Language Module

A useful thing for some (other) linguist to do would, I think, be to set up a website for cataloging bad arguments in favor of UG. I’ve just run across a beauty.

I’m writing qualifying papers this summer, some of which are about Syntax, and I thought it might be a good idea to start with some foundational stuff. I never really had a proper foundational course in syntax - for *ahem* various reasons - and most of what I know has been picked up from reading LI and sitting in on discussion groups. There’s a lot of arcana in the field these days, so it never hurts to pick up a textbook and start over … was my reasoning.

So I’ve been flipping through Andrew Carnie’s book, and last night I read the inevitable introductory pro-UG argument. These things are apparently required by Holy Writ of Trade Guild for books on mainstream Syntax. Well, not really - the general argument is that the “standard” approaches to Syntax don’t make sense without UG, which is probably true in some broad sense, but not really in the narrow sense they generally mean. Notwithstanding, every textbook I know starts out with some throwaway rationalist argument that just doesn’t really work. So here’s Carnie’s in a nutshell.

Rather than imagining the trouble inherent in learning a language, which is apparently considerable, we’ll imagine instead someone simply matching sentences with situations. Say, the sentence is the cat spots the kissing fishes, and the child has to match this with a situation (Carnie helpfully provides an illustration of a cat spotting some kissing fishes[sic]).

Her job, then, is to correctly match up the sentences with the situation. More crucially she has to make sure she does not match it up with all the other possible alternatives, such as the other things going on around her (like her older brother kicking the furniture, or her mother making breakfast, etc.).

No objections there. I believe the most quoted statement of this problem comes from Quine, who tells a story of some natives shooting a rabbit and saying “gavagai” and leaving the accompanying white dude puzzled as to whether “gavagai” was the rabbit, or the arrow, or the act of shooting, or some kind of cheer, or … WHAT EXACTLY GORAMIT??? Point being, we’re glossing over some difficult issues blithely saying that kids “hear words in context and pick up their meanings.”

Of course, it’s interesting that Carnie should choose this problem to illustrate in a book about syntax. Surely this is a general learnability issue? I mean, this applies as much to learning words in isolation as it does to learning how to string them together, no? So in that sense it’s kind of an odd retreat to beat.

It gets better.

Let’s make this even more abstract to get at the mathematics of the situation. Assign each sentence some number. This number will represent the input to the rule. Similarly assign each situation a number. The function (or rule) modeling language acquisition maps from the set of sentence numbers to the set of situation numbers. Now let’s assume that the child has the following set of inputs and correctly matched situations (perhaps explicitly pointed out to her by her parents). The x value represents the sentences she hears, the y the number correctly associated with her situation.

And then he gives a table, but let’s make it easier on me typing and just say that 1 gets mapped to 1, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, 4 to 4 and 5 to 5. So the question is, given 6, what do we map it to? Well, you might be tempted to say “6,” but then, foolish mortal, you would have fallen victim to Carnie’s Clever Trap®! In fact, suppose the mapping function isn’t identity, but rather [(x-5)*(x-4)*(x-3)*(x-2)*(x-1)] + x = y. GOTCHA! In this case, x=6 maps to 126. Oops!

And actually, I don’t mean to be facetious. This is quite a good example. The trouble is that it’s nothing specific to syntax or even to language. Yes, it does indeed demonstrate rather nicely a general learnability problem, but how does this imply the existence of UG?

I’m actually quite sympathetic to the idea that at least the foundations of human knowledge are innate, having been pretty soundly convinced of that by Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason when I was 19. Kant’s examples are better, and they crucially deal with general cases, nothing specifically to do with language. The point is that a lot of what we “know” about the outside world is innate, including, for Kant, even the notions that we exist in space and time (yes, I buy his argument there too - but that’s a subject for another post - and probably on a different blog).

This mathematical example is, again, kind of a strange choice for an argument about Universal Grammar, considering it has implications for epistemology in general. In fact, this is a nicer illustration of what Russell called the “Problem of Induction,” in my opinion, than Russell gave himself. (Or, actually, maybe Russell did give this example somewhere else, but I’m more familiar with the famous chicken example from Chapter VI of “Problems of Philosophy”).

