Rough Theory

Being an inaugural guest’s post, I hope that, while not up to the usual standards of this blog, the following content is not too far short either. By way of introduction: I am involved in the same reading group as N Pepperell, and have been invited to write some notes on several of the texts we cover. Our reading so far has aimed at doing a potted history of 20th century linguistics, and our path has arrived at Chomsky’s “Language and Mind”.

My apologies in advance for what might seem a naive and anachronistic take – none of our group are linguists by training, and therefore we have stumbling through what is no doubt a fragmentary and selected course. And I apologise for the prolixity of this, an inaugural guest’s post… In any case, what Chomsky presents in this 1968 version of his account of language is roughly as follows: there are 6 lectures, split into 2 groups of 3. The first group of 3 were based on lectures delivered at Berkeley in ’67; the second group were delivered to different audiences at different times. In this light, the didactic purpose of the book becomes clear in moving through it: Chomksy is presenting, to different audiences, in more or less technical detail, 3 distinct ideas.

Firstly, he presents in a number of guises the idea of universal grammar – where grammar is a set of rules which determine the matching of a given sound to a given meaning. Meanings belong, according to the universal grammar thesis, to a deep semantic structure; sounds belong to a surface phonological structure; and what connects the two are syntactic rules.

Secondly, he presents the related but not, in my view, essential idea that such a system is both required by all human languages, and acquired too quickly by human individuals to be accounted for by a range of cultural, social or environmental stimuli. Instead, using the Poverty of the Stimulus argument commented upon elsewhere in this blog, this system must be innate.

Thirdly, the “innateness” thesis connects his, that is to say Chomsky’s view, with a broad, important but largely forgotten tradition of rationalism (long since eclipsed by the rise of empiricism in general, and behavioralism in particular, in the human sciences).

At this stage I want to comment about one aspect of Chomsky’s argument: that semantic deep structures exist prior to their transformation into phonological surface structures. At least in his account here, it seems that every sentence – even assuming for now that in a normative account, sentences can be taken for meaning “informational statements” – must exist in some ready-made semantic form before it can go through some transformational process. However this account seems to me to miss a key aspect of language production – that most sentences develop in time. While a well-formed sentence may be reverse-engineered into into its constituent parts – into noun phrases, verb phrases and so on – it seems unlikely to me that this is how such sentences are always generated in the first place. Such analysis misses the essential fact of language utterances – that they exhibit a linearity, insofar as the start of a sentence is always before the end of the sentence. The following is a tentative stab at how I think this argument could unfold:

When I make a sentence, I can proceed in a number of ways. I can start with some logical proposition I wish to convey, then determine which is the best form for the conveyance (moulding some semantic content into phonetic or othographic form via syntactic transformations, in the Chomskyan way). But this is only one of a number of ways I can proceed. I can start with a particular phrase (“Notwithstanding Chomsky’s insightful analysis…”), then proceed with what may seem a logical extension (“… I disagree with his theory of the innateness of language”). I can also recant: “… well, actually, I agree with his analysis”). I can also forget where I ‘was’, or simply allow my semantic content to remain, perhaps wistfully, unexpressed: “…”. I can perform a number of acts, but none of those acts are irrevocably determined by some original semantic content which remains intact throughout the duration of the act. Even the original phase (“Notwithstanding Chomsky’s insightful analysis…”) does not establish a determinate meaning for the sentence in which it is found – my subsequent words can serve to undercut – with sarcasm or irony; to frame – by quoting or paraphrasing; to emphasise, castigate, or perform a number of acts which alter the meaning of an existing phrase or sentence. Chomsky’s examples always assume that a speaker who has considered what she or he wants to say before saying it, and remains committed to the saying of it at least until the saying is said – but of course there are many examples, mundane and famous, which run counter to this.

