Pinker and Jackendoff

[Stephen Wechsler]

I see it as a big shift with respect to innateness.  The new categories
(FLN/FLB) may be similar to the old ones (I-Lg/E-Lg), but the contents
have changed.  From Hauser et al (p. 1574):

"The FLN may approximate a kind of 'optimal solution'... Many of the
details of language that are the traditional focus of linguistic study
(e.g. subjacency, wh-movement, the existence of garden-path sentences)
may represent by-products of this solution, generated automatically by
the neural/computational constraints and the structure of FLB--
components that lie outside of FLN."

In other words, the old "Principles of UG" have vanished, leaving only
recursion itself.  Chomsky seems to be a late convert to a view he
rejected with heat for so many years-- that the 'details of language'
result from interface conditions.

For those syntacticians on the list who don't follow the evolution and
innateness debates and have not read Hauser et al, I recommend it.
Personally I never understood the MP until I read this article.  (I
mean that I could not understand why Chomsky would entertain the
hypotheses on which the MP is based.)  After reading Hauser et al,
suddenly it all fit.

Steve


On Tuesday, August 17, 2004, at 01:16 AM, Shalom Lappin wrote:

> It is not clear to me in what sense Chomsky has changed his view with
> respect
> to the relation between evolution and the design of universal grammar.
> The Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch article postulates a distinction between
> a broad and narrow language faculty, with the former corresponding to
> core grammar (the "computational system") and the latter to interface
> modules. Evolutionary selection is restricted to the latter, with the
> former
> effectively exempted from its influence. This seems to be a
> restatement of
> the I-Language/E-language distinction, with the narrow language faculty
> still carefully protected from evolutionary explanation. Where is the
> shift?
> I must be missing something here. Regards.
>                           Shalom
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 06:46:26PM -0700, dmellow at sfu.ca wrote:
>> Thank you for pointing out these articles.
>>
>> I am rather astonished by Chomsky's apparent change of perspective on
>> the
>> nature of cognition -- moving substantially away from universal
>> grammar and
>> innatism.  Has this shift received much attention (in journals and
>> hallways)
>> among generative syntactians (broadly defined)? Or have we entered
>> something
>> of a post-Chomskyian era in which his shifting hypotheses no longer
>> have as
>> much influence?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Dean Mellow
>> Simon Fraser University
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:54:13 +0100 (BST) rborsley at essex.ac.uk wrote:
>>> Anyone who is interested the current position of minimalism within
>>> syntactic theory should take a look at Pinker and Jackendoff's 'The
>>> faculty of language: What's special about it?', a reply to the
>>> Hauser,
>>> Chomsky and Fitch Cognition article, available from Jackendoff's web
>>> page:
>>
>>>
>>> http://people.brandeis.edu/~jackendo/
>>>
>>> It says all sorts of things that most of us would agree with. It
>>> seems to
>>> me that we sometimes exaggerate the strength of minimalism. It is
>>> coming
>>> under attack by various people who were once quite close to Chomskyan
>>> syntax. (Newmeyer's recent review article in Language provides
>>> another
>>> example.) I think there are some grounds for optimism here.
>>>
>>> Bob Borsley
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Prof. Robert D. Borsley
>>> Department of Language and Linguistics
>>> University of Essex
>>> Wivenhoe Park
>>> COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ, UK
>>>
>>> rborsley at essex.ac.uk
>>> tel: +44 1206 873762
>>> fax: +44 1206 872198
>>> http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rborsley
>>
>>
>>
>