tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53000477111608354602024-03-24T00:09:57.530-07:00LanguageAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-2710119241545067002016-08-23T14:00:00.002-07:002016-08-23T14:34:02.756-07:00Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-39222624563735074112016-08-23T14:00:00.001-07:002016-08-23T14:33:28.105-07:00Philosophy, Psychology and Monkey Cognition<div class="WordSection1">
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<span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">Hey there´s this thing called the
European Society of Philosophy and Psychology which has a conference every year. The meeting this year was at the University of St Andrews August 10-13, 2016 (see <a href="http://espp16.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/">http://espp16.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk</a> </span> for the conference website). </div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">In fact,
I happen to be the Linguistics Program chair for this society/conference and
so, for my sins, I have to read abstracts, think of keynote speakers and
actually attend the conference every year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Every year, I wrench myself away from my linguistics-internal concerns
and duties wondering whether I really have time for this. And every year I come
away from the conference thinking "OMG<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, I am so glad I made time for
this”. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>linguists <i>should</i> make time to engage with our
colleagues over in philosophy and psychology who are thinking about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very same issues </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but in radically different and yes, sometimes
incompatible ways. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can make all the
noises we like about building bridges with philosophy and psychology in the
abstract, but unless we talk to them and go to their conferences those bridges
won´t actually get built, and misunderstandings will proliferate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In particular, clicking on and reading the
occasional hyped psychology article that catches your eye does not prepare you
for the whole culture of concerns and assumptions and indeed heterogeneity of
approach that you find when you are actually at one of these meetings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">This
year, there was a common thread running through the conference on animal
cognition and primate cognition in particular, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in part due to the invitation of Philippe
Schlenker, CNRS-Institut Jean Nicod (</span><a href="http://www.institutnicod.org/membres/membres-permanents/schlenker-philippe/?lang=en"><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">http://www.institutnicod.org/membres/membres-permanents/schlenker-philippe/?lang=en</span></a><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;"> ), <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as one of the keynote speakers and to the
local expertise of our hosts at St Andrews in the area of primate cognition
(Check out the Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>here </span><a href="https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/organisations/centre-for-social-learning--cognitive-evolution(aca65ea5-18be-4425-8477-a13cdbd890c9).html"><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/organisations/centre-for-social-learning--cognitive-evolution(aca65ea5-18be-4425-8477-a13cdbd890c9).html</span></a><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;"> )<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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As we all probably know, the field of primate cognition today is largely
insensitive to the overly simplistic historical dichotomies of `innate´ vs.
`learned´ that inspired linguists´ early
attempts to teach chimpanzees human language (and which still fills chapters in
beginner textbooks on psychology of language).
A linguist looking to sign up for the cheering gallery on one side or
other of that debate will be cruelly disappointed. So its all the more important for the responsible linguist to get up to speed on the latest knowledge
that has emerged from research in this area over the past couple of decades.</div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">First of
all, it is quite convincing from the research that the great apes communicate
intentionally, do social learning, use tools, have problem-solving abilities
and even some hallmarks of theory of mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The whole issue of intention to communicate, as tested and
proved by a number of researchers, requires at least some sort of
recognition that others possess minds, and that the state of their knowledge
can be affected by one´s own communicative actions (I am thinking here of
papers I heard by Christine Sievers (</span><a href="https://philsem.unibas.ch/seminar/personen/sievers"><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">https://philsem.unibas.ch/seminar/personen/sievers</span></a><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">) and Thibaud Gruber (</span><a href="https://www2.unine.ch/compcog/thibaud_gruber)"><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">https://www2.unine.ch/compcog/thibaud_gruber)</span></a><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;"> , and also Katie Slocombe´s <a href="https://www.blogger.com/goog_81532254">(</a></span><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;"><a href="https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/faculty/ks553/">https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/faculty/ks553/</a>)</span><span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;"> contribution in the invited
symposium).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the interesting question
is whether there is some sort of basic groundfloor `theory of mind´ such that
apes and very young children can have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i>,
but not <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the fullblown version that would
allow them to pass the standard false belief test. </span>If there <i>is</i> an intermediate version, is it
distinguished from the full version because:</div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK" style="mso-ansi-language: NO-BOK;">-It ascribes
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knowledge</i> to other minds rather than
belief (as Jennifer Nagel was arguing <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/jnagel/Home_Page.html">http://individual.utoronto.ca/jnagel/Home_Page.html</a>
)</span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">-It is
expressive rather than genuinely perspective shifting (as Dorit Bar-On
suggested <a href="http://www.doritbar-on.com/">http://www.doritbar-on.com</a> )?;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">-It is
one-step rather than recursively specular in the way it takes other minds into
account?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Are any
of these distinctions themselves correlated with any of the others, or indeed
with the the special linguistic capacities for syntax?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">In
Schlenker’s keynote address that kicked off the conference, he described in
detail the sign system employed by a number of groups of monkeys and attempted
to describe the truth conditions for each individual sign in a systematic
way. Schlenker was scrupulous in staying
away from questions of whether we should call such systems `language’ or not, preferring rather be specific about
how it seems that this particular system is working. The interesting aspect of his proposal for
the meanings deployed in the system is that they seem to involve a kind of
blocking, where the informationally more specific sign blocks the use of the
more general one. If this kind of
informational pragmatic choice guides the deployment of signs in monkey
communities, it seems to point to at a least a limited theory of mind.
Schlenker himself, in ascribing pragmatic competence to monkey groups, stopped
short of claiming that they needed to possess full specular theory of mind of
the kind that is assumed to lie behind our competences in standard forms of
Gricean reasoning. But if this limited
kind of pragmatic effect can be seen even in these simple systems, with
rudimentary acknowledgement of audience then it is important both for studies
of the evolution of theory of mind, and for the architecture of the language
faculty. (If you are interested in the details, see the recent issue of
Theoretical Linguistics devoted to Formal Monkey Semantics for a target article
written by Schlenker and his research group, with commentaries by various
linguists and cognitive scientists <a href="http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/thli.2016.42.issue-1-2/issue-files/thli.2016.42.issue-1-2.xml">http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/thli.2016.42.issue-1-2/issue-files/thli.2016.42.issue-1-2.xml</a>
)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">What does
it mean that monkeys seem to have systems that are best described via
informational blocking (maxim of quantity).
Full Gricean reasoning probably involves infinite specular regress, but
certain facts with respect to informational computation do not seem to require
that degree of sophistication. It can
be shown that great apes exist in social groups and utilize their gestures and
vocalizations intentionally with an aim to express or convey information. But surely one can intend to warn others without having
full blown theory of mind? </span>Some acts
of expression can be purely reflexive in the sense of not being under conscious
control, but it can be shown that at least some ape gestures/vocalizations are
not of this type. And pragmatic effects
can only arise in the context of an audience. So there must be different levels of
pragmatics corresponding to different levels of sophistication with respect to how we represent other minds.</div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Andrew
Whiten from St Andrews gave the final keynote of the conference and he talked
about the work that his group has been doing on cultural transmission within
primate communities. With respect to
being social animals with socially transmitted traditions, chimps once again
seem to have some restricted version of what we see in humans. In fact, Whiten would argue that the
differences we find here are slight indeed.
Chimps use tools and pass on use of those tools, as well as certain
non-necessary ways of doing things to the group. Groups of chimps also seem to have
a strong instinct for social conformity within the group. Chimps are good at imitating and are rational
problem solvers/learners. Unlike the
claims of the Tomasello group, the Whiten group in St Andrews has been
successful in showing that chimps do have imitative and social instincts---
they are not just emulators. (Tomasello’s group had a hypothesis to the effect
that chimps merely tried to emulate `goals’ of
actions they perceive others doing where that goal is attractive to them, but
are sloppy about the detail when copying the means by which the emulated being
is bringing about those goals. So for the Tomasello group apes were not genuine imitators in our sense.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">In fact,
it can be shown that these cousins of ours, the great apes, are actually
qualitatively better imitators than other monkeys. (Ironically then, there is actually no generalized `monkey
see, monkey do’, but a restricted version of that is found specifically within the
great apes.) Chimps can be taught a version of the Simon Says game (for a
reward) very quickly for example, but not capuchin monkeys who are otherwise
pretty smart. </span>But the
Tomasello group is partly right too. In
experiments where a certain goal is achieved by a sequence of actions, a chimp
will copy the actions to achieve the goal. But if it becomes manifest to the
chimp that some of the steps are not practically necessary to the observed
outcome, the chimp will miss out these steps.
Young children however, will systematically continue to repeat the
useless elaborative steps, even after it has been made manifest that they do
not contribute to the outcome. This the
phenomenon that is now known as `over-imitation’. They were initially
discovered by the Whiten group, and have been robustly replicated. </div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">But maybe
children are less rational at this age than the chimps, or less able to
calculate physical outcomes, so they are just playing it safe? Or maybe
both children and human adults in an experimental situation see the task as a
kind of game which leads them to over imitate?
In an interesting new extension of the paradigm, the Whiten group ran a
similar experiment with adults in a non-experimental situation. They set up the same primate-tested tasks as
part of a hands-on installation at Edinburgh zoo, inviting adults passing
through the exhibit to `have a go’ at
the tasks that had been tested on primates. The adults could watch the training
video (the different conditions were cycled) and then attempt the same task on
the actual equipment. Importantly, the
human adults did not know they were even being observed, although they were in
fact being filmed. Once they did the
task, an experimenter came up to them and explained `candid camera’ style, asking if they were willing to sign a
consent form for their data to be used (they usually did). The amazing upshot of the study was that the
unobserved fully rational adults also did the full detail imitation <i>even
when they could judge that those extra bells and whistles had no effect on the
outcome! </i>Recall that the chimps in the same situation left out the extra
bits and went straight for the prize. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Now who
would have thought that there would be so much interesting difference in the
realm of imitation? Imitation, we are
told in LING 101 is the thing that
language acquisition is <i>not </i> about.
