On Edge

[Edith A Moravcsik]

Hello Frans, 
Thank you for your posting on this important issue and specifically for the sample of crosslinguistic statements you listed that have been shown to recur across languages widely. Here are my thoughts. 

UNITY OR DIVERSTY? 
I believe language typology will continue to probe into both the similarities among languages and their differences. This appears to follow from the general cross-scientific concept of “typology”. For example, if we typologize grammatical elements and constructions within a single language, we do this by looking for similarities and differences among them. If we typologize plants, this is again to reflect their similarities and differences. The “what? where? and why?” questions, as formulated succinctly by Balthasar Bickel, define the goals of typology in any domain of inquiry inside and outside language. 

2/ ARE PROPOSED UNIVERSALS TRUE OR UNTRUE? 
The key concept here is statistics: a crosslinguistic generalization may be true or false to a certain extent. It is empirical research that will tell us whether there are any crosslinguistic statements that are exceptionless for the sample of languages available to us or whether they hold only for a particular percentage of the sample. Both absolute and statistical crosslinguistic generalizations are interesting; they both call for explanations, whether these ultimately turn out to be genetic or areal or rooted in universal human cognition. 

3/ IS UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR DEAD? 
This depends of course on what is meant by “Universal grammar”: whether it refers to a set of universals that are claimed to be domain-specific (having to do with people’s specific linguistic endowment) or that may be in part or fully domain-general, being instances of the principles that underlie human cognition. 

Here the key distinction to make is between assumptions and hypotheses. We should not assume either domain-specificity or domain-generality: each is to be viewed as a hypothesis (i.e., we do not yet know the answer) rather than an assumption (i.e. that we already know that the statement is true). Whether all crosslinguistically recurrent grammatical properties are domain-specific as has been claimed, or whether, as much recent work suggests, some or all are domain-general needs to be decided by empirical research. 

In answer to your question: I don’t have any suggestions for eliminating any concepts used in typological research. 

Best, 

Edith Moravcsik 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Plank" <Frans.Plank at UNI-KONSTANZ.DE> 
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG 
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 6:57:36 AM 
Subject: On Edge 




Dear typologists, 


typology is about linguistic diversity and unity, right? I quote from memory, but I'm sure I've seen this claim made in many a textbook, sinngemaess. At any rate that, this is what your papers were expected to be about if they were to go into LT, because the mission statement of that journal wanted them both, diversity and/in relation to unity. But then, tempora mutantur, nosque mutamur in illis. Is this dual assignment water under the bridge, yesteryear's snow, old hat, passé? Has our professional remit been assuaged? Can we forget the unity half? So it indeed seems to the most complex and sophisticated minds. 


The annual question of Edge.org for 2014 was: 








WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? 

One of the candidates nominated for retirement -- alongside "The Theory of Everything", "Urvogel", "People Are Sheep", "Languages Conditioning Worldviews", "The Standard Approach to Meaning", "Culture" (retired twice), "Only Scientists Can Do Science", "Planck's Cynical View of Scientific Change", and some 170 other ideas (all at http://www.edge.org/annual-questions ) -- was "Universal Grammar". I'm copying this contribution in full below, in case you're not regular followers of Edge. (Edge ad speak about its business model: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." ) 


The sentiment here expressed seems to be gaining popularity. It is typically vented outside professional fora, and not only by outsiders who have heard the name Chomsky and otherwise know little about linguistics, but also by professionals keen on maximising impact, at the expense of having to somewhat overdo the rhetorics. 


But seriously, can anybody be confident that there are no universal constraints on how languages can vary from one another, and that this is a consensus to this effect among those scholars who ought to know best (typologists, naturally)? (Replace "languages" by "mental lexicons-and-grammars" if you're a mentalist or by "doculects" if you work with corpora.) Is it really anywhere close to the truth that "basically every proposed universal feature" has been empirically shown to be invalid through crosslinguistic research? (Which is different from not having found much support from acquisition research inspired by the Poverty of the Stimulus argument. But that does not seem what was at issue in the present Edge contribution.) Conceivably there is disagreement on whether linguistic universals are genetic/innate language-specific biases or have one or another other explanation. (Such as, perhaps most promising, being constraints on linguistic change, on transitions rather than on states.) But that wouldn't be denying that there ARE universals. 


Incidentally, Dan Everett is also on Edge. He wants to retire an idea seemingly similar: 'The idea that human behavior is guided by highly specific innate knowledge has passed its sell-by date. The interesting scientific questions do not encompass either "instinct" or "innate."' But I'm sure Dan wouldn't dream of retiring linguistic universals, such as these (almost) random examples: 


