The Primacy of Grammar Part 1

The Primacy of Grammar.

Nirmalangshu Mukherji.

Preface.

Human languages are commonly viewed as complex, porous, and moldable systems that we construct by active human agency to meet a variety of sociocultural ends. On this view, languages are more like inst.i.tutions such as legal and political systems; they are no doubt codified in some sense, but their codified character should not mislead us into thinking that there is some natural basis to their organization. In contrast, a small minority does hold the view that languages are natural objects with a biological basis, not unlike the respiratory or immune systems. Even there, most think of biological systems as irreducibly complex and messy where the methods of the exact sciences such as theoretical physics do not apply.

In any case, for most people, a prominent lesson from the history of the sciences is that there are reasons to be skeptical about genuine scientific advances in the study of what may be called the ''inner'' domains.

In the prevalent intellectual scenario, it is of considerable interest that the contemporary discipline of generative linguistics-also called ''biolinguistics''-has raised the prospects for developing a form of inquiry achieved only in some of the basic sciences. Biolinguistics is arguably the only attempt in the history of ideas in which, according to Noam Chomsky, a study of an aspect of the human mind-language-is beginning to have the ''feel of scientific inquiry.'' Biolinguistics is currently suggesting that the structure of language may be ''perfect'' in design, not unlike the arrangement of petals in the sunflower and the double helix of the DNA. Yet these advances have been accomplished essentially independently of the natural sciences, especially biology. In that sense, biolinguistics has initiated a (basic) science in its own terms. In view of these startling developments, there ought to be some interest in the foundations of this discipline. For instance, it is most natural to ask: Which aspect of nature does this science investigate? The topic is introduced in chapter 1.

I made a very preliminary attempt to address this issue in a short monograph earlier (Mukherji 2000). The present book vastly extends the scope of that work. Here I have made a more serious eort to construct a philosophical discourse that weaves in and out of some of the basic ideas in biolinguistics, including some technical ones, as I examine its internal logic. My contention is that the theoretical beauty of biolinguistics cannot be adequately displayed without marshaling some degree of rigor and formal precision. Biolinguistics is not just a clever coverage of data; it is a search for invariants in nature, as noted. The limited technical discussion of grammatical theory in chapters 2 and 5 is directed at the nonlinguist readers, but is neither intended nor enough to turn them into working linguists. As for professional linguists, there is perhaps some novelty in the way familiar material has been presented. In any case, I need this material for the complex argument that follows.

What It Is Not I am aware that biolinguistics is not alone in syntax research, not to speak of studies on language as a whole; there are other perspectives on the organization of language and the architecture of the mind. However, as my basic interest is to understand the scope and limits of biolinguistics and to extract some general consequences from that understanding, I have made no attempt to engage in comparative studies; to that extent, this work is not a defense of biolinguistics.

In fact, the work is pretty much confined to Chomsky's contributions in linguistic theory. Apart from the fact that Chomsky continues to be the prime mover in biolinguistics, the issues that interest me arise directly from his work, or so I think. I am aware that almost everything Chomsky is currently saying on the design of the language faculty is under dispute even within the core biolinguistic community; I have noted as many of them as possible while trying not to clutter the text with field-internal debates. In fact, I myself will express a variety of disagreements with Chomsky. So, as with any rational inquiry, the general argument of the book is conditional in character: a.s.suming the validity of Chomsky's claims that I find attractive (and I will tell you why), certain general conclusions seem to follow that go far beyond those claims. I am not suggesting that Chomsky is likely to agree with these conclusions.

This basic focus on Chomsky's work in biolinguistics has also (severely) constrained the extent to which I could address specific topics from other disciplines that merit extensive discussion on their own. Apart from topics internal to biolinguistics, the work touches on topics in the history and philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, lexical and formal semantics, and psychology of music, among others. I discuss them, at a suitable level of abstraction, only to see what light they throw on the character of biolinguistic inquiry from the perspective that interests me.

In any case, it is physically impossible by now to look at even a fraction of the literature on language and related capacities, not to speak of developing expertise in all the areas listed above. My own professional location is in the philosophy of language. Venturing out from there, I had to make hard choices regarding the material to include, and a host of rich details internal to the individual disciplines had to be set aside, mostly by design but sometimes out of sheer exhaustion as well.