For good reason, since imitation alone is totally inadequate to the
task. In particular, overexuberant imitation of everything would be a
hopelessly huge task and would actually inhibit pattern discovery (in the
jargon, compulsive imitation is not the same as over-imitation). There needs to be selective attendance to
certain aspects of what the young human is exposed to. But that is not all, I would argue. Over and above that, the evidence seems to be that humans in certain domains attend
and imitate in an overly fine-grained way, in a way that <i>does not need to be justified by immediate practical goals. </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Another
difference in the imitative capacity between us and chimps, is called
`ratcheting’, and I think it actually might be related to the first. Children can easily be taught to build one
learned behaviour on top of another one.
If you try to do this with chimps, they get stuck at the first
stage. Now, if you try to teach them the same
sequence of actions but to a single final goal, they <i>are </i>capable of that, so its not the memory or extended nature of
the task that is hard. Things go wrong
if you teach a chimp a behaviour that achieves a certain goal, and then, a
while after they have learned that behaviour, try to teach them to suspend goal
number one and use the first behaviour as a stepping stone add a new behaviour and achieve an even
bigger payoff. Chimps should in
principle be rational enough to see the advantage of this but in fact,
according to Whiten, they get stuck.
No <i>ratcheting</i> (this is
apparently the technical term but I might be spelling it wrong). This
for the Whiten team is the reason that chimp culture does not undergo
cumulative advance, unlike our own. But
the discussion of the no ratcheting discovery started me thinking about how
this could also be related to the acquisition of language.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Rational
and goal oriented emulation like the chimps generally do ends up as low
fidelity copying--- you concentrate on the outcome and try to reproduce that. </span></div>
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But arbitrary and <i>causally more opaque</i> tasks (or tasks with non transparent or
deferred payoffs) are hard to
acquire if you are a goal-oriented learner. </div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">But what if you just take pleasure from your
success at high fidelity imitation with no need of reward? What if we humans have an instinct for
learning just for the fun of it (within certain targeted domains of course, that
we are predisposed to pay attention to) ?
Learning for the sake of it, <i>non-goal
oriented learning, </i>is actually something that distinguishes us from our
great ape cousins. That would explain
both the rachetting and the overimitation.
Learning is not a rational strategy for us the way it is for chimps. We
get rewards just from the success of learning itself. Arguably both rachetting
and overimitation are important for learning language. Overimitation because
very fine grained motor imitations are necessary to start producing the differentiation
in the produced code that language requires, even in the absence of immediate
rewards. Ratcheting because we need to be able to build up our skills
cumulatively and build hierarchical complexity in the symbolic system. Recursion at the symbolic level requires that
one can use one result as a stepping stone to the next. The very thing that the chimps get stuck on.
(Now there may be evidence that chimps use recursive reasoning in problem
solving tasks, or in their vision systems like us, or whatever, but what we are
talking about here is symbolic manipulation, which is crucially mediated by learning.) So one hypothesis might be that it is
narrowly goal-oriented learning vs. and instinctive joy of imitation that is
one of the crucial ingredients in what makes us special. (This latter aspect on
the other hand, we seem to share with some birds).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Back to
Tomasello. Tomasello’s big idea about what makes humans unique is the complexity
and richness of our social structures (<a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/staff/tomas/pdf/Tomasello_EJSP_2014.pdf">http://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/staff/tomas/pdf/Tomasello_EJSP_2014.pdf</a> ). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">However,
my own hunch from the research of the Whiten group and others is that what we are seeing in chimps with respect to social structures is a difference in degree not in kind, and certainly not drastic enough to underpin the huge cognitive leap to language. If so, then we need to look elsewhere for the crucial cognitive
ingredient in my opinion. One could speculate about a kind of genetic switch
that suddenly allowed recursion. But what would that be? Suppose the key is in
the non-goal orientedness of the learning mechanism, which creates both high
fidelity and ratcheting?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">Thinking
about it this way makes a nonsense of the old dichotomies of nature vs.
nurture by the way--- the thing that is innate and
distinctive is a <i>way of learning. </i>(The
more we know about nature and nurture from the geneticists anyway the more
those two things get blurred.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="NO-BOK">At any
rate, that is just a flavour of the ideas floating around the conference and my
own thoughts on hearing them. To be clear, none of the speculations and
ramblings opined in this piece would be endorsed by those real psychologists
and philosophers out there, but they certainly provoked me to think them. I can only hope my short description inspires
other linguists to attend this kind of meeting in future. The next ESPP takes place at the University
of Hertfordshire. Watch this space !<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-46895471966614804062015-09-14T06:12:00.002-07:002015-09-14T06:12:30.199-07:00Allosemy---- No thanks.<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">On Allosemy<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It seems like I am always complaining about the status of
semantics in the theory of grammar. I complain when its ignored, and then I
complain when its done in a way I don´t like, I complain and complain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today is not going to be any different.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the ROOTS IV conference, we had a number of lexical
semantics talks, which clearly engaged with meaning and generalizations about
root meaning. Then we had the morphology talks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I´m not convinced those two groups of
people were actually talking to each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Now, the thing about Distributed Morphology is that it doesn’t believe
in a generative lexicon, so all of the meaning generalizations that are in the
lexicon for the lexical semanticists have to be recouped (if at all) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the functional structure, for DM and its
fellow travellers, me included. This is not a deep problem if we are focusing
on <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the job figuring out what the meaning
generalizations actually are in the first place, which seems independent of
arguing <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>about the architecture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there is also a danger that the
generalizations that the lexical semanticists are concerned about are perceived
as orthogonal to the system of sentence construction that morphosyntactians <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are looking at. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Within DM, the separation of the system into
ROOT and functional structure already creates a sharp division whereby meaty
conceptual content and grammatically relevant meanings are separated
derivationally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in turn can lead to
a tendency to ignore lexical conceptual semantics if you are interested in
functional morphemes, and to suspect that the generalizations of the lexical
semanticists are simply not relevant to your life (i.e. that they are not part
of the `generative system´).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the
extent that there are generalizations and patterns that need to be accounted
for, we need to look to the system of functional heads proposed to sit above
the verbal root in the little vP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
more challengingly, we need to relate them via selectional frames to the sorts
of ROOTS they combine with in a non ad hoc manner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If, in addition, we require a constrained
theory of polysemy, the problem becomes even more complex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think we are nowhere close to being able to
solve these problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps because of
this, I think that standard morphological <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and syntactic theories currently do not yet
engage properly with the patterns in verb meaning, by which I mean both
constraints on possible meanings, and the existence of constrained
polysemies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I contend that the architecture
that strictly separates the conceptual content of the root from the functional
structure in a derivational system must resort to crude templatic descriptive
stipulations with which to handle selection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This architecture also obscures the generalizations surrounding
polysemy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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One of the interesting talks in the conference that was one
of the few that attempted to integrated worries about meaning into a system
with DM-like assumptions, was the contribution by Neil Myler. Neil was
interested in tackling the fact that the verb <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have </i>in English is found in a wide variety of different
constructions, and he was interested in giving a unified explanation of that
basic phenomenon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To that extent, I
thought Neil´s contribution was excellent, and I agreed with the motivation,
but I found myself <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>uncomfortable with
some of the particular tools he used to put his story for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The issue in question involves the deployment
of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Allosemy.
</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Let me first complain about the word Allosemy. It´s
pronounced<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>aLOSSemi, right? That´s how
we are supposed to pronounce it. Of course, doing so basically destroys all
recognition of the morphemes that go into making it , and renders the word
itself semantically opaque even though it is perfectly compositional. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I hate it when stress shift does that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Curiously, the problem with the pronunciation is similar to
the problem I have with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>its existence in
the theory, namely that it actually obscures the semantics of what is going on,
if we are not careful with it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let´s have a look at how Allosemy is deployed in a <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>series of recent works by Jim Wood, Alec
Marantz and Neil Myler (We could maybe call them The NYU Constructivists for short). I am supposed to be a fellow
traveller with this work, but then why do I feel like I want to reject most of
what they are saying ?? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Consider the
recent paper by Jim Wood and Alec Marantz, which you can read <a href="http://psych.nyu.edu/morphlab/publications/Wood%20&%20Marantz%202015.pdf">here</a> .
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So to summarize briefly, the idea seems to be that instead
of endowing functional heads with a semantics that has to remain constant
across all<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>its instantiations, we give a
particular functional head like little v <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>N possible semantic meanings, and then say
that it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">allosemic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>In other words it is N-ways ambiguous
depending on the context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This allows
syntax to be pure and autonomous. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a
side effect this means that meaning can be potentially built up in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>different ways, and the same structure can
have different meanings. The cost?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">COST 1: </b>In
addition to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>all the other listed frames
for selection and allomorphy, we now have to list for every item a subcategorization
frame that determines the allosemic variants of the functional items in the
context of insertion. (Well, if you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">like </i>construction
grammar……)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">COST 2: </b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the mapping between syntactic structure
and meaning can no longer be relied upon, there is no chance of semantic and
syntactic bootstrapping for the poor infant trying to learn their
language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I personally do not see how
acquisition gets off the ground without bootstrapping of this kind.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">COST 3: </b>(This is
the killer). Generalizations about hierarchy and meaning correspondences like
the (I think exceptionless) one that syntactic embedding never inverts
causational structure is completely mysterious and cannot fall out naturally
from such a system (see this <a href="https://www.academia.edu/15682634/Event_Structure_and_Verbal_Decomposition">paper of mine</a> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> for discussion).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">PAYOFF:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Syntax gets to be autonomous again.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But wait. We want this exactly, Why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because Chomsky showed us the generative
semanticists were wrong back in the sixties? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And anyway,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>isn’t
syntax supposed to be quite small and minimal now, with a lot of the richness
and structure coming from the constraints at the interface with other aspects
of cognition? Doesn’t this lead us to expect that abstract syntactic structures
are interpreted in universally reliable ways?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Allosemy says that the only generalities are syntactic ones.
