How I spent my summer vacation

Like all avid GGers, I spend part of my summer vacation rereading some of the greatest hits.  This year, this included rereading Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (CILT). If you haven’t done so recently, you should go out and read it (again) now, before the BBC series comes out on public TV. It is a fantastic little book and very timely for it lays out more clearly than anything else I know what the original GG enterprise took the central questions of interest to be. It is worth knowing what these were (and still are) for it helps prevent energetically chasing off in the wrong direction in pursuit of answers to questions of dubious utility.  In other words, knowing what you are interested in, what the research questions are, helps you to avoid wasting time. Remember: those things not worth doing are not worth doing well. And, there are many too many things that are really not worth doing. I will mention one such enterprise below that seems to have recently stirred the tea post tempestuously once again. 

This said, back to CILT. The book starts with a short important chapter on the goals of ling theory: what are the things we want to explain? Chomsky points to two central questions: (i) Linguistic Creativity: how do competent speakers go (in various kinds of uses (e.g. production, comprehension)) from utterances to structural descriptions of those utterances and (ii) The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition: how do kids/acquirers go from primary linguistic data to their acquired generative grammars.  These are the two questions we want to answer and this involves limning the fine structure of Gs and FL/UG. More abstractly CILT provides the following two important mnemonic diagrams.

(1)  utterances à A à structural description

(2)  PLD          à B à generative grammar

A is a place-holder for (at least) a particular G and B for the theory of FL/UG.  The aim of inquiry is to describe the innards of A and B.  Or as Chomsky puts it:

The perceptual model A is a device that assigns a full structural description D to a presented utterance U, utilizing in the process its internalized generative grammar G, where G generates a phonetic representation R of U with the structural description D…The learning model B is a device which constructs a theory G (a generative grammar G of a certain langue) as its output on the basis of primary linguistic data (e.g. specimens of parole) as input…We can think of general linguistic theory as an attempt to specify the character of device B. We can regard a particular grammar as, in part, an attempt to specify the information available in principle (i.e. apart from limitations of attention, memory, etc.) to A that makes it capable of understanding an arbitrary utterance, to the highly non-trivial extent that understanding is determined by the structural description provided by the generative grammar. (26)

Thus G and FL are seen as causally relevant factors in explaining various kinds of performances; normal discourse and acquisition. The aim of linguistics is to describe these two mechanisms, which causally contribute to these two kinds of “behavior,” (i.e. talking and language acquisition).

What is the empirical criterion of adequacy for the two cases? The relevant measure of evaluation for the first is that it “correctly describes the linguistic intuition of the speaker” (26). Note the singular intuition! What we call linguistic intuitions reflect a speakers grammatical intuition (i.e. the sense of his/her language). That’s why they are important. But the thing we want our theory of G to match is the singular, the plural being interesting to the degree that it reveals this. We return to this anon.

The relevant measure for evaluating proposals about (2) are that the Gs B selects correspond to “the speakers’ linguistic intuition, in the case of particular languages” (27). Thus, the adequacy of B is judged in relation to how good the Gs it selects are in describing a native speaker’s actual grammatical intuition (i.e. the mental structures that underlie linguistic facility).

The aim, then, is to describe the features of real cognitive objects, either Gs that speakers actually have and procedures for constructing these Gs that speaker’s come equipped with. These are the objects of inquiry and what linguistic theories should aim to model.

Why does Chomsky take these as the two central problems? Because of two basic very big and very obvious facts. The first, and the one that he hammers again and again in CILT, is the fact of linguistic creativity, by which Chomsky intends the following:

…a mature native speaker can produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a language, the class of sentences with which we can operate fluently is so vast that for all practical purposes (and, obviously, for all theoretical purposes), we may regard it as infinite. (7)

So, the fact of linguistic creativity implicates mastery of a recursive procedure  (aka a G) that is used by native speakers in understanding and producing utterances. And the fact that Gs are required to explain this creativity means that a native speaker must acquire such a G in order to be fluent. So, the aim of linguistics is to describe these Gs and explain how they are acquired.

