The appeal of P&P

[Ash Asudeh]

Hi everyone

At the risk of getting flamed, I'd like address this already lengthy
thread by starting out with the following quote:

"The study of generative grammar represented a significant shift of focus
in the approach to problems of language. Put in the simplest terms ... the
shift of focus was from behavior or the products of behavior to states of
the mind/brain that enter into behavior. If one choses to focus attention
on this latter topic, the central concern becomes knowledge of language:
its nature, origins, and use.

The thre basic questions that arise, then, are these:
(i) What constitutes knowledge of language?
(ii) How is knowledge of language acquired?
(iii) How is knowledge of language put to use?"
(Chomsky, 1986, p.3)

In fact, the title of the Chomsky book in question, is the best
cocktail-party line I know for telling people just what the hell I'm
doing.

Although I have plenty of disagreements with Chomsky as a social
phenomenon (to be fair, he is not as much to blame for this as people
whose sole scientific working hypothesis is "H0: Chomsky is right."), I
think that this is still the most elegant statement of what generative
grammar is about.

Now, granted that practice hasn't always lived up to this statement.
Granted that the whole "innateness hypothesis" may not even be the best
way to think about this.*(footnote). However, I think the goals of
linguistic theory are pretty well laid out here.

The problem is, as Bob pointed out and Raul as well: HPSG hasn't had much
to say about language acquisition (I know of one paper by Georgia Green),
and it hasn't had much to see about systematic language typology and
universals. What's universal? Some types? Some features? WHICH ones?

*footnote: Actually, I don't find the Chomsky quote that Dick included in
his message so astonishing. There is a perfectly sensible reading of
Chomsky and Fodor (I think) whereby all they're saying is that the
capacity for language is i) species-specific, and ii) domain-specific. It
should be pointed out that the connectionist book, "Rethinking
Innateness", that Lara mentioned is an (attempted) refutation of ii), and
not i). In fact, it doesn't really refute ii), because it's unclear that
the neural networks in question work for other domains, and it certainly
doesn't refute i), because the neural networks in question are posited
only for language acquisition, and this is presumably a human trait. One
weakness of the book is that it has no explanation of *why* only humans
have language, given that lots of other things, from chimps to giant
squids have neural networks.


 (by the way, I certainly
agree with C himself, as quoted by Dick Hudson, that there's a sensible
reading of him and Fodor according to which the claim is only that there
is some species-specific



On Tue, 1 May 2001, Dick Hudson wrote:

> Andreas Kathol:
>
> "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.
>
> ## By chance, I've just read the following quotation from Chomsky himself
> cited on another list. Personally I find it astonishing, but it's highly
> relevant to Andreas's interesting message.
>
>   I might add that "autonomy of syntax" is a term I do not think I have
>   ever used, except in reaction to references to some alleged "autonomy
>   of syntax" thesis, sometimes attributed to me. There is a one-sided
>   debate about "autonomy of syntax"; one-sided in that only critics
>   of the alleged thesis take part. There are a number of such debates,
>   including the debate over what critics call the "innateness
>   hypothesis" (also often attributed to me, Fodor, and others). I
>   have no idea what the phrase is supposed to mean and correspondingly
>   have never advocated any such hypothesis--beyond the truism that there
>   is some language-relevant distinction, to be discovered, between my
>   granddaughter and her pet kitten (monkey, rock, etc.). (Chomsky,
>   interviewed in Stemmer 1999: 400)
>
> Andreas again:
> "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?"
>
> ## There's a great deal of work in psycholinguistics that challenges the
> innateness hypothesis, though I'm afraid I'm not the person to guide you
> through it - I just read it and  then forget it. (I'm copying below a few
> bibliographical hints that I prepared for undergraduates.) My impression is
> that most psychologists aren't impressed by the innateness hypothesis, and
> that psycholinguists are deeply divided, just like syntacticians.
> 	One particularly interesting psychologist (in my opinion) is Michael
> Tomasello (currently at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig), who has been
> very influential in Cognitive Linguistics. His thesis (1992) showed that
> children acquire syntactic patterns in relation to specific lexical items -
> they learn that EAT takes an object, but don't generalise to DRINK (not his
> examples, but you get the point). This strikes me as much closer in spirit
> to HPSG than to MP, and makes at least some parts of syntax much easier to
> explain without innateness. As I'm sure you all know, other people in
> Cognitive Linguistics have argued that particular 'patterns' found in
> language (e.g. Binding, Extraction islands) are applications of more
> general areas of cognition.
>
> ===============================
> Bibliography on alternatives to innateness:
>
> Bates, Elizabeth. 1997. On the nature and nurture of language. To appear in
> E. Bizzi, P. Catissano and V. Volterra (eds.) Frontiere della Biologia. The
> Brain of Homo Sapiens, Roma: Giovanni Trecani. [prepublished version]
> Downloadable as .pdf file at http://crl.ucsd.edu/~bates/.
>
> 	This dazzlingly clear and accessible article defends emergentism' as an
> alternative to both innatism and empiricism: grammar emerges as the only
> possible solution to the problem of mapping a rich set of meanings onto a
> limited speech channel, heavily constrained by the limits of memory,
> perception and motor planning. Grammar and lexicon are parts of a single
> unified system. Considers phonetics/phonology, semantics, grammar and
> pragmatics separately, showing for each how it is integrated within general
> cognition, and lacks specific modules. Considers evidence from acquisition,
> pathology, brain-imaging and priming experiments.
>
> Bates, Elizabeth; Elman, Jeffrey; Johnson, Mark; Karmiloff-Smith, Annette;
> Parisi, Domenico; Plunkett, Kim. 1998. Innateness and Emergentism. In
> William Bechtel and George Graham (eds.) A Companion to Cognitive Science,
> Oxford: Blackwell. 590-601.
>
> 	Clear, well argued and well documented. Language is emergent', not
> specifically innate (as claimed in strong nativism). "... grammars
> represent the class of possible solutions to the problem of mapping
> hyperdimensional meanings onto a low-dimensional channel, heavily
> constrained by he limits of human information processing."  Thanks to
> recent progress in nonlinear dynamics, multilayer neural networks and
> developmental neurobiology, a theory of language emergence may be round the
> corner. Strong nativism must assume innate representational constraints',
> but these are impossible genetically. More plausible are architectural
> constraints and constraints on timing of developmental events (chronotypic
> constraints'). "... brain development ... appears to involve massive
> overproduction of elements in early life (neurons, axons and synapses),
> followed by a competitive process through which successful elements are
> kept and those that fail are eliminated." They consider and reject
> arguments for strong nativism based on domain specificity (including SLI),
> species specificity, localization and learnability.
> 										
> Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species. The Co-evolution of Language
> and the Human Brain. Penguin, Chapters 1 to 4 (21-143).
>
> 	Clearly and entertainingly written, but intellectually demanding. His main
> idea is that what is special about language is not its complexity but the
> fact that it involves symbols. The reason why animals  don't even have
> simple languages is that they can't learn symbols - all they can learn are
> icons' and indices' (which he explains and contrasts with symbols). He
> rejects both Chomskyan nativism (the Hopeful monster' theory) and simple
> induction; instead he thinks we can learn symbols because our brains
> evolved to do so (especially the prefrontal lobe), and that language has
> evolved so that it only has features that are learnable - so there's no
> mystery. But he also says much, much more .....
>
> Ellis, Nick. 1998. Emergentism, connectionism and language learning.
> Language Learning 48, 631-64.
>
> 	A very clearly written and accessible review of the many "-isms" that are
> relevant to understanding how our first language develops: generative
> linguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics,
> sociolinguistics, connectionism, neurobiology, emergentism and a few more!
> He supports the view that language is emergent', i.e. its special
> characteristics emerge as a result of our experience, rather than being
> innate. He also explains and supports connectionism, which is one of the
> most important theories in modern cognitive psychology because it allows
> very powerful computer systems which come close to behaving' like human
> learners.
>
>
> Dick Hudson
>
> Richard (= Dick) Hudson
>
> Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
> Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
> +44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
> http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
>