What does typology teach us about FL?

I have been thinking lately about the following question: What does comparative/typology (C/T) study contribute to our understanding of FL/UG? Observe that I am taking it as obvious that GG takes the structure of FL/UG to be the proper object of study and, as a result, that any linguistic research project must ultimately be justified by the light it can shed on the fine structure of this mental organ. So, the question: what does studying C/T bring to the FL/UG table?

Interestingly, the question will sound silly to many.  After all, the general consensus is that one cannot reasonably study Universal Grammar without studying the specific Gs of lots of different languages, the more the better. Many vocal critics of GG complain that GG fails precisely because it has investigated too narrow a range of languages and has, thereby, been taken in by many false universals.

Most GGers agree with spirit of this criticism. How so? Well, the critics accuse GG of being English or Euro centric and GGers tend to reflexively drop into a defensive crouch by disputing the accuracy of the accusation. The GG response is that GG has as a matter of fact studied a very wide variety of languages from different families and eras. In other words, the counterargument is that critics are wrong because GG is already doing what they demand.

The GG reply is absolutely accurate. However, it obscures a debatable assumption, one that indicates agreement with the spirit of the criticism: that only or primarily the study of a wide variety of typologically diverse languages can ground GG conclusions that aspire to universal relevance. In other words, both GG and its critics take the intensive study of typology and variation to be a conceptually necessary part of an empirically successful UG project.

I want to pick at this assumption in what follows.  I have nothing against C/T inquiry.[1] Some good friends engage in it. I enjoy reading it. However, I want to put my narrow prejudices aside here in order to try and understand exactly what C/T work teaches us about FL/UG? Is the tacit (apparently widely accepted) assumption that C/T work is essential for (or at least, practically indispensible for or very conducive to) uncovering the structure of FL/UG correct?

Let me not be coy. I actually don’t think it is necessary, though I am ready to believe that C/T inquiry has been a practical and useful way of proceeding to investigate FL/UG. To grease the skids of this argument, let me remind you that most of biology is built on the study of a rather small number of organisms (e. coli, C. elegans, fruitflies, mice). I have rarely heard the argument made that one can’t make general claims about the basic mechanisms of biology because only a very few organisms have been intensively studied. If this is so for biology, why should the study of FL/UG be any different. Why should bears be barely (sorry I couldn’t help it) relevant for biologists but Belarusian be indispensable for linguistics? Is there more to this than just Greenbergian sentiments (which, we can all agree, should be generally resisted)? 

So is C/T work necessary? I don’t think it is. In fact, I personally believe that POS investigations (and acquisition studies more generally (though these are often very hard to do right)) are more directly revealing of FL/UG structure. A POS argument if correctly deployed (i.e. well grounded empirically) tells us more about what structure FL/UG must have than surveys (even wide ones) of different Gs do. Logically, this seems obvious. Why? Because POS arguments are impossibility arguments (see here) whereas surveys, even ones that cast a wide linguistic net, are empirically contingent on the samples surveyed. The problem with POS reasoning is not the potential payoff or the logic but the difficulty of doing it well. In particular, it is harder than I would like to always specify the nature of the relevant PLD (e.g. is only child directed speech relevant? Is PLD degree 0+?). However, when carefully done (i.e. when we can fix the relevant PLD sufficiently well), the conclusions of a POS are close to definitive. Not so for cross-linguistic surveys.[2]

Assume I am right (I know you don’t, but humor me). Nothing I’ve said gainsays the possibility that C/T inquiry is a very effective way of studying FL/UG, even if it is not necessary. So, assuming it is an effective way of studying FL/UG, what exactly does C/T inquiry bring to the FL/UG table?

I can think of three ways that C/T work could illuminate the structure of FL/UG.

First, C/T inquiry can suggest candidate universals. Second, C/T investigations can help sharpen our understanding of the extant universals. Third, it can adumbrate the range of Gish variation, which will constrain the reach of possible universal principles. Let me discuss each point in turn.

First, C/T work as a source of candidate universals. Though this is logically possible, as a matter of fact, it’s my impression that this has not been where plausible candidates have come from. From where I sit (but I concede that this might be a skewed perspective) most (virtually all?) of the candidates have come from the intensive study of a pretty small number of languages. If the list I provided here is roughly comprehensive, then many, if not most, of these were “discovered” using a pretty small range of the possible Gs out there. This is indeed often mooted as a problem for these purported universals. However, as I’ve mentioned tiresomely before, this critique often rests on a confusion between Chomsky universals with their Grennbergian eponymous doubles.

Relevantly, many of these candidate universals predate the age of intensive C/T study (say dating from the late 70s and early 80s). Not all of them, but quite a few. Indeed, let me (as usual) go a little further: there have been relatively few new candidate universals proposed over the last 20 years, despite the continually increasing investigation of more and more different Gs. That suggests to me that despite the possibility that many of our universals could have been inductively discovered by rummaging through myriad different Gs, in fact this is not what actually took place.[3] Rather, as in biology, we learned a lot by intensively studying a small number of Gs and via (sometimes inchoate) POS reasoning, plausibly concluded that what we found in English is effectively a universal feature of FL/UG. This brings us to the second way that C/T inquiry is useful. Let’s turn to this now. 