Chomsky also notes a second interesting capacity that G knowledge endows a native speaker with: the “ability to identify deviant sentences and, on occasion, to impose an interpretation on them” (7).

As we all know, this second capacity (aka: native speaker linguistic intuitions) has proven to be an excellent window into the structure of a native speakers language specific capacity. The generative enterprise has relied on this capacity to probe the structure of G and FL. It is what licenses GGs reliance on linguistic intuitions (note the ‘s’ here) as guides to the structure of linguistic intuition (note the absence of an ‘s’). So, Gs explain (in part) how linguistic creativity is possible and their structure can be probed by querying native speakers’ evaluations of the acceptability and interpretation of products of these Gs.

It is worth noting that the second capacity does not follow from the fact that speaker’s possess Gs. This could have been true without it being true that speakers could usefully reflect on G products. Speakers could have used Gs to speak and understand without having reliable linguistic intuitions useful for probing this capacity.

Chomsky discusses skepticism regarding such judgment data in chapter 3. Not surprisingly he concludes that it’s the best thing we’ve got and that “[w]e neglect such data at the cost of destroying the subject” (56). However, as Chomsky noted in CILT such judgments are not “sacrosanct and beyond any conceivable doubt” (56). Some such data might be bad (as any data in any area might be). We can firm it up by looking for “consistency among speakers of similar backgrounds” as well as “for a particular speaker on different occasions” (56). In other words, such data as a class are fine, though particular instances are reasonably challenged.

Chomsky notes a second important check on the reliability of such data. I call it the proof-of-the-pudding test: “The possibility of constructing a systematic and general theory” also matters. Theory tests data just as much as data tests theory. With 60 years of hindsight we can conclude that such data has been very useful and reliable precisely because the theories built on it have proven to be remarkably insightful.

So, CILT picks out two central questions for linguistic investigation and explains why they should be cynosures of further inquiry. Moreover, he outlines the kind of data that is relevant in pursuing these questions. Moreover, and most famously, in chapter 2 he outlines what he takes to be the relevant measures of theoretical adequacy; observational, descriptive and explanatory.  Let’s turn to this next.

Chomsky identifies three levels of adequacy for grammatical description: (i) observational adequacy, (ii) descriptive adequacy and (iii) explanatory adequacy.

Observational adequacy is “the lowest level” and is achieved “if the grammar presents the observed primary data correctly” (29). As Chomsky is quick to point out (see his note 1) what constitutes the relevant observable data is not at all straightforward. One measure of relevance involves the “possibility for a systematic theory.” Moreover, in an important sense, what linguists are looking for are data that bear on linguistic structure and so good data is that which are sensitive to these structures. Sadly, however, linguistic structure is not itself observable and is only accessible to a speaker only via an utterance that embodies it. Some utterances are good windows into these structures and so judgments based on these are generally useful (that’s why quite often unacceptability is a better window into G than acceptability). But some are not. Useful data allows one to infer grammatical structure from its effects in the visible utterance, and what data does this is not always obvious. As Chomsky puts it:

The problem of determining what data is valuable and to the point is not an easy one. What is observed is often neither relevant nor significant, and what is relevant and significant is often very difficult to observe, in linguistics no less than…anywhere in science.

What’s a descriptively adequate description? It’s one that “gives a correct account of the linguistic intuition of the native speaker, and specifies the observed data (in particular) in terms of significant generalizations that express the underlying regularities in the language” (28). So, a descriptively adequate description will enumerate the properties of that G that the speaker has internalized. Given that Gs are recursive rules systems, they will (implicitly) embody regularities characteristic of the language they generate. 

Last of all we get to explanatory adequacy. Theories of grammar achieve this level if  they provide “a general basis for selecting a grammar that achieves he second level of success over other grammars consistent with the relevant observed data that do not achieve this level of success” (28).  Explanatory adequacy is a predicate of theories of FL. Descriptive adequacy is a predicate of Gs. Explanatorily adequate FLs are those that derive descriptively adequate Gs relative to some specification of PLD. As is clear, issues of descriptive and explanatory adequacy are intimately intertwined with considerations of both bearing on the adequacy of each. Like it or not, claims about descriptive adequacy commit hostages to explanatory adequacy no less than do claims about the latter for the former. Given the close connection between explanatory adequacy and Plato’s Problem and the PoS issues that surround it, Chomsky’s vision of linguistics demands that these concerns be at the center of every linguist’s attention (sad to say, IMO, this is hardly the case nowadays).

