Babel's Dawn

Occam’s Razor v. Noam Chomsky

Here’s a puzzle for you: Study the four sentences below and provide a rule that explains (a) why the first 3 are correct while the last one (marked with an *) is incorrect, and (b) why sometimes the reflexive pronoun (ending in –self/-selves) appears before its referent (underlined) and sometimes after:

• Pete shot himself in the foot.
• Speaking for himself at last, John proposed to Priscilla.
• The picture of himself on the post office wall disturbed John quite a bit.
• *Joan told me herself hates chocolate.

Shouldn’t that first sentence be as easy to explain as Pete shot Joe in the foot?

Maybe so, but generative grammarians have had a heck of a time accounting for reflexives. They have developed a whole line of explanation, known as binding theory, to regulate reflexives and other usages, called anaphora, in which a pronoun or noun phrase always refers to another noun in the same sentence.

Last Roar from a Dying Grammar?

Along with the question about the evolution of blank slates (see last post) Dr. Bolhuis sent me a paper just published in Trends in Cognitive Science. The paper, which Bolhuis  teased would annoy me, is titled, “Structures, not Strings: Linguistics as Part of the Cognitive Sciences” and has a number of distinguished co-authors, including Noam himself. Bolhuis is the corresponding author. I told him I would never have been able to maintain my blog for so long if I did not have a taste for being annoyed.

Truth is, however, I was more puzzled than annoyed. The paper seems a concise summary of positions held for many  years. Why write such old news?

Attention-Based Syntax

The Rosetta Stone

Last June I posted a three-part series titled "I'm Tired of Chomsky" in which I summarized Chomsky's theory, put forth an alternate theory, and reached some conclusions (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, All 3 in 1 PDF). At the end I found that there was some overlap in our ideas about language:

• Internal language: Although I do not accept Chomsky's theory of innate, elementary concepts, I do believe that humans enjoy a subjective, sensory knowledge that language can evoke but not reproduce.
• A Merge system: I disagree with Chomsky's idea that language is produced by combining symbols for elementary concepts, but I agree that language is created by combining words into a string. In my view, the words direct attention to evoked knowledge.

But, as the saying goes, you can't beat something with nothing. Chomsky and his many admirers have produced an elaborate system of analysis that has its limitations—how seriously can anybody take an account of language that does not explain how we are able to communicate knowledge?—but has the great virtue of actually existing. I have felt for some time that somebody ought to produce an account of how language can evoke not just images, but complete ideas that hang together.

More on Basic and Extended Syntax

 

Question pronouns are important but hard to visualize.

Yesterday I posted a notice about a review article by Heather K.J. van der Lely and Steven Pinker titled "The biological basis of language," that reports the brain supports two separate syntax networks which the authors call basic and extended syntax. I did not go into the grammatical analysis of that paper because it was irrelevant to my focus, which was on the multi-step evolutionary process implicit in their account. In this post, I do want to look at their grammatical analysis because it differs from the way I look at language. Can I accept the van der Lely-Pinker findings without accepting their thoughts about syntax?

A Breakthrough Paper

 

Sophie's Story looks at the strengths and limitations of Specific Language Impairment.

The story of language and its origins that has been emerging on this blog is fairly simple:

1. Members of the human lineage began using words when a population became communal enough to trust one another with shared knowledge.
2. Those first language users differed from their ancestors in the nature of their community, not in the acquisition of some new verbal skill.
3. Once populations of language users became competitive, selection pressures to enrich language functions grew stronger and new verbal abilities did evolve.
4. The competition à enrichment cycle persisted and continued to produce expanded verbal abilities.

How might such a story be tested? Points 1 and 2 imply that, intellectually, some parts of language should require no special human abilities, but point 3 implies that some parts of language do depend on special adaptations. So I have been keeping an eye open for any findings that would support or demolish these expectations.

A review article by Heather K.J. van der Lely and Steven Pinker titled "The biological basis of language," seems to be the paper I have been looking for. Basing their work on the study of children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI), the authors sort syntax and phonology under two headings: basic and extended.

A Brain for Resolving Hierarchies

A naive observer might say this is a group of people strung out one after another,  but someone more familiar with lines will know there is some kind of more complex social hierarchy here. Getting to handle such things was part of our history..