The second way that C/T inquiry has contributed to the understanding of FL/UG is that it has allowed us (i) to further empirically ground the universals discovered on the basis of a narrow range of studied languages and, (ii) much more importantly, to refine these universals. So, for example, Ross discovers island phenomena in languages like English and proposes them as due to the inherent structure of FL/UG. Chomsky comes along and develops a theory of islands that proposes that FL/UG computations are bounded (i.e. must take place in bounded domains) and that apparent long distance dependencies are in fact the products of smaller successive cyclic dependencies that respect these bounds. C/T work then comes along and refines this basic idea further. So Rizzi notes that (i) wh-islands are variable (and multiple WH languages like Romanian shows that there is more than one way to apparently violate Wh islands) and (ii) Huang suggests that islands needs to include adjuncts and subjects and (iii) work on the East Asian languages suggests that we need to distinguish island effects from ECP effects despite their structural similarity and (iv) studies of in-situ wh languages allows us to investigate the bounding requirements on overt and covert movement and (v) C/T data from Irish and Chamorro and French and Spanish provides direct evidence for successive cyclic movement even absent islands.

There are many other examples of C/T thinking purifying candidate universals. Another favorite example of mine is how the anaphor agreement effect (investigated by Rizzi and Woolford) shows that Principle A cannot be the last word on anaphor binding (see Omer’s discussion here). This effect strongly argues that anaphor licensing is not just a matter of binding domain size, as the classical GB binding theory proposes.[4] So, finding that nominative anaphors cannot be bound in Icelandic changes the way we should think about the basic form of the binding theory. In other words, considering how binding operates in a language with different case and agreement profiles from English has proven to be very informative about our basic understanding binding principles.[5]

However, though I think this work has been great (and a great resource at parties to impress friends and family), it is worth noting that the range of relevant languages needed for the refinements has been relatively small (what would we do without Icelandic!). This said, C/T work has made apparent the wide range of apparently different surface phenomena that fall into the same general underlying patterns (this is especially true of the rich investigations on case/agreement phenomena). It has also helped refine our understanding by investigating the properties of languages whose Gs make morpho-syntactically explicit what is less surface evident in other languages. So for example, the properties of inverse agreement (and hence defective intervention effects) are easier to study in languages like Icelandic where one finds overt post verbal nominatives than it is in English where there is relatively little useful morphology to track.[6] The analogue of this work in (other) areas of biology is the use of big fat and easily manipulated squid axons (rather than dainty, small and smooshy mice axons) to study neuronal conduction.

Another instance of the same thing comes from the great benefits of C/T work in identifying languages where UG principles of interest leave deeper overt footprints than in others (sometimes very very deep (e.g. inverse control, IMO)). There is no question that the effects of some principles are hard to find in some languages (e.g. island effects in languages which don’t tend to move things around much, or binding effects in Malay-2 (see here)). And there is no doubt that sometimes languages give us extremely good evidence of what is largely theoretical inference in others. Thus, as mentioned, the morphological effects of successive cyclic movement in Irish or Chamorro or verb inversion in French and Spanish make evident at the surface the successive cyclic movement that FL/UG infers from, among other things, island effects. So, there is no question that C/T research has helped ground many FL/UG universals, and has even provided striking evidence for their truth. However (and maybe this is the theorist in me talking), it is surprising how much of these refinements and evidence builds on proposals with a still very narrow C/T basis. What made the C-agreement data interesting, for example, is that it provided remarkably clear evidence for something that we already had pretty good indirect evidence for (e.g. Islands are already pretty good evidence for successive cyclic movement in a subjacency account). However, I don’t want to downplay the contributions of C/T work here. It has been instrumental in grounding lots of conclusions motivated on pretty indirect theoretical grounds, and direct evidence is always a plus. What I want to emphasize is that more often than not, this additional evidence has buttressed conclusions reached on theoretical (rather than inductive) grounds, rather than challenging them.

This leaves the third way that C/T work can be useful: it may not propose but it can dispose. It can help identify the limits of universalist ambitions. I actually think that this is much harder to do than is often assumed. I have recently discussed an (IMO unsuccessful) attempt to do this for Binding Theory (here and here), and I have elsewhere discussed the C/T work on islands and their implications for a UG theory of bounding (here). Here too I have argued that standard attempts to discredit universal claims regarding islands have fallen short and that the (more “suspect”) POS reasoning has proven far more reliable. So, I don't believe that C/T work has, by and large, been successful at clearly debunking most of the standard universals.

However, it has been important in identifying the considerable distance that can lie between a universal underlying principle and its surface expressions. Individual Gs must map underlying principles to surface forms and Gs must reflect this possible variation. Consequently, finding relevant examples thereof sets up interesting acquisition problems (both real time and logical) to be solved. Or, to say this another way, one potential value of C/T work is in identifying something to explain given FL/UG. C/T work can provide the empirical groundwork for studying how FL/UG is used to build Gs, and this can have the effect of forcing us to revise our theories of FL/UG.[7]  Let me explain.