Chapter 2 does a very nice job operationalizing these notions in the context of linguistic theory circa the early to mid 60s. There is still lots to learn by reading these discussions (especially, IMO, the section on levels of adequacy in semantics).  It is also worth carefully re-reading section 2.4 where Chomsky sums up the discussion of the importance of the measures. Here is his blunt assessment (52):

…three levels of adequacy have been sketched…Of these, only the levels of descriptive and explanatory adequacy (and ultimately on the latter) are of sufficient interest to justify further discussion.

This makes perfect sense given the two questions CILT highlights. If you are interested in human language, then the name of the game is ultimately to describe the properties of FL/UG. All else is interesting to the degree that it contributes to this end. Unfortunately, much current work on language seems to assume that discussions of PL/UG are at best premature and quite often little more than cow pie.  Many are happy to limit their interests to “coverage the data,” aiming primarily for observational adequacy, with some pretensions to descriptive adequacy. Chomsky has some choice remarks about this.  Here are two:

It is important to bear in mind that a grammar that assigns correctly the mass of structural descriptions (remote as this is from present hopes) would still be of no particular linguistic interest unless it also were to provide some insight onto those formal properties that distinguish a natural language from arbitrary, enumerable sets of structural descriptions. At best, such a grammar would help to clarify the subject matter for linguistic theory, just as a fourteenth century clock depicting the positions of the heavenly bodies merely posed, but did not even suggest an answer to the questions to which classical physics addressed itself. (52-3)

In other words, work that fails to at least suggest something about the structure of FL/UG is of very dubious value given the central questions of GG. A corollary suggests itself: it is always worth explicitly asking what light some piece of work tells us about FL/UG. If the answer is unclear, then this is very much worth knowing.

Here’s the second quote:

Comprehensiveness of [data, NH] coverage does not seem to me to be a serious or significant goal in the present stage of linguistic science. Gross coverage of data can be achieved in many ways, by grammars of very different forms. Consequently, we learn little about the nature of linguitc structure from the study of grammars that merely accomplish this…[I]t is only by studying the properties of gramamrs that achieve higher levels of adequacy and by gradually increasing the scope of description without sacrificing depth of analysis that we can hope to sharpen and extend our understanding of the nature of linguistic structure. (53)

I see no reason to think that we have finally reached a stage where big data work will shed much light on the structure of grammar. In fact, I would go further. I doubt that data coverage in the big data/corpus linguistic sense will ever be of linguistic interest. Why? Because it is seldom driven by the impulse of uncovering the basic properties of linguistic structure. An explanatory theory aims to uncover the basic operations and principles that descriptively adequate Gs deploy. There is no doubt that these principles interact with many other non-linguistic factors in every day speech. But if your interest is in these principles and operations, then it needs a good argument to conclude that looking at speech in the wild or lots of it will reveal what these principles are. It’s not how things proceed in the “real” sciences, so why think that this is the right way of doing linguistics? Beats me. 

One last bon mot from Chomsky: He makes an important distinction between exceptions and counter-examples. The latter are important, the former not so much, or not obviously much. A counter example is interesting because it contradicts a principle and principles are what FL/UG is all about. An exception need not. It may simply show what is already conceded, that our theories do not aim towards broad data coverage, i.e. text fidelity.  Here’s Chomsky on this:

Examples that lie beyond the scope of a grammar are quite innocuous unless they show the superiority of some alternative grammar. They do not show that the grammar as already formulated is incorrect. Examples that contradict the principles formulated in some general theory show that, to at least this extent, the theory is incorrect and needs revision. (55)

What we are interested in is the failure of principles, not in the failure of coverage.