It might seem that this sort of criticism echoes those of pragmatists generally, and Searle in particular. However what is striking to me is not that sentences can do things other than make statements of fact, but rather that even when making a statement of fact, I can alter the meaning of the statement significantly at any time during its utterance. This is trivially true, in that I can always proceed as teenagers do when they append “…not!” at the end of sentence. So the point would be that it is empirically contingent for any given well-formed sentence as to whether its meaning had been determined entirely in advance of its utterance – and therefore could have undergone the sorts of sentence-wide syntactic transformations (active to passive, and so on) that Chomsky proposes. On the other hand, it seems equally plausible that for a number of sentences the syntactic form is prior to the semantic content – as in question-and-answers routines, where the answer’s syntax mirrors that of the question (“who saw Bill” – “John saw Bill” versus “who was Bill seen by?” – “Bill was seen by John“). Of particular importance in this regard is that it is possible for me to be committed to the syntax of a sentence I am about to make, before I know what I am going to say. How could I then, consciously or otherwise, apply rules to get to a known syntactic construction (for instance, a passive construction) from some as-yet unknown semantic meaning?

This is not to say, at the level of a phrase, and indeed for many sentences, there may not be processes at work transforming meaning into sound the way Chomsky describes – indeed this may even be the normative case. However it seems to me that there are many other ways sentences can be formed, and these show that a more complex relationship exists between the semantic, syntactic and phonological parts of a sentence than what Chomsky – circa 1968 – will allow.

Quite possibly, later Chomsky or other more recent accounts resolve this problem in some way – if indeed it is a problem. Meanwhile, we are now moving on to How to do Things with Words…

I had mentioned previously that the reading group intended to take a break for a month, while two of our members tour the US. At yesterday’s meeting, though, we decided that a month was simply too long to go without a substantive (or, depending on your point of view, insubstantial) discussion of linguistics. We’ve therefore decided that, for the next several weeks, we’ll move the reading group online. We’re still working out the exact details, but the general concept, I think, is that we’ll open periodic threads for discussion of specific works on this site, reading group members (and anyone else who wants to dive in) will contribute and discuss, and general enlightenment will ensue…

The works proposed for the virtualised reading group include some lighter and some heavier material – if only to allow our travelling members some opportunity for light entertainment while they’re away. The specific works proposed, in the order we’re currently intending to discuss them, are:

Austin How to Do Things with Words

Pinker <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-Creates-Perennial-Classics/dp/0060958332/sr=1-1/qid=1161811475/ref=sr_1_1/002-5294189-5521642?ie=UTF8&s=books&quot; target="_blank"The Language Instinct

And then as much as you care follow of the debate between Pinker, Jackendoff and Chomsky, outlined in this Language Log summary of the state of play. (Note: for brevity’s sake, I’ve posted only the Language Log link here, rather than the more detailed set of recommendations that were circulated via email within the reading group – reading group members will know the more specific recommendations; anyone following from a distance can make their own selections, which I’m sure will be no worse than ours…)

I’ll try to post a few observations on our previous reading selection, Language and Mind, in a separate post, some time during the next couple of days.

Rather than doing something rational like reading the works the reading group will actually discuss this week, I’ve been drawn off onto a tangent, looking at works on what is called the “poverty of the stimulus” argument. Unfortunately, most of the key pieces I want to read are temporarily unavailable – needing to be recalled from other students, or in journals I’ll need to request via interlibrary loan – making the attempt to trace the intellectual history of this argument more frustrating than it otherwise ought to be. The discussion that follows is therefore unlikely to reflect the best possible presentation of the poverty of the stimulus argument – a better understanding of which might well obviate most or all of my questions.

As I understand it, the “cash value” of the poverty of the stimulus argument is to establish that nativist theories of language acquisition, which posit that children possess an innate predilection for grasping key grammatical principles, are more plausible than empiricist theories, which posit that children decode grammatical principles via exposure to speech in practical situations.

The argument relies on the counter-factual notion of how an “unbiased” learner might conceivably approach language acquisition – where an unbiased learner is understood as something like a computer, tackling the problem of language acquisition by brute computational force, without any organising principles at its disposal other than its own observational analysis of statistical patterns: capable of hypothesising all the various ways in which words might conceivably be combined, and having no particular a priori conditioning to organise words in any particular order. (There are prior issues about how an unbiased learner gets to the point that they understand the difference between a meaningful and unmeaningful sound, how an unbiased learner develops an understanding that streams of meaningful sounds can be chunked down into words, etc. – I’ll leave these issues aside for the moment, although they can also be brought into the nativist-empiricist debate.)

