The Primacy of Grammar Part 2

(p. xii). Given the continuing popularity of these complaints against biolinguistics, apparently leading to a ''cras.h.i.+ng wave of rejections,'' some brief remarks are in order at this point. I will discuss the question of meaning in biolinguistics at length as I proceed, especially in chapters 37.

''Meaning,'' Chomsky (1957) observed in his early work, is a ''catch-all'' term. The term evokes a variety of expectations, not all of which can be met in serious theoretical inquiry. Furthermore, there is no a.s.surance that, when the common concept of meaning is placed under theoretical scrutiny, whatever remains of the common concept will be located in one theoretical place. It is more likely that the thick and loose ordinary 18

Chapter 1.

concept will be broken down into theoretically salient parts, and that the individual parts will be attached to dierent corners of the total theoretical plane.

Keeping these points in mind, consider Chomsky's general characterization of the computational system of language. A computational system consists of ''rules that form syntactic constructions or phonological or semantic patterns of varied sorts to provide the rich expressive power of human language'' (Chomsky 1980, 54.). Notice that this characterization includes ''semantic patterns.'' Almost every topic in biolinguistics is directly concerned with semantics and questions of meaning. For example, treatment of grammatical phenomena such as understood Subject, antecedents of anaphors and p.r.o.nouns, quantifer movement, and so on, are directly semantically motivated. In fact, the entire nonphonological part of computation (N ! SEM computation) is currently viewed as geared to form an ''image'' SEM in a way such that the (configurational) demands placed by the systems of thought are optimally met.

Furthermore, it is most natural to view the language faculty itself as containing what may be called ''I-meanings'': representations encoded in the formal-semantic features of lexical items. Finally, other naturalistic things being equal, the domain of syntax may be broadened to include much of what goes by the label ''formal semantics''; thus, the concept ''semantic value'' could cover syntactic objects internal to the mind but external to the language faculty. So much for Chomsky's ''preoccupation with 'meaning-free' syntax,'' and his stopping ''people from working on meaning'' (Marvin Minsky, cited in Jenkins 2000, 52). It is hard to find any interest, then, in the objections to the biolinguistic enterprise from the outside.

Therefore, the only option is to try to make sense of linguistic research in the context of current science. And here the stumbling block, to repeat, is that there is nothing in the relevant current sciences that tells us how to make that sense. The problem, as Chomsky notes, may well lie with biology and the brain sciences, which do not provide any basis for what appear to be well-established conclusions about language. More specifically, the biological sciences may not have suciently advanced to respond to the questions posed to it by linguistic research. It could be, as Chomsky (2000d, 104) observes, ''any complex system will appear to be a hopeless array of confusion before it comes to be understood, and its principles of organization and function discovered.''

I will briefly cite two examples to suggest what is at stake here. Consider the research on nematodes. Nematodes are very simple organisms The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

19.

with a few hundred neurons in all, so people have been able to chart their wiring diagrams and developmental patterns fairly accurately. Yet Chomsky (1994b) reports that an entire research group at MIT devoted to the study of the ''stupid little worm,'' just a few years ago, could not figure out why the ''worm does the things it does.'' More recently, citing cognitive neuroscientist Charles Gallistel, Chomsky writes that ''we clearly do not understand how the nervous system computes, or even the foundations of its ability to compute, even for the small set of arithmetical and logical operations that are fundamental for any computation for insects''

(Chomsky 2001b; Gallistel 1998). Commenting on Edward Wilson's optimism about a ''coming solution to the brain-mind problem,'' Chomsky remarks that the ''grounds for the general optimism'' regarding ''the question of emergence of mental aspects of the world'' are at best ''dubious.''

There are serious attempts in biology itself to address the tension between the concept of perfection and what is known about biological systems. In recent years, there has been increasing application of considerations from physics (such as symmetry, least-energy requirement, and the like) to try to understand the organization and function of complex biological systems (Jenkins 2000; Leiber 2001; Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2004; Chomsky 2005, etc.). If this approach is successful in providing an account of some of the complex physical structures and patterns found in the biological domain, then biology will also confirm the intuition about nature's drive for the beautiful which has been a guiding theme of modern science ever since its origins, as Chomsky (2001b) remarks following Ernst Haeckel. Still, even if we grant that the patterns on zebras or the icosahedral structure of viruses have interesting least-eort explanations, the chance of such explanations extending to the abstract structures of language is at best remote. I return to this point in section 7.3.1.