CILT should be required reading for all GGers. From where I sit, its theoretical and methodological observations are as relevant today as they were when first written. In fact, they may be more relevant today. As a field becomes technically more sophisticated it can loose its bearings. Technique substitutes for insight. Keeping ones eyes on the central questions of interest is a useful prophylactic against this. CILT has a very clear research agenda. It has a clear target of explanation and outlines relevant criteria of success. It has the virtue of being clear about these things. If you too are interested in these fundamental questions, then nightly chanting from the pages of CILT will serve you well. 

  

A useful addendum to the previous post

I ran across this nice little discussion today (here) that others might find interesting. It identifies a plausible cost behind getting too methodologically stringent. There is a tradeoff between generating false positives and false negatives. What we want are methods that get to the truth when it is there (sensitivity) and tell us when what we think is so is not (specificity). There is, not surprisingly, a tradeoff here and tightening our "standards" can have unfortunate effects. This is especially true in domains where we know little. When you know a lot, then maybe generating exciting new ideas is less important than not being mislead experimentally. But when we know little, then maybe a little laxity is just what the scientists ordered. At any rate, I found the framing of the issues useful so I pass the piece onto you.

Stats and the perils of psych results

As you no doubt all know, there is a report today in the NYT about a study in Science that appears to question the reliability of many reported psych experiments. The hyperventilated money quote from the article is the following:

...a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested.

The clear suggestion is that this is a problem as over half the reported "results" are not. Are not what? Well, not reliable, which means to say that they may or may not replicate. This, importantly, does not mean that these results are "false" or that the people who reported them did something shady, or that we learned nothing from these papers. All it means is that they did not replicate. Is this a big deal?

Here are some random thoughts, but I leave it to others who know more about these things than I do to weigh in.

First, it is not clear to me what should be made of the fact that "only" 39% of the studies could be replicated (the number comes from here). Is that a big number or a small one? What's the base line? If I told you that over 1/3 of my guesses concerning the future value of stocks were reliable then you would be nuts not to use this information to lay some very big bets and make lots of money. If I were able to hit 40% of the time I came up to bat I would be a shoe-in inductee at Cooperstown. So is this success rate good or bad? Clearly the headline makes it look bad, but who knows.

Second, is this surprising? Well, some of it is not. The studies looked at articles from the best journals. But these venues probably publish the cleanest work in the field. Thus, by simple regression to the mean, one would expect replications to not be as clean. In fact, one of the main findings is that even among studies that did replicate, the effects sizes shrank. Well, we should expect this given the biased sample chosen from.

Third, To my mind it's amazing that any results at all replicated given some of the questions that the NYT reports being asked. Experiments on "free will" and emotional closeness? These are very general kinds of questions to be investigating and I am pretty sure that these phenomena are the the results of the combined effects of very many different kinds of causes that are hard to pin down and likely subject to tremendous contextual variation due to unknown factors. One gets clean results in the real sciences when causes can be relatively isolated and interaction effects controlled for. It looks like many of the experiments reported were problematic not because of their replicability but because they were not looking for the right sorts of things to begin with. It's the questions stupid!

Fourth, in my shadenfreudeness I cannot help but delight in the fact that the core data in linguistics gathered in the very informal ways that it is is a lot more reliable (see Sprouse and Almeida and Schutze stuff on this). Ha!!! This is not because of our methodological cleverness, but because what we are looking for, grammatical effects, are pretty easy to spot much of the time. This, does not mean, of course, that there aren't cases where things can get hairy. But over a large domain, we can and do construct very reliable data sets using very informal methods (e.g. can anyone really think that it's up for grabs whether 'John hugged Mary' can mean 'Mary hugged John'?). The implication of this is clear, at least to me: frame the question correctly and finding effects becomes easier. IMO, many psych papers act as if all you need to do is mind your p-values and keep your methodological snot clean and out will pop interesting results no matter what data you throw in. The limiting case of this is the Big Data craze. This is false, as anyone with half a brain knows. One can go further, what much work in linguistics shows is that if you get the basic question right, damn methodology. It really doesn't much matter. This is not to say that methodological considerations are NEVER important. Only that they are only important in a given context of inquiry and cannot stand on their own.

