12.1796, Disc: On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-1796. Thu Jul 12 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.1796, Disc: On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study

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1)
Date:  Wed, 11 Jul 2001 22:20:51 +0200
From:  Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro <jlmendi at posta.unizar.es>
Subject:  Re: 12.1785, Disc: On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study

2)
Date:  Wed, 11 Jul 2001 23:02:24 -0400
From:  Chris Johnson <chrajohn at indiana.edu>
Subject:  Re: 12.1785, Disc: On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 11 Jul 2001 22:20:51 +0200
From:  Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro <jlmendi at posta.unizar.es>
Subject:  Re: 12.1785, Disc: On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study

>From:  "Dan Everett" <Dan.Everett at man.ac.uk>
>
>I hope that what follows below in this posting will provoke discussion on
>objects of study in linguistics. I am posting to both
>LINGUIST List 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).

Nope.
The object of study of what you have inadequately called Chomskyan/Cartesian
linguistics is a ***natural object***: i.e., a state, a property of the human
mind/brain.

Here is what Chomsky actually says, in an appropriate context (To make things
easy I quote only from Chomsky's recent 'New Horizons in the Study of Language
and Mind' , Cambridge University Press, 2000):

"The faculty of language can be regarded as a 'language organ' in the sense in
which scientists speak of the visual system, or immune system, or circulatory
system, as organs of the body" (...) "We assume further that the language
organ is like others in that its basic character is an expression of the
genes. How that happens remains a distant prospect for inquiry, but we can
investigate the genetically-determined 'initial state' of the language faculty
in other ways. Evidently, each language is the result of the interplay of two
factors: the initial state and the course of experience. We can think of the
initial state as a 'language acquisition device' that takes experience as
'input' and gives the language as an 'output' - an 'output' that is internally
 represented in the mind/brain" (p. 4).

> What could count as evidence for
>this Cartesian construct/grammar? All and only phenomena which have no
>nongrammatical explanation.

No. As Chomsky goes on saying, both the 'input' and the 'output' are open to
examination:

"we can study the course of experience [the process of language acquisition,
JLM] and the properties of the languages that are acquired. What is learned in
this way can tell us quite a lot about the initial state that mediates between
them" (p. 4).

Then, there is no limit to the different types of data that may be useful in
such inquiry (grammatical, psychological, neurological, etc.). The only
condition being falsability.

>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.

I agree. We cannot know what is pure-grammatical a priori, but the notion of
'pure grammar' does not appear in Chomsky's writings, to my knowledge.

>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.

Again I agree, but it is not the matter.
You are constructing your thesis on the assumption that the object of study
of Chomkyan linguistics (let's dispense with Descartes by now) is an ideal
pure grammar, but it isn't.

Let's see again what 'the Master' says about I-language and grammar:

"The approach I have been outlining is concerned with the faculty of language:
its initial state, and the states it assumes. Suppose Peter's language organ
is in state L. We can think of L as Peter's 'internalized language'" (p. 5).

When Chomsky uses 'I' he is meaning internal, individual, and intensional
(the characterisation of a function in intension), not 'purely grammatical'
nor 'uncontamined by nongrammatical factors':

"When I speak of language here, that is what I mean. So understood, a
language is something like 'the way we speak and understand', one traditional
conception of grammar. Adapting a traditional term to a new framework, we can
call the theory of Peter's language the 'grammar' of his language.
Peter's language determines an infinite array of expressions, each with its
sound and meaning. In technical terms, Peter's language generates the
expressions of his language. The theory of this language is therefore called
a generative grammar" (p. 5).

So, the object of study is not 'grammar' but some system of knowledge that
uncontroversially lives in our minds, in our brains. A 'grammar' is a theory
(idealised as all theories about something in nature) of that state of the
mind/brain.

>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?

As I have shown a 'mental grammar' may be considered a natural object and
then a licit object for scientific inquiry. But this is only true if we use
the word 'mental' in a proper sense (i.e. a non-dualistic, non-metaphysical
sense).

