attractions and distractions

[Andrew Carnie]

Hi Ivan,

I had sworn to keep my big trap shut about the issue -- at least on list
-- but since Ivan directly challenges me to, I guess I'll do my best.
My apologies for including all the previous messages, but I'd like to keep
the context intact for purposes of reference.

First my comment, then Ivan's first point.
>
> > With no offense to Shalom and his colleagues intended, the MP-critical
> > NLLT article and book did little to advance the cause for precisely
> > this reason. The valid criticisms in the article were obscured alternately
                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > by incorrect information or by generalizations about social scholarly
> > behavior that were so nastily phrased that no one in their right might
> > would assume that they were guilty of the charged offense. Sociologically
> > speaking the article had precisely the opposite effect of it's intent. It
> > was so nasty, so biased, and so misinformed, that I think MP-adherents are
> > *less* likely to take alternative approaches seriously now than they were
> > before.
>
> Whew... I'd hate to see what you wrote when you DID intend to offend
> someone...  It's funny that you should be so harsh about this work. I was
> talking with David Pesetsky in May about the Johnson-Lappin book and why there
> had been no published response to it. What he said was that (almost all?) the
> objections they raised in the book were the very issues that had already been
> recognized as critical problems for MP and which people were already working
> on. So in David P's view, if I understood him right, the issues raised didn't
> provide grounds for a rejection of MP at all. David P. also suggested that
> this mismatch of assumptions played a role in why no one took on their book
> pointedly. All right. Presumably, David J and Shalom would disagree with this
> assessment, but let's not go there right now.

First as a point of clarification, I was primarily talking about the NLLT
article. I probably should not have referred to the book, I'll admit that
the book address more substantive empirical issues, ones that I'd be happy
to quibble about, but aren't relevant to the discussion here.

I can't presume to know what David Pesetsky thinks, nor was I
present for your conversation, so it is hard for me to respond to
this. However, from your description of his response it sounds not
that different from my central point, which if you'll read my original
post, said that MP adherents are well aware of many of the methodological,
theoretical and empirical problems with the theory/program and don't see
them as necessarily unsurmountable issues. You'll note that I acknowledge
that some of the criticisms were very valid, and ones that we are quite
well aware of. What HPSG and LFG can bring to
the table is not repeated criticisms of the theory/program, but potential
solutions in the form of theoretical tools that have been developed in
your paradigm.


> You may be right that MP-adherents are less likely to take alternative
> approaches seriously now than they were before, but your assessment of the
> research seems at odds with David P's (I'm sure he'll correct me if I have
> misrepresented him). In particular, your charge that their work was `so nasty,
> so biased, and so misinformed' seems at odds with what I took David P to be
> saying.
>
> I'd like to think that I've misunderstood something.  Could it be that you're
> really just talking about the NLLT Topic-Comment exchange, rather than the
> Johnson-Lappin book? Even if that's so, bear in mind that it's one thing to
> say that the NLLT pieces by Shalom, Bob L, and David J were reacted to
> negatively or were perceived as nasty, biased and misinformed; it's quite
> another to assert in a post to this list that you believe they were nasty,
> biased, and misinformed.... These are accusations that someone might
> ask you to defend in points of detail (or else retract....). Enough said.

Re Nasty: It isn't very difficult to defend this point. I think that being
called a "post-modernist hack" in the context of this listserv was pretty
darn nasty. The article softshoes it a bit, but the clear implication of
the article was that anyone who followed MP from GB is either
pseudo-scientific, a mindless drone, or a slave to fashion. I
suspect that JLL would agree that they aren't at all sympathetic to MP
adherents. What I call "nasty", they would probably characterize as
"calling it as it is..." Different names for the same thing.

As to misinformed, Take for example the
issue of programmatic vs. theoretical research paradigms. Chomsky's
minimalist program, although it contains theoretical claims, is not a
theory. It's a program. The theory that most minimalists work in today is
still principles and parameters, it is just guided by a programmatic
statement. No one I know "abandoned" GB theory, we may have *revised* it
(correctly or incorrectly -- that of course is the big empirical question)
according to programmatic goals, but that's quite different from
abandoning a research paradigm as JLL claim. The idea that programmatic
considerations don't play a role in every theory (including LFG and HPSG)
is ridiculous. Given a choice between empirically equal accounts (assuming
that such things exist) where one analysis involved movement and the other
one was non-derivational, which one would an HPSG or LFG person take? That
kind of decision, or any a priori, "Can we do without theoretical device
X" decision is necessarily programmatic. The shift from construction
driven rules to general principles in the shift from EST to GB was
necessarily based on a program for research. The different between MP and
other programmatically driven shifts, is that this one is particularly
explicit that what is going on is programmatic. Every sciencific
paradigm is driven by programs. As one particular piece of misinformation
JLL present they suggest both that MP is an unscientific "theory", and
that it is somehow represents an "abandonment" of GB. Neither of which are
correct. The article makes it sound as if one day we all went out and
burned our copies of LGB, and said "Let's start again, Oh great Noam,
please tell us how!". I think that's pretty darn insulting.
	Many of the  advances of MP are of a particular kind, for
example, the motivations for movement in GB theory were diverse. In GB,
NPs moved for Case or for the EPP, wh-movement was triggered by the
wh-criterion, head-movement was triggered by morphological considerations
such as the need to host an affix. A significant advance of MP, I think was
in the recognition that these three kinds of movement are triggered by a
single constraint (the principle of full interpretation). This advanced us
signficantly empirically, because it allowed us to see that the
various kinds of
locality constraints that were presumed to govern all these kinds of
movement (Condition A, the ECP, Subjacency, the Head Movement constraint)
were really all conditions of a single type (the nature of this constraint
type has varied -- economy (which I suppose David P. was thinking of when
he said that MP had already reacted to the flaws with MP) to a cyclic
theory. Here's where HPSG/LFG  can make a contribution, as JL attempt to
do, the MP literature and point out that a truly local condition is a
local tree, a view which phasing had already implemented in some form.

As to biased. I'd be happy to take apart many of the JLL arguments against
MP. But I'm resistant to doing here for two reasons (1) this is an HPSG
list, not an MP list and (2) many others have argued the points in print
elsewhere (including not only NLLT, but also Lingua). I could add my own
personal take on the issues, but that seems more self-serving than helpful
at this point.

I suspect I'll get an email from David P. telling me to shut up. :) (Hi
David!) but I couldn't resist responding.

Let the rotten fruit fly my way....,

Best,

Andrew