Some perspective on the nature of language and mind does seem to follow once these choices are made.

What It Is Biolinguistics is centrally concerned with Plato's problem: How do humans come to know so much from so little exposure to the environment?

It is interesting that biolinguistics has in fact furnished a partial but substantive answer to this ancient question for a restricted domain that falls within the wider domain of language; the identification of this restricted domain is a task that will occupy us through much of this work.

As discussed in chapters 3 and 4, biolinguistics has been able to maintain some distance from topics traditionally thought to be central to the study of language: concepts, truth conditions, and communication. In this very specific sense, biolinguistics is concerned with the study of grammars. As in the opening citation from Chomsky, I use grammar mostly to designate the object of biolinguistic inquiry, but sometimes I use it to label the inquiry itself. I expect the context to make clear which of the two uses of grammar is intended. For example, the t.i.tle of this work should strictly read The Primacy of Grammatical Theory. The context makes it very clear: no useful theoretical sense can be attached to the idea that the object-a piece of the brain-has primacy.

Grammars consist of schematic and computational aspects of the mind/brain. Principles of grammar compute over symbols (representations) that may be used to express thoughts and emotions. But these principles do not compute over contents of thoughts and emotions, where content covers both the (mind-internal) conceptual aspects and the xviii external significance of language. Against the current perhaps, I take the isolation of this rather austere object to be the central contribution of Noam Chomsky; its significance lies in its frugality. The history of the more established sciences suggest that once some observed complexity has been successfully a.n.a.lyzed into parts, a study of the original complexity often drops out of that line of research, perhaps forever.

This restriction to grammar, and the abstraction away from ''language,'' opens the possibility that the computational system of human language may be involved in each cognitive system that requires similar computational resources. In chapter 6 and the early part of chapter 7, a mixture of a.n.a.lytical argumentation, varieties of empirical and introspective evidence, and some speculation suggests a picture in which a computational system consisting of very specific principles and operations is likely to be centrally involved in each articulatory symbol system-such as music-that manifests unboundedness. Finally, in the rest of chapter 7, I suggest that the following things converge: e The scientific character of biolinguistics e Its independence from the rest of science e Its basic explanatory form.

The domains of its application.

From this perspective, the real gain of the biolinguistic approach to cognitive phenomena is that the approach may have identified, after thousands of years of inquiry, a specific structure of the human mind, perhaps a real joint of nature.

Acknowledgments.

I have been working on this book, o and on (more o than on), for over a decade. It is a pleasure to record my grat.i.tude for people who helped me sustain this eort for so long in otherwise dicult circ.u.mstances. As noted throughout this book, my foremost intellectual debt is to the work of Noam Chomsky, apart from my personal debt to him for his swift, lengthy, and typically critical but constructive comments in many e-conversations over the years. I am also delighted to mention Ramakant Agnihotri, Daniel Andler, Roberto Casati, Probal Dasgupta, Pierre Jacob, Lyle Jenkins, Mrinal Miri, Bibhu Patnaik, Susrut Roy, and Rajender Singh for their support to the project in various ways.

After several unsuccessful attempts (including computer disasters), the basic structure of this work finally fell (more or less) in place during the summer of 2003 in Paris, in studios located in the ancient Latin Quarters and the ravis.h.i.+ng Montmartre. I am grateful to Roberto Casati, close friend and critic, for proposing the visit on behalf of the marvelous Inst.i.tut Jean Nicod, and for maintaining a constant watch on my well-being. I am indebted to Maurice Aylmard and Gilles Tarabout of Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and Pierre Jacob, Director of Inst.i.tut Jean Nicod, for supporting the trip. Unfortunately, several years elapsed before I could return to the work as I s.h.i.+fted to other more pressing concerns soon after returning from Paris.

I am fortunate that Ma.s.simo Piattelli-Palmarini, Howard Lasnik, Norbert Hornstein, Cedric Boeckx, and Wolfram Hinzen read one of the recent versions, in part or in full. I must mention that I had no personal acquaintance with any of these renowned scholars when I approached them. Yet, they agreed to look at the ma.n.u.script (repeatedly, in some cases); there must be some invisible hand after all. I also learned much from the reports of the reviewers for the publisher on the penultimate version. I deeply appreciate the eorts of the editorial team at the MIT Press for executing the project with exemplary understanding.

