On nonobjects of syntactic study

[Dan Everett]

I hope that what follows below in this posting will provoke discussion on
objects of study in linguistics. I am posting to both
linguistlist and FUNKNET, so I apologize for multiple receptions of the
letter. This is a very condensed form of a thesis I am
currently developing in book form, so feedback would be personally useful,
in addition to what I believe the benefits of such a discussion
would be for linguists more generally.

The basic thesis is that in a Chomskyan/Cartesian linguistics there is in
principle no object of study. Alternatively, there is in-principle no
way at getting at that object, however clear it may sound conceptually.

Here goes:  Chomsky claims that the object of study in syntax is I-language
or, to use
 an older term, speaker competence. What is this supposed to be? It is an
internal *grammar* (not language - whether of the 'I-' or 'E-' variety - of
any type widely accepted in Linguistics). Such
a grammar is  necessarily a Cartesian construct based on assumptions about
the mind, e.g.
that  there is a mind and that it is inside the head (instead of, for
example, between members of a society). What could count as evidence for
this Cartesian
construct/grammar? All and only phenomena which have no nongrammatical
explanation. What
 sorts of phenomena will have this property? Just those linguistic-like
phenomena
 with no explanation in terms of history, function, sociolinguistics,
phonetics,
 semantics, culture, sex, baldness, etc. (this list is ultimately
'everything
 but grammar'). How do we recognize which phenomena are grammar-only in this
 sense? We do not. We have not. We will not. We cannot.

And the problem of recognition here is not merely hard. It is in-principle
impossible.
This is because to know that this or that fact is 'pure grammar',
uncontaminated
by nongrammatical factors, would require knowledge of everything about that
fact, i.e. just everything.

 Therefore, there is not, nor could there be, an object of study for an
Cartesian-Chomskyan
 research program. There are only aspects of study (hence the
appropriateness
 of the title of a certain syntax book from 1965). What could syntacticians
study, then, if not a Cartesian or mental grammar?
That answer is easy: whatever we find useful to study. Ergo, the guiding
principles for linguistic
 theory are more likely to be found in Pragmatism (James, Peirce, Dewey, CI
Lewis, Rorty, Quine, Putnam, Wittgenstein), not in Cartesianism, especially
as
developed in Chomskyan linguistics.

 -- Dan Everett
    Department of Linguistics
    University of Manchester