Fifth, these sorts of results can be politically dangerous even though our data are not particularly flighty. Why? Well, too many will conclude that this is a problem with psychological or cognitive work in general and that nothing there is scientifically grounded. This would be a terrible conclusion and would affect linguistic support adversely.

There are certainly more conclusions/ thoughts this report prompts. Let me reiterate what I take to be an important conclusion. What these studies shows is that stats is a tool and that method is useful in context. Stats don't substitute for thought. They are neither necessary nor sufficient for insight, though on some occasions they can usefully bring into focus things that are obscure. It should not be surprising that this process often fails. In fact, it should be surprising that it succeeds on occasion and that some areas (e.g. linguistics) have found pretty reliable methods for unearthing causal structure. We should expect this to be hard. The NYT piece makes it sound like we should be surprised that reported data are often wrong and it suggests that it is possible to do something about this by being yet more careful and methodologically astute, doing our stats more diligently. This, I believe, is precisely wrong. There is always room for improvement in one's methods. But methods are not what drive science. There is no method. There are occasional insights and when we gain some it provides traction for further investigation. Careful stats and methods are not science, though the reporting suggests that this is what many think it is, including otherwise thoughtful scientists.

I couldn't resist

As many of you know, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he forgot to bring along enough indefinite articles. On landing he made the following very famous statement:

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

The semanticists in the crowd will appreciate that what he meant to say was not this contradiction but "that's one small step for A man…"

For a while I thought that I found this lost indefinite. I found its way into Kennedy's famous Berlin speech, where he identified with the city's residents by uttering the famous sentence "Ich bin Ein Berliner." However, my German friends assured me that though Kennedy's shout out was well received and was very moving, it did not quite mean what it said. Apparently what he wanted to say was "Ich bin Berliner," the added Ein, the indefinite article leads to the following translation: "I am a jelly donut," a Berliner being a scrumptious city specific treat. At any rate, move the indefinite from Kennedy to Armstrong and historical linguistics is set right.

Ok, this is all just preamble for the real point of this post. I heard a great trivial story today that I thought I would relay to you. I know that I don't usually do this sort of stuff, but heh, WTH.  I got this from a friend and it puts Armstrong into a very positive light.  Here is what I got verbatim.

IN CASE YOU DIDN'T ALREADY KNOW THIS LITTLE TIDBIT OF WONDERFUL TRIVIA..............

ON JULY 20, 1969, AS COMMANDER OF THE APOLLO 11 LUNAR MODULE, NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO SET FOOT ON THE MOON.

HIS FIRST WORDS AFTER STEPPING ON THE MOON,

"THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND," WERE TELEVISED TO EARTH AND HEARD BY MILLIONS.

BUT, JUST BEFORE HE RE-ENTERED THE LANDER, HE MADE THE ENIGMATIC REMARK "GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY."

MANY PEOPLE AT NASA THOUGHT IT WAS A CASUAL REMARK CONCERNING SOME RIVAL SOVIET COSMONAUT.

HOWEVER, UPON CHECKING, THERE WAS NO GORSKY IN EITHER THE RUSSIAN OR AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAMS ..

OVER THE YEARS, MANY PEOPLE QUESTIONED ARMSTRONG AS TO WHAT THE 'GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY' STATEMENT MEANT, BUT ARMSTRONG ALWAYS JUST SMILED.

ON JULY 5, 1995, IN TAMPA BAY , FLORIDA , WHILE ANSWERING QUESTIONS FOLLOWING A SPEECH, A REPORTER BROUGHT UP THE 26-YEAR-OLD QUESTION ABOUT Mr.   Gorsky   TO ARMSTRONG.

THIS TIME HE FINALLY RESPONDED BECAUSE HIS MR. GORSKY HAD JUST DIED,SO NEIL ARMSTRONG FELT HE COULD NOW ANSWER THE QUESTION. HERE IS THE ANSWER TO

"WHO WAS MR. GORSKY":

IN 1938, WHEN HE WAS A KID IN A SMALL MID-WESTERN TOWN , HE WAS PLAYING BASEBALL WITH A FRIEND IN THE BACKYARD.