1.3.2.

A Body of Doctrines Pending such advances in biology, the only option is to make scientific sense of linguistic research in its own terms. In eect, I view the basic vocabulary and the constructs of linguistics-its lexical features, clause structures, island constraints, argument structures, landing sites, constraints on derivation, and so on-as theoretical devices to give an account of at least part of the organic world, namely, the human grammatical mind, and perhaps much more. More specifically, one should be allowed to draw a tree diagram and claim that it describes a state of the brain.

20.

Chapter 1.

Returning at this point to the period in the history of chemistry mentioned above, recall that chemistry was viewed as a mere ''calculating device'' on the grounds that it could not be unified with physics. The gap seemed unbridgeable essentially because the chemists' matter was discrete and discontinuous, the physicist's energy was continuous (Chomsky 2001b). Under the a.s.sumption that the physicist's view of the world is ''basic'' at all times, it is understandable that chemistry was viewed as ''unreal.'' However, as Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out in recent years, the gap was bridged by unifying a radically changed physics with a largely unchanged chemistry. a.n.a.logically, from what we saw about the current state of biological research on cognition and behavior, it is possible that a ''radically changed'' biology, perhaps on the lines sketched above, will unify with a ''largely unchanged'' linguistics. Since the likeli-hood of such biology is remote, all we have in hand is the body of linguistic research itself.

Chomsky drives the point by citing what he calls the ''localist'' conception of science attributed to the eighteenth-century English chemist Joseph Black: ''Let chemical anity be received as a first principle . . . till we have established such a body of doctrine as [Newton] has established concerning the laws of gravitation'' (quoted in Chomsky 2000d, 166). Thus, chemical research proceeded along a dierent path from physics, and the gap between the disciplines widened.

In my opinion, the gap between biology and linguistic research is even wider. After all, the chemist's view of matter as discrete and discontinuous was not something unheard of in (earlier) physics. Newton himself was a ''corpuscularean'' about many aspects of nature in the sense that he thought that all matter in the universe is made up of the same ''building blocks.'' So, for him, even something as ethereal as light also consists of ''particles,'' a view confirmed from a wholly dierent direction two centuries later. In that sense, in adopting the chemist's view of matter, (later) physics was reconstructing a part of its own past.

Furthermore, the disciplines did get unified. It could mean either that something totally unexpected happened, or that the disciplines were ''proximal'' for centuries for this to happen eventually. The bare fact that this form of unification is a very rare event in science lends support to either interpretation. Still, the second option of proximality is more plausible since the first involves a miracle. In contrast, although the general idea of biolinguistics goes back to ancient times in many traditions, there is no record of ''proximity'' of the disciplines of linguistics and biology-just the opposite in most cases, as we have seen. In general, if The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

21.

there is exactly one case of large-scale unification in the whole of science, it is natural to expect that there is a history to it, which does not often repeat itself.

Pursuing the point a bit further, it seems that although physics and chemistry became separable bodies of doctrine at some point, there was some conception of a unified picture throughout. That is, some conception of properties of more ''basic'' elements combining to produce both physical and chemical eects guided much research for centuries. In this connection, the issue of John Dalton's professional ident.i.ty is interesting: Was Dalton a chemist or a physicist? The Britannica Micropaedia article on Dalton (vol. 3, 358) lists him as both a chemist and a physicist; so does the main Macropaedia article (vol. 5, 439). The Macropaedia article on the history of the physical sciences, however, lists him as a chemist only.

But the section on chemistry in this article (vol. 14, 390) begins as follows: Eighteenth century chemistry derived from and remained involved with questions of mechanics, light, and heat as well as iatrochemistry and notions of medical therapy. . . . Like the other sciences, chemistry also took many of its problems and much of its viewpoint from [Newton's] Opticks and especially the ''Queries''

with which that work ended. Newton's suggestion of a hierarchy of cl.u.s.ters of un-alterable particles formed by virtue of the specific attractions of its component particles led directly to comparative studies of interactions and thus to the table of anities.