1 The Loneliness of Biolinguistics Reflecting on the state of language research, after a decade of work in the principles-and-parameters framework, Noam Chomsky (1991b, 51) observed that the systems found in the world will not be regarded as languages in the strict sense, but as more complex systems, much less interesting for the study of human nature and language, just as most of what we find around us in the world of ordinary experiences is unhelpful for determining the real properties of the natural world. . . . I have spoken only of language, which happens to be one of the few domains of cognitive psychology where there are rather far-reaching results. But I think it would hardly be surprising if the truth of the matter were qualitatively similar in other domains, where far less is known . . . only ancient prejudice makes this prospect appear to many to be unlikely.

I find it instructive to open the discussion with a somewhat free interpretation of these remarks. The citation has two parts. In the first, it is suggested that the study of ''complex systems'' ''found in the world'' is not likely to lead to the discovery of the ''real properties of the natural world.'' In the second part, the citation mentions the discipline of cognitive psychology where ''rather far-reaching results'' have been achieved in some of its domains. The results have been ''far-reaching'' in the sense that something has been learned in these domains at a sucient remove from ''the world of ordinary experiences.'' Combining the two, it follows that, in these few domains of cognitive inquiry, research has been able to abstract away from the complexities of systems found in ordinary experience to isolate some simple systems whose properties may be viewed as real properties of nature.

The implicit reference here is to some small areas of the more established sciences such as physics, chemistry, and certain corners of molecular biology, where rather surprising and deep properties of the natural world are sometimes reached by abstracting away from common experiences 2

Chapter 1.

and expectations (Stainton 2006). I will have many occasions in this work to evaluate advances in the ''few domains'' of cognitive psychology in terms of the history and methodology of physics and other advanced sciences (also see Boeckx 2006). For now, Chomsky seems to be generally suggesting that, in these domains, something like the explanatory depth of the natural sciences is almost within reach. How did it happen?

1.1..

Some Cla.s.sical Issues.

If ''cognitive psychology'' is understood broadly as a systematic study of human cognitive behavior (as contrasted to, say, motor behavior), then the study is probably as old as human inquiry itself. Extensive, and sometimes quite rigorous, studies on this aspect of human nature dominated much of philosophical thinking across cultures for centuries. These studies were not always cast in direct psychological terms-that is, in terms of the properties of the human mind. For example, language was often studied as an independent, ''external'' object by itself, and the character of the studies ranged from mystical reflections to more critical and often constructive suggestions on the nature of this object.

Such studies proliferated in large parts of the ancient Indian intellectual tradition. In the Rgveda (c. 1000 BC), for instance, the phenomenon of language is once described as a ''spirit descending and embodying itself in phenomena, a.s.suming various guises and disclosing its real nature to the sensitive soul.''1 On the other hand, much later but within the same tradition, Panini (c. 450 BC) worked out the first extensive and rigorous .

grammatical account of Sanskrit to trigger discussion and a.n.a.lysis that continue today (Kiparsky 1982; Barbosa et al. 1998, 2; Dasgupta, Ford, and Singh 2000; Coward and Kunjunni Raja 2001). Although nothing like the sophistication of Paninian grammar was ever reached in other domains, vigorous discussion of conditions governing human knowledge, perception, memory, logical abilities, and the like, continued for over a millennium in eight basic schools of thought with many subschools within each. The complexity and the depth of this tradition have begun to be understood in contemporary terms only recently. Unfortunately, the context and agenda of the present book do not allow more detailed comments on this tradition.2 Similar variations are found in the Western tradition as well. For the mystical part of the tradition, one could cite Hegel, for whom language is ''the medium through which the subjective spirit is mediated with the The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

3.

