Is generative grammar moving to the “we knew it all along” phase?

As you may know, for the last few years the linguistics world has been transfixed by a cage match between Daniel “The Pirahã Whisperer” Everett and Noam “The World’s Greatest Intellectual” Chomsky over the nature of language. Chomsky claims, has claimed for years, that recursion is the central defining feature of human language, where syntax is the central ‘organ’ of language. Everett, on the other hand, claims that while recursion is central to human thought, it is not a necessary component of language. The argument centers on whether or not the language spoken by the Pirahã has recursive structures. Everett says “no” while Chomsky says “it has to.”

Everett has recently published an informal account of the controversy in Aeon, “Chomsky, Wolfe and me”. In his article he quotes Schopenhauer as saying “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I think the generativists are about to enter the third stage.

For the last few years I’ve been following, albeit at a distance, Faculty of Language, a blog devoted to generative grammar (GG). On January 6 Norbert Hornstein posted “Inchoate minimalism” and that post reads like the third stage is about to begin. As you may know minimalism is the latest version of Chomsky’s theory. He quotes a passage from Chomsky’s 1968 Language and Mind, arguing that it presages the minimalist program. Here’s the passage followed by Hornstein’s gloss:

Here’s the quote (L&M:182):

I would, naturally, assume that there is some more general basis in human mental structure for the fact (if it is a fact) that languages have transformational grammars; one of the primary scientific reasons for studying language is that this study may provide some insight into general properties of mind. Given those specific properties, we may then be able to show that transformational grammars are “natural.” This would constitute real progress, since it would now enable us to raise the problem of innate conditions on acquisition of knowledge and belief in a more general framework....

This quote is pedagogical in several ways. First, it does indicate that at least in Chomsky’s mind, GG from the get-go had what we could now identify as minimalist ambitions. The goal as stated in L&M is not only to describe the underlying capacities that make humans linguistically facile, but to also understand how these capacities reflect the “general properties of mind.” Furthermore, L&M moots the idea that understanding how language competence fits in with our mental architecture more generally might allow us to demonstrate that “transformational grammar is “natural”.” How so? Well in the obviously intended sense that a mind with the cognitive powers we have would have a faculty of language in which the particular Gs we have would embody a transformational component. As L&M rightly points out, being able to show this would “constitute real progress.” Yes it would.

Could those “general properties of mind” include recursion? Is that where this is going? Inquiring minds want to know.

Here’s Hornstein’s next paragraph:

It is worth noting that the contemporary conception of Merge as combining both structure building and movement in the “simplest” recursive rule is an attempt to make good on this somewhat foggy suggestion. If by ‘transformations’ we intend movement, then showing how a simple conception of recursion comes with a built in operation of displacement goes some distance in redeeming the idea that transformational Gs are “natural.”

Hey, Dan! Get ready. You’re about to be mugged!

Pinker on Chomsky and Universal Grammar, the Modular Mind, granularity

Tyler Cowen has an interview with Steve Pinker that ranges widely. Here's what Pinker says about the Chomsky/UG debate:

It’s a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field‑tested against a dataset of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice.

Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure [Noam Chomsky] and his opponents that it didn’t proceed in the ordinary direction of making the theory more precise, more testable.

With that caveat in mind, I think there is such a thing as, you can call it “universal grammar” in the following sense: that the child is biased to analyze the speech that he or she hears in particular ways. It does not simply record sentences verbatim.

That’s the memory half of the language system, but the algorithmic or computational or rule‑governed half tries to pull out combinatorial rules from the speech stream. There are certain kinds of rules and elements that a child is keyed to look for. That set of abilities would be what I would call (if I used the term) universal grammar.

There are commonalities across the world’s languages that come from the fact that language is created anew every generation by the minds of the children who construct it out of the data that they get from their parents and peers.

Modular mind:

Modules never quite seemed like the best metaphor. There is structure or specialization. I don’t think the mind is spam. I don’t think we just have a homogeneous neural network in the skull. There is some organization.

The problem with the module metaphor is some of them are snapping components with very limited channels of communication between them. I think that’s too strong, but I think it is reasonable to say that there are different faculties, to use an old‑fashioned word.

To choose a different metaphor, I think it may have been Chomsky who proposed that the mind is like a biological system made out of organs and tissues. When I was in high school I was taught, for example, that the blood was an organ.

Now the blood, of course, suffuses all of our tissues. You can’t draw a dotted line around it. It’s not like the rump roast and the flank steak at the supermarket cow display. Likewise the mind can have a specialization, and structure, and different components, without them literally being independent.

Granularity:

I also think that often — going back to finding a middle ground — the middle ground isn’t finding, say, the arithmetic mean between the two extremes. But rather it’s trying to go down a level of more finer-grain causal mechanisms underneath the phenomena. To state a position that may not look like either of the original extremes, because it’s more precise.

In the case of language, for example, I’ve always been bored by the idea of “is language innate or is it learned.” It’s neither. It’s not halfway in between because that doesn’t give you any insight either. Rather there is an innate structure that does the learning, because learning doesn’t happen by magic. There has to be something in place that does the learning.

Let’s characterize the nature of the learning mechanism in terms of its information-processing abilities. What is its computational architecture, as the computer scientists say?

Once you have that, that is the solution to the nature-nurture problem; namely, what’s innate is an ability to learn. Since any mechanism does some things well and some things not so well, that gives you insight as to what and how we learn.

