25.4363, Review: Ling Theories; Syntax; Text/Corpus Ling: Sampson, Babarczy (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4363. Mon Nov 03 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4363, Review: Ling Theories; Syntax; Text/Corpus Ling: Sampson, Babarczy (2013)

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Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 14:45:28
From: Qizhong Chang [zephyr_chang at hotmail.com]
Subject: Grammar Without Grammaticality

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-5288.html

AUTHOR: Geoffrey  Sampson
AUTHOR: Anna  Babarczy
TITLE: Grammar Without Grammaticality
SUBTITLE: Growth and Limits of Grammatical Precision
SERIES TITLE: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 254
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Qizhong Chang, National University of Singapore

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY 

This book is a monograph comprising fifteen chapters explaining and giving
evidence for a refreshing and novel view of the nature of human language,
while questioning notions of grammaticality and empiricism that are widely
accepted by most linguists. Other common and recurring themes are the authors’
arguments against the generative enterprise, rejecting the idea of using the
linguist’s own intuitions as data, and warning against a Euro-centric view of
language. The book draws extensively on data from several corpora and adopts a
structural annotation scheme (SUSANNE) created by one of the authors (Sampson,
1995).

English provides most of the empirical material, and is both complemented and
contrasted with other languages, such as Old Chinese, Malay and Indonesian.
Most of the chapters in the book have been published as standalone papers
previously, as part of an ongoing research program. The book is organized as
follows:

1.  Chapter 1: Introduction
2.  Chapter 2: The bounds of grammatical refinement
3.  Chapter 3: Where should annotation stop?
4.  Chapter 4: Grammar without grammaticality
5.  Chapter 5: Replies to our critics
6.  Chapter 6: Grammatical description meets spontaneous speech
7.  Chapter 7: Demographic correlates of speech complexity
8.  Chapter 8: The structure of children’s writing
9.  Chapter 9: Child writing and discourse organization 
10.  Chapter 10: Simple grammars and new grammars
11.  Chapter 11: The case of the vanishing perfect
12.  Chapter 12: Testing a metric for parse accuracy
13.  Chapter 13: Linguistics empirical and unempirical
14.  Chapter 14: William Gladstone as linguist
15.  Chapter 15: Minds in uniform

In Chapter 1, the authors set out to develop the idea that languages have
grammar, but not ‘grammaticality’. They show that an early grammarian,
Meiklejohn’s (1902) failure to define a set of non-sentences (sentences that
we consider ‘ungrammatical’) “...makes his description more faithful to the
fundamental nature of human language than a theory that specifies a contrast
between “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” word-sequences could be” (Sampson &
Babarczy, 2013:5). The authors’ view grammar as a leaky system, stating that
grammar is best described as “behavior patterns but no binding rules”. Sampson
and Babarczy (S&B henceforth) claim that it is impossible to define
grammaticality in the way logicians and generative grammarians attempt to do
so, for there is no common logic that languages share -- it is not true that
English and other human languages express a common range of
thought-structures. To illustrate this, S&B show examples of vagueness in
meaning in Indonesian, and Old Chinese. They also expect languages to continue
to develop new thought-structures, with the accompanying grammatical
innovation. Therefore, it would be pointless to talk of grammaticality.

S&B sets out to “enquire into the growth and limits of grammatical precision”
(Sampson & Babarczy, 2013:24). To do this, they ask questions such as:

-  If the grammatical structure of a language is developed by the community
that uses it, and acquired by individual speakers, along lines that are not
prescribed in advance, how refined does that structure become?

-  Are there particular areas of grammar which are less, or more, precisely
defined than other areas?

-  Do the answers to some of these questions differ for written and spoken
modes of language?

-  Can we make generalizations about the path taken by children toward the
levels of grammatical refinement achieved by adults?

According to S&B, the answers to these questions lie in the grammatical
annotation of corpora data, instead of introspection and intuition.

In Chapter 2, the authors describe an experiment that tests the reliability of
the grammatical annotation scheme SUSANNE: they compare the results when the
scheme is applied independently to the same set of samples by separate
analysts. Three conclusions fall out from the exercise: firstly, human error
is more significant than definitional limitations; secondly, structural
ambiguity is often pragmatically nonsignificant; and lastly, assigning
functional categories is especially problematic.

Chapter 3 discusses various ways to approach indeterminacy in parsing
structure, and the common/potential problems annotators face. S&B suggest that
linguistic annotation ought not to be made dependent on linguistic theorizing,
even when certain theories claim to have the answers to these problems of
indeterminacy.