The poverty of stimulus argument maintains that the number of hypothetically-conceivable principles that could motivate the observed regularities in any given language is much greater than the number of principles that children appear to entertain, when their process of language acquisition is studied empirically: there are certain hypothetically plausible interpretive errors that children never seem to make, even though, in some cases, these errors might involve simpler “hypotheses” about how language works than the hypotheses that seem to inform children’s linguistic practice. The theory further argues that environmental stimulus is inadequate to account for children’s linguistic practice: that children do not receive sufficient reinforcement, particularly negative reinforcement, to account for their “correct” interpretations of the principles underlying spoken language. The theory can also point to a range of empirical evidence – for example, the observation that children tend to learn their native language (including sign languages) in consistent stages, with characteristic errors and achievements at each stage – that is highly suggestive that children’s language acquisition is not sensitive solely to environmental conditioning. The conclusion is therefore that nativist explanations for language acquisition are more plausible than empiricist ones.

I have a few questions about this argument, but I should perhaps indicate at the outset that I don’t have a dog in this fight – I’m not completely certain that I even understand, at this point, why this fight draws such strong emotions from the opposing positions (I’m sure I’ll learn…). I find empirically persuasive certain key claims about children’s language acquisition (that it progresses in clearly observable stages, with characteristic errors, etc.) because I’ve worked professionally in roles where these sorts of observations could be easily confirmed. To that extent, I suppose I’d be claimed by the nativist side – but only because, and this is where my questions begin, this argument seems to assume that the key opposition is between something like the following positions:

– a form of empiricism that views humans as unbiased learners, with no inbuilt predilection for making sense of their world in one direction, rather than another, and for whom environmental stimulus must therefore account for any regularities we observe in language acquisition;

vs.

– a form of nativism that argues that, because humans can empirically be observed not to be unbiased learners of language, we can therefore draw the conclusion that humans possess an innate, domain-specific facilty for language acquisition.

My curiosity – and I should stress that, at this point, my position is nothing more than a curiosity – is whether these two positions exhaust our options? The version of empiricism presented here seems somewhat straw-mannish to me – and I worry that this straw man element may have the result of obscuring an overbroad conclusion on the nativist side. It sounds superficially impressive to note, for example, that there might be a statistically enormous number of ways that an unbiased learner might choose to order English auxiliary verbs (“50,000 times the number of seconds since the beginning of the universe, and about a hundred billion times the number of neurons in the human brain”, according to one source), but that children somehow manage to hit on precisely the 99 combinations that are grammatically possible in English. But this assumes that the “real odds” of children’s performance can validly be calculated by comparing them to a hypothetical unbiased learner who can freely select any of a number of equally-weighted options from a universe of choices.

While this might sound plausible on first glance – surely you calculate odds against the universe of everything that it possible, etc. – I’m not convinced that this kind of reasoning applies in complex, interactive systems in which the actual choices available might be highly dependent on a wide variety of conditioning factors – one of which, certainly, might be some kind of nativist specialised language acquisition subsystem, but which might equally – since we’re speaking about hypothetical entities that, as I understand it, are not currently considered subject to direct empirical investigation – be hypothesised to include conditioning factors that, while not specialised to language acquisition, nevertheless have the effect, individually or in combination, of making certain kinds of linguistic interpretations more plausible than others: for example, feedback from a wide variety of environmental stimuli, not limited to the “environment” provided by spoken words, but with implications for language acquisition; neurological functions that are not specialised to language acquisition, but that shape language use; cross-fertilisations that result from the fact that children are not working only on a “problem” like auxiliary verbs in isolation, but in conjunction with other kinds of puzzles that must be also sorted during language acquisition – the combined effect of which may be to make certain grammatical extrapolations more likely than others; etc.