As Chomsky again puts it:

"The approach is mentalistic, but in what should be an uncontroversial sense.
It is concerned with 'mental aspects of the world', which stand alongside its
mechanical, chemical, optical, and  other aspects. It undertakes to study a
real object in the natural world -the brain, its states, and its functions -
and thus to move the study of mind towards eventual integration with the
biological sciences" (p.6).

What Chomsky is saying here is that the adjective 'mental' must be used just
as we use 'chemical', 'optical', etc. When we say that some events or
processes, etc. are chemical or electrical we are not including a metaphysical
division. We are just grouping various aspects of the world for the purpose of
investigation. Chomsky uses the terms 'mental' and 'mind' in the same way:

"By 'mind', I mean the mental aspects of the world, with no concern for
defining the notion more closely and no expectation that we will find some
interesting kind of unity or boundaries, any more than elsewhere; no one
cares to sharpen the boundaries of 'the chemical'" (p. 75).

>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.

Non sequitur. The premise is fine, but the conclusion is untenable. All the
great thinkers you have mentioned have been interested in the use of language,
in the ways language relates to society, truth, logic, and the world, but they
have not said a word about the structure of language (i.e., about the
properties of the mind/brain that make it not only possible, but just like
it is).

Jose-Luis Mendivil
Universidad de Zaragoza
Spain


-------------------------------- Message 2 -------------------------------

Date:  Wed, 11 Jul 2001 23:02:24 -0400
From:  Chris Johnson <chrajohn at indiana.edu>
Subject:  Re: 12.1785, Disc: On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study

At 2:25 +0000 7/11/01, Dan Everett wrote:

>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.


This is an extremely interesting issue.  I've been struggling a bit
with related issues myself lately, so I've got some (muddled) ideas.
Basically, I guess I see language as a social thing, but to
understand how people participate in this social institution we have
to understand how social convention is reflected in the cognitive
abilities, systems and behaviors of the individual speaker.
Linguistic competence is a kind of bridge between social conventions
(existing out there in some nebulous, abstract social space) and
what's in the head.

I just read Howard Wettstein's book "Has Semantics Rested on a
Mistake? and Other Essays" (1991, Stanford University Press).  The
basic point of the last few essays is the contrast the Fregean
approach to linguistics semantics, where language is considered
thought externalized, from a more Wittgensteinian approach to
language as a set of institutionalized conventions, as a social
practice.

Imagine a Martian showed up at your doorstep speaking English.  This
Martian has a radically different sort of brain-like thing than we
do.  Nevertheless, it's able to use language in exactly the same way
that we do: it would be able to tell that "John saw the badger" is
grammatical but "John badger saw the" is not, it could (in principle,
given enough knowledge about the world) recognize when "John saw the
badger was true and when it was false, it would know that if "Every
man saw the badger" is true then so is "John saw the badger", it
would know whether it was appropriate in a particular context to say
"a badger" or "the badger" to communicate about a specific
individual, etc.

Now, due to its radically different mental functioning, the Martian's
ability to use the English language is implemented in a very
different way than yours.  It uses a different sort of parser, it
chooses between two allophones by consciously following a set of
if-then rules rather than by using whatever possibly
constraint-based, non-conscious phonological mechanisms we uses, etc.
Despite these difference, we would be inclined to say that the
Martian was competent user of English.

For a more real world example, think of speakers of English who
acquired it as a second language as adults.  It's generally accepted
by linguists that there are major differences between the way the
mind of a native speaker comprehends and produces utterances in a
language and the way the mind of a second language speaker does.  Yet
if the second language speaker's usage conforms enough to that of
native speakers, we say that that speaker is a competent speaker of
the language.

The Chomskyan competence-performance distinction is basically the
same as the mathematical distinction between a function and an
algorithm.*

Consider the function n^2 ("n squared").  The function itself is
simply an infinite set of ordered pairs: {<1,1>, <2,4>, <3,9>,
<4,16>,...}.  There are lots of algorithms that compute this
function. For instance, "multiply n by itself" or "add up the first n
odd numbers".

