Reply to carnie from LLJ

[David Pesetsky]

Dear HPSG-L,

I've been a subscriber to this list for a while, but have refrained from
getting involved in the discussions. I think this was a good policy,
especially since I didn't want to be seen as intruding. At the same time I
don't want to let Andrew Carnie be hung out to dry, so I hope I will be
forgiven for adding a remark or two.

I agree with Lappin, Levine and Johnson (and with Andrew himself) that the
Johnson & Lappin book was not polemical in tone.  We read through the book
in a class I taught last Fall, so I am fairly familiar with it (as are a
number of our students).  The book is impressive in the degree to which it
takes the opposing views seriously, clarifying these views where necessary,
offering alternatives not only from an HPSG perspective, but also from
Minimalist and GB perspectives.

That said, Ivan has characterized some of my impressions accurately, when
he writes, recalling a recent conversation:

>[Ivan:] 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.

Lappin, Levine and Johnson, responding to a similar point made by Andrew,
wrote in their recent message:

>[L, L & J:]Carnie informs us that the adherents of the MP were well aware
>of the issues that we raised in our L&P article and our monograph,
>and they were attempting to address them. This is interesting and
>important news. Why weren't these efforts published? Where is the
>record of critical examination of these problems within the MP
>literature? Are we alone in having missed it?

In fact, much of the literature that calls itself "Minimalist" -- including
Chomsky's own subsequent articles -- is devoted to "critical examination of
these problems" and others like them. For example, Chomsky's own proposal
in "Minimalist Inquiries" that syntax proceeds "phase by phase" (when
combined with very explicit views about the categories that make up a
phase) responds to many of the combinatory explosion problems discussed by
Johnson and Lappin in section 2.3 of their monograph and elsewhere.  It is,
in fact, I think, close to the patch that Johnson and Lappin themselves
hint at in the last paragraph (second sentence) of page 14 of their
monograph.  Likewise, the inconsistency between covert movement analyses of
the English 'there' construction and other "Minimalist" proposals,
discussed in section 2.4.4 of J&L's book, is resolved by Chomsky's later
proposal to distinguish (but link) agreement and movement, when combined
with his ideas about the particular properties of  "defective" categories
that lack a full set of phi-features.   Similaly, the Smallest Derivation
Principle (J&L's terminology) -- invoked by Chomsky to explain the
impossibility of overtly raising a direct object from the Object Shift
position to Spec,TP,  and roundly criticized by J&L in section 2.5 -- is
not needed if Chomsky's "Activity Condition" is invoked.  Indeed, exactly
this sort of problem *motivated* the Activity Condition, which is argued to
play a role in explaining other phenomena as well.

I assume that HPSG-L is not the place to argue at length whether these
responses are on the right track.  All I want to note is (1) that the
issues were indeed already live when J&L's work appeared; and (2) that the
responses exist -- thus substantiating Andrew's remark.

Now I don't think it is a bad thing at all that J&L called attention to
problems that others were also identifying.  It is impressive when
researchers in different locations, with very different perspectives and
goals, converge on a conclusion. Indeed, J&L could hardly have been unaware
of this, since the third chapter of their book (as they note) is devoted to
critiquing proposals by Collins and Yang that also aimed to solve some of
the problems presented in J&L's second chapter.  But it is perhaps worth
asking why one group of researchers  (e.g. Johnson and Lappin) concludes
from their critique that they have shown the Minimalist Program to be "an
untenable framework that had not been properly motivated" -- while others
view it as a *strength* of the approach that "Minimalist" work suggests
interesting, testable solutions to such problems.

One answer is the obvious difference in the hunches and prejudices of
different groups of syntacticians.  Another answer, I think, is simply
terminological confusion.  For better or for worse, the phrase "Minimalist
Program" has come to mean lots of different things to different people.
The phrase encompasses everything from Chomsky's speculations about
language to the research guidelines argued to flow from these speculations,
to the very specific set of proposals and analyses proposed by Chomsky
himself -- as well as a much larger (and quite diverse) set of proposals
and analyses by researchers whose thinking is somehow influenced by
Minimalist work.  Whatever the term "Minimalist Program" may mean to the
field (and I personally have no objection to discarding it), it's not a
"framework".

Not that we probably all agree on what a "framework" is, either!  But I
suspect that the term "framework" can be meaningfully applied to the
packages of disparate but connected proposals that one finds in certain
individual publications or groups of publications,  e.g. Chomsky's
"Categories and Transformations" (= "Chapter 4") in the case at hand.   One
might indeed reasonably claim that L&J and others have shown that the
"framework" presented in that paper of Chomsky's is "untenable" and not
"properly motivated" --  in that there are problems and internal
contradictions among the ideas of that paper.  You could probably find
multitudes of self-styled "Minimalists" who would agree on that point, put
that way.  A meaningful divergence of views between L&J and Minimalists
would probably come in answer to the question "what next?", but that's a
different topic.

Even so, however, I think we can do better than debating frameworks.  The
wisest remark made so far in this discussion has been Lappin, Levine and
Johnson's admonition that "theories are instruments of explanation, not
religious affiliations".  Yes!  It is my personal experience that
discovering the links and disconnects among specific ideas is more
productive (and a lot more interesting) than debating the merits or
demerits of pre-packaged "frameworks" as if they were take-it-or-leave-it
religions -- which they never really are.

Thanks for hearing me out.

-David Pesetsky


*************************************************************************
David Pesetsky	[pesetsk at mit.edu]
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
32-D862 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
(617) 253-0957 office           (617) 253-5017 fax
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/pesetsky.home.html