In Chapter 4, the authors discuss in detail their proposal and why they do not
adhere to a simple notion of ‘(un)grammaticality’. They use the analogy that
ungrammatical sentences are simply friends that one has not yet met. That is
to say, certain sentences deemed to be ‘ungrammatical’ now might become widely
used in the future. S&B objects to Chomsky’s (1957) claim that “the
fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate the
grammatical sequences...from the ungrammatical sequences...” and do not
believe that there is a ‘range of things we cannot say’. The authors offer a
piece of statistical analysis to prove their point: in a graph showing tagma
frequency against proportion of tokens, they show that there is a significant
number of distinct daughter-sequences which only appear once in a sample of
131, 302 words. In other words, constructions that are rarely observed, will
together make up a large proportion of a language. These constructions are
usually not found in grammatical descriptions of those languages. S&B also
criticize the ‘unscientific’ idea that speakers of a language have
introspective or intuitive access to aspects of its grammar: this could be
idiosyncratic to each speaker, and there is no real reason to assume that
patterns in a speaker’s intuitive grammaticality judgments reflect realities
of his language. Arguments on empiricism and how intuition has led linguists
astray are continued in Chapter 13. Chapter 4 ends with a discussion of the
‘realistic’ kind of descriptive (rather than prescriptive) grammar that
linguists should be concerned with. The authors claim that the endeavor of
trying to define ‘psychologically real’ grammars has not been very productive
thus far.

In Chapter 5, S&B attempts to address known criticisms of their controversial
proposal. These include objections from Pullum (2007) and Müller (2008). They
also include support for their proposal from other scholars: for instance,
Stefanowitsch (2007) believes that sequences commonly seen by linguists to be
‘ungrammatical’ often turn out to be absent from real-life usage not because
of grammar, but because they mean things that people don’t want to say. The
chapter, and also a large part of the remaining sections of the book,
ultimately ends up being a critique of Universal Grammar. S&B claim that
“...there are linguists for whom the concept of grammaticality is not an a
priori assumption, but rather an implication which they need to believe in,
because it follows as a consequence of a more abstract claim about human
language to which they are attached” (Sampson & Babarczy, 2013:107). The
authors also take issue with the fact that Universal Grammar has been poorly
defended and documented in the linguistics literature, proponents not having
provided many substantive and specific universals of language. S&B are also
opposed to linguistic nativism, or Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis. 

Chapter 6 gives us a good illustration of how spontaneous speech produces even
more variant grammatical structures than written language, from an annotation
point of view (using SUSANNE). This is an extension of S&B’s discussion of
limited grammatical precision of spoken language. In Chapter 7, the authors
examine demographic variables such as social class, gender and age, as well as
speakers’ region of origin. Using data from the British National Corpus, they
plotted mean embedding index against age, and obtained a steadily rising
graph. To S&B, this shows a behavior of ‘lifelong learning’: that the process
of language acquisition is a never-ending one; as opposed to the innatist
belief that there is a critical period for language acquisition. The
innateness hypothesis is further explored in Chapters 8 and 9, which discuss
children’s writing and discourse. The authors provide evidence to show that
there is NO innate programme under which grammar unfolds in a child’s mind in
a fixed sequence.

In Chapter 10, S&B take issue with McWhorter’s claim that “the world’s
simplest grammars are creole grammars” (McWhorter, 2001). Again, they use
examples from Old Chinese and Malay/Indonesian, and Akkadian (from Deutscher,
2000) to show that there is no reason to expect all languages with long
histories to contain any minimum structural complexity. They treat the
development of novel logical or abstract concepts, and loss of existing
categories, as normal aspects of the life of all human languages. Chapter 11
provides a case study of the vanishing Perfect distinction. This constitutes
evidence that languages are constantly evolving, thus supporting the authors’
claims that there is no ‘grammaticality’.

The remaining chapters of the book compare different metrics for parse
accuracy (Chapter 12), discuss empiricism in linguistics (Chapter 13), and
discuss linguistic relativism, Eurocentrism, and linguistic diversity (Chapter
14 and 15).