Like `I have an EPP feature’ or` I introduce an argument’. It denies that there
are any generalities at the level of abstract semantics. I would argue rather that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the challenge is to
give these heads a general enough and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">underspecified
</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>semantics so that the normal
compositional interaction with the rest of the structure these things compose
with will give rise to the different polysemies seen on the surface. <i>Allosemy is not the same as compositionally potent underspecification</i>. The
strategy of the Woods and Marantz paper is to go for a brute force semantic
ambiguity which is controlled by <i>listing</i> selectional combinations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is perfectly clear that this architecture
can describe anything it wants to. And while one might be able to do it in a
careful and sensible way so as to pave the way for explanation later on, it is
also perfectly clear that this particular analytic tool allows you to describe
loads of things that don’t actually exist!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So, isn’t this going backwards, retreating from explanatory adequacy?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, the rhetoric of the Woods and Marantz paper
sounds lovely and high-minded. The head that introduces arguments (i* ) is
abstract and underspecified. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The kind
of thing a syntactician can love.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(There
is also another version of i* which is modulated by the fact that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a ROOT is adjoined to it, and this version is
the one that introduces adjuncts and is influenced by the semantics of the ROOT
that adjoins to it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, core i* is
nothing nothing new, in fact it is a blast from the past (not in a bad way, in
fact).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is just a notational variant of
the original classical idea of specifier, where it was the locus for the
subject of predication (as in the the classic and insightful paper by Tim
Stowell from 1982, Subjects across Categories <a href="https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=qeUgXfAAAAAJ&citation_for_view=qeUgXfAAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC">here</a>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the i* with stuff adjoined to it is what
happens when you have an argument introduced by a preposition. So i* is only
needed now because we got rid of specifiers and the generality of what it means
to be a specifier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So. Allosemy. Can we just not do this? <o:p></o:p></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-67965422622468831632015-09-09T03:54:00.000-07:002015-09-09T03:54:33.162-07:00THOUGHTS ON ROOTS IV, NYU<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">THOUGHTS AFTER ROOTS
IV, NYU<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It’s been a while since New York, but I whisked away for
vacation time immediately afterwards, from which I am only slowly recovering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of you will already know that I am also
on sabbatical this term, hanging out in Edinburgh, loosely affiliated with the
University, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but trying to lay low.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has in turn made August<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a month of moving and organizational
hecticness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But productivity is slowly
picking up.<o:p></o:p></div>
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ROOTS<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>IV took place
in New York, June 29<sup>th</sup>- July 2<sup>nd</sup>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the 4th meeting of its kind, organized brilliantly
by Itamar Kastnar, Alec Marantz and the department at NYU and co-sponsored by
NYU Abu Dhabi. Check out the website for the panel discussion here,
including a YouTube video of all the panel presentations, including yours truly <a href="http://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/news-events/new-york-city-events/2015/07/more-than-words--morphology-and-the-universality-of-language.html">here</a>. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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Avid blog followers will recall that I expressed my fears in
advance of this meeting that I might end up at the wrong party, i.e. that the
workshop would largely be some kind of theory-internal Distributed Morphology
discussion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alec debunked that notion
forcefully and convincingly in his opening address. And indeed, one can see
from the invited participants to this event, that we were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>all specifically classic
DM-ers,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but came from a broad group made
up of what Alec called `fellow-travellers’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By this I think he meant those who broadly shared enough starting
assumptions to actually get a meaningful and stimulating conversation going
about details. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a fellow-traveller, I
offer some thoughts in this blog inspired and stimulated by being at this
workshop and being part of the ROOTS IV event. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the end, the conference split quite firmly
into the morphologists (that group of fellow travellers) and the lexical
semanticists who didn’t actually seem to be in the same conversation (but more
about this in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">next</i> post). <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MAJOR NEWS FLASH (FOR
ME, ANYWAY)!<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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It seems to me that at this conference, Distributed
Morphology officially acknowledged in a common and public forum that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">root suppletion exists</i>. Heidi Harley’s
<a href="http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/thli.2014.40.issue-3-4/tl-2014-0010/tl-2014-0010.xml">poster child case from root suppletion in Hiaki</a> has stood up to scrutiny and we
have to just suck it up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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The DM-ers at the conference seemed to all reluctantly agree, including Alec<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Skepticism and vocal disagreement<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from Hagit Borer notwithstanding).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Since it is a little outside my world view, I took some time
to reflect on the special status of roots within DM and what work it does in
the theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In DM, recall, Roots are the
only <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>listed thing there at the start of
the syntactic derivation. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike
vocabulary items, they are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>late-inserted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They also have no syntactic features on them
inherently, and they usually come in at the lowest part of the tree<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(more recent approaches also allow roots to
be `adjoined’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to various syntactic heads,
but we put this aside for now).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roots
are the creatures that anchor the whole derivation, within the theory of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Distributed Morphology, and which are the
basis for the enclosing identity within which competition for insertion can be
calculated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are also the identity
that underlies allomorphy and allosemy in particular contexts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the fact of root suppletion does to this
system is that, previously, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an abstract
phonological representation could be thought to be a stand-in for the identity
represented by a particular root. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if
there is root suppletion then that is no longer always the case, and the thing
that is the same across all spell-outs of ROOTs in a context has to be much
more abstract than that (Heidi makes this point in the article I linked to
above. In that work, she argues for a system of abstract indices to track the
identities we need).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I guess this is also the reason that the paradigm people believe
in paradigms. Paradigms are probably a notational variant of the abstract
indices idea (a sub-list defined by
features inside a single address).</div>
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To see how this affects the whole system, consider the nice
*ABA generalization that Jonathan Bobaljik has famously proposed and discussed
in his book on comparatives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Norbert
discussed this work warmly in his blog earlier this summer <a href="http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/i-admit-it.html">here</a> ). </div>
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*ABA is a constraint
that makes references to a particular kind of situation where syntactic
features are in a particular inclusion relation, ordered in a particular
hierarchy. In this situation, if you have a vocabulary item that can spell out
a lower position but a suppletive one that spells out an intermediate position,
then you cannot revert to the first item to spell out the highest node. Thus the claim is about the correlation between
possible polysemies and syntactic structures—polysemy must respect the contiguity
of the inclusion relations in syntactic
structure, as a constraint on the operation of the Elsewhere Principle. A very
interesting proposal, if true. Now, what
we need to understand about this pattern is that the statement of it also
relies on correctly distinguishing cases of true suppletion from other kinds of
phonological variants in the vocabulary items.
We all understand and accept cases of phonologically conditioned
allomorphy, where the phonological rules present and active in the language
create variations on the ROOT’s abstract representation due to phonological
context. But there are also cases of phonological readjustment
rules that exist in DM, which are sensitive to morphosyntactic context (not
phonology), and which are <i>not the same as
any actual phonological rule in the
language, ( or even possible rule sometimes).
</i>These abstract readjustment rules do not count as suppletion--- crucially
do not `count’ as creating a B out of an
A. Essentially, you still have an A if
you `phonologically readjust’. There
are many of us who do not like ad hoc phonological readjustment rules, just to
preserve the fiction of phonological ROOT identity. But according to Bobalijk (pc), readjustment
rules were crucially taken into account in reaching the *ABA generalization in the first place. (Thanks to Peter Svenonius for pointing this
out to me). Putting this together with
the previous point, consider now the fact that
root identity is no longer underwritten always by an abstract phonological representation, but
by something MUCH more abstract, like an index.
Now we need to make sure that we have an architecture of the kind that constructs ROOT identity across
suppletive environments, while still maintaining an internal distinction
between `related’ variants and
suppletive variants of the same thing for the purpose of stating the deep
Bobaljik generalization. So what gives?