I don’t mind, of course, if someone wants to conclude that their preferred option among these choices is a nativist concept of a specialised language subsystem – as long as this is acknowledged as a working hypothesis for a period when we can’t yet have evidence to differentiate among a variety of possibilities. I become uncomfortable only when the argument seems to be framed as though the only conceivable alternative would be some form of hyper-Skinnerian notion of a tabula rasa, whose behaviour is determined in a very straightforward, mechanistic way by environmental stimulus. I admittedly don’t know the field of linguistics very well at all, but I have a difficult time believing that this Skinnerian fever-dream is anyone’s notion of a serious alternative. (But, yes, I’ll acknowledge that the poverty of stimulus argument offers a devastating critique of such a perspective, if anyone out there holds it…) It seems to me, though, that the actual problem is far more complex – and I’m somewhat concerned that the nativist approach might be slicing this particular gordian knot a bit too quickly: how much do we really know, at this point, about the complex array of factors that make us biased learners? About how these factors interact with one another? About how these interactions limit the plausible ranges of learning we are likely to acquire? Do we know how to interpret the empirical evidence we have about children’s language acquisition, until we have looked at these issues in more detail?

I am painfully aware that these questions may be simply naive – I am so early into this reading, and so new to this field, that I’m happy to be pointed to work of which I am all-too-likely to be unaware… These were, however, the questions that struck me, as I was reading things I wasn’t intended to read, for the discussion my reading group is about to have on something else entirely… ;-P So now back to that copy of Language and Mind…

So in theory I’m supposed to be writing on Chomsky, but in practice I seem to keep writing about odd elements that crop up in critiques of Chomsky. Note that criticising Chomsky’s critics isn’t quite the same as defending Chomsky – I still don’t know enough about his argument to affirm or deny it. My goal is simply to get a bit closer to understanding what you would need to criticise, if you wanted to tackle Chomsky’s core theoretical claims…

My current concern is directed to a point that Searle has brought up, in slightly different ways, in both his 1972 and 2002 critiques – a point relating to the… onotological and causal status of linguistic “rules” within Chomsky’s framework. I’ll reproduce a couple of passages to try to communicate what troubles me – and to make it easier for others to decide whether I’m just midunderstanding Searle, or whether Searle is misunderstanding Chomsky – or whether both Searle and I are equally confused…

In the 1972 article, Searle seems to feel that it is a problem for Chomsky’s account that Chomsky cannot say clearly how underlying grammatical rules come to be known by actual speakers of particular languages:

[Chomsky] is not, of course, claiming that a speaker actually goes consciously or unconsciously through any such process of applying rules of the form “rewrite X as Y” to construct sentences. To construe the grammarian’s description this way would be to confuse an account of competence with a theory of performance.

But Chomsky does claim that in some form or other the speaker has “internalized” rules of sentence construction, that he has “tacit” or “unconscious” knowledge of grammatical rules, and that the phrase structure rules constructed by the grammarian “represent” his competence. One of the chief difficulties of Chomsky’s theory is that no clear and precise answer has ever been given to the question of exactly how the grammarian’s account of the construction of sentences is supposed to represent the speaker’s ability to speak and understand sentences, and in precisely what sense of “know” the speaker is supposed to know the rules of the grammar.

If I’m understanding correctly, a similar issue arises in the 2002 debate, in what, to my admittedly inexperienced eye, seems to be a somewhat confused passage relating to the relationship of Chomsky’s rules to the causes of linguistic behaviour:

1. Rules. Chomsky thinks that I suppose the rules of grammar are regulative rules like the rule “drive on the right.” That is not true. In my article, I introduced a reference to driving on the right as an example to show how rules can function causally in behavior; but in the article I also distinguish between “regulative” and “constitutive” rules. Regulative rules regulate antecedently existing activities like driving. Constitutive rules create the very possibility of the activities they regulate, for without the rules there is no activity to regulate. Human languages—like chess, money, private property, and government—are matters of constitutive rules, because to speak English—or play chess—for example, one must follow (at least a large subset of) the rules.