Following these remarks, the article goes on to view Joseph Priestley's work on chemical anities as continued explorations of Newtonian queries. This is exactly what I had in mind about the ''proximity'' of chemistry and physics. In light of these considerations, the alleged ''divergence'' between physics and chemistry as separable ''bodies of doctrine''

could be viewed as a late-nineteenth-century construction motivated largely by the temporary decline of corpuscular theories and the rise of wave mechanics in physics. Similarly, the alleged ''convergence'' of the physical and chemical in the postquantum era could be a twentieth-century construction based on the revival of ''corpuscular'' theories in physics. Chemistry, as Chomsky emphasized, remained essentially unchanged throughout. It is at least questionable how much weight should be placed on these temporary phases to form a general conception of science as it develops over centuries.

In fact, without this background continuum, the concept of body of doctrine with its ''locality'' does not make clear sense, just as cl.u.s.ters of South Pacific land ma.s.ses are ''islands'' in the context of the continuum of the ocean. I have no problem with the concept of body of doctrine 22

Chapter 1.

that separates physical, chemical, biological, geographic, and so on with respect to a general conception of science emanating from a unitary source, here Newton. Otherwise, the concept just seems to label any inquiry whatsoever (astrological, sociological, economic, etc.) and is, therefore, without empirical force.

In sharp contrast, there is neither any historical eort nor any contemporary evidence for us to be able to place studies on language somewhere in this continuum. There are two crucial points to this. First, language theory is envisaged here entirely in terms of its object, which is an abstract computational system with certain output properties with, I think, a possible range of application across related domains such as music, arithmetic, and logical reasoning: this object is called ''grammar.'' It does not include the conceptual system, and its operations are fairly ''blind''

with respect to the band of information it computes on. We will see all this as we proceed. Second, the most amazing fact is that language theory is available in the Galilean style. As long as language theory was not there, we had some loose ''philosophical'' conception of a domain that also did not belong to the Newtonian continuum precisely because it was not a science at all. So, a very dierent issue opens up once the Galilean style began to apply to language, and language theory in its recent form emerged. On the one hand, the availability of the Galilean style surely signals the arrival of a science of language; on the other, this arrival has had no historical link with the only scientific continuum in hand, namely, the Newtonian one.

In fact, there is a sense in which there indeed is a ''continuum'' in which to place language theory, as hinted in section 1.1. The curve begins with, say Panini, and continues through Aristotle, Port Royal, von Hum- .

boldt, Saussure, Turing, and so on, to lead to generative grammar. The continuum could well be called the ''generative enterprise,'' in a wider sense. No doubt, this continuum, unlike the Newtonian continuum, is an abstract conception without direct historical-textual lineage. Its themes originated more or less independently in dierent textual traditions in India and Europe; the spirit of high ideas knows no boundary. With the intervention of German ''orientalists,'' we can also think of the two traditions converging at Saussurean linguistics in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. This enterprise flourished essentially independently of, and parallel to, the Newtonian continuum more or less throughout. The emergence of language theory shows, in afterthought, that it had always been a scientific enterprise. With two continuums in hand, various possibilities for unification arise. The present point is that such unification is The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

23.

likely to be very dierent in structure from the ones within the Newtonian continuum.

Nevertheless, Black's ''isolationist'' conception of science still holds fairly decisively with respect to his original example: Newton's theory of gravitation. It is well known that the postulation of universal gravitation immediately raised a storm of controversy strikingly similar to contemporary controversies around Universal Grammar. Much reordering has happened in science since Newton's formulation of the theory over three hundred years ago. Newton's original conception (''action at a distance'') was replaced by the concept of a gravitational field. The concept of field was extended to the phenomena of electricity and magnetism, which were subsequently unified under Maxwell's laws. More recently, there has been further unification within physics of electromagnetic forces with forces internal to the atom. As noted, physics was unified with chemistry, and chemistry with molecular biology. Through all this turbulent history, gravitation remained an enigma; the concept just could not be coherently accommodated with the rest of physics (Held 1980; Hawking and Israel 1987, for history of gravitation theory). It continues to be a problem even in the recent advances in quantum field theory, the most general unified theory in physics currently available (Cao 1997).

Roger Penrose (2001) formulates the general problem as follows.