Are suppletive variants `the same’? Or
are they `different’ , i.e. Bs as opposed to As in Bobaljik’s
generalization? </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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I for one would like to give up ad hoc phonological
readjustment rules in favour of straight-up variant insertion, making these
kinds of variations indistinguishable from <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>cases of suppletion (which we can no longer run away from theoretically, if Heidi is right). But then I am in danger of losing *ABA. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or rather, I would have to make
*ABA a bit of telling historical detritus, a morphological patterning that
shows us something real, but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>indirectly
and not synchronically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would also
expect in that case to see<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>some evidence of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pure<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>*ABA where one only needs to compare two distinct forms without the help
of phonological readjustment rules.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
don’t control the examples from the book well enough to know how much reliance
there is on those in Bobalijk’s book to make the generalization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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But in any case, there is a real tension here I think. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If there really is a generalization
concerning the mapping between insertion and syntactic structure that relies on
suppletive forms being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">different </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in an important sense, then how does that
reconcile with ROOTs having an identity across suppletive variants?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Morphologists: Help?</div>
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This has gone on too long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In my next post on ROOTS IV, I will muse on semantics and the existence
of Allosemy (or not). <o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-13212654387427194102015-06-18T15:47:00.000-07:002015-06-18T15:47:08.841-07:00Anticipation: Roots<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px;">
<b>ROOTS</b></div>
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The recent meeting of syntacticians in Athens has whet my appetite for big gatherings with lots of extremely intelligent linguists thinking about the same topic, because it was so much fun. </div>
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At the same time, it has also raised the bar for what I think we should hope to accomplish with such big workshops. I have become more focused and critical about what the field should be doing within its ranks as well as with respect to communication with the external sphere(s).</div>
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The workshop I am about to attend on Roots (the fourth such) to be held in New York from June 29<span style="font-size: 8px;"><sup>th</sup></span> to July 3<span style="font-size: 8px;"><sup>rd</sup></span>, offers a glittering array of participants (see the preliminary program here <a href="http://wp.nyu.edu/roots4/wp-content/uploads/sites/1403/2015/02/roots4_program.pdf"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(4, 51, 255); color: #0433ff;">http://wp.nyu.edu/roots4/wp-content/uploads/sites/1403/2015/02/roots4_program.pdf</span></a> ), organized by Alec Marantz and the team at NYU. </div>
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Not all the participants share a Distributed Morphology (DM)-like view of `roots’, but all are broadly engaged in the same kinds of research questions and share a generative approach to language. The programme also includes a public forum panel discussion to present and discuss ideas that should be more accessible to the interested general public. So Roots will be an experiment in having the internal conversation as well as the external conversation. </div>
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One of the things I tend to like to do is fret about the worst case scenario. This way I cannot be disappointed. What do I think is at stake here, and what is there to fret over in advance you ask? Morphosyntax is in great shape, right?</div>
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Are we going to communicate about the real questions, or will everyone talk about their own way of looking at things and simply talk past one another? <span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Or will we bicker about small implementational issues such as should roots be acategorial or not? Should there be a rich generative lexicon or not?</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Are these in fact, as I suspect,</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">matters of implementation, </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">or are they substantive matters that make actual different predictions?</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">I need a mathematical linguist to help me out here.</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">But my impression is that you can take any phenomenon that one linguist flaunts as evidence that their framework is best, and with a little motivation, creativity and tweaking here and there, that you can give an analysis in the other framework´s terms as well. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Because in the end these analyses are still at the level of higher level descriptions, and it may look a little different but you can still always describe the facts. </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> </span></div>
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DM in particular equips itself with an impressive arsenal of tricks and magicks to get the job done. We have syntactic operations of course, because DM prides itself on being `syntax all the way down´. But in fact, but we also have a host of purely morphological operations to get things in shape for spellout (fission, fusion, impoverishment, lowering what have you), which are not normal actions of syntax and sit purely in the morphological component. Insertion comes next, which is regulated by competition and the elsewhere principle, where the effects of local selectional frames can be felt (contextual allomorphy and subcategorization frames for functional context). After spellout, notice that you still get a chance to fix some stuff that hasn´t come out right so far, namely by using `phonological´ readjustment rules, which don´t exist anywhere else in the language´s natural phonology. And this is all before the actual phonology begins. So sandwiched in between independently understood syntactic processes and independently understood phonological processes, there´s a whole host of operations whose shape and inherent nature look quite unique. And there´s lots of them. So by my reckoning, DM has a separate morphological generative component which is different from the syntactic one. With lots of tools in it.</div>
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But I don´t really want to go down that road, because one woman´s Ugly is another woman´s Perfectly Reasonable, and I´m not going to win that battle. I suspect that these frameworks are inter translatable and that we do not have, even in principle, the evidence from within purely syntactic theorising, to choose between them.</div>
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However, there might be deep differences when it comes to deciding what operations are within the narrow computation and which ones are properties of the transducer that maps between the computation and the other modules of mind brain. So it´s the substantive question of what that division of labour is, rather than the actual toolbox that I would like to make progress on.</div>
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To be concrete, here are some mid-level questions that could come up at the ROOTs meeting.</div>
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<b>Mid-Level Questions:</b></div>
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A. Should generative aspects of meaning be represented in the syntax or the lexicon? (DM says <i>syntax</i>)</div>
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B. What syntactic information is borne by roots? (DM says <i>none</i>)</div>
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C. Should there be late insertion or should lexical items drive projection? (DM says <i>late insertion</i>)</div>
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Going down a level, if one accepts a general DM architecture, one needs to ask a whole host of important lower level questions to achieve a proper degree of explicitness:</div>
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<b>Low-Level Questions</b></div>
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DM1: What features can syntactic structures bear as the triggers for insertion?</div>
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DM2: What is the relationship between functional items and features? If it is not one-to-one, can we put constraints on the number of `flavours` these functional heads can come in?</div>
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DM3: What morphological processes manipulate structure prior to insertion, and can any features be added at this stage?</div>
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DM4: How is competition regulated?</div>
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DM5: What phonological readjustment rules can apply after insertion?</div>
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There is some hope that there will be a discussion of the issues represented by A, B and C above. But the meeting may end up concentrating on DM1-5.</div>
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Now, my hunch is that in the end, even A vs. B vs. C are all NON-ISSUES. Therefore, we should not waste time and rhetoric trying to convince each other to switch `sides’. Having said that, there is good evidence that we want to be able to walk around a problem and see it from different framework-ian perspectives, so we don’t want homogeneity either. And we do not want an enforced shared vocabulary and set of assumptions. This is because a particular way of framing a general space of linguistic inquiry lends itself to noticing different issues or problems, and to seeing different kinds of solutions. I will argue in my own contribution to this workshop on Day 1, that the analyses that adopt as axiomatic the principle of acategorial roots prejudges and obscures certain real and important issues that are urgent for us to solve. So I think A, B and C need an airing.</div>
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If we end up wallowing in DM1-5 the whole time, I am going to go to sleep. And this is not because I don’t appreciate explicitness and algorithmic discipline (as Gereon Mueller was imploring us to get more serious about at the Athens meeting), because I do. I think it is vital to work through the system, especially to to detect when one has smuggled in unarticulated assumptions, and make sure the analysis actually delivers and generates the output it claims to generate. The problem is that I have different answers to B than in the DM framework, so when it comes to the nitty-gritty of DM2,3 and 5 in particular, I often find it frustratingly hard to convert the questions into ones that transcend the implementation. But ok, it’s not all about me.</div>
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But here is some stuff that I would actually like to figure out, where I think the question transcends frameworks, although it requires a generative perspective. </div>
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<b>A Higher Level Question I Care About</b>: </div>
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Question Z. If there is a narrow syntactic computation that manipulates syntactic primes <i>and </i> has a regular relationship to the generation of meaning, <i>what aspects of meaning are strictly a matter of syntactic form, and what aspects of meaning are filled in by more general cognitive processes and representations? </i></div>
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Another way of asking this question is in terms of minimalist theorizing. FLN must generate complex syntactic representations and semantic skeletons that underwrite the productivity of meaning construction in human language. What parts of what we traditionally consider the `meaning of a verb’ are contributed by (i) The narrow syntactic computation itself, (ii) the transducer from FLN to the domain of concepts (iii) conceptual flesh and fluff on the other side of the interface that the verb is conventionally associated with. </div>
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Certain aspects of the computational system for a particular language must surely be universal, but perhaps only rather abstract properties of it such as hierarchical structuring and the relationship between embedding and semantic composition. It remains an open question whether the labels of the syntactic primes are universal or language specific, or a combination of the two (as in Wiltschko’s recent proposals). This makes the question concerning the division of labour between the skeleton and the flesh of verbal meaning also a question about the locus of variation. But it also makes the question potentially much more difficult to answer. To answer it we need evidence from many languages, and we need to have diagnostics for which types of meaning we put on which side of the divide. In this discussion, narrow language particular computation does not equate to universal. I think it is important to acknowledge that. So we need to make a distinction between negotiable meaning vs. non-negotiable meaning and be able to apply it more generally. (The DM version of this question would be: what meanings go into the roots and the encyclopedia as opposed to meaning that comes from the functional heads themselves).</div>
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There is an important further question lurking in the background to all of this which is of how the mechanisms of storage and computation are configured in the brain, and what the role of the actual lexical item is in that complex architecture. I think we know enough about the underlying patterns of verbal meaning and verbal morphology to start trying to talk to the folks who have done experiments on priming and the timing of lexical access both in isolation and integrated in sentence processing. I would have loved to see some interdisciplinary talks at this workshop, but it doesn’t look like it from the programme. </div>
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Still, I am going to be happy if we can start comparing notes and coming up with a consensus on what we can say at this stage about higher level question Z. (If you remember the old Dr Seuss story, Little Cat Z was the one with VOOM, the one who cleaned up the mess).</div>
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When it comes to the division of labour between the knowledge store that is represented by knowing the lexical items of one’s language, and the computational system that puts lexical items together, I am not sure we know if we are even asking the question in the right way. What do we know of the psycholinguistics of lexical access and deployment that would bear on our theories? I would like to get more up to date on that. Because the minimalist agenda and the constructivist rhetoric essential force us to ask the higher level question Z, and we are going to need some help from the psycholinguists to answer it. But that perhaps will be a topic for a different workshop.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-73028293680646966682015-06-02T06:24:00.002-07:002015-06-02T06:24:50.422-07:00Athens: Final Instalment<div class="MsoNormal">
I would like to start off by saying, in case it wasn´t
already perfectly obvious, that the posts I have been making are my own highly
subjective highlights and interpretations from an extremely contentful and
interesting event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not even
attempting to provide a proper transcript, and these are not even Minutes. They
also have no official status, in the sense that the organizers have no idea
what I am writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought I would
start my last post in this fashion, because the final instalment will probably
be even more subjective and interpretational than the previous ones. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I ended my last post with the assertion that it is hard to
agree on the content and formulation of our field´s MLGs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To illustrate this I take a toy example
from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the realm of argument structure and
think out loud for a bit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Suppose I
range my own commitments and things I consider consensual in a kind of
hierarchical ranking going from most general to most specific. The most general
level is shared I expect by all generative syntacticians, while the lowest
reaches might start to get more contentious.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GG1</b>:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Language System discrete and symbolic,
and makes crucial reference to hierarchy in its complex representations. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GG2</b>: A linguistic
representation includes the formation of dependencies and relations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These all seem to come with their own specific
locality conditions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MLGs (?) For Verbal
Syn-Sem<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. There is a grammatically relevant notion of SUBJECT that
cannot be defined purely by reference to thematic/semantic properties.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2. In<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the linguistic
expression of an event where both agentive and patientive participants are
obligatorily represented,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the nominal
constituent representing the Agent is always hierarchically superior to the
nominal constituent representing the Patient in the syntactic representation
(SYN-SEM generalization). <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
3. A monoclausal verbal structure cannot express more than
one temporally non-overlapping dynamic portion (SYN-SEM generalization).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
4. ARGUMENTS (thematic and notionally obligatory
participants related to ta verbal expression) behave in a linguistically
distinct way from ADJUNCTS.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(lots of sub-generalizations here related to the formation
of dependencies into the two types). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
5. Argument structure and aktionsart generalizations<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are properties of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the verbal projection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>properties of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>verbal lexical items. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(Depending on who you talk to, there are different sorts of
feeding relations between the lexical verb and the verbal structure it appears
with).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
6. In a phrase structure representing the verbal event,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>argument structure projections such as CAUSE
and PASSIVE appear inside (i.e. hierarchically closer to the root) than
inflectional and ASPECT, and TENSE projections.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Ok, that was just off the top of my head, and I was trying
to state the MLG level in terms that would be acceptable to the maximum number
of people who would consider themselves generative syntacticians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Notice that I didn´t put in Burzio´s
Generalization, or express (5) in terms of acategorial roots.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the former, that´s because I couldn´t
think of a way to express it in primes that I accept in a way that makes it
both contentful and true; for the latter, I would not agree with (5) if I had
to accept that extra analytic step.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are also a lot of other things I could write down
there that I believe are correct (with a fair amount of good reason), but which
I reckon that too many other people would take issue with, so they didn´t make
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But where is the cut-off ?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Another thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Groups
of syntacticians that share more terms of art, will have more specific
commitments in common. But are they MLGs really, or are they<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>just agreements about how to use the
toolbox?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, some of the things one might want to write down as
an MLG have been demonstrated and tested on only a small (and typologically
narrow) set of the worlds languages. They are up there because they look good
so far. There would be nothing on the list if<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>we had to confine ourselves to things that are true of every world
language. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think it is fair to concede
that deep engagement with the facts and properties of currently less well
understood languages can sometimes radically change the terms of the MLGs that
ultimately turn out to be correct. (Dechaine was the leading voice of caution
here).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is worth emphasizing that the list above is both
provisional and highly descriptive. Some of them may end up having a fan of
sub-generalizations; some of them might end up being just be tendencies, or
confined to certain language groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In all of this, we must not lose sight of the fact that this
list is not a list of Universals in the sense of Universal Grammar, since we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>think that whatever languages have in common,
they have to be the abstract things that underwrite and give rise to these
patterns and tendencies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once this is
recognized, even tendencies and conditional generalizations are valuable,
because they give insight into what those commonalities might be. It is an
empirical issue what level of abstraction the common UG properties might exist.