• Provided a language distinguishes grammatically relevant lexical classes ("parts of speech"), if there is one for property concepts, there will also be distinct classes prototypically accommodating thing/time-stable concepts and action/time-unstable concepts. 
• If words other than those designating action concepts inflect for tense, words designating action concepts will inflect for tense, too (notwithstanding the possibility of nominal tense). 
• If nouns inflect (most likely for number), verbs will inflect, too (most likely for person, number, tense). 
• Provided words designating property concepts are divided in their allegiance between object words and action words in the grammar of predication, then those designating human propensities will follow the model of action words and those designating materials will follow the model of object words. 
• Provided a language distinguishes main and dependent clauses, the morphosyntax and prosody of dependency will take predictable forms –– too complex to go into here: but it's all about deficits relative to main clauses. 
• Provided a language has numerals, if it has one for 9 it will also have ones for 1-8, etc. 
• Provided a language has numerals, the numeral system won't have 3, 7, 9, or 11 as a base or as one of its bases (and I won't enumerate the legitimate bases here: there are more than have sometimes been recognised: 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 60 -- read it up in LT). 
• Provided a language has three series of numerals for (i) counting, (ii) quantifying, (iii) locating in an ordered sequence, the quantifying forms and/or their constructions won't be more complex than the others; if there are differences in complexity, they will be the other way round. 
• Syllable weight resides in the rhyme and cannot be contributed by the onset (or not exclusively -- if you insist, Dan). 


And so on and on and on. Are the valid/uninvalidated universals all trivial/superficial, with the interesting/profound ones all invalid? I'd say that depends on what sense is made of such descriptive generalisations. Universals aren't discovered at a glance and aren't self-explanatory: in-depth analysis and proper sense-making are integral parts of the typological enterprise together with the inductive generalising. (Since this seems so dear to the Edge author, I'm not really sure there are known languages which entirely fail to distinguish the lexical categories N and V, if properly analysed.) 


Obviously I'm not denying that many items documented in the Universals Archive ( http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/ ) are dubious or defunct, especially as I have debunked many myself. But I'd advise against pushing the baby over the edge and throwing it out with the bathwater. 


Innateness seems to be going through a bad patch in general: Allison Gopnik also wants it thrown out on Edge. Encouragingly, Steven Pinker only questions whether "Behavior = Genes + Environment". And anti-innateness, aka "Radical Behaviorism", is also up for retirement. 


Also on Edge, Ian McEwan questions the question (vindicating Hoelderlin, not on Edge: Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter): Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! 


If you find the rhetorical questioning of the existence of universals a waste of time, we can perhaps still take inspiration from Edge and ask ourselves: Are there ideas in typology OTHER THAN universals which are ready for retirement? Your nominations, please! Expect restatements of LT's mission statement in due course. However, for the time being, unity is being kept along with diversity. 



Frans Plank 




PS: If you've been wondering, Planck's Cynical View of Scientific Change was as follows: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." I hate to unretire and out-Planck Planck, but I'm afraid that may be true of falsehoods, too. 


Sprachwissenschaft 
Universität Konstanz 
78457 Konstanz 
Germany 

Tel +49 (0)7531 88 2656 
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eMail frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de 
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Benjamin K. Bergen 

Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Author, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning 




Universal Grammar 




The world's languages differ to the point of inscrutability. Knowing the English word "duck" doesn't help you guess the French "canard" or Japanese "ahiru." But there are commonalities hidden beneath the superficial differences. For instance, human languages tend to have parts of speech (like nouns and verbs). They tend to have ways to embed propositions in other ones. ("John knows that Mary thinks that Paul embeds propositions in other ones.") And so on. But why? 
An influential and appealing explanation is known as Universal Grammar : core commonalities across languages exist because they are part of our genetic endowment. On this view, humans are born with an innate predisposition to develop languages with very specific properties. Infants expect to learn a language that has nouns and verbs, that has sentences with embedded propositions, and so on. 
This could explain not only why languages are similar but also what it is to be uniquely human and indeed how children acquire their native language. It may also seem intuitively plausible, especially to people who speak several languages: If English (and Spanish… and French!) have nouns and verbs, why wouldn't every language? To date, Universal Grammar remains one of the most visible products of the field of Linguistics—the one minimally counterintuitive bit that former students often retain from an introductory Linguistics class. 
But evidence has not been kind to Universal Grammar. Over the years, field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones) have reported that languages are much more diverse than originally thought. Not all languages have nouns and verbs. Nor do all languages let you embed propositions in others. And so it has gone for basically every proposed universal linguistic feature. The empirical foundation has crumbled out from under Universal Grammar. We thought that there might be universals that all languages share and we sought to explain them on the basis of innate biases. But as the purportedly universal features have revealed themselves to be nothing of the sort, the need to explain them in categorical terms has evaporated. As a result, what can plausibly make up the content of Universal Grammar has become progressively more and more modest over time. At present, there's evidence that nothing but perhaps the most general computational principles are part of our innate language-specific human endowment. 
So it's time to retire Universal Grammar. It had a good run, but there's nothing much it can bring us now in terms of what we want to know about human language. It can't reveal much about how language develops in children—how they learn to articulate sounds, to infer the meanings of words, to put together words into sentences, to infer emotions and mental states from what people say, and so on. And the same is true for questions about how humans have evolved or how we differ from other animals. There are ways in which humans are unique in the animal kingdom and a science of language ought to be trying to understand these. But again Universal Grammar, gutted by evidence as it has been, will not help much. 
Of course, it remains important and interesting to ask what commonalities, superficial and substantial, tie together the world's languages. There may be hints there about how human language evolved and how it develops. But to ignore its diversity is to set aside the most informative dimension of language. 














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