The working GG conceit is that the LAD uses FL and its UG principles to acquire Gs on the basis of PLD. To be empirically adequate an FL/UG must allow for the derivation of different Gs (ones that respect the observed surface properties). So, one way to study FL/UG is to investigate differing languages and ask how their Gs (i.e. ones with different surface properties) could be fixed on the basis of available PLD. On this view, the variation C/T discovers is not interesting in itself but is interesting because it empirically identifies an acquisition problem: how is this variation acquired? And this problem has direct bearing on the structure of FL/UG. Of course, this does not mean that any variation implies a difference in FL/UG. There is more to actual acquisition than FL/UG. However, the problem of understanding how variation arises given FL/UG clearly bear on what we take to be in FL/UG.[8]

And this is not merely a possibility. Lots of work on historical change from the mid 1980s onwards can be, and was, seen in this light (e.g. Lightfoot, Roberts, Berwick and Nyogi). Looking for concomitant changes in Gs was used to shed light on the structure of FL/UG parameter space. The variation, in other words, was understood to tell us something about the internal structure of FL/UG. It is unclear to me how many GGers still believe in this view of parameters (see here and here). However, the logic of using G change to probe the structure of FL/UG is impeccable. And there is no reason to limit the logic to historical variation. It can apply just as well to C/T work on synchronically different Gs, closely related but different dialects, and more. 

This said, it is my impression that this is not what most C/T work actually aspires to anymore, and this is becuase most C/T research is not understood in the larger context of Plato’s Problem or how Gs are acquired by LADs in real time. In other words, C/T work   is not understood as a first step towards the study FL/UG. This is unfortunate for this is an obvious way of using C/T results to study the structure of FL/UG. Why then is this not being done? In fact, why does it not even seem to be on the C/T research radar?

I have a hunch that will likely displease you. I believe that many C/T researchers either don’t actually care to study FL/UG and/or they understand universals in Greenbergian terms. Both are products of the same conception; the idea that linguistics studies languages, not FL.  Given this view, C/T work is what linguists should do for the simple reason that C/T work investigates languages and that’s what linguistics studies. We should recognize that this is contrary to the founding conception of modern linguistics. Chomsky’s big idea was to shift the focus of study from languages to the underlying capacity for language (i.e FL/UG). Languages on this conception are not the objects of inquiry. FL is. Nor are Greenberg universals what we are looking for. We are looking for Chomsky universals (i.e. the basic structural properties of FL). Of course, C/T work might advance this investigation. But the supposition that it obviously does so needs argumentation. So let’s have some, and to start the ball rolling let me ask you: how does C/T work illuminate the structure of FL/UG? What are its greatest successes? Should we expect further illumination? Given the prevalence of the activity, it should be easy to find convincing answers to these questions.

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[1] I will treat the study of variation and typological study as effectively the same things. I also think that historical change falls into the same group. Why study any of these?

[2] Aside from the fact that induction over small Ns can be hazardous (and right now the actual number of Gs surveyed is pretty small given the class of possible Gs), most languages differ from English in only having a small number of investigators. Curiously, this was also a problem in early modern biology. Max Delbruck decreed that everyone would work on e.coli in order to make sure that the biology research talent did not spread itself too thin. This is also a problem within a small field like linguistics. It would be nice if as many people worked on any other language as work on English. But this is impossible. This is one reason why English appears to be so grammatically exotic; the more people work on a language the more idiosyncratic it appears to be. This is not to disparage C/T research, but only to observe the obvious, viz. that person-power matters.

[3] Why has the discovery of new universals slowed down (if it has, recall this is my impression)? One hopeful possibility is that we’ve found more or less all of them. This has important implications for theoretical work if it is true, something that I hope to discuss at some future point.

[4] Though, as everyone knows, the GB binding theory as revised in Knowledge of Language treats the unacceptability of *John thinks himself/heself is tall as not a binding effect but an ECP effect. The anaphor-agreement effect suggests that this too is incorrect, as does the acceptability of quirky anaphoric subjects in Icelandic.

[5] I proposed one possible reinterpretation of binding theory based in part on such data here.  I cannot claim that the proposal has met with wide acceptance and so I only mention it for the delectation of the morbidly curious.

[6] One great feature of overt morphology is that it often allows for crisp speaker acceptability judgments. As this has been syntax’s basic empirical fodder, crisp judgments rock.

[7] My colleague Jeff Lidz is a master of this. Take a look at some of his papers. Omer Preminger’s recent NELS invited address does something similar from a more analytical perspective. I have other favorite practitioners of this art including Bob Berwick, Charles Yang, Ken Wexler, Elan Dresher, Janet Fodor, Stephen Crain, Steve Pinker, and this does not exhaust the list. Though it does exhaust my powers of immediate short term recall.

[8] Things are, of course, more complex. FL/UG cannot explain acquisition all by its lonesome; we also need (at least) a learning theory. Charles Yang and Jeff Lidz provide good paradigms of how to combine FL/UG and learning theory to investigate each. I urge you to take a look.

Evans-Levinson: the sound and the fury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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