HIS FRIEND HIT THE BALL, WHICH LANDED IN HIS NEIGHBOR'S YARD BY THEIR BEDROOM WINDOW.  HIS NEIGHBORS WERE MR. AND MRS. GORSKY.

AS HE LEANED DOWN TO PICK UP THE BALL, YOUNG ARMSTRONG HEARD MRS. GORSKY SHOUTING AT MR. GORSKY,

"SEX! YOU WANT SEX?! YOU'LL GET SEX WHEN THE KID NEXT DOOR WALKS ON THE MOON!"

It broke the place up.     NEIL ARMSTRONG'S FAMILY CONFIRMED THAT THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

It's not really possible that UG doesn't exist

There are four big facts that undergird the generative enterprise:

1.     Species specificity: Nothing talks like humans talk, not even sorta kinda.

2.     Linguistic creativity: “a mature native speaker can produce a new sentence on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them’ (Chomsky, Current Issues: 7). In other words, a native speaker of a given L has command over a discrete (and for all practical and theoretical purposes) infinity of differently interpreted linguistic expressions.

3.     Plato’s Problem: Any human child can acquire any language with native proficiency if placed in the appropriate speech community.

4.     Darwin’s Problem: Human linguistic capacity is a very recent biological innovation (roughly 50-100 kya).

These four facts have two salient properties. First, they are more or less obviously true. That’s why nobody will win a Nobel prize for “discovering” any of them. It is obvious that nothing does language remotely like humans do, and that any kid can learn any language, and that there is for all practical and theoretical purposes an infinity of sentences a native speaker can use, and that the kind of linguistic facility we find in humans is a recentish innovation in biological terms (ok, the last is slightly more tendentious, but still pretty obviously correct). Second, these facts can usefully serve as boundary conditions on any adequate theory of language. Let’s consider them in a bit more detail.

(1) implies that there is something special about humans that allows them to be linguistically proficient in the unique way that they are. We can name the source of that proficiency: humans (and most likely only humans) have a linguistically dedicated faculty of language (FL) and “designed” to meet the computational exigencies peculiar to language. 

(2) implies that native speakers acquire Gs (recursive /procedures or rules) able to generate an unbounded number of distinct linguistic objects that native speakers can use to express their thoughts and to understand the expressions that other native speakers utter. In other words, a key part of human linguistic proficiency consists in having an internalized grammar of a particular language able to generate an unbounded number of different linguistic expressions. Combined with (1), we get to the conclusion that part of what makes humans biologically unique is a capacity to acquire Gs of the kind that we do.

(3) implies that all human Gs have something in common; they are all acquirable by humans. This strongly suggests that there are some properties P that all humans have that allow them acquire Gs in the effortless reflexive way that they do.

Indeed, cursory inspection of the obvious facts allows us to say a bit more: (i) we know that the data available to the child vastly underdetermines the kinds of Gs that we know humans can acquire thus (ii) it must be the case that some of the limits on the acquirable Gs reflect “the general character his [the acquirers NH] learning capacity rather that the particular course of his experience” (Chomsky, Current Issues; 112). (1), (2) and (3) imply that FL consists in part of language specific capacities that enable humans to acquire some kinds of Gs more easily than others (and, perhaps, some not at all).

Here’s another way of saying this. Let’s call the linguo-centric aspect of FL, UG. More specifically, UG is those features of FL that are linguistically specific, in contrast to those features of FL that are part of human or biological cognition more generally. Note that this allows for FL to consist of features that are not parts of UG. All that it implies is that there are some features of FL that are linguistically proprietary. That some such features exist is a nearly apodictic conclusion given facts (1)-(3). Indeed, it is a pretty sure bet (one that I would be happy to give long odds on) that human cognition involves some biologically given computational capacities unique to humans that underlie our linguistic facility. In other words, the UG part of FL is not null.[1]

The fourth fact implies a bit more about the “size” of UG: (4) implies that the UG part of FL is rather restricted.[2] In other words, though there are some cognitively unique features of FL (i.e. UG is not empty), FL consists of many operations that FL shares with other cognitive components and that are likely shared across species. In other words, though UG has content, most of FL consists of operations and conditions not unique to FL.

