Pinker and Jackendoff

[Andrew Carnie]

If any one is interested, you might look at a review I wrote back in 2000
of Fritz Newmeyer's book on Functionalism. I asserted there that Chomsky
had become a functionalist (http://linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-57.html)
due to the fact that he was essentially claiming  that the interesting bits
of language variation all fell out of interfaces with semantics and
phonology.  This  assertion was met with a great deal of scorn and
disbelief, (and a denial in a private email from Noam himself).
There is also a small amount of discussion of this idea in my review of
the Darnell Volumes, that I co-wrote with Norma Mendoza Denton. It appeared
in JLing. I still think it's true, and I think Stephen's observations
below are right on target.

Best,

AC



On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Stephen Wechsler wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	/ \			Andrew Carnie, Ph.D.
       /   \	  		Assoc. Professor of Linguistics
     	  / \    		Department of Linguistics
     	 /   \			Douglass 200E, University of Arizona
    	    / \			Tucson, AZ 85721
	   /   \
				Tel: (520) 621 2802  Cell: (520) 971 1166
				http://linguistics.arizona.edu/~carnie