According to him, quantum theory and gravitation will be properly unified-that is, we can expect gravitational eects at the quantum scale-only in a ''new physics''; the current scales of quantum theory and relativity theory are insucient. If we take a free electron (current scale of quantum theory), we get the relevant quantum eects, but the gravitational eects are too small. If we take a cat (current scale of relativity), quantum theory produces paradoxes. So we settle for an intermediate scale, say, the scale of a speck of dust: ''With a speck of dust you can start to ask the question, 'could a speck of dust be in this place and in that place at the same time?' '' The point is that a speck of dust is not in the domain of either quantum theory or relativity theory.

Pus.h.i.+ng the a.n.a.logy with gravitation further, it is of much interest that, for several centuries after Newton postulated the force, the physical character of gravitation, even in the field version, remained an enigma. That is, although the properties of gravitation itself were mathematically well understood and its empirical eect widely attested, no one really knew what it means for the physical universe to contain such a force. Albert Einstein finally characterized universal gravitation in terms of other parameters of the physical universe, namely, the spatial properties of 24

Chapter 1.

bodies. But, as Penrose's remarks suggest, in so doing he had to construct a theory that just would not mesh with the rest of physics. In other words, although Einstein explained the ''evolution'' of gravitation (from bodies), the theory of evolution he needed could not be arrived at from some theory of proto-gravitation already available in existing physics.

There is a case, then, in which a body of doctrine has resisted unification with the rest of physics for over three hundred years, despite some of the most imaginative scientific reflections in human history. Note also that this problem has persisted in research essentially on ''outer'' domains. In contrast, the unification problem facing biolinguistics arises for an ''inner'' domain. Here a solution of the unification problem requires not only a radical s.h.i.+ft in domains, but also that the purported solution works across ''inner'' and ''outer'' domains. It can only be ancient prejudice that the entire body of biolinguistics is often dismissed on the grounds that it does not come armed with a certificate from existing theories of organic evolution.

Biolinguistics is a body of doctrines that is likely to remain isolated, in the sense outlined, from the rest of science far into the future. To emphasize, this conclusion is based on the history of science, namely, that the problem of unification between psychological studies and biology is as unresolved today as it was two centuries ago.12 The crucial recent dimension to this history is that psychological studies now contain a scientific theory, so there is a genuine part.i.tion in science. I will draw on this perspective a lot in what follows.

1.3.3.

A Mind-Internal System In the meantime, we can ask other questions about biolinguistics. Given its (current) isolation, a natural question is, ''What is its reach?'' This question can be rephrased as follows. According to Jenkins (2000, 1), the biolinguistics program was supposed to answer five basic questions: (1) What const.i.tutes knowledge of language? (2) How is this knowledge acquired? (3) How is this knowledge put to use? (4) What are the relevant brain mechanisms? (5) How does this knowledge evolve? How many of these issues are within the reach of current biolinguistic inquiry?

In view of the state of the unification problem, it is clear that substantive answers to questions 4 and 5 are currently beyond reach. This does not mean that no answers are available, especially for 4. For example, one could simply take the constructs of linguistics to be properties of brain states as currently understood, and proceed from there; some of that could already be happening in the brain-imaging literature. To con- The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

25.

sider just one case, it is suggested that a system of neurons executes what is known in linguistics as the ''trace deletion hypothesis'' (Grodzinsky 2000). Similar proposals are routine in physics; geodesics and potentials are viewed as located all over the universe. Yet, the dierence between physics and linguistics is that the universe is what physics says it is; there is no other account of the universe once we grant that scientific understanding is limited to its intelligible theories. But the brain is not what linguistics says it is.13 There are independent electrochemical-microbiological accounts of the brain on which these images take place.

These accounts do not explain what it means for the trace deletion hypothesis to be executed there (Smith 2000). As for answers to question 5, until explanations are available via a ''radically changed'' biology envisaged above, what we have in hand for now, according to Chomsky (2002), are more like ''fables'' and ''stories.''

Substantive work in biolinguistics, through all its phases, has been basically concerned with question 1: ''What const.i.tutes knowledge of language?'' In the generative enterprise, this question was pursued in an interesting symbiosis with question 2, the issue of acquisition of language.