Now, the argument outlined above is often taken to be very controversial and highly speculative. It isn’t. That humans have an FL with some unique UGish features is a trivial conclusion from very obvious facts. In short, the conclusion is a no-brainer, a virtual truism! What is controversial, and rightly so, is what UG consists in. This is quite definitely not obvious and this is what linguists (and others interested in language and its cognitive and biological underpinnings) are (or should be) trying to figure out. IMO, linguists have a pretty good working (i.e. effective) theory of FL/UG and have promising leads on its fundamental properties. But, and I really want to emphasize this, even if many/most of the details are wrong the basic conclusion that humans have an FL with UGish touches must be right. To repeat, that FL/UG is a human biological endowment is (or should be) uncontroversial, even if what FL/UG consists in isn’t.[3] 

Let me put this another way, with a small nod to 17^th and 18^th century discussions about skepticism. Thinkers of this era distinguished logical certainty from moral certainty. Something is logically certain iff its negation is logically false (i.e. only logical truths can be logically certain). Given this criteria, not surprisingly, virtually nothing is certain. Nonetheless, we can and do judge that many more or less certain that are neither tautologies nor contradictions. Those things that enjoy a high degree of certainty but are not logically certain are morally certain. In other words, it is worth a sizable bet with long odds given. My claim is the following: that UG exists is morally certain. That there is a species specific dedicated capacity based on some intrinsic linguistically specific computational capacities is as close to a sure thing as we can have. Of course, it might be wrong, but only in the way that our bet that birds are built to fly might be wrong, or fish are built to swim might be. Maybe there is nothing special about birds that allow them to fly (maybe as Chomsky once wrly suggested, eagles are just very good jumpers). Maybe fish swim like I do only more so. Maybe. And maybe you are interested in this beautiful bridge in NYC that I have to sell you. That FL/UG exists is a moral certainty. The interesting question is what’s in it, not if it’s there.

Why do I mention this? Because in my experience, discussions in and about linguistics often tend to run the whether/that and the what/how questions together. This is quite obvious in discussions of the Poverty of Stimulus (PoS). It is pretty easy to establish that/whether a given phenomenon is subject to PoS, i.e. that there is not enough data in the PLD to fix a given mature capacity. But this does not mean that any given solution for that problem is correct. Nonetheless, many regularly conclude that because a proposed solution is imperfect (or worse) that there is no PoS problem at all and that FL/UG is unnecessary. But this is a non-sequitur. Whether something has a PoS profile is independent of whether any of the extant proposed solutions are viable.

Similarly with evolutionary qualms regarding rich UGs: that something like island effects fall under the purview of FL/UG is, IMO, virtually uncontestable. What the relevant mechanisms are and how they got into FL/UG is a related but separable issue. Ok, I want to walk this back a bit: that some proposal runs afoul of Darwin’s Problem (or Plato’s) is a good reason for re-thinking it. But, this is a reason for rethinking the proposed specific mechanism, it is not a reason to reject the claim that FL has internal structure of a partially UGish nature. Confusing questions leads to baby/bathwater problems, so don’t do it!

So what’s the take home message: we can know that something is so without knowing how it is so. We know that FL has a UGish component by considering very simple evident facts. These simple evident facts do not suffice to reveal the fine structure of FL/UG but not knowing what the latter is does not undermine the former conclusion that it exists. Different questions, different data, different arguments. Keeping this in mind will help us avoid taking three steps backwards for every two steps forward.

---

[1] Note that this is a very weak claim. I return to this below.

[2] Actually, this needs to be very qualified, as done here and here.

[3] This is very like the mathematical distinction between an existence proof vs a constructive proof. We often have proofs that something is the case without knowing what that something is.

Four papers to amuse you

I just returned from an excellent two weeks eating too much, drinking excessively, getting tanned and sweaty, reading novels and listening to weird opera. In the little time I had not so productively dedicated, I ran across four papers that readers might find interesting as they related to themes that have been discussed more than glancingly in FoL. Here they are.