Here’s Russell:

And this kind of association is not confined to men … Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

The chicken’s problem is of course the same as that of the child in Carnie’s example. The child has only ever seen a pairing of a number with itself and thus expects this pattern to continue - but she has the wrong idea about what the pattern actually is. Just as the chicken expects the pattern of its being fed when it sees the farmer to continue - and continue the underlying pattern does, though the chicken was mistaken about the nature of that pattern.

But Russell continues:

But in spite of the misleadingness of such expectations, they nevertheless exist. The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe the sun will rise to-morrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which unexpectedly has its neck wrung. … The problem we have to discuss is whether there is any reason for believing in what is called ‘the uniformity of nature’. The belief in the uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that has happened or will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no exceptions. The crude expectations which we have been considering are all subject to exceptions, and therefore liable to disappoint those who entertain them. But science habitually assumes, at least as a working hypothesis, that general rules which have exceptions can be replaced by general rules which have no exceptions. ‘Unsupported bodies in air fall’ is a general rule to which balloons and aeroplanes are exceptions. But the laws of motion and the law of gravitation, which account for the fact that most bodies fall, also account for the fact that balloons and aeroplanes can rise; thus the laws of motion and the law of gravitation are not subject to these exceptions.

And I think if Carnie had continued along something like these lines, we would be in a better position. Because this is indeed what we syntacticians are doing. Languages are remarkably the same - though they may not appear so on a superficial glance - the world over in terms of syntactic phenomena. It is indeed striking enough that we would like to, if possible, capture these similarities in terms of universal laws that admit of no exceptions, that indeed explain the superficial exceptions. Where I can’t follow this argument is to the point that these laws arise from some biological specialization for language.

Surely Carnie is falling victim to his own trap here. Granted, a biological specification for language is the superficially most plausible explanation. Laws of gravity are laws of objects, laws of language are things specific to a human-produced communication system, so it seems reasonable to look for their cause in biological specialization. But there is no reason we should necessarily look there. There are plenty of other plausible explanations - most notably that UG phenomena could be explained out of simple biological economy using something roughly akin to our explanation for the fact that highly frequent items are more likely to be irregular (because it’s too much trouble for people to remember exceptional forms for words they seldom use, so they devise rules for the past tense of things like “disarm” but are happy to use “went” as the past tense of a frequent item like “go”). In Carnie’s terms, there is an underlying pattern, but we’ve no way of knowing what it is, exactly.

To the extent that Carnie is merely offering some background about learnability for the purpose of advancing UG as a plausible working hypothesis, he’s on solid ground and I support him. This would be something similar to Pinker’s defense of the idea that research should be done into innate cognitive gender differences, even as Pinker himself remains uncommitted as to whether there are such things. Unfortunately, that this is not all Carnie’s doing is made clear by the transition to the next section:

The evidence for UG doesn’t rely on the logical problem alone, however.

Just like that - as though he’d even bothered to present any logical problems that related to language learnability exclusively, i.e. that were not general epistemological problems of knowledge of the outside world in general.

These sorts of things are risible to me since I don’t really see the need for a biological UG to justify the study of syntax in the first place. The fact is, there are syntactic regularities, and this can easily be demonstrated by appeals to the students’ own native intuitions about the classroom language. Where those regularities come from, ultimately, is an interesting question, but it is not a question for syntacticians. Psycholinguists (and neurolinguists, for that matter, to the extent that there really is a language-specific UG) are much more qualified to address those issues than we are. Our job is merely to model how the system works, to describe those regularities that require careful attention to uncover. That these are numerous and subtle enough to justify a field of inquiry has been amply demonstrated over the last 40-50 years to anyone who cares to glance through LI. The “learnability problem” really isn’t, or shouldn’t be, our main preoccupation.

In particular, given the multiplicity of possible explanations for how children acquire the subconscious knowledge of their language they acquire, both proposed and yet-to-be-proposed, and given the highly specialized psychological or information-theoretic or biological knowledge that will be necessary to adjudicate between them, it seems silly to ask people armed only with Chomsky to pronounce an opinion on the subject one way or the other. Certainly biological UG is a plausible working hypothesis, but it is only one of many, and we just don’t have the information before us to venture much more than a guess as to the nature of UG at this point.