The current issue of the online journal Biolinguistics is devoted to the subject of recursion, a procedure that enables the creation of sentences of indeterminate length. Last week's post discussed an article that doubts "full-blown recursion" is part of language. Another important paper in the issue is The Neural Basis of Recursion and Complex Syntactic Hierarchy by Angela D. Friederici, Jörg Bahlmann, Roland Friedrich & Michiru Makuuchi. Based on a series of experiments, it concludes that hierarchical thinking is common to many tasks besides syntax. Most striking is the evidence that mathematical thinking uses different parts of the brain from syntactical thinking and therefore (says I) evidence of unbounded recursion in mathematical reasoning cannot be used to support unbounded recursion in "the language faculty."

Reconsidering Recursion

I got into the matter of language origins initially because I rejected the possibility of an infinite regress. Could it be, however, that infinite repeitition is the key to language after all?

The online journal, Biolinguistics, has published an issue devoted to the matter of recursion, and it looks as though everyone interested in the details of language origins will have to be familiar with the issue's arguments. In 2002 the Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch paper put forth the proposition that there is a faculty of language, i.e. a biological system supporting language, that can be divided into a narrow and a broad sense. The broad sense includes all those biological supports that are shared with other members of the animal kingdom. An example of such a trait might be navigation abilities that let us understand the many spatial references common to all languages.

The narrow sense includes any biological abilities that support language and are exclusive to humans. The only example given of a narrow faculty was recursion: the ability to create a new sentence by taking an existing sentence and using a repetitive process to change it. For example, take the sentence The big dog chased the calico cat and turn it into a new sentence: The big dog that Freddy got for his birthday chased the calico cat. This new sentence was generated by taking the old sentence and inserting a phrase. That's an instance of recursion.

Monkey Syntax

The New York Times is reporting (here) that a study of Campbell's Monkey cries in the Ivory Coast has found the use of suffixes to modify the meaning of a call. The monkeys have 6 basic calls which they can modify. For example, krak is the call made in response to seeing a leopard; krak-oo appears to be a modification of the call that indicates the caller only thinks or hears that a leopard is nearby.

boom is an invitational sound (i.e., come to me), but when monkeys combine it with krak-oo to get boom-krak-oo the call signals a falling tree.

For those who stress syntax as the unique element of language, a few dance steps may be needed to explain this one. It sounds like the sort of story we are going to be hearing about for years.

Is Anything Universal in Language?

One of the most basic quarrels about language and its origins has flared up again in a particularly fierce way.

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The question at hand: do the things that all languages have in common reflect certain universals of human thought and experience, or do they reflect the workings of a universal language faculty? Fifty years ago a third answer dominated: languages are learned from scratch and have no universals. That position, however, is still so out of favor that it is not much proposed in the current quarrel.

The latest dispute arises from a stark denial that languages have any peculiar grammatical universals of their own. It amounts to a total rejection of Chomsky’s core idea that the syntax of any individual language reflects an instance of a universal grammar (UG).  Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson have published a paper in the wonderful journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science” (uncorrected final draft available here). Also published with the paper were a series of responses including many sharp retorts from generative grammarians who still firmly believe in UG. They score their points, but the fact that the issue has returned underlines the basic fact: after fifty years of proclaiming the existence of a UG, we still don’t know what it is. All in all the paper and responses make for a brutal slugfest.

Intermediate Syntax

Me Tarzan. — You Jane. Could anybody have ever really talked in that super-simple manner?

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A plausible account of the evolution of syntax is coming into view. I had almost despaired. 

Most syntacticians (I believe) still hold the view that syntax must have come as an all or nothing package, a proposition I consider an evolutionary absurdity. 

Second, even when it is discussed in evolutionary or biological contexts syntax is presented in syntactically formal terms that provides no clue as to how the formal operation can be translated into something important to natural selection. 

Finally, I don’t believe syntax, as formally described, is much of a help to people when they are trying to figure out the best way to say something. I know that whenever I give editorial advice, I talk about a completely different set of issues from technical discussions about moving phrases, etc. The formal system is great for mechanical operations in which the machine has no awareness of what it is doing, but does not really address the experience of using language. If editing really worked best at the unconscious level, all these thoughts about helping the reader follow along should just get in the way. Instead, they help get it right.

At the same time, syntax is obviously important and has to be accounted for. “Syntax” was one of the original categories for posting on this blog, but I have long doubted that I would have much to report. Lately, however, things are looking more promising. I am especially encouraged by a paper, “Sex and Syntax” (here) by Ljiljana Progovac in the current Biolinguistics.