Abstract
I examine John Collins’ reconstruction of the cognitive revolution in linguistics, showing that one of the main arguments for cognitivism is simply not compelling. While there is a convincing case for aiming to achieve “explanatory adequacy” in linguistics, over and above mere observational and descriptive adequacy, this aim need not be underwritten by a cognitivist conception of language. A unified theory of all human languages is desirable whether or not cognitivism is correct. Next, I point out that, although cognitivism entails that grammars are psychologically real, the reverse entailment does not hold; a grammar can be psychologically real even if the objects of the formal syntactician’s concern are public, conventional E-languages. Chomsky’s view entails that psycholinguists should seek a relatively transparent relation between the syntacticians’ grammar and the “knowledge-base” that constitutes competence—a “natural” grammar-parser combination. Progress toward this goal has been slow, in part because syntacticians are not as concerned with psycholinguistic data as a cognitivist would expect them to be. In the mainstream syntax literature, psychological reality is a distant, dimly understood, and rarely invoked desideratum. Nevertheless, a parsing model that makes direct use of independently plausible syntactic principles is the simplest and strongest theoretical option.
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Notes
- 1.
There are important ambiguities in the term ‘surface string’, which bear on issues concerning the coherence and utility of the notion of E-language. On the one hand, a surface string might be a linear ordering of words, morphemes, or phonemes. These categories are picked out by technical notions from linguistic theory and hence might be argued by a Chomskyan theorist to be I-linguistic—that is, psychological—entities. On the other hand, a surface string might be a linear ordering of inscriptions, acoustic waveforms, or muscle contractions. In this case, surface strings are plainly E-linguistic entities. But it is difficult to make sense of the idea that a grammar might generate such things. As I see it, the friend of E-language must argue (i) that the notions ‘word’, ‘morpheme’, and ‘phoneme’ actually have their home in E-linguistics and (ii) that an adequate grammar will include some sort of systematic mapping from these theoretical constructs to the observational categories that include inscriptions, acoustic waveforms, and muscle contractions. A formal statement of such a mapping would license talk of a grammar generating observable E-linguistic entities. (Analogously, the cognitivist must specify psychological mechanisms that compute phonological, morphological, and syntactic representations on the basis of causal encounters with inscriptions, acoustic waveforms, and muscle contractions.) Note, finally, that even when this ambiguity in ‘surface string’ is resolved, there remains a further issue: must an observationally adequate grammar generate only those strings that have actually been observed—e.g., recorded in a corpus—or must it also generate strings that either will or might be observed? In what sense of “will” and “might”? See Quine (1953) for reflections on this and related matters, and Chap. 2 for a discussion of its bearing on the infinitude issue.
- 2.
The term ‘feature’ is to be understood in its generic sense, though there is a way in which this claim is true even if the term is taken to have its more technical meaning from phonology and syntax, e.g., in Minimalism (Chap. 9).
- 3.
The parameters are often taken to be binary, but this is not a core claim of the P&P model. It is, instead, an additional claim, to be established on independent grounds. In this respect, it is like the claim that the parameters refer solely to the features of functional heads—a condition imposed by grammars in the Minimalist tradition (e.g., Chomsky 1995).
- 4.
For a decidedly unsympathetic evaluation, see Tomasello (2005). Tomasello raises a serious objection to the P&P model of acquisition, targeting specifically the assumption, highlighted above, that the linguistic input does not come in the form of a labeled syntactic structure, but, rather, in the form of a messy acoustic and visual stream. For a child to assign any syntactic structure to pieces of the primary linguistic data, it must have somehow already bridged the gap between an acoustic description of the data and the more abstract description couched in some or other syntactic formalism. Tomasello’s point is that whatever cognitive resources allow the child to do this—in his view, sophisticated statistical reasoning, coupled with innate mind-reading abilities—are, in principle, powerful enough to both generate a rudimentary syntactico-semantic framework, and then to refine that framework in accordance with the needs engendered by increasingly complex social interactions. The objection is, I think, a powerful one, but by no means decisive. Impressive efforts to meet it have been made, e.g., by J. D. Fodor (1998b).
- 5.
Needless to say, opponents of the cognitivist conception can, should, and do allow that language acquisition is one of the primary explananda of some theory. What they deny is that the theory in question is the formal grammar of the language, or of human language more generally. The acquisition theorist will doubtless appeal to such a grammar, but acquisition of the grammar will be seen by the anti-cognitivist as a separate matter.
- 6.
Chomsky penned The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory in 1955–1956, prior to publishing Syntactic Structures (1957), but the work only appeared in print in 1975.
- 7.