Now, I did say that Carnie continued on in another section. So maybe there are better arguments there?

No such luck, actually. Carnie’s next item for consideration is the that-trace effect. Given this pair of sentences:

(a) Who do you think that Ciaran will question first?
(b) Who do you think Ciaran will question first?

a reasonable conclusion for a learner is that complementizer “that” is simply optional. A further addition to the dataset seems to confirm it:

(c) Who do you think will question Seamus first?

So again, we have one of “these pattern things.” The underlying pattern appears to be that you can simply omit “that” if you feel like it. But then along comes something that causes us to question this conclusion:

(d) *Who do you think that will question Seamus first?

Mysteriously, in English, complementizers are prohibited when it’s the subject that’s been extracted. How do children learn this? After all - it’s hugely implausible that they’ve ever heard sentence (d) and been told it’s wrong. Clearly ungrammatical sentences of this kind generally fail to be produced at all. So how do they learn it? Must be UG, right?

Well, again, maybe. But equally plausible seems to me that whatever subconscious model of language they’ve formed from the sentences they’ve heard simply predicts this for them. To cite an example from my own life - when I first learned to play Shogi (Japanese chess), no one told me the rule that you can’t have two pawns on the same file. In Shogi, you see, you can drop pieces that you’ve captured onto the board in place of making a move (so capturing pieces is more like “converting” them to your side). But there’s a ban on using this feature to simply line up masses of pawns on the same file. No one told me that specifically, but when my opponent did it, I turned to the person teaching us the game and asked if it was legal. Surprised, he said that it wasn’t, and then asked if I’d ever played Shogi before, since he could think of no other explanation for how I “knew” that. But I hadn’t played before - it just “felt wrong” is all. Point being, I think it’s really hasty to rush to conclusions about language-specific innate brain modules just because children are able to generalize from the pieces of the system they’ve acquired so far to pieces no one has explained to them. Clearly, there is some kind of innate reasoning ability over systems and rules, but it doesn’t have to be specific to language, and it certainly doesn’t have to be as specific as a parameter setting for the that-trace effect. Again, I would stress that the job of the syntactician possibly includes raising these questions, but definitely not answering them. We simply describe the system in as much detail as we possibly can - and maybe (hopefully!) something about the regularities we uncover will give psychologists and biologists a clue as to how children do whatever it is they do.

I don’t want to be too critical of Carnie’s book in general, I should add. There are some sections of the first chapter that I really appreciate - particularly the boxes on pp. 10 and 12 responding to common criticisms about the existence of rules and the validity of basing a science on “intuitions.” From the former:

… a brain is a mass of neurons firing, how can formal mathematical rules exist up there? Remember, however, that we are attempting to model Language, we aren’t trying to describe language exactly. … Obviously the rules don’t exist, per se, in our brains, but they do represent the external behavior of the mind.

Quite correct. There is a certain subspecies of phonetician/cognitive scientist (the kind that likes to refer to itself as a “language scientist”) that seems congenitally unable to grasp this point. Syntax is a model, not the final physical explanation. Grammaticality exists as a phenomenon in the world, and we try to explain its operation in as concise a way as possible. Entirely too many first-year graduate students in Linguistics come away with the idea that Syntacticians really honestly believe that there are explicit trees in our heads and that “movement” is a genetically-specified neurological operation. Poppycock, obviously, but because it is obviously poppycock and because they somehow form the impression in spite of us that we literally believe this, it’s easy to understand why we’re so often the objects of their ridicule. I appreciate that Carnie’s book takes the time to refute this view clearly. It shouldn’t have to, of course (responding to straw mans isn’t really in an intro textbook’s job description, after all), but it does everyone a service by recognizing the need and addressing the issue anyway.

I just wish we could drop all the talk about UG. Yes, it’s there in some sense, but it’s like Global Warming, really. We know it’s happening, but we don’t know to what extent, what the implications are, or even exactly what the mechanism is (there’s still debate as to the extent of human complicity), let alone what to do about it. Yes, there’s some sense in which there are universal grammar rules for all human languages. But we don’t know exactly where this comes from, on what level it operates, or even how pervasive it is in the real explanations for these similarities. So let’s stow it, please, until people qualified to address these questions can do so.