One might say that both the human English speaker and the Martian
English speaker are able to compute the same linguistic function, but
they do it with radically different algorithms. So, one idea I
briefly entertained was that Chomky's "competence models" were simply
accounts of the social conventions that made up a particular
language.  That doesn't actually work, however.  This
function/algorithm view doesn't exactly capture the relationship
between a language as a social institution and a speaker's ability to
use that language.

The reason has to do with the sorts of arguments proponents of the
"new theory of reference" like Putnam and Kripke came up with.  Take
Putnam's "elm" vs. "beech" example.  Presumably, social convention
maps the word "elm" to one sort of tree and "beech" to a different
sort.  A sentence "That is an elm" is true if the indicated tree
really is of the type the speech community associates with "elm".
The individual speaker, however, doesn't have to know anything at all
about the type of tree "elm" is mapped to in order to use the word
competently.  He/she might not be able to distinguish elms from
beeches.  Similarly, one doesn't have to know which guy linguistic
convention associates with "Aristotle" in order to competently use
and understand the name.  So it seems to me that linguistic
competence is a weaker notion than social convention.

Thus, it seems to me that there are three sorts of accounts of language here:

(1) an account of linguistic convention (e.g., a set of mappings like
{..., <"Aristotle", the actual flesh and blood guy in ancient
Greece>,...})

(2) an account of linguistic competence (e.g., Maybe a function that
maps "Aristotle" to the descriptive meaning "the individual which the
speaker's speech community calls 'Aristotle'"... I don't particularly
like this formulation.  Maybe the competence function maps the word
"Aristotle" to a rule associating conditions with objects in the
world: {<community calls OBJ_123 "Aristotle, OBJ_123>, <community
calls OBJ_7 "Aristotle", OBJ_7>,...}.)

(3) an account of linguistic performance/processing (either in one
particular speaker or generally in human beings) (e.g., maybe
something *very* roughly like "When the person hears sounds the
phonological recognizer recognizes as /eirIstOtl/, the mind searches
the lexicon for that phonological string; if it finds it, the
associated representation of an individual is activated.  If it
doesn't a new representation of a discourse referent is created and
attached to this phonological representation, as well as some default
assumptions about animacy and humanness.... etc., etc.)

(1) is essentially E-Language, while (2) and (3) are the competence
and performance aspects of a study of I-Language.

There are obviously complex relationships between these different
levels.  Linguistic competence is something like the rules and
conditions an individual speaker has to conform to for their
linguistic practice to count as part of the social institution we
call the English language.  Linguistic performance is related to
linguistic competence as an algorithm is to a function.  Linguistic
convention is strongly influenced by our cognitive machinery, since
most of the members of a speech community have essentially the same
sorts of perceptual categories, conceptual systems, language specific
abilities, etc.

Thus, one object of study for linguists is something like the way a
social institution (a language) is reflected in the head of a native
speaker - both what a speaker has to know (or how they have to
behave, if you don't like describing linguistic competence as
"knowing that") to participate in the social practice of that
language (competence) and how that speaker's brain actually performs
the various tasks involved in language use.

* Actually, things are a bit more complex.  If a function is an
infinite, as n^2 and the function mapping sentences to their truth
conditions are, it can't be specified by simply listing the set of
ordered pairs.  Thus, one way of specifying a function is to use an
algorithm that computes it.  Many generativists and truth-conditional
semanticists hope that the algorithms they use to specify the
linguistic competence functions they're trying to account for will
also suggest something about what a processing model of language
would look like.  (Example: Many supporters of Discourse
Representation Theory see the intermediate representations in their
theory, discourse representation structures, as being in some way
related to the mental representations we use while
comprehending/producing discourse.  One can try to flesh this out in
a bunch of ways.)
-
Chris Johnson                 	         chrajohn at indiana.edu


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