The first deals with publishing costs and what can be done about it. Here’s a quote that will give you an excellent taste of the content: 

“The whole academic publishing industry is a gigantic web of avarice and selfishness, and the academic community has not engaged to the extent it perhaps should have to stop it,” Leeder said.
“Scholarly publishing is a bit like the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. It’s not totally clear what the hell is going on, but you can be sure someone is making a hell of a lot of money from it.”

The second and third discuss the reliability of how successful pre-registration has been in regulating phising for significant results. It seems that the results have been striking. Here’s a taste again:

The launch of the clinicaltrials.gov registry in 2000 seems to have had a striking impact on reported trial results, according to a PLoS ONE study1 that many researchers have been talking about online in the past week.

A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments. But that figure plunged to just 8% in studies that were conducted after 2000.

The third is a piece on one problem with peer review. It seems that some like to review themselves and are often very impressed with their own work. I completely understand this. Most interesting to me about this, is that this problem arose in Springer journals. Springer is one of the larger and more expensive publishers. It seems that the gate-keeping function of the prestige journals is not all that it is advertised to be.

The self-review issue, I suspect, though dramatic and fun (Hume provided an anonymous favorable review of the Treatise, if memory serves) is probably the tip of a bigger iceberg. In a small field like linguistics like-minded people often review one another’s papers (like the old joke concerning the New York Review of Each Other’s Books) and this can make it more difficult for unconventional views (those that fall outside the consensus) to get an airing. I believe that this partially explains the dearth of purely theoretical papers in our major journals. There is, as I’ve noted many times, an antipathy for theoretical speculation, an attitude reflected in the standard review process

The last article is about where “novel” genes come from.  Interestingly they seem to be able to just “spring into existence.” Moreover, it is claimed that this process might well be very common and “very important.” So, the idea that change might just pop up and make important contributions seems to be gaining biological respectability. I assume that I don’t need to mention why this possibility might be of interest to linguists.

Universals again

I am on vacation and had hoped not to post anything for two weeks. But just as I was settling into a nice comfortable relaxing sojourn I get this in my inbox. It reports on a universal that Ted Gibson discovered that states that words that semantically go together are more often than not linearly close to one another. The answer, it seems, is that this makes it easier to understand what is being said and easier to express what you have in mind, or so the scientists tell us. My daughter and sister-in-law read this and were surprised to find that this kind of thing passes for insight, but it seems that it does. More interesting still, is the desire to see this surprising new finding as bearing on Chomsky's claims about universal grammar. It seems that we finally have evidence that languages have something in common, namely the tendency to put things that semantically go together linearly close to one another. Finally a real universal.

The astute reader will note that once again universal here is understood in Greenberg's terms, not Chomsky's. Happily, Ted Gibson notes as much (to, what I take to be the apparent disappointment of the interviewer) when asked how this stuff bears on Chomsky's claims (here). As he notes, it is largely at right angles to the relevant issues concerning Chomsky universals.

I now think that there is really no way to flush this misconception out of the intellectual cogno-sphere. For reasons that completely elude me, people refuse to think about Universals in anything but Grennbergian terms. I suspect that this is partly due to strong desire to find that Chomsky is wrong. And given that his big claim concerns universal grammar and given that it is not that hard to find that languages robustly differ in their surface properties, it seems pretty easy to show that Chomsky's claims were not only wrong, but obviously so. This fits well into a certain kind of political agenda: not only is Chomsky a political naif, but he is also a scientific one. If only he had bothered looking at the facts rather than remain blinkered by his many preconceptions. Of course, if Chomsky universals are not Greenberg universals then this simple minded dismissal collapses. That's one reason why, IMO, the confusion will be with us for a long time. It's a confusion that pays dividends.

There are several others as well. You all already know that I believe that Empiricism cannot help confusing the two kinds of universals, as Greenberg universals are the only kinds that the Eishly inclined can feel comfortable with. But this may be too fancy an account for why this stuff gets such widespread coverage in the popular press. For the latter, I think the simple desire to sink Chomsky suffices.

At any rate, for those that care, it's hard to believe that anyone will find this "discovery" surprising. Who would have thought that keeping semantically significant units close to one another could be useful. Sure surprised me.