The rules of generative grammar were intended to be constitutive in this sense. The chief difference between me and Chomsky was not over whether there really were constitutive rules of generative grammar, but their relation to consciousness. I thought that unconsciously functioning rules had to be the kind of rules that could be conscious; Chomsky disagreed. Indeed, four of the features of rules in Chomsky’s early work were that the rules functioned unconsciously, were not even accessible to consciousness, were constitutive, and functioned causally. The rules have to be causally real in order to explain linguistic behavior. The speaker’s competence consists in a mastery of the rules and his competence gives rise, though often imperfectly, to his performance. Competence is the competence to perform. And in order to function causally the rules have to be constitutive in my sense, because prior to the rules there is nothing to operate causally on. There is no set of physical properties sufficient to determine all and only English sentences (or games of chess or married couples or governments), because such things exist only within systems of rules.

What puzzles me about these statements is that they seem to imply that, if you posit the existence of generative rules that describe regularities or patterns within observed practice, then:

(1) there is no value to defining such rules, unless you can also explain where they currently “reside” and/or how they come to be “internalised” so that they can then be expressed in practice; and

(2) you must necessarily accord such generative rules an ontological status that allows them to function as causal forces.

For the moment, I want to bracket the issue of whether Chomsky might, e.g., regard the linguistic rules he has identified as causal (Chomsky’s responses, to me, suggest that Searle may be mistaken in this point, but my main concern here is to approach this problem in at a more abstract level, separate from the specific claims of Chomsky’s work, on which I’m not qualified to comment at this point).

The first objection – that it is problematic to talk about generative rules unless you can explain how these rules have come to be internalised – seems an odd critique, mainly because it seems unnecessarily to bind together two distinct objects of inquiry: it’s certainly an interesting question, why regularities of practice come into being and how they are maintained, but it’s an analytically distinct question from what regularities might exist – what patterns we might be able to identify when we abstract from the thicket of rich experience that can obscure practitioners’ awareness that their behaviour demonstrates previously unrecognised order. Having made a case that a particular pattern exists, we can then of course begin to inquire into what causes this particular pattern of practice to occur: whether we can best make sense of the patterns we observe by appealing to notions of innate capacities, internalisation of social rules, etc. But it seems to me quite possible – and perhaps even quite likely – to be correct in our argument that a particular pattern of behaviour exists, while being completely incorrect in our explanation of why this pattern arises. These are two separable issues – whose investigation, I suspect, would generally involve quite different forms of research.

I find it similarly problematic to insist that generative rules, if they exist, must necessarily be conceptualised as ontologically-existent causal forces (rather than, say, as descriptions of empirical regularities, or as themselves the products of other causes, etc.). Certainly in other forms of social research, there are a number of traditions that attempt to map patterns of social practice – a process that can be useful for all sorts of reasons, among them clarifying the complexity of what we may need then to explain on a causal level – that would never assume the pattern has some separate ontological existence, isolated out from the social practices that express it and causing those practices to take a specific form. The search for causes can be understood as a distinct research problem, separate from the search for patterns within social practice. Take the simple, intuitive example of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” regulating market exchange: the proximate causes of market behaviours are incredibly complex and multifaceted. This causal complexity, however, by itself does nothing to undermine the validity of claims that there might be certain aggregate patterns of behaviour that result from these complex causes, patterns that we can define, measure and analyse – patterns that, perhaps, we must define, measure and analyse if we ever hope to tackle the far more complex question of what causes this pattern to arise…

Searle is, of course, criticising Chomsky – not some hypothetical concept of how one might approach the search for linguistic rules. It may well be that, in context, the critique applies as written (or, perhaps even more likely, that I’m missing the point…). My question is whether it is for any reason impossible to apply to the search for linguistic rules a distinction between the search for patterns, on the one hand, and the attempt to explain those patterns causally, on the other?

In the somewhat unlikely event that anyone desires to follow along with the Reading Group from a distance, I thought I’d pass on the links to what we’ve been discussing. Between last week and this, we spent a bit too long reading somewhat anarchistically, each of us browsing in and around debates over Chomsky’s linguistic writings without settling on much in the way of a preferred common text. In the end, the common text therefore ended up being a fairly light read – a useful bit of intellectual history, embodied in a sprawling, time-delayed discussion between Searle, Gewirth, Lakoff and Chomsky published in the New York Review of Books in the early 1970s.