It might be just MERGE, plus a range of cognitive tendencies, learning biases,
and 3<sup>rd</sup> factor design properties. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I found it a good exercise to try to write some of these
things down. And I also found it an interesting exercise to see a whole room
full of generative syntacticians trying to brainstorm a list together. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can all agree broadly, but it is much
harder to make the fine grained judgements that this kind of list requires in a
consensual way.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But perhaps absolute consensus is neither possible nor
desirable. The effort to transcend parochiality is good, but the list should
have a more flexible and pluralistic status if it is going to have any good
effects. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It certainly seems true to me that if we had such a list, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>however imperfect, it could be immensely
useful in guiding research questions and providing a platform for genuinely
comulative advance, especially after we have made the effort to state our
commitments in the maximally general way possible so as to communicate across
frameworks, and ultimately across disciplines. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What did We
Accomplish?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I seriously hope that the subcommittee set up impromptu on
the floor at Athens will manage to negotiate the minefield of the The List<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and come up with something that at the very
least can serve as a springboard for discussion and further hypothesis testing
(replications and extensions).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We also had a nice affirming experience in Athens in the
sense that it was impossible to leave that event without thinking that
syntacticians are serious, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>smart and
committed and doing a lot of good and responsible work.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finally, we came up with a number of practical suggestions
for how we can manage the outreach to schools, to the public, and to academics
in other disciplines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was something
we could all agree on.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">So its all Good,
Right?<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The syntacticians at the Athens meeting are real live
people, and so they straddle the whole spectrum of personality types<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with respect to thoughts on the Road Ahead,
and the reasons for the call----- Happy, Bashful, Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey
and Doc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to concentrate for a
moment on Happy and Grumpy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Happy is the syntactician who was a little baffled by the
terms of the call, and thinks that internal to syntax there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>no problem, no crisis, and no reason at all
for this meeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grumpy is the syntactician
who sort of darkly suspects that the reason we have been so bad at
communicating outside our own tribe is that we have some internal issues to
resolve as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I speak as one who
would classify herself as Grumpy in this regard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think, for example, my friend and colleague
David Adger is Happy. (I hope David will not yell at me for this, but I think
we have actually had this conversation).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This could just be a personality thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But if I can generalize, (and I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know
</i>I am getting myself into trouble here) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would say that Happy is a syntactician
working in the US<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or the UK who is
comfortable using the canonical minimalist toolbox, terms and framework
language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Grumpy was usually living in
non English speaking Europe, and often had fewer mainstream commitments at the
implementational level. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think Grumpy
would be much happier if syntactic theorizing used a less parochial toolbox,
emphasized generalizations at the MLG level more, and if it was a little bit
more multilingual in its engagement with other implementational languages and
of the bridging discourses to other disciplines.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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I´m sure I´ve forgotten something, but it´s gone on too long already.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-86500242639019214602015-06-01T04:20:00.002-07:002015-06-01T04:20:16.690-07:00Athens Day 3<div class="MsoNormal">
Day 3 consisted of no new panel sessions--- just summaries
and discussion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the morning, we tried
to raise and discuss in more detail the most important issues that emerged from
the meeting. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One interesting issue in the morning discussion was the idea
of 3<sup>rd</sup> Factor principles and the extent to which they can, in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>practical terms, constrain the theories we
develop. This had been a recurring theme, and people clearly pulled in
different directions here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hornstein had
already spoken out strongly in favour of top down general principles that are
used to constrain the questions we ask and the kinds of solutions we seek at
the linguistic level. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>3<sup>rd</sup>
Factor principles such as general cognitive limitations and proclivities, and
logical facts about memory, or learning, or the way symbolic systems configure themselves
for maximum efficiency etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are the
boundary conditions for what the grammar ends up looking like, and have
contentful implications, apparently belied by their abstractness. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rizzi expressed in a clear calm way what I
take to be the source of resistance many working linguists feel in practice
which is that we don’t have clear enough ideas to make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a priori </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>choices about what
those 3<sup>rd</sup> factor principles are. There is an empirical dimension to
these facts, and our choices of which are relevant where, that makes it hard to
use them at a concrete level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is
the `perfect solution’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to the problems
imposed by the interfaces? And why do we think that what our human logic
considers to be conceptually perfect, or simple, is what biology considers to be
perfect? Maybe biology thinks repetition and overlap and reuse is `perfect’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are all just speculating here.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think Rizzi is right in this, but I also think Hornstein
is right to emphasize the role of top down theorizing, and the drive for
abstractness in keeping syntax healthy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the afternoon we attempted a much more positive
contribution by trying to brainstorm as a collective to come up with a
consensual list of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>major results and mid
level generalizations that had emerged within the generative linguistic
tradition in particular.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This seemed important for a number of reasons<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
important because it reminds <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>us of what
our current state of knowledge is and allows the next questions to be asked in
a way that will be genuinely cumulative and productive</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Generative syntax has often been accused of being narrow,
jargonistic, or impenetrable, so that gives us a second reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">B.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is important to try to state the important
discoveries and generalizations of the field in terms that are general enough
to transcend frameworks and particular implementations, as a healthy mental
exercise for ourselves.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Actual day to day syntactic analysis requires formal
discipline and precision in practice, to ensure that the model one builds is
indeed capturing the data one has described, and specialized terminology is
unavoidable. (If I understand M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ü</span>ller correctly, the substance of his
complaint about our field was that much recent work seems to have lost the
skills or inclination to pursue a syntactic analysis at this `algorithmic’
level. I don’t know if this is true or not. It might be. There’s unfortunately
a fair amount of shoddy syntactic papers out there, but there’s good and bad
work in every field). At the same time, we certainly do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> want to say that the results of the generative enterprise are
confined to those discovered in one particular framework or architecture. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or that those discovered in different
frameworks and in different eras are not commensurable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nobody in the room wanted to say that. And
with respect to older versions of Chomskian grammar such as GB, it was
explicitly affirmed that GB was responsible for establishing certain MLGs for
the field that are a central part of the cumulative legacy of generative
syntax.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our mathematical
linguist on the ground here in Athens, Thomas Graf,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>kept insisting and reminding us that he could
not see that anything substantive could hinge on the differences at the level
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grammar architecture that the field
often seems to be preoccupied with arguing about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This came up strongly in the derivations vs.
representations session, and again in the discussions of how the formal grammar
interacts with the parser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In discussions over lunch and dinner, we syntacticians felt
compelled to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pursue this with Graf in
more detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a strong intuition
among us, that some theories (with a little t) are just better at capturing
particular generalizations<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>than others.