EVALUATION

An important merit of this book is that it asks linguists to confront their
fundamental beliefs about language and approaches to research. The book
bravely challenges the most established of linguistic theories -- the
Generative framework -- and holds its own. The authors’ decision to devote a
full chapter (Chapter 5) to answering their critics is a very welcome one,
given the controversial nature of their proposal. However, some of their
objections are too vague to be convincing. For instance, in their rejection of
Meurers’s (2007) analogy of language as path-making in a mountainous area
(where mountain peaks and other unpassable terrain represent
ungrammaticality), the authors say “…we know that this is a logically-possible
model; but we believe it to be the wrong model”, without pointing out
explicitly what is wrong with Meurers’s model (Sampson & Babarczy, 2013:106).
Some of the authors’ criticisms can also be construed as contradictory to
their own position. In an example about the fallibility of using intuition as
primary data, the authors  criticize linguists who ‘invent’ data, by quoting
Hanks (2013): “There is a huge difference between consulting one’s intuitions
to explain data and consulting one’s intuitions to invent data. Every
scientist engages in introspection to explain data. No reputable scientist
(outside linguistics) invents data in order to explain it.” It could very well
be the case, using the authors’ own analogy, that these ‘invented’ sentences
are simply ‘unmet friends’. 

The diversity of approaches adopted in this monograph -- from language
parsing, annotation, language and mind, language acquisition, child language,
to typology -- ensures that it will be relevant for linguists of any
persuasion. For instance, Chapter 6 on the primacy of spontaneous speech to
linguistic research, and Chapter 10 on how creole grammars are not simple
grammars, covers themes explored in research on emerging varieties of English.

A significant number of the 15 chapters in this book come from papers
previously published by one or both of the authors. Together, the majority of
these chapters form a coherent, well-researched and detailed research program.
However, at least two of these chapters look like they are ‘shoehorned’ into
the book. Chapter 12, for instance, is a detailed comparison of the Leaf
Ancestor metric and Grammar Evaluation Interest Group (GEIG) metric, which
concludes in favor of the former. This comparison is probably too technical
for the uninitiated and does not seem necessary for the authors’ proposal. The
larger point made in this chapter is that most computational linguists accept
the GEIG metric over the Leaf Ancestor metric, despite the authors’ claiming
that the latter is superior. They believe that the only reason the GEIG metric
is preferred over the Leaf Ancestor metric is that there is “authority” behind
the former. This, at best, only lends indirect support to their overarching
argument “…that the grammaticality concept has been accepted by linguists more
generally: it has appeared to have authority behind it” (Sampson & Babarczy
2013:236); and in the first place, is a claim that cannot be objectively
verified. I think the point could have been made more concisely. Chapter 14,
an entire chapter about Gladstone’s writing about language, also seems odd and
out of place; or at best, it is probably too long just to make the point that
“intellectual advance requires not only individuals who produce good ideas but
also an audience ready to receive them” (Sampson & Babarczy 2013:295).

This book is generally an excellent piece of writing, and suffers only from
very infrequent spelling and formatting errors. Some chapters can be read
independently of the others; but should be read together in sequence for a
more coherent picture. The book is meant for advanced students and scholars of
linguistics, who have experience in research, and a broad understanding of
different subfields of linguistics, as well as a certain level of familiarity
with the historical development of major theories within the field. The
analyses are firmly grounded in a linguistic annotation framework, and cover
much empirical ground. Overall, this is an important work that all linguists
should read (even/especially if they are generative grammarians).

REFERENCES

Chomsky, N. 1957. “Syntactic Structures”. Gravenhage: Mouton.

Deutscher, G. 2000. “Syntactic Change in Akkadian: the evolution of sentential
complementation”. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hanks, P. 2013. “Lexical Analysis: norms and exploitations”. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.

McWhorter, J. 2001. The world’s simplest grammars are creole grammars.
“Linguistic Typology” 5: 125-166.

Meiklejohn, J. 1886. “The English Language: its grammar, history and
literature”. 23rd ed., London: Alfred M. Holden.

Meurers, W. 2007. Advancing linguistics between the extremes. “Corpus
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory” 3: 49-55.

Müller, S. 2008. “Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: eine Einführung” (2nd
revised edition). Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.

Pullum, G. 2007. Ungrammaticality, rarity, and corpus use. “Corpus Linguistics
and Linguistic Theory” 3: 33-47.

Sampson, G. 1995. “English for the Computer: the SUSANNE corpus and analytic
scheme.” Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sampson, G. & Babarczy, A. 2013. “Grammar Without Grammaticality: Growths and
Limits of Grammatical Precision”. De Gruyter: Mouton.

Stefanowitsch, A. 2007. Linguistics beyond grammaticality. “Corpus Linguistics
and Linguistic Theory” 3: 57-71.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Qizhong Chang is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Linguistics at the
National University of Singapore. He is interested in Syntax, Syntax and new
varieties of English.








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