The specific articles are available online:

Searle, John (1972) “A Special Supplement: Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics” New York Review of Books vol. 18, no. 12, June 29.

Lakoff, George (1973) “Deep Language” New York Review of Books vol. 20, no. 1, February 8.

Gewirth, Alan (1973) “The Sleeping Chess Player” New York Review of Books vol. 20, no. 2, February 22.

Chomsky, Noam (1973) “Chomsky Replies” New York Review of Books vol. 20, no. 12, July 19.

Searle’s article provides a quite engaging and readable intellectual history, from the perspective of the early 1970s, of the revolution in linguistics that was sparked by Chomsky’s work. Searle summarises, in a fairly general way, what he presents as a Kuhnian revolution in linguistics, in which Chomsky mobilised accumulated empirical anomalies to undermine the credibility of structuralist and behaviourist approaches to linguistics, and to create a space for the new paradigm of generative and transformational grammar. In Searle’s account, however, this revolution has not ended with Chomsky triumphant: instead, Searle portrays Chomsky as sidelined by his own revolution, pushed to the edges by some of his own best and brightest students who, responding to further empirical anomalies, have displaced syntax from the pride of place Chomsky assigns to it, and moved toward a rapprochement with semantics.

Along the way, Searle contests Chomsky’s claim to be heir to an earlier rationalist philosophical tradition, questions Chomsky’s attempt to use his work on syntax to draw conclusions about any innate linguistic faculty or deep structure of the mind, and argues that Chomsky’s work represents an untenable attempt to analyse language severed from its function of facilitating purposive communication. Searle’s critical aim is thus to restrict the reach of Chomsky’s concepts – to argue that Chomsky’s revolution is confined to the study of syntax, and therefore leaves untouched issues of meaning and of language as a purposive, contextual, social practice – issues that Searle, given his own theoretical focus on speech act theory, finds more central.

The other contributions to this discussion are briefer, and less satisfying, but give a sense of some of the contested issues within Searle’s account. Lakoff’s piece makes sweeping, dramatic dismissals of Chomsky’s work – arguing that core elements have been disproven but, unfortunately for our inexperienced eyes, not pointing to some of the works that could substantiate this claim. (Searle’s original article, by contrast, provides a nice potted bibliography to guide a reader through the milestones in the intellectual history of the Chomsky revolution, and was thus quite useful.)

A large portion of the additional commentary revolves around debunking Chomsky’s claim to be heir to a long rationalist philosophical tradition – a critical focus that left at least a couple of the reading group members puzzled, not because we believe it is necessarily incorrect, but because it seems like the kind of claim that can easily be severed from Chomsky’s more analytically central arguments about syntax: Chomsky may think it important to establish himself as the latter-day Descartes but, to be honest, if I were intending to write a critique of Chomsky’s approach, I’d position this as more of a side issue, and focus on more analytically and empirically central claims. We similarly felt that much of the debate over innate linguistic faculties – although undoubtedly important to Chomsky, and certainly worth debating for its intrinsic interest – was nevertheless not as intrinsically bound as Chomsky might believe to his research into syntax.

Our goal for next week is to provide ourselves with a better basis for assessing these perhaps over-hasty reactions. We are reading the third edition of Chomsky’s Language and Mind, which is a collection of essays, the core of which were originally delivered as lectures in the late 1960s, recently republished with some material from 2004. We’ll also be looking at the chapter titled “Public Language” from Ian Hacking’s Historical Ontology.

After our meeting next week, we’ll have a long hiatus, as one (two?) of our group members will spend some time travelling to more interesting places (although, if I might suggest, Chicago in the wintertime might not have been the best choice)… We have a general notion that we should use this long break to dive into some more complex material than we can usually cover in our weekly meetings. Whether we remain with our current linguistic focus or shift to other themes remains to be decided. Suggestions would be welcome…

I’ve been meaning to write an update on my reading group but, as we’ve spent these first several weeks getting to know one another and working out what we want to do in a more structured way, we’ve also been reading a bit randomly and, in some weeks, more lightly than we plan to do once the term is over. I do have plans to write something more elaborate on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but am currently in negotiation with another person who has not been able to attend the reading group (you know who you are… ;-P) about whether this could productively be written as an online discussion, rather than as one of my theoretical monologues. I’ll use this negotation (and my immense ignorance of Wittgenstein, of course) as an excuse not to preempt my discussion of that text.