We did not like to be told that these `small-t-differences’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>were illusory, and not worth arguing
about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Graf, in turn, voiced a
completely different perspective on small-t-Differences<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that resonated strongly with me. In
mathematics, the reality of a phenomenon transcends small-t-differences, but
choice of small-t framework is a powerful determinant of how easy it is to
solve a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>particular analytic problem,
whether generalizations emerge in a way that is intuitive to the human perceiver,
and even the kinds of issues one even looks at. So translating into different
small-t frameworks is actually a Thing--- a positive tool, that allows you to
walk all the way around a particular problem and see its front side and its
back side and its top side etc. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
small-t-theories allow a particular pattern to emerge gracefully to our senses
where their translation into a notational equivalent would not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Being able to be precise about our
small-t-theories but also in some cases switch between them should a be seen as
a source of strength for problem solving, not a source of point-scoring fodder
for article publications.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In addition, we have a third reason for why attempting to
state the midlevel generalizations is important.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">C. It<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is important because it allows us to scale up
our claims to a level of granularity at which we are able to interface with our
colleagues in related academic disciplines, potentially narrowing the
commensurability gap.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having said that, the exercise of trying to do this in a
group of one hundred people, and syntacticians of different persuasions was
difficult, frustrating and instructive in equal measure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is easy to agree when the discussion takes abstract form.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But as soon as an actual list was attempted, disagreements
started to emerge about what counted as a mid level generalization:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>why/if<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>we should be doing this at all;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how
theoretically charged the terms<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>should
be; judgements of size and/or importance; level of crosslinguistic
generality;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>how much consensus does
there need to be on something for it to make it onto that list. It's a minefield.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After three days of stimulating discussion,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and No Shouting (unlike what I had
predicted),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>irritations started to
emerge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was so much residual good
will in the room, that most of us stuck at it and battled through. If we get a
List that anybody likes at all or thinks is important, it will be a triumph of
unity. And I still have hope that such a list will emerge. A committee has been put in charge of taking the 50 or so bullet points on our communally generated first draft and making it into something that makes sense. But I fear that the difficulties here are representative of deep
internal disagreements/perspectives about the current state of the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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In my next post, I will continue with my summary of where I
think the internal faultlines are. I will reiterate my support for the exercise
in articulating MLGs, and I will give an example of my own version of the list in
one small subdomain of syntax that I actually know something about (Argument
Structure).<o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-72872656172234970722015-05-30T09:54:00.000-07:002015-06-01T14:26:22.331-07:00Athens Day 2<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Athens Day 2<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quote of the day: Rizzi: ``I guess I agree with Norbert to the extent
that he agrees entirely with me’’</i></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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The first session of Day 2 was a panel on the interaction of
syntax with morphology and phonology (Anagnostopoulou, Cheng, van Riemsdijk).<o:p></o:p></div>
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When it comes to phonology, van Riemsdijk made a plea that
we should do more of it because it might actually have some interesting
internal properties that look a bit like syntax. Cheng argued specifically that
prosody and intonation <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in fact have the `syntactic’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>property of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>hierarchy/recursive units, and that the mapping to syntax is one of the
big exciting open issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They both
argued for a reassessment of the arguments strictly separating syntax and
phonology, and for building bridges.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Once it came to morphology, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it was immediately clear from the discussion
that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> was no bridge building
exercise. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every syntactician in the
room was already convinced that morphology was in bed with syntax on one way or
another, and considered it part of their domain of interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specifically, the questions were of the form
is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">type </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of syntax found inside the word level the same
as that you find outside the word level. Are the features and operations
identical? In a subset relationship? An overlapping relationship?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At some point on Day 2 or perhaps even Day 3, the discussion was so rich (and specific) about the issues at stake, Bobalijk had to reiterate the point that actually the vast majority of morphologists
in the world don’t believe this at all, and think that morphology is its own
thing and is distinguished from syntax in having <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no</i> internal structure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
about half a second, the entire room went completely silent. And then <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we just carried on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, there really was nowhere to go from
there, since there was no one in the room to argue with. I have not tried to reproduce the details of the issues and individual contributions in this post since that way lies madness; I am hoping that the contributors will make their slides available for everyone to see the specifics of what was discussed. Here, for example, are the slides from Anagnostopoulou, who has kindly provided me with a link to them here: <a href="https://www.academia.edu/12734374/Issues_in_the_Syntax-Morphology_Interface._Presented_at_the_Roundtable_Generative_Syntax_in_the_Twenty_First_Century_The_Road_Ahead._Athens_May_28-30_2015">https://www.academia.edu/12734374/Issues_in_the_Syntax-Morphology_Interface._Presented_at_the_Roundtable_Generative_Syntax_in_the_Twenty_First_Century_The_Road_Ahead._Athens_May_28-30_2015</a><br />
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I cannot summarize the nitty gritty of this discussion,
although it was extremely rich, specific and informed. One big picture question
stood out, though, perhaps as a result of the syntax-all-the-way-down
assumption. This was raised by Pesetsky some time in the middle of some morphological
discussion. It<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>can be summarized thus: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>``Words. What’s up with that?’’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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What followed was a flurry of discussion back and forth
about whether this was a deep question or not, or whether we had an explanation
or not, and are Words even a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thing <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>such that there can be a mystery about them.
But the discussion slowly converged on a general acknowledgement that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> a real linguistic unit here, crucially
of our own making (i.e. we cannot hand it off to the phonologists to define
it), and that we really have no idea how to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">explain
</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>its existence (this is as opposed to
being able to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">code </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>its existence), or<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>explain its internal variability across
languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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In the morphology session there were no bridges to build
because you don’t need to build a bridge from a thing to itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In the semantics session, Merchant and I seemed to agree
that there was no real bridge.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because
the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>proper hard core formal semanticists
don’t seem to want one, and the syntacticians think that someone else is building
it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Specifically, Merchant worried that semanticists seemed very
often to construct representations that used their own tools and ontologies
that were a very poor fit with the shapes and ontologies of syntactic
representations and their lexical items. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This gives rise to some very funny LFs if you
believe that one is allowed to transform syntactic representations to make them
fit better with the structure of the semantic formalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I agreed with this assessment, and went
further to claim that a huge and coherent field of semantics exists,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>which actually does not care about the match
to syntax, and which is concerned only with the proper description of
meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conversely, the semantic
toolbox is in principle so powerful, that it does not provide any substantive
constraints on syntactic representations. What is needed is an actual narrowing
down of the semantic tools--- an actual <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">theory
</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of semantic primes and primitive
combinatoric operations that underlie natural language(s).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
not that many people are actually doing this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Deal agreed with me, but repeatedly asserted that she thinks this is
just a temporary trend, and will be over soon once the field as a whole
rediscovers the joys of the syntax-semantics interface).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I provocatively suggested that syntacticians (since that was
my audience) cannot simply sit back and relax in the belief that the problem of
mapping to semantics is being taken care of somewhere else. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even suggested that syntax-semantics might
not even be a mapping problem at all, but in fact part of the core
computation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I argued that Structural Semantics
is so inextricably tied up with syntactic hierarchy that the syntactician
ignores it their peril.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By structural
semantics I meant core things such as property predication over things of type
e, modification and compositional semantic embedding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This in turn massively underdetermines truth
conditional meaning. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let’s call<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that Big Meaning. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Big Meaning <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(albeit underwritten by structural semantics) is
not part of the syn-sem computation, It actually sits over in the nonlinguistic
C-I module.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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(In case anyone is getting upset, we can all (as
syntacticians) think of a bunch of wonderful syn-sem people out there who are
doing a great job. Yes. These are the ones we know. And guess what. The
semanticists have a name for them---- Syntacticians, also sometimes known as
NotRealSemanticists .)<o:p></o:p></div>
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When it comes to the interface with experimental and
psycholinguistics, I am going to be a bit eclectic and fold in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>remarks<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and minidiscussions<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that came
from outside the actual panel slot, since the interesting controversies only
seemed to emerge gradually in this domain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Again, there were a number of specific results and ideas presented and
discussed, but here I only have time for the big picture and methodological issues
that struck me as interesting and stimulating. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Some people (e.g. M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ü</span>ller) were skeptical towards experimental
linguistics, arguing that it really hasn’t discovered anything new for us, and
that psycholinguistics<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and especially
neurolinguistics are remote from our concerns to be relevant to the kinds of questions
we are asking. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But other people were more
positive (e.g Rizzi). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why this
difference of opinion and what are the roots of the problem here?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the big problems seems to be that even
though psycholinguists were eager for good input from us for what kinds of
things to drive research questions,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we
do not seem to be consistently providing them. This is not because we are not
generating results and analyses, but because those `results’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are so<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>framework internal and notationally specific so as to make them useless
to the granularity of the questions that are answerable by experimental or
psycholinguistic techniques.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We need to
scale up our questions to a different kind of granularity if we are going to reap
mutual benefits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Scaling up our questions
is also therapeutic for us, I suggest, since it allows us to see the bigger
issues on which the smaller debates depend.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I illustrate with an example from Rizzi’s recent work on the
processing of object vs subject relatives, which he presented.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One might ask oneself<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>concerning certain dependencies that are
known to be sensitive to intervention effects from a `like’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>element, whether this sensitivity is due to a
deep fact about the grammar (i.e. what we know when we know a particular
language) or about the parser and its limitations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To answer this question, Rizzi hypothesized
that (i) if the effect was found equally in comprehension and production, then
it was more likely to be a grammar problem than a parser specific problem, and
(ii) if it was sensitive differentially to grammatically active <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>`like’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>features as supposed to inactive features (language dependent
classification), <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it was probably a
grammar issue not a processing or performance issue. Obviously this kind of
question, experiment, and answer, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tell
us absolutely nothing about the coding or implementational properties of the
dependency relation if indeed it is found to be a grammatical as opposed to <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>processing fact. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Another big and recurring issue in the room, was the hard
and (if I understand it correctly) largely open question of how to model the
relationship between the parser and the grammar so that both the performance
systems (comprehension and production) can make crucial reference to it while
embedded in the online processes of actually producing and understanding
language. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is hard because
we have make all kinds of decisions about working memory and things like that which
have a huge impact on the result, but which we currently have no independent
understanding of to guide us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we use a derivational metaphor in
constructing our grammar description (minimalism), does that have any impact at
all on its psychological plausibility?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In fact, no.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Graf says that it’s
mathematically easy to write top down parsers for minimalist grammars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still the details of embedding grammatical
knowledge within a performance system are largely unresolved to date. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here’s a place where we need to continue to
keep talking to each other.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Finally, we come to the issue of the communication of syntax
with the outside world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Van Riemsdijk<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>opened the very first day of the conference saying that although we have
done great things in the past, our glory days are over and we fighting for our very
survival. We need to shore up our position with respect to communicating with
others and make friends which those who are antagonistic to us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But also, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he claimed, we are simply not very good at
generating research questions any more--- we <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>cannot allow ourselves to stay narrow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mood in the room on the end of the
second day however was much more upbeat, even though we know that there really
is a problem, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think we were upbeat
because we had all just spent two days have a very enjoyable and stimulating
set of discussions so it was very hard to be grumpy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everybody put aside their differences of
opinion and had a good hearty discussion containing suggestions for improving
outreach to the community outside of our small group. There were different
emphases, with some arguing that we need to get linguistics into schools, and
others saying that communication with our fellow non linguist academics in
related fields would be the most efficacious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was notable that most felt sufficiently positive that there were
important and cool results to communicate, and all agreed that we need to do
better in these various ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each to
his or her own talents, and sharing the burden around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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I am going to save practical suggestions and outcomes for my
