The Primacy of Grammar Part 23

Insects may be ''too imperfect,'' to use Descartes'' phrase,18 but some other animals may be viewed as meeting the suggested criteria. For example, contemporary research on bird songs shows that some species of birds are capable of producing songs of impressive variety and complexity, so these are certainly systems of articulation. The complexity of the songs and the method of acquisition suggest an inner drive that appears to be largely free from external control; suppose so. Thus, for researchers in this area, the only issue seems to be recursion ( discrete infinity) in nonhuman species.

In an innovative experiment, Fitch and Hauser (2004) tested monkeys for their ability to ''master'' two dierent rule systems. It is important to be clear about the exact scope of this work. After noting that human languages have the ''capacity to generate a limitless range of meaningful expressions from a finite set of elements,'' the authors wanted to see if cotton-top tamarin monkeys can be ascribed this capacity. ''Weak''

grammars that contain only ''local organizational principles, with regularities limited to neighboring units'' cannot represent this capacity. The capacity requires that the grammar incorporates ''hierarchical structure'': a ''phrase-structure'' grammar. To capture the distinction, they devised a rule system of the form (AB)n -a weak grammar-which generates iterative sequences like ABABAB. . . . The monkeys readily mastered this grammar.

Fitch and Hauser devised another rule system of the form AnBn -a ''phrase-structure grammar''-which generated embedded structures like AAABBB . . . , that is, AB embedded in AB, AABB embedded in AB, and so on: central embedding. The monkeys failed to master this system.

According to Fitch and Hauser then (i) mastering hierarchical structures is necessary for mastering human language, and (ii) monkeys cannot master hierarchical structures. It follows that monkeys cannot learn human languages. Although Fitch and Hauser do not make it perspicuous, it does not follow that, had the monkeys learned the AnBn grammar, they would have learned human languages.

In a more recent study, Timothy Gentner and colleagues studied some European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) from the same direction (Gentner et al. 2006). They found that these songbirds could master a rule system of the form AnBn after over forty thousand trials. Do these systems contain CHL and belong to the hominid set? The crucial issue is whether the starlings display symbolic articulation to indicate the ''capacity to generate a limitless range of meaningful expressions from a finite set of elements.''

A Joint of Nature 241.

As Gentner et al. note, central embedding of more than one linguistic item is not the preferred form of productivity of human symbol systems; performance systems begin to collapse after two or three embedding: the nurse [whom the cook [whom the maid met] saw] heard the butler (Miller and McNeill 1969, 707).19 Furthermore, as Chomsky (personal communication) suggests, starlings could be just storing sequences of A's and B's up to familiar limits on short-term storage (Miller 1956). If these observations are valid, both group of researchers, Fitch-Hauser and Gentner et al., could have been looking at the wrong phenomenon to locate a.n.a.logues of human language in other species.

In any case, with respect to the issue of symbolic articulation, Gentner et al. note that ''starlings sing long songs composed of iterated motifs (smaller acoustic units) that form the basic perceptual units of individual song recognition.'' It follows that starlings themselves do not produce hierarchically organized sequences. Also, it is well known that even elaborate birdsongs convey only global information such as announcing the presence of a s.e.xual partner or guarding of territory.20 Unlike human language and music, individual units of birdsongs do not combine to generate more complex meaningful units. Peter Marler (2000, 36) calls this ''phonocoding'': ''recombinations of sound components in dierent sequences where the components themselves are not meaningful.'' In other words, the phenomenon of phonocoding signifies absence of computational meaning in birdsongs.21 I have made the following points about starlings: (i) their own productions (songs) do not have the telling features of human recursion leading upto computational meanings; (ii) the evidence of recursion in their perception of acoustic stimuli is far from conclusive; (iii) in particular, the absence of computational meaning in the production case suggests its absence in the perception case as well. Taking the c.u.mulative eect of (i) (iii), it is implausible that PCEs are operative in these systems since the basic task of the PCEs is to generate computational meaning under optimal conditions. Since there is no compelling reason to attribute the relevant notion of a computational system to these organisms, it is currently implausible that their structural organization be viewed on a par with human linguistic and musical systems. Studies on birdsongs currently do not encourage extending the notion of a computational system to anything beyond the hominid set.

To review the central concerns of this chapter, on the one hand, it seems plausible to hold that Merge, the singular recursive mechanism, applies beyond language to a narrow cla.s.s of symbol processors, especially 242

Chapter 7.

to human music; on the other, it is doubtful that PCEs, the restricted set of principles of computational economy, apply beyond this narrow cla.s.s.