being of objects.'' The critical and constructive part of the enterprise took shape since Plato and Aristotle and continued to Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Hume, and later thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836).3 Here as well we notice the interesting unevenness between linguistic studies, say, in the Aristotelian and CartesianPort Royal traditions, and the rest of the studies on human cognition. While studies on language and logic grew in sophistication, it is hard to see any radical progress since, say, the Theory of Ideas proposed by Plato in the fifth century BC. Very tentatively, therefore, there seems to be a sense in which the ''few domains'' of language and related objects are such as to open themselves to focused theoretical inquiry.4 It is not dicult to reinterpret at least some of these studies from either tradition in naturalistic terms to suggest that they were directed at uncovering the ''real properties'' of one part of nature, namely, the human mind. For Bhartrhari (c. 450500 AD), a philosopher of language in the Paninian tradition, speech is of the nature of the Ultimate Reality (Sabda-Brahma): ''Although the essence of speech is the eternal Brahman, its significance evolves in the manner in which the world evolves.''5 The thought is subject to a variety of (often conflicting) interpretations.

However, no familiar conception of divinity-for example, an object of wors.h.i.+p-attaches to the concept of Brahman. In that sense, nothing is lost if Brahman is understood as a system of invariants that constrains both the evolution of the world and the significance of speech.

For the Western tradition, consider what Chomsky takes to be the central question in cognitive psychology: How do humans come to know so much from so little exposure to the environment? In dierent places, Chomsky calls this problem variously ''Plato's problem'' (Chomsky 1986), ''Descartes' problem'' (Chomsky 1966), or ''Russell's problem''

(Chomsky 1972b). These names suggest that, at least in the Western tradition, the general problem was raised throughout directly in psychological terms-that is, in terms of constraints on human knowledge. Nevertheless, despite the noted unevenness between linguistic and other studies, studies from Rgveda to Russell hardly qualify as scientific studies in any interesting sense of ''science.'' Suppose we label the most rigorous eorts in this area as ''proto-science.''

For some domains of current cognitive psychology, in contrast, what Chomsky is claiming is a lot stronger. He is claiming that studies in these domains already exhibit some of the properties of the most advanced corners of some of the natural sciences. So the situation is this: the general 4

Chapter 1.

questions currently asked in these domains are fairly cla.s.sical though the form and the content of the answers have radically changed. I can think of only one way this could have happened.

Recall that only a few domains of ''cognitive psychology'' seemed to be intrinsically open to serious theoretical inquiry leading to proto-science; they at once await and motivate, as it were, development of new ideas and theoretical tools. Whenever new ideas and tools are directed at cla.s.sical questions, interesting answers begin to appear at a certain remove from common experience only in these domains from among the a.s.sorted domains to which the general, philosophical inquiry was initially, somewhat aimlessly, directed. a.s.suming this, it is no wonder that the object responded to the eorts of Paninian, Aristotelian, and Port Royal grammarians, as well as to contemporary generative linguists. Also, it could have been the case that the object, the new tools, and novel ideas formed a symbiotic relations.h.i.+p in that these tools and ideas interestingly applied only to this object. If so, then we have some explanation of why thousands of years of philosophical investigations into the nature of the rest of human knowledge in either tradition revolved around basically the same set of ideas and problems while formal studies on language and related topics flourished. I return to these issues shortly.

1.2.

Limits of Cognitive Inquiry The picture sketched above sheds some light on what seems to me to be a major perplexity in contemporary studies on language and mind. The perplexity is this: although there are reasons, both historical and conceptual, for skepticism about the very idea of (serious) cognitive inquiry, certain approaches to language have rapidly reached the standards of the advanced sciences.

There is an old adage that a theory of language is an impossibility since the theory has to be stated in some language or other. Thus, the theory always falls short of its object. It quickly generalizes to a dim view of theories of mind as well: a theory of mind is an impossibility since the theory itself will be a product of the mind, and hence a part of the object under examination. The adage appeals to the image of eyegla.s.ses: we can give only a partial and distorted description of the gla.s.ses when we wear them; we can take them o, but then we cannot see. This adage is distinct from cla.s.sical skepticism that denies the possibility of any knowledge.

The eect of the adage is restricted only to cognitive inquiry; in that The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

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sense, it allows the possibility of knowledge of the ''external world,'' say, the world of physics.