discussion of the final day and end rather with A Salutory Tale<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>conveyed to us from the Greek linguist
community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apparently,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a few linguists wrote a textbook for the
schools, which was rather traditional in most respects, but which contained the
linguistically uncontroversial assertion that Modern Greek contains five
phonological vowels. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took a while for
the traditionalists to notice this, but what ensued was a furore of Orwellian
proportions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, as we know,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Greece is the proud inheritor of an ancient
language with great prestige and cultural significance, and ordinary people
have very strong feelings and opinions about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problem is this: Ancient Greek had seven
vowels which correspond to seven distinct orthographic marks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, the Linguists had come along and were
trying to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">steal vowels from the Greek
nation</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Everyone was outraged. The
book had to be banned!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over a hundred
Greek linguists signed a petition to explain<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>to the highest reaches of government that this was not a Mistake, and
that there was difference between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek, and between
phonology and Orthography.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was no
good. The issue became a national scandal overnight and the whole country was
in uproar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The linguists (many of whom
were in the room as this tale was being told) were then subjected to shouting
and internet abuse, and public scrutiny of their credentials by ordinary
citizens who were convinced that they knew better.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In the end I think the Linguists managed to
make their point stick in the end, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>although I do not think they ever managed to
win over the Common Man).<o:p></o:p></div>
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I think this is a particularly extreme example of the kind
of problem the field as a whole faces. It highlights the difficulty of getting
our message through to regular people, who have in many cases strong feelings
and opinions about language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I tell
this story also because the Greek Linguists have been our hosts these three
days and I want to stand in solidarity with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have been honourable in sticking to
their ideals under trying circumstances;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>they have been gracious in hospitality; they have been stimulating in
conversation; they continue to maintain their standards and their good nature
under the most difficult of conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We are grateful to them for hosting this event.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In my blog for Day 3, I will try to assess what we got out
of all of this navel-gazing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Practical
outcomes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Concrete suggestions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Affirmatory Lists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Day 3 will have it all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-32759910422599463692015-05-29T07:17:00.000-07:002015-05-29T14:35:18.545-07:00Athens Day 1<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">DAY 1: Summary<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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First of all I just want to say how surprisingly inspiring
it is to be here. I feel like I am part of a big conversation with super smart
people who share my nerdy passion. Such<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>a Big Conversation one rarely gets to have. All grumpiness on my
part<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is in danger of vanishing in the
heady atmosphere of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>just having a damn
good time listening to people I respect,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>debating the big issues surrounding my favourite topic. <o:p></o:p></div>
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A recurring theme of day 1 was the balance of power between
language description,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>analysis and
implementation issues, and higher level theorizing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An important concept in the discussions was
the term `mid level generalizations’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>which refer to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the concrete
results<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of bread and butter generative
syntax (whether GB, LFG or HPSG) which would not have been discovered without
the explicit goals and methodologies of generative grammar (MLGs).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all seem to agree that these are many and
I will try to cobble together a list for a later blog post.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Thanks to Deal, incidentally, for insisting
that Hornstein call this the MLG level and not GB, as he was referring to it. )
For example, Merchant in his contribution in the morning made the explicit
claim that the discovery of locality in grammar (suitably relativized to
individual phenomena) is one of the big and important MLGs in the field.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Hornstein thinks that minimalism is an exercise in meta
level grammatical theorizing, and that its job is not to create MLGs at
all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My impression is that Hornstein
feels quite happy with the current bag of MLGs and that we are ready to move to
the next step (even though there is still more to be done to harvest
MLGs).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Dechaine’s contribution in that session was interesting to
me because she expressed the view that I am very sympathetic towards, that our
MLGs are still hopelessly limited.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Specifically, our failure to internalize the facts of more unfamiliar
language types (so far) casts doubt on the generality of our so called ML`G’s,
so that much more work needs to be done before we can be satisfied, even at
that level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the syntactician’s job
of generating MLGs, presumably at successive degrees of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>abstraction, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is far from over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Typology</i>
session, which consisted of Dechaine,, Baker and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bobalijk<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>drove home this point with respect to the problem of examining a
representative sample of languages, when attempting to approach genuine
universals, and a genuine formal typology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Bobalijk also explicitly took up the theme of the
relationship of data to high theory. They are not separate strands; they need
to sit together at the same table.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
you do one without the other then you<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>risk
trying to do high level generalization over the WRONG mid level
generalizations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bobalijk says for
example that we don’t have good generalizations about Case yet.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Typology </i>session
was inspiring<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from the point of view of
generating concrete productive suggestions for making progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dechaine promoted the idea of more
collaborative research to fill out the typological requirement in cases where
one wants to make arguments about universals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This involves changing some of the sociology of the field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One cannot do this kind of thing on one’s
own, but there might be ways to start building data bases and lists of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>generative questions that we would like to
have answers to, for each language that gets studied or described.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we essentially want is Databases with
MLGs, triggered by the questions that only generativists ask. (As all the
panelists pointed out, in many cases this work is urgent since many of the more
understudied languages are on the brink of extinction.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Pesetsky pointed out that there really needs to be a proper
venue for unremarkable but potentially useful findings, which led to the
semi-facetious suggestion of setting up a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal
of Unremarkable Results.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>I think
this is a great title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once it gets
popular, we should have a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of
Experimental Nonreplications. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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In the session on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Derivations
vs. Representations </i>, M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ü</span>ller<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>argued that recent syntactic work has largely neglected explanation and
explicit proofs of the adequacy of the proposed analysis--- what he called the
`algorithmic level’ . He looked at LI issues from nineties compared to noughties
and counted the number of numbered `example’ -like thingies that corresponded
to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>data and the number of example-like
thingies that corresponded to the statement of principles of theorems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He claimed that the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>number of principles had gone down
drastically, and this was evidence for his assessment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I actually could not make sense of his
methodology or what those numbers meant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I also found that he seemed to be worrying about the stuff that I WASN’T
worried about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> But that might be a personal taste thing (I've never liked housekeeping and cleaning although I force myself to do it). I do agree that explicitness is necessary if you want to say anything at all about anything. </span>It is at this
technical implementational level that the issue of representations vs.
derivations comes up,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>although M<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">ü</span>ller
was clear to point out that his algorithmic level was neutral between the two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Indeed,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>he thought there were independent reasons to favour derivations, but
this was a separate question).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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In the old days this was a major big picture topic. Sells
was a great introduction to this session because he was there in Stanford on
the ground<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>when the interest in this
question was at its peak and when the choices between GB, LFG and HPSG were
strongly informed by where you stood on this issue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also remember it being the big meta issue
of my own graduate career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Graf
from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the audience pointed out that one
can prove that the things such as derivation vs. representation that provoke so
much internal debate can be shown to be notational variants at a very deep
level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s a mathematical/computational
linguist so I assume he knows what he is talking about at a formal level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More generally, it seemed to me that the
young people in the audience were very unimpressed by the derivations vs.
representations issue, and were inclined to dismiss it as a non issue. We
Grey-Heads<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>kept going back to it, trying to push on what potential evidence there might be for choosing
between the two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I really want the mathematical guys to win
this one because I am SO bored of this particular issue. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In general, we had a number of differences of opinion on
whether higher level considerations such as Darwin’s problem should drive our
research programme.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sells attacked the a priori notion of perfection saying that
language is messy like people, and that it is amazing that we see the amount of order that we do. But a priori elimination of imperfections seems like a poor top-down
imperative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hornstein thought that the
ONLY way to generate hypotheses (which are crucial for doing science) is to
have top-down higher level considerations, since hypotheses themselves do not
emerge naturally from data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
completely agree with this and I think most of us in the room, as scientists, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>agreed too. The real question seems to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">which </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>higher order considerations, but also I think <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what is the abstraction gap </i>between the
MLGs and the top-down considerations that are driving theory construction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Roberts came out strongly against using
Darwin’s problem as any kind of motivation, and would be in favour abandoning
all discussions of language evolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note that the nature of the high level
generalization driving research is clearly subject to trends and fashion. Top-down is all very well, and is scientifically necessary, but how do we choose
our favourite higher order principle?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some high level considerations change over time, and these are for
different reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This could be a
natural organic change, such as in the case of Plato’s problem which one might
argue has disappeared from the syntactic discourse because in fact that it has
been so thoroughly internalized. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Different is the case of the issue of
parameters and parameter setting which seems to have fractionated and dissolved
beyond recognition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(We had a couple of
strong Parameters people in the room however, so this is of course an
exaggeration).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here’s MY question: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is the most productive and creative distance between
top down principles and bottom up surface generalizations?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My personal taste is
that Darwin’s Problem is at too high a level of abstraction and the lack of
commensurability between the primes of cognition and the primes of syntactic
theorizing make it strikingly unproductive in some cases, and often misleading
and wrong when wielded clumsily. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Couple this with the suspicion that most of our
understanding at the MLG level is still woefully incomplete, and it looks like
we are in very dangerous territory.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So how bad is it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Most people in the room think that we know way more important stuff now
than was known before. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, there
are questions could not even <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have been
posed <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if it weren’t for the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>generative enterprise.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ok, Ok, I’m going to go round the room and make a list. Stay
tuned. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-89917111431705579362015-05-25T15:33:00.000-07:002015-05-25T23:56:26.112-07:00Thinking About The Road Ahead<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Generative
Syntax—Following the Yellow Brick Road to Athens<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the aftermath of Eurovision, and as a way of coping with
the usual (though short-lived) withdrawal symptoms, I find myself fantasizing
up a comparison between the upcoming Athens event on the future of Generative
Syntax, and the Eurovision Song Contest.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The comparison was prompted by musing over the different
positions and stances taken by the participants in their<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>written statements in advance of the
event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am struck by the differences in
tone and emphasis--- optimism vs. grumpiness when it comes to our own present
achievements and research goals; bravado vs. caution and practicality when it
comes to the outside world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
threads run through the different contributions in different proportions, and
with respect to different topics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with things in all of these written
statements, and swithering between optimism and despondency in equal measure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder what kind of conversations there will
be, and what kind of common ground there will actually be when we all meet face
to face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For this is not obvious to me
at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of these smart,
experienced, passionate linguists!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At
the end of the event, what kind of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>song
will we choose when all the conversations are over, and the time has come to vote?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1.Upbeat catchy dance tune (We agree to list our
achievements and reaffirm the rightness of what we are doing, and come up with
practical suggestions for explaining how great we are to the outside world)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2.Soul searching mournful<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>ballad of unrequited love (Where did it all go wrong? Why are we so
misunderstood? How can we do good science if we can’t even agree what good
science is among us?)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
3. Power ballad of the `I am Woman/Bearded-woman/Alternative
–Hear-me-Roar’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>variety (A bit like 1,
but less conciliatory)<o:p></o:p></div>
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4. Or will the song that emerges be a watered down
compromise statement that nobody really loves but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was a kind of lowest common denominator of
things that no one violently disagrees with. (Think Ireland in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1990s Eurovision).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Facetiousness aside, I for one hope for a plurality of
voices and a lot of Listening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have
always liked working within a field such as Generative Linguistics where there
is not yet a rigid framework or doctrinaire theory that one has to follow.