In eect, I have made two suggestions. First, each symbol processor, narrowly conceived, contains the same computational system (CHL). Second, it is currently not intelligible that computational systems, in the relevant sense, exist anywhere else in nature. If these suggestions jointly hold, then, strictly speaking, CHL, which replicates under reproduction in humans, is the only computational system in nature.

Notes.

Chapter 1.

1. Rgveda 4.58.3. Interpretation by T. R. V. Murthy; cited in Coward 1980, vii.

2. For some a.n.a.lysis with respect to the issues discussed in this work see Matilal and Shaw 1985, Matilal 1990, Siderits 1991, Mohanty 1992, Ganeri 1999, Dasgupta, Ford, and Singh 2000.

3. For remarks on possible convergences between cla.s.sical and contemporary inquiries in the Western tradition, see Chomsky 1966, 1972a, 1975, 1995a, 1997.

4. Interestingly, similar remarks apply to formal theories of music in either tradition. See Mukherji 2000, chapter 4, and McLain 1976 for some discussion and references. Developments in number theory provide another example; see Lako and Nunez 2000. Note that the remarks concern just these two traditions; there are others.

5. The original Sanskrit couplet is: Anaadinidhanam brahma sabdatattvam yad aksaram / Vivartate 0rthabhaavena prakriyaa jagato yataah (I.1). Bhartrhari's cla.s.sic work Vaakyapadiya (''On Words and Sentences'') begins with these words.

6. ''At their politest, [neuroscientists] say that the gap between molecules and mind is so vast that it is absolutely fruitless to think about bridging the gap. At their worst, my colleagues warn me to stick to molecules, because it is the only hard-nosed approach'' (James Schwartz, in Chomsky 1994b, 72).

7. See Leiber 1991 for a similar conception of cognitive science. See Seidenberg 1995 for a somewhat dierent conception.

8. The label mind/brain just signals that the unification problem between linguistics and the brain sciences remains unsolved, perhaps fundamentally so; see sections 1.3.1 and 7.3.2. I do not think the objection to this concept by Bennett and Hacker 2003 applies in the specific case of biolinguistic research, even if their objection holds for more questionable areas of cognitive neuroscience such as studies on consciousness, beliefs, and perception.

9. One piece of evidence is the immediate popularity of (persistent) attempts to show that even the grammar of languages is culturally determined. The latest ef-fort is by Everett 2005, see Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues 2007 for criticism.

244.

Notes.

10. The structure is ambiguous in many ways; its resolution by language users touches on some deep aspects of language acquisition. For some discussion, see Chomsky 1965, 22, and Chomsky 2000a.

11. See Edelman 1992, 243, as well as Chomsky 2000d, 103104, on Edelman.

See Jenkins 2000, 52., for more examples.

12. This observation needs to be sharply distinguished from the a priori claim that, since mental properties are ''nomologically autonomous,'' their study is ''not part of the rest of science'' (cited in Churchland and Sejnowski 1992, 2).

13. See Mukherji 1990 for a more general discussion of the issue.

14. ''Roughly'' because Fodor and Lepore's actual claim is more complicated.

They claim that natural languages such as English do not have a semantics at all (Fodor and Lepore 2002); semantics, in the form of symbol-world connections, applies systematically to the ''language of thought'' (Fodor 2007). See Pietroski 2006 for discussion and criticism.

Chapter 2.

1. Saul Kripke (2005, 1012) points out that, although the scope problem studied by linguists is claimed to be a ''very recently noticed distinction,'' the basic idea goes back to Russell. Kripke's observation thus lends some support to the strategy adopted here.

2. See Chomsky 1955b for an early and illuminating discussion of this issue.

3. I am indebted to Howard Lasnik for going through the rest of this chapter carefully and for making many suggestions. Any mistakes that still remain are mine.

4. Phrase-structure rules do not automatically generate a labeled bracketing or a tree diagram. For this we need to define a ''phrase marker'' as a structure consisting of (i) a collection of partially ordered nodes with a top node uniquely defined, and (ii) a collection of labels that are a.s.signed to the nodes. Now the rewriting rules may be suitably interpreted to fit this structure. For more on this and related issues, see Chomsky 1955a, chapter 7; 1965, 8890; 1986, 5658. Also see Martin and Uriagereka 2000, 26.

5. See Jackendo 2002, 3839, for a variety of very natural examples such as I wonder if Susan knows that Fred a.s.sured Lois that Clark would remind Pat to buy food for dinner. Also see Soames and Perlmutter 1979, 281.