Moreover, the adage needs to be distinguished from the more general observation by Chomsky (1980) that, since the human science-forming capacity is itself a natural object, there ought to be limits on scientific inquiry: the constraints that govern the capacity both allow and restrict the formation of scientific theories. Thus, unsolved problems divide into two kinds: ''puzzles'' that the human mind can in fact solve, and ''mysteries''

whose solutions, perhaps even intelligible formulation, lie beyond the power of the human mind (Chomsky 1975). The scope of this suggestion is dicult to estimate. On the one hand, the suggestion seems to apply to all the sciences: Are the unsolved problems of the origins of life or of the universe puzzles or mysteries? On the other hand, it is unclear whether it applies to the entire study of inner domains. For example, Chomsky specifically thinks that what he has called ''the creative aspect of language use''-our essentially unbounded ability to produce and interpret sentences appropriately in novel circ.u.mstances-is a mystery. In the limit, we could conjecture that any significant general study of the science-forming capacity itself is beyond the power of the capacity. It does not follow, as the adage requires, that the study of cognitive systems such as the visual system, structural aspects of human reasoning, the observed diversity of languages, and so on also fall beyond the capacity, as Chomsky's own work on language testifies.

The adage is also dierent from a more recent skeptical perspective on the history of science. According to Chomsky, lessons from the history of the natural sciences seem to suggest that ''most things cannot be studied by contemporary science.'' On this issue, it seems to him that Galileo's intuition that humans will never completely understand even ''a single ef-fect in nature'' is more plausible than Descartes' confidence that ''most of the phenomena of nature could be explained in mechanical terms: the inorganic and organic world apart from humans, but also human physiology, sensation, perception, and action to a large extent.'' Developments in post-Cartesian science, especially Newtonian science, ''not only eectively destroyed the entire materialist, physicalist conception of the universe, but also the standards of intelligibility that were based on it.''

Thus Chomsky (2001b) supports Alexander Koyre's remark that ''we simply have to accept that the world is const.i.tuted of ent.i.ties and processes that we cannot intuitively grasp.'' Clearly, these remarks apply to the whole of science including, as noted, the most innovative proposals 6

Chapter 1.

in theoretical physics. The remarks tell us about the kind of science we are likely to have at best; they do not deny that some form of science is available to humans in most domains of inquiry. The adage under discussion, on the other hand, suggests that scientific explanation may not be available for the study of ''inner'' domains at all, notwithstanding the character of scientific explanation already available for the ''outer''

domains.

Nevertheless, the adage and Chomsky's observations possibly converge around the issue of complexity. Chomsky suggests that sciences of outer domains work under severe constraints, cognitive and historical. These constraints perhaps lead to the striking unevenness in the development of science. Genuine theoretical understanding seems to be restricted to the study of simple systems even in the hard sciences such that ''when you move beyond the simplest structures, it becomes very descriptive. By the time you get to big molecules, for example, you are mostly describing things'' (Chomsky 2000a, 2). Thus the quality of explanation falls o rapidly as inquiry turns to more complex systems. Given that the organization of our inner domains-that is, the respects in which we wish to understand them-is vastly more complex than free electrons or isolated genes, it is not surprising that we lack scientific progress in these domains.

These remarks suggest that, even when we reach some understanding of cognitive domains such as language, the understanding is likely to be restricted to small and simple parts of the domain such as grammar.

The adage fosters a lingering intuition that our ability to have a theoretical grasp of ourselves must be severely restricted somewhere: ''There are inevitably going to be limits on the closure achievable by turning our procedures of understanding on themselves'' (Nagel 1997, 76). It is likely that when we approach that point our theoretical tools begin to lose their edge and the enterprise simply drifts into ba.n.a.lities since, according to the adage, our resources of inquiry and the objects of inquiry begin to get hopelessly mixed up from that point on. Such a point could be reached in the ''hard sciences'' as well when they attempt to turn ''inward.'' This may be one way of understanding the origin of the deep puzzles around the so-called measurement problem in quantum physics. The conjecture here is that, for inner domains such as reasoning and language, such points show up sooner rather than later.