I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hope Athens will make the conversation
more open, and ideologies less rigid. In Eurovision, all the countries
eventually went over to singing in English, pushing out all the other
languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think Generative Syntax
has to go in the other direction, and old fixed genres and domains need to
cross over, mix and creatively relook at old problems with new eyes, instead of
hunkering down in their old corners.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Let’s see how it goes.<o:p></o:p></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02948668339394316663noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5300047711160835460.post-57457941303854914302015-04-19T10:38:00.004-07:002015-04-20T05:22:49.720-07:00On Being a Generative Linguist<div class="page" title="Page 1">
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<span style="font-family: CMBX12;"><b>I am a Generative Linguist</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'CMBX12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">A. <i>Defining Myself as a Generativist</i></span><span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">:<br />
My own commitments as a linguist are to the ideas that (i) the human language faculty must be described in terms of a system that generates infinite
creative possibilities from finite symbolic means and that (ii) the ultimate object of inquiry is our internal knowledge of language, not some description of
the data </span><span style="font-family: 'CMTI12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">produced </span><span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">by it. ( I think further that Chomsky introduced these ideas
to linguistics, so in that sense I am a Chomskian Linguist.)</span><span style="font-family: CMR12; font-size: 12pt;"> I am fascinated by
the question of to what extent the ‘special’-ness of human language flows from
innate (and undoubtedlly rather abstract) capacities. I take a rather open
minded view of what those innate capacities are—representational vs. procedural vs. a product of the special ways in which we learn and generalize—
though I lean more to the latter than the former. I do not particularly
care whether those special things are unique to the language faculty or not,
although I do think that language provides the richest and clearest instantiation of those properties. I certainly don’t believe that representational facts
about language (whether we are talking about Principles of the Binding theory, or the Functional Sequence) are innate per se. But I am fascinated by
the emergence of patterns in language that appear to be common to all instantiations of it, and I suspect that discovering these kinds of commonalities
are a good clue to what is unique and special about the human mind. All
of these things, I think I have in common with a broad swathe of linguists
who are usually labelled ‘generative’, but it is a far cry from the simple way
in which generative grammar is characterized as: “Massive amounts of representational innateness, loads of highly specific universals and a belief that
Chomsky is always right”. I do not recognise this description of the field,
and I am dismayed by the fake ideological battles fought in its name.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'CMBX12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">B. <i>Improving the Nature of the Generative-internal Conversation</i></span><span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">If my credo in (i) and (ii) above is really shared by most generativists then we
should actually be a broader church than we appear to be from the outside.
There are parts of ‘generative’ grammar that I do not feel a particularly
strong part of . For example, I am not sympathetic to recent trends in
Biolinguistics, which to my mind is guilty of extreme Overreach in attempting to connect linguistics to Biology. I think it gives the whole field a bad
name. The granularity gap and the terminology gap (to put it in Poeppel’s
terms) are still too great to sustain the specific kinds of proposals that are </span><span style="font-family: CMR12; font-size: 12pt;">being taken seriously in this sub-group. I also am dismayed by a culture in
which much theorizing in a highly theory-internal way is done on the basis
of </span><span style="font-family: CMTI12; font-size: 12pt;">a priori </span><span style="font-family: CMR12; font-size: 12pt;">and conceptual arguments concerning simplicity and ‘perfect design’. I think we have no bloody idea what constitutes perfect design when
it comes to the brain and I suspect that Jackendoff, for example, is right
that redundancy and parallel architectures are the more realistic structures.
I find personally that alternative architectures that involve non-derivational
constraint based systems, or parallel architectures do not actually get taken
seriously in our field, and that there is a privileged discourse within syntax
that uses a rather specific set of analytical choices and terms (Merge, feature checking, DM-style architectures for morphology) which I cannot even
begin to participate in because I do not share the assumptions. The privileged tool box exists even though the broad generative perspective that I
sketched above is consistent with all of these alternative architectures and
implementations. The same is true about the particular ways in which the
interfaces are conceived, which have not actually changed in 50 years, even
though the background philosophical rhetoric has changed massively. We
need to find a way to keep the system open to technical innovation, and
different ways of doing things, while still maintaining the ability to have a
common conversation. Right now, there seems to be no way in terms of the
current linguistic disagreements in popular media, of distinguishing between
a Jackendoff (who I think is NOT crazy) and truly uninformed and purely
ideology driven people. Our image in the world, as well as our ability to make
progress on our core scientific questions are </span><span style="font-family: CMTI12; font-size: 12pt;">both </span><span style="font-family: CMR12; font-size: 12pt;">dependent on us getting our
house in order from the point of view of what is our scientific starting point
and what we are committed to. (It would be nice in this regard to have a list
of major results and improvement in understanding that generative linguistics (broadly construed) has contributed to the field during the past 50 years).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: CMR12; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'CMBX12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">C. <i>Improving the Nature of the Conversation between Generativists and the Other</i>s</span><span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">:<br />
If we do this clearly, and make clear what our core is, distancing ourselves
from minority positions and extremes in our own field, then we have a better
chance of heading off the real big source of debate affecting our enterprise, and setting itself up to undermine it, which is the trendy view that
</span><span style="font-family: 'CMTI12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">everything </span><span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">can be solved with Big Data and Lots of Counting. This is the
behaviourist mindset rebooted with shiny new computational tools. The reasons it exists are the reasons it has always existed: people feel comforted by </span><span style="font-family: CMR12; font-size: 12pt;">objectivity; it feels hardcore and scientific. But behaviourism does not work,
and we must fight the simplistic versions of it which would seek to shut down
classic generative linguistics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Having said that, I wonder though, how many of those on the ‘other’
planet out there would be comfortable with my simplistic characterization of
them as rebooted behaviourists. There is of course an interesting old question lurking here— the classic mind-body problem. People who emphasize
connectionist architectures and emergent grammars are also in their own way
fascinated by the idea that the illusion of order can be made to emerge out
of chaos, that the illusion of mind can emerge out of matter, once things
are complicated enough and incorporate enough ‘feedback loops’. Learning
and ways of learning are vitally important questions for our field, and vitally
important to understanding the human mind. We do not make progress on
them if we simply mock the connectionists or the counters. Rather, simulations of this type are ideal for exploring the tension and interplay between
categorization, levels of generalization, and the emergent rule systems. One
of the differences between the earliest stages of generative grammar and today is that we understand much better how an innate tendency or ability
that is very abstract can give rise to quite rich and specific solutions in the
logical problem of language acquisition. Our differences with the connectionists and the counters are that we are pushing on different ends of the
problem, and have a tendency to favour solutions with a different balance
between the hard wired and the emergent. The rhetoric that underlies this
conversation is what is most damaging to progress. The debate is always
set up as a battleground where someone is right and someone is wrong. In
point of fact, the connectionists conceded ages ago that something about the
human mind must be innate (see Elman’s classic textbook on Rethinking
Innateness where he makes this point in the introduction), and generativists
have long backed off from the idea that Principle A could in any way be representationally innate in the human mind. The divisive rhetoric belies this
essential convergence. The question of what in fact needs to be considered
innate is an open one, and one which both kinds of linguists are interested
in. I for one am also completely open to the idea that the magic innate thing
or things is not unique to language, although I do think as I said above,
that language is the richest and most accessible manifestation of that special
thing. Moreover, we need to keep open the lines of communication across
the two camps, with their different methodologies and different ‘gut feelings’,
because that way we will learn from each other and actually find answers.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Incidentally, I do think that there is some positive action going on on the B and C fronts, but not enough. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'CMBX12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">D <i>Specific Big Picture Issues I am Passionate About</i></span><span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">:
</span><br />
<ul>
<li style="font-family: 'CMSY10'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Separating structure/hierarchy from linearization and rethinking our
standard architectures concerning the interface relationship between
the narrow computational system and Externalization
</span><br />
</li>
<li style="font-family: 'CMSY10'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Rethinking the interface with the semantics: putting some structural
semantics back into form; understanding the work done by the concep-
tual primitives at the interface
</span><br />
</li>
<li style="font-family: 'CMSY10'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Spanning and the formal status of ‘word’
</span><br />
</li>
<li style="font-family: 'CMSY10'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'CMR12'; font-size: 12.000000pt;">Derivational vs. Constraint based and Parallel architecture models </span><br />
</li>
</ul>
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