6. There is some evidence that the head-complement structure of a language has phonological consequencess in terms of which word of a phonological phrase has prosodic prominence. In eect, when babies are able to segment speech inputs into phonological phrases, they can hear the prominence and settle on the value of the head parameter for that language (Mehler, Christophe, and Ramus 2000, 6263).

7. The best accessible discussion that I know of is in Uriagereka 1998, chapter 3, especially section 3.5.

Notes.

245.

8. ''r'' for referring expressions: the category also contains variables; wh-traces, as we will see, are paradigmatic examples of variables.

9. See Hornstein and Weinberg 1990 and Hornstein 1995 for more on this topic, especially the argument from ''weak crossover'' for some cla.s.sic cases. See also Lasnik and Uriagereka 2005, chapter 6, for a more recent review.

10. In Hungarian, QPs and WPs in fact move overtly to the clause front such that the syntax of the Hungarian equivalent of John loves Mary and John loves everyone is rather dierent overtly (for details, see Lasnik and Uriagereka 2005, 6.2).

11. See Roeper and de Villiers 1993 for more on this from the point of view of language acquisition.

12. For Fox (and a range of linguists he cites), the semantic component is described by truth-theoretic semantics. In what follows, the theoretical salience of this conception of a post-LF semantic component is precisely the issue under discussion.

Chapter 3.

1. See Heim and Kratzer 1998, 4753, for an illuminating discussion of this issue.

It is not clear to me what lesson they draw regarding the syntax-semantics divide, since their concept of interpretability is explicitly drawn from logical theory.

2. In contrast, Hinzen (2006, 221) grants full semantic status to LF: it is a level of representation in the linguistic system ''in which semantic information is coded by means of narrowly linguistic principles and constraints.''

3. I am aware of major internal dierences between Montague Semantics and Davidsonian Semantics. See Lepore 1982 for an influential discussion of this topic. According to Lepore, Montague Semantics, unlike Davidsonian/Structural Semantics, fails to be an ''absolute'' theory of truth that explains language-world connections. Thus, I concentrate on Davidsonian Semantics when discussing these (purported) connections; I turn to Montague Semantics when discussing mind-internal properties of expressions. Hence, I cover both eventually.

4. I am not suggesting that Chomsky and Hornstein approve of this addition; they do not.

5. It is not a downright truism because of vacuous words such as pleonastic it and there, vacuous inflections on words, and ''frozen phrases'' such as idioms.

6. I am setting aside the issue of whether the phonological form of s suces as a structure description of it.

7. I cannot think of other ways of formulating the right-hand side with ''LFs''

occurring in it.

8. I set aside the issue of whether the predicate in question has enough constraints to match a sentence with its ''own'' circ.u.mstance.

9. Both Frege and, as noted, Tarski were rather strongly opposed to the use of formal logic to characterize ''our mother tongues.''

246.

Notes.

10. See Higginbotham 1986, 1991, for a dierent angle on the idea. See Lappin 1997 for a more comprehensive list.

11. Dictionaries I could lay my hands on are of little help; denote is simply paired with terms that require exactly the same clarification: designate, indicate, mean, signify, refer, and the like.

12. This argument, first suggested by Michael Dummett to my knowledge, is dif-ferent from the Davidsonian objection (Lepore 1982) that one may know ''John denotes what is denoted by John'' and fail to know what John denotes. I am suggesting that one fails to know what John denotes even if one has the linguistic knowledge John denotes John.

13. We need not a.s.sume that Chomsky was making a serious empirical proposal.

All he could have meant was that, in order to account for this universal ability displayed by children, we need to postulate something like the Peano axioms.

14. Current followers of Montague obviously dier with him on this issue. See Partee 1979, 1980, 1992, for more.

15. Szabo (2005) holds that the so-called uniqueness condition in the theory of descriptions is not only misleading (as I will also argue from a dierent direction), but that Russell never really gave any substantive argument in support of this condition.

16. Russell's enigmatic 1905 paper raises many issues. I am only concerned with its application to uses of English the-phrases. Even there, there are many objections to Russell's theory within this concern that I will not touch. See Schier 2005 for a recent revival of Keith Donnellan's objections from referential uses (Donnellan 1966); also Mukherji 1987, 1989. I will focus on the fundamental equivalence.

17. For instance, in a recent special issue of the journal Mind (vol. 114, no. 456) devoted to Russell 1905, Stephen Neale, Saul Kripke, David Kaplan, and Nathan Salmon all simply take the uniqueness condition for granted and proceed to extremely complex theoretical discussion.

18. ''More'' includes data such as all the boys, some of the boys, most of the boys, exactly one of the boys, and so on, but not *that the boy.