Wittgenstein aside, the reading group has done a bit of a random tour through a few lighter texts of some relevance to linguistics – a very broad focus on which we’ve settled for the moment because one of our members is currently doing a PhD on the semantic web, and is interested in the intellectual history of some of the issues that arise in this research, while the rest of us feel a somewhat less targeted sense of guilt for not knowing more about the field… ;-P We took a very quick look at Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics – a text with which I think we were all relatively familiar and comfortable (also the text that seemed most enjoyable to my fellow passengers on the train during my commute, judging from the number of people who were evidently reading over my shoulder in transit – my guess is that they were looking at the pictures – which, given what the pictures are, suggests that most people must find train transport during peak hour remarkably dull…), and a few pieces from Whorf, which were also fairly straight-forward texts to discuss.

We then took a week out from our normal routine because I was away at the conference, and returned to have a special “dueling supervisors” session, since we each have supervisors who have written recent books on globalisation, and wanted to see how their works compared…

This week, we took a look at a couple of texts from Chomsky – chosen for their easy availability on short notice (we had a shorter than usual gap between meetings), rather than for their conceptual centrality to Chomsky’s linguistic theory. These included:

– a piece published in Language, vol 31, no 1, (Jan-Mar 1955), pp. 36-45, titled “Logical Syntax and Semantics: Their Linguistic Relevance“. To my very untrained eye, this piece followed a sort of navigating-scylla-and-charybdis strategy: fending off simplified artificial language approaches to linguistics, on the one hand, while also rejecting something like distributional empiricist approaches, on the other.

– a “Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior“, republished with a new intro in Jakobovits and Miron’s edited volume Readings in the Psychology of Language (1967). I enjoyed this piece much for the same reasons that I also enjoyed re-reading Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” with the group a few weeks back: because it offers some wonderful criticisms of forms of dubious academic argument that also trouble me when I occasionally run across them in other works. In this piece, Chomsky’s focus is on Skinner – but his critiques resonate more widely, cautioning all researchers to be very precise about how thoroughly their grand claims are grounded in underlying data. Among the dubious techniques Chomsky criticises are what he sees as Skinner’s tendency to conflate the very specific and well-defined meaning that terms might have within the context of a laboratory experiement, with the terms’ much broader and fuzzier commonsense meaning. This conflation can work to suggest a far wider scope and power for a theory than the underlying laboratory data actually support – a risk inherent, in Chomsky’s words, when “a term borrowed from the laboratory is used with the full vagueness of the ordinary vocabulary”. Chomsky also criticises another pet peave of mine: the tendency to declare a problem solved when, in fact, the theorist has simply given the old problem a new name – an approach that, Chomsky argues, merely “perpetuates the mystery under a new title”.

This doesn’t quite count as reading, but we also enjoyed the YouTube footage of the “Justice vs. Power” debate between Chomsky and Foucault in 1974. (Although, I have to admit, every time I read or see Foucault in an interview context, I’m always struck by the contrast between what he says about his work, and what he actually seems to do in his work. My fellow reading group members are arguing that I am not adequately appreciating the constraints of the sound bite format – and they may well have the correct view of the situation…) The YouTube footage can be found here:

Part One
Part Two

Having dabbled a bit with Chomsky, the group has now found a bit of a focus for itself over the next couple of weeks. We have a few questions we’re trying to answer – and are in search of some appropriate readings to move us in the right direction. We are currently looking for:

– more information about the contemporary consensus/contestation over Chomsky’s concepts, particularly relating to how Chomsky’s generative/transformative grammar concepts intersect with empirical research findings; and

– a series of readings that will give us some decent “touchstones” in the intellectual history of 20th century linguistics – we are thinking here about primary texts, but wouldn’t be averse to being pointed to some good secondary materials. We are particularly interested in getting a better sense of an “insider’s” view of the field – major schools of thought, contestations, consensus.

If anyone can offer suggestions, they would be most appreciated.