The appeal of P&P

[Andreas Kathol]

Dear all,

I hate to raise some issues that will make poor Carl spend even more
time responding to postings to this list ..., but here it goes:

I'd like to inject another thought into this discussion, which I
believe has been missing so far. If we want to understand why it is
that Chomskyan linguists have been playing fast and loose with formal
rigor and citation etiquette, I don't think it's because P&P attracts
a greater proportion of jerks than other frameworks. Rather, I'd like
to submit that it has to do with the fact that Chomskyan linguistics
is at some level engaged in a different enterprise than many of its
alternatives. More than questions such as whether LF or traces exist,
the Chomskyan enterprise is characterized by the persistent belief in
the innateness hypothesis and its implementation in the form of the
principles and parameters model. Part of what has attracted so many
people to the P&P model (and keeps them loyal to it, even in times of
great intellectual uncertainty) is that as a practitioner of Chomskyan
linguistics, one is made to believe that one is part of a Grand Quest
for the very essence of what has been portrayed to be the Great
Mystery, namely what makes language learnable. For many people, lack
of formal precision (or even empirical mispredictions) seem to become
relatively insignificant in light of the enormity of the task of
uncovering the Big Picture behind human language. I think this also
explains why so few Chomskyans are particularly worried about the
time-dependent nature of truth (which Carl has pointed out).  If
something is proposed/discovered as part of the Grand Quest, then for
a lot of Chomskyan this immediately seems to endow it with a veneer of
scientific legitimacy, whereas if the same proposal/discovery is made
in a different context that does not pursue the greater purpose of the
Chomskyan enterprise, then it looks accidental and without the stamp
of noteworthiness that only a greater purpose can bestow.

I'm not saying this to condone the reprehensible behavior that has
been discussed on this list; I just want to point out to what extent
human nature and the power of the communual experience of pursuing
so-called "deep questions" have shaped the intellectual culture that
has been bemoaned in the recent postings.

At the danger of stepping on the toes of those adherents of HPSG that
actually (still) harbor sympathies for the P&P view of linguistic
knowledge, I think that Chomskyan linguistics will only begin to lose
market share when it becomes clear that the P&P model is truly
untenable as a theory of language acquisition. At that point, it will
no longer be possible to defend the kind of hypertrophied analyses
that characterize P&P/MP by appealing to innate linguistic knowledge
that would make those analyses cognitively plausible. Chomskyan
linguistics seems to have conceded long ago that it doesn't have
anything interesting to say about language processing, but it still
desperately clings to language acquisition as the one source for any
claims re. cognitive plausibility.

The upshot of this is that more than pointing out mispredictions or
lack of formal precision, the real challenge (and one that Chomskyans
of influence may be more likely to take seriously) will come from
evidence that the P&P model is neither necessary nor sufficient for
explaining language acquisition. I'm aware of some work that takes on
this task from inside linguistics (for instance Culicover's recent
work), but I suspect that ultimately it'll have to come from outside
of linguistics, i.e., such fields as psychology and neuroscience. I
for one would like to have a better sense of the work in those areas
that already poses a direct challenge to the innateness hypothesis and
P&P. Suggestions?

  --A