Despite the intellectual appeal of the adage, it is not clear how to examine it in a theoretically interesting manner. In fact, from the point of view of the cognitive sciences, the adage may be viewed as intrinsically uninteresting. How can we tell now what an enterprise is going to look like in the The Loneliness of Biolinguistics

7.

future (Fodor 2000, 11 n. 1)? Skeptical questions could have been, indeed must have been, raised at the beginning of physics. But physics progressed, through calm and stormy times, without ever directly answering them. The questions were ultimately answered indirectly by the growth of physics itself to the point that skepticism became uninteresting. However, there is no credible evidence in the history of the sciences-just the opposite in fact, as we will see briefly in the context of biology-that lessons from the history of physics generalize to other domains of inquiry. It could be that Galilean physics is an exception rather than the rule in scientific inquiry. To emphasize, Galilean physics could be an exception precisely because it could extract and focus on simple parts of nature.

In any case, the natural sciences typically focus on ''outer'' domains of nature, called the ''external world'' in the philosophical literature; the study of inner domains just does not belong to serious science. This is one source of the cla.s.sical mind-body problem. The mind (the collection of inner domains) is thought to be so fundamentally dierent from the body (the collection of outer domains) that the forms of scientific explanation available for the latter are not supposed to obtain for the former.

Chomsky has dubbed this doctrine ''methodological dualism'' (Chomsky 2000d, chapter 4, for extensive criticism). When we add the further a.s.sumption that the forms of explanation that apply to the outer domains are the only ones in hand, it follows that inner domains fall out of science.6 To find some grip on these very general issues, I will a.s.sume, as noted, that the study of inner domains is essentially concerned with what Chomsky has called ''Plato's problem'': How do organisms form rich cognitive structures from little exposure to the environment? I take this to be the original and fairly cla.s.sical motivation for cognitive science although not everyone who currently works in the cognitive sciences shares the motivation.7 The problem arises from what has come to be known as the ''poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments,'' which show that there is not enough information in the environment for the rich systems constructed by organisms (Chomsky 1959; Piattelli-Palmarini 1980; Wexler 1991; Crain and Pietroski 2001; Berwick and Chomsky 2009, etc.). As Chomsky (2000a, 6) puts it, ''We can check the experience available; we can look at it and see what it is. It's immediately obvious that it's just much too limited and fragmentary to do anything more than shape an already existing common form in limited fas.h.i.+ons.''

The observation applies across the board to human language, the visual system, bird songs, insect navigation, bee dances, and so on. For 8

Chapter 1.

example, in the visual-cli experiment, a given pattern is broken into an upper and a lower half with a gla.s.s top extending from the ''shallow'' half over the ''deep'' half. Thus, in the absence of depth perception, the lower half looks continuous with the upper. Newly hatched chicks and one-day-old goats will stop at the upper edge of a visual cli at the very first exposure; a goat will in fact extend its forelegs as a defensive measure when placed on the ''deep'' side and leap onto the ''shallow'' side (Kaufman 1979, 237).

For human language, which is our basic concern, it has been extensively doc.u.mented that children rapidly acquire languages not only on the basis of impoverished information, but also, in many cases, seemingly without any relevant information at all (Jackendo 1992, chapter 5). In a particularly telling case, three deaf children were able to construct a sign language secretly and for use only among themselves in the face of parental opposition. Investigations later showed that this language compared favorably with the spoken language developed by normal children of the same age (Goldin-Meadow and Feldman 1977; Gleitman and Newport 1995; Goldin-Meadow 2004). In fact, studies show that deaf and normal children make the same ''mistakes'' at the corresponding stage of acquisition. At a certain stage, normal children typically use you to refer to themselves and I to refer to the addressee. Amazingly, corresponding gestures in American Sign Language for you and I by deaf children show very similar reversal despite the fact that these gestures are iconic (Chiat 1986; Pet.i.tto 1987).

Studies show that twelve-hour-old babies can distinguish between linguistic and nonlinguistic acoustic inputs. Jacques Mehler and his a.s.sociates showed further that four-day-old infants can distinguish between the prosodic contours of, say, Russian and French (Mehler et al. 1986).

Turning to more abstract syntactic abilities, four-month-old babies are sensitive to the clause boundaries of, say, Polish and English, their native tongue. By six months, however, they lose their sensitivity to Polish clause boundaries, but retain the same for English (Karmilo-Smith 1992, 37).

In other terms, as we will see, some parameters of specific languages are fixed by then (Baker 2001). The general task of the cognitive sciences is to explain this astonis.h.i.+ng ability in every domain in which it is displayed.