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Biolinguistics and fresh Chomsky's paper
Radek Šimík
Tuesday, 04 December 2007 19:40 UTC
How is the newest paper of Chomsky? In three words: no big news. In his recent general linguistics writings (maybe since the late 1990s), Chomsky has proceeded in rather small steps. At the onset of the minimalist program (early 1990s), Chomsky first admitted that the hypothesized Universal Grammar could actually be very small. Since the pronunciation of the strong minimalist thesis", it has been clear that Chomsky is willing to abandon the idea of a highly structured and language specific Universal Grammar, i.e. a system that is genetically given and wired into our brains, in a fashion that we are far from being able to understand. How could it be that Chomsky abandoned this very appealing, but no doubt highly controversial hypothesis? Well, it is the new emerging research horizon that gave the way to (potentially) dump the innateness hypothesis – attributing the properties of human language to linguistic-independent laws of nature, such as the efficiency of computation.
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So what is left in the Universal Grammar, according to Chomsky? Well, not much. Recursion is one thing, or more particuarly, the recursive application of the operation Merge (connect two linguistic items, simple or complex, and create a new one) and it is under discussion (even by Chomsky himself) whether recursion is a language-specific (or even species-specific) principle. Then there are some “residues of phrase structure grammar”, i.e. a principle that decides how the object created by Merge is to be seen for further operations (i.e. is it a verb or a noun, or perhaps a preposition?). These residues, which could be called “projection” or “labeling” can also be dispensed with, Chomsky says. Last but not least, there is just one level of linguistic representation, or perhaps no representation at all – there only being a cyclic derivation with a rather short memory.
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I find this development interesting. In the eyes of Chomsky’s critics, Chomsky hasn’t really changed so much – they probably stopped reading him a long time ago, and his old positions were easier to criticize (btw. as any explicit and strong hypothesis). In the meantime, the research conducted under the “generative grammar” label has developed rapidly. For me personally, the most significant step has been the recent “marriage” of syntax with compositional semantics, or rather the fact that it has been become standard to put these two things together, or even to understand them as being one. The generative grammar inquiries have thus proved to be serious inquiries into the general mental organization of human beings. Irrespective of the Universal Grammar and the innateness hypothesis, the findings show a high degree of universality in the hierarchical organization of the material in sentences, i.e. morphemes, words, and phrases. The organization for which there is more and more evidence from various languages, appears to bear evidence of how we structure our thoughts, how we perceive and categorize the surrounding world.
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Chomsky’s paper opens a new journal, called "Biolinguistics. There is a hope that this journal will further support the interdisciplinary studies of language, mainly neurolinguistics and genetics+linguistics, two subfields which have recently started to grow and already brought some exciting results. The editors of Biolinguistics are two hard-core syntacticians, Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes Grohmann. Let’s hope they will manage it well. Let’s wish them good luck.
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Replies
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It all looked beautiful and well-structured at the start: look at generative phonology – developing from the two-level model with neat correspondences for syntactic Deep and Surface structures towards a hierarchy of principles. Or language acquisition – where even most ardent generativists now acknowledge the role of environment and social interaction.
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Well, I would call it a natural development of theories. They get revised all the time. However, at any point of development, a theory should be clear and concise and must make clear predictions. As soon as this is the case, any kind of science/linguistics is all right. I think generativists have always admitted that social aspects play their role in linguistics. They have just always abstracted from these. And they keep doing it, as far as I know. I don’t know of a generative theory that incorporates society/environment-based variables.
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