In the main text, I have stressed the notion of theoretical generality. But there is also something to be said for the super-empirical virtues of explanatory simplicity and, perhaps more importantly, explanatory unity. As noted above, the P&P model was motivated in large part by the fact that it can be used to explain a wide range of seemingly disparate phenomena within a particular language by appeal to a handful of interacting syntactic principles. (See, e.g., Ludlow 2011: Chap. 1 for detailed examples.) Moreover, the model uses a small number of parameters to account for seemingly unrelated differences between languages. A prime example of this can be found in the unification of a great many linguistic properties by reference to the pro-drop parameter. (See Haegeman 1994: pp. 19–25 and Berwick 1991b.) For our purposes, the important point is that these virtues are enjoyed by the P&P model irrespective of whether that model is construed as a theory of the cognitive states involved in acquisition.
- 8.
- 9.
“Trivially, then, there is some property P of the human cognitive design that allows each of us to acquire any given language. If all of this is so, then it would appear that inquiry into what each language shares is a substantial pursuit, for we must all share something given that we can acquire any language, notwithstanding the many apparent differences between any two languages” (Collins 2008a, b: p. 85). See also Chomsky (1986: p. 17).
- 10.
It is noteworthy that compelling arguments have recently been advanced for the conclusion that the sustained search for linguistic universals has come up entirely empty-handed. See Evans and Levinson, “The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science,” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009).
- 11.
Collins provides only a couple of examples of actual linguistic universals (p. 85). First, he cites the possibility of ambiguity, and the need for transformations to explain it. Another universal is “creativity”—the capacity for indefinitely novel production and comprehension. These are notably less sexy than the universals whose discovery is sometimes touted as a shining achievement of the Chomskyan approach—e.g. X-bar theory or the Head-Movement Constraint (both of which, incidentally, are now under fire from recent developments in the Minimalist program). The universals that Collins mentions are quite general, and thus impose very modest constraints on grammars. Correspondingly, they provide very weak support for Chomsky’s innateness thesis. That these constraints rule out some very anemic grammars is, I suppose, somewhat interesting, but it shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the constraints tell us very little about the innate endowment that the child brings to bear on the acquisition task. Indeed, if our cognition of nonlinguistic domains can also be captured by recursive formalisms—a not wholly implausible proposition (consider our understanding of kinship and other social relations, our mathematical competence, our tonal and rhythmic competence, etc.)—then this particular constraint doesn’t even militate in favor of independent language faculty. In such a hypothetical-but-not-inconceivable case, the constraints would tell us only about general cognitive development, not language acquisition per se. More generally, only the existence of very specific universals can be marshaled as evidence for a robust innateness thesis.
- 12.
See also Devitt (2006a: Chap. 12) for a discussion of various arguments for the innateness of a mentally represented UG. On Devitt’s view, an adequate grammar must be true of the external representational system that is a language. Moreover, he holds that human languages, like the representational systems of bees, prairie dogs, and other creatures, are acquired on the basis of innate constraints. It follows that an adequate grammar will not ascribe properties to a language that would make it impossible to acquire on this basis. Hence, an independently confirmed theory of the innate constraints can help the linguist narrow down the space of adequate grammars for a language. Devitt claims, however, that our present-day understanding of the innate constraints is poor. I echo this claim in the final pages of this discussion.
- 13.
There is a strange double standard in Berwick and Weinberg’s (1984) treatment of this issue. In the opening pages of Chap. 2, they make the following reasonable point about how parsing theory typically fails to constrain grammar construction: “We ought to be able to recruit sentence processing results to tell us something about what the grammar should look like. If we had some independently justified parsing model, we could reject grammars that were incompatible with it. In practice, though, because very little is known about the details of the syntactic parser, confidence in constraining the choice of grammatical theory via this route must be correspondingly weak. If the parsing theory has no independent motivation, we can always change it to suit the grammatical format” (p. 36). However, they go on to suggest that our understanding of the acquisition process is more detailed and hence provides more firm constraints on grammar constructions. But surely, their observation about the lack of fixed points in parsing theory holds just as well with regard to acquisition. Indeed, the only characteristics of acquisition that B&W bring to bear in their introductory chapter are these: (i) acquisition is accomplished in about 5 years, and (ii) the input to it is variable, partially ill formed, and rarely (if ever) provides negative evidence. This is not more than what we know about parsing. Yet these considerations were marshaled, in their first chapter, as the justification for profound shifts in syntactic theory.
- 14.
The rolling revolution in syntactic theory also makes trouble for syntacticians. Ludlow (2011: p. 29) discusses how fans of the Minimalist Program were forced to sacrifice the “sweet results” that issued from the PRO theorem, when that theorem was abandoned by Chomsky (1995)—a case of what Ludlow quite aptly labels “Kuhn loss.”
- 15.
- 16.
Talk of “the syntactician’s grammar” is misleading. There are many substantively distinct grammars on offer, e.g., Principles and Parameters grammars, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, to name just a few. And there is even more variety if we consider the theoretically irrelevant but computationally significant notational variants of each of these grammars. See Chaps. 8 and 9 for examples.
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Pereplyotchik, D. (2017). Language Acquisition and the Explanatory Adequacy Condition. In: Psychosyntax. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 129. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60066-6_4
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