As noted, the enterprise was directly concerned with what is known as the ''problem of explanatory adequacy'': ''languages must somehow be extremely simple and very much like one another; otherwise, you couldn't acquire any of them'' (Chomsky 2000a, 13). Question 1, therefore, was taken to be shorthand for ''What const.i.tutes the knowledge of language such that Plato's problem is solved in this domain?'' In that sense, answers to question 1 have an immediate bearing on question 2: we would want to know if the abstract conditions on acquisition, which are postulated to answer question 1, are in fact supported by, say, child data. Thus within the computational-representational framework, interesting answers to question 2 flow directly from substantive answers to question 1 (Crain and Pietroski 2001 and references). However, beyond this framework, the problem of unification aects answers to question 2 insofar as we expect the issue of acquisition to be addressed in terms of the physical mechanisms of organisms.

These remarks extend to question 3 as well. If the issue of language use concerns mechanisms, not to speak of actions, the unification problem blocks substantive answers. However, subtle questions of language use can be posed within biolinguistics itself. Recall that the design problem for the language faculty was posed in terms of language use: To be usable, the expressions of the language faculty (at least some of them) have to be legible to the outside systems. It looks as though the computational 26

Chapter 1.

system of the faculty of language is, in a way, sensitive to the requirements of the conceptual-intentional systems-the ''thought'' systems.

For example, to meet its own conditions of optimality, the computational system sometimes places a linguistic object in a location where pragmatic conditions are also satisfied. Consider the so-called pa.s.sive constructions in which the Object of the main verb moves to the Subject position: John read the book ! The book was read by John. This is a purely grammatical phenomenon that I will look at in some detail from dierent directions later. Now consider the following sentences (Pinker 1995a, 228): Scientists have been studying the nature of black holes. The collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble creates a black hole. The trouble with the ''active'' second sentence is that there is a discontinuity of topic with the first. The first sentence has introduced the topic of black holes and the second should take o from there. This is achieved by the pa.s.sive sentence: A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble. In that sense, substantive answers to question 1 also lead to interesting answers to question 3.

Furthermore, these results, apart from suggesting a unified approach to questions 13, also oer a theoretically motivated division of the concept of language use. Pretheoretically, it is natural to view the question of language use thickly in terms of whatever it is that we do with language: express thoughts and feelings, talk about the world, ask questions, get someone to do something, and so on. In this picture, there is a cognitive system called ''language'' that we put to use in the external social setup to enable us to do these things. Therefore, question 3 (''How is this knowledge put to use?'') is cla.s.sically viewed as a question about, say, how we talk about the world: the problem of reference.

As we just saw, a very dierent set of issues emerges when we frame the question of language use in terms of satisfaction of legibility conditions at the interfaces. Here the question, roughly, is about language-external but mind-internal systems that not only immediately access but also (partly) influence the form of the representations constructed by the language faculty. In this sense, in meeting the legibility conditions, language has already been put to use! But this concept of use, restricted to mind-internal systems, need not appeal to any concept of use that involves, say, the concept of reference; in other words, the question of how language is related to the rest of the world to enable us to refer is now delinked from the question of how language relates to mind-internal systems. This is fundamental progress, and it was achieved by answering The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

27.

question 1 in minimalist terms. From this perspective, the cla.s.sical problem of Intentionality-how language relates to the world-basically falls out of biolinguistics.

Is there a meaningful problem of Intentionality outside of biolinguistics? Chomsky's (2000d, chapters 2 and 7) basic position is that words do not refer, people do; in fact, ''I can refer to India without using any word, or any thought, that has any independent connection to it.'' ''It is possible,'' Chomsky (2000d, 132) suspects, ''that natural language has only syntax and pragmatics''; ''there will be no provision'' for what is a.s.sumed to be the ''central semantic fact about language,'' namely, that it is used to represent the world. I return to these issues in chapter 3.

Chomsky's conclusion may be viewed as a rejection of what Jerry Fodor and Ernst Lepore have called ''Old Testament semantics'': ''Semantic relations hold between lexical items and the world and only between lexical items and the world.'' According to Fodor and Lepore (1994, 155), there is no semantic level of linguistic description: ''The highest level of linguistic description is, as it might be, syntax or logical form.'' Roughly, the claim is that the output of grammar, LF, is not a semantic level.14 I will question this conception of LF in some detail in this work to argue that LF itself may be viewed as a (genuine) semantic level.