More on Chomsky

From a short note by Michael Covington, "Has Chomsky been blown out of the water?":

Chomsky’s first major contribution to linguistics was item 1 in the outline, mechanisms to describe syntax precisely. Before he came on the scene, linguists widely accepted the behaviorist dictum that science can only refer to observed behavior. Some took this so far as to forbid that the study of meaning (which is only observable within the mind), which greatly impeded the study of sentence structure. Chomsky argued cogently that abstract models are as appropriate in linguistics as in physics. He allowed syntactic theory to be abstract enough to do its job. 

Besides the tree structures that are now familiar, Chomsky introduced transformations, which are rules that turn one tree structure into another. At first these were used to turn one kind of sentence into another, such as declaratives into questions. They made the grammar more concise; after you accounted for one kind of sentence, the transformation gave you another kind of sentence with no extra work. 

Very soon, transformations took on a different function, to build observed sentences from more abstract structures that are not observed. This made it possible to simplify the grammar and make it more general. 

Since Chomsky's early work linguists have developed many methods for precisely describing syntax, some inspired by Chomsky, some not. More than anyone else, he got that ball rolling.

What's in doubt is his postulation of universal grammar:

He proposed that the principles of grammar are the same in all languages; the brain is pre-programmed for universal grammar. To learn a particular language, all you have to learn is the vocabulary and a set of “parameters” that establish how the grammar rules play out in that particular language. That is how children manage to learn to talk so quickly and efficiently, without being taught, from hearing incomplete examples of speech. [...] 

The second is advances in cognitive psychology. Back in 1957, there was almost no cognitive psychology. Chomsky was rebelling against Skinnerian behaviorism. Most psychologists at the time advocated an impossibly simple theory of how the mind works. Against that backdrop, he had to postulate inborn universal grammar in order to do everything that simple stimulus-response associations couldn’t do. Nowadays we know that the human mind has complex, powerful, abstract capabilities in many areas, not just language, and new possibilities are opening up for explaining language from general mechanisms of thinking and learning.

This judgment seems right to me:

What is pervasive is the expectation that other linguists will investigate questions that Chomsky raised, whether to prove him right, prove him wrong, or follow the evidence in some other direction entirely. That’s how science is done. This expectation is warranted because Chomsky has raised undeniably important questions.

McWhorter on Wolf on Chomsky and Everett: What color are the thoughts of a 12-tone squid sleeping furiously?

Dan Everett says that John McWhorter's review of Tom Wolf's The Kingdom of Speech is the best review of the book to date. I'll take Dan's word for it. The book, as you may know, pits Everett against Chomsky in the Intellectual Cage Match of the Century.

Here's McWhorter getting started on Chomskyian linguistic theory:

For example, in English we say, What do you want? But Chomskyan theory suggests that when our brains first assemble such a sentence, it structures it as You want what? This hardly seems implausible, since what is the object of want and objects usually come after their verb in English (I kick the ball). Besides, we can even actually say, "You want what?" depending on the tone we intend.

Thus, Chomskyan syntax has it that — in English, although obviously not in all other languages — there is a special rule for a word like what, which moves it from after want to the beginning of the sentence.

So far, fine. But from one academic generation to the next, this method of parsing language has mission-crept into a strangely complicated business, increasingly unrelated to what either laypeople or intellectuals outside of linguistics would think of as human language. It is truly one of the oddest schools of thought I am familiar with in any discipline; it intrigues me from afar, like giant squid and 12-tone classical music.

Yes! I like the slippage "from one academic generation to the next," which I've observed in literary theory. And McWhorter has a word on that as well:

And as to whether the density of the jargon (which I have spared the reader) is deliberately fashioned for an air of profundity, the charge is as unnecessary as it is against the lingo of literary criticism. The jargon accreted gradually and imperceptibly over decades, and is readily comprehensible to practitioners.

This McWhorter, he's a level-headed guy. On Dan Everett:

Everett agrees that there is some kind of genetic specification for language in a general sense — there’s a reason chimpanzees do not talk and do not even use sign language on a primitive level unless painstakingly taught to by humans. But he dismisses the idea that it calls for quietly shifting subjects, verbs bouncing around, or exercising the mental muscles that perform math and create computer programs. Language is just saying what you are: "Our identities and our cultural cloaks," as Everett has put it. For those dedicated to Chomsky’s syntactical tree diagrams, this could only sound simplistic, uninformed, and even dangerous — distracting the public from science with feel-good pablum.

FWIW McWhorter thinks the syntacticians may have a point:

Wolfe describes how three die-hard Chomskyans penned an almost obsessively detailed rebuttal to Everett’s claims about Pirahã in linguistics’ flagship journal Language, making them seem like hapless, sputtering refugees from The Revenge of the Nerds. The truth is that even someone more inclined to Everett's claims than the Chomskyans' – e.g., me — who slogged through that rebuttal plus the response from Everett and a riposte from the syntacticians, ends up unexpectedly finding the syntacticians largely convincing. It seems quite plausible that Pirahã is not as quirky a human language as Everett proposed.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Why Chomsky’s Ideas Were so Popular

I am in the process of revising, Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics, and uploading it as a downloadable PDF. The following is from the new material going into the revision.

At the beginning of the chapter on Chomsky, Golumbia speculates that Chomsky’s ideas were so popular because they filled an existing need (p. 31):

[...] despite Chomsky’s immense personal charisma and intellectual acumen, it is both accurate and necessary to see the Chomsky revolution as a discourse that needed not so much an author as an author-function – a function “tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourses” (Foucault 1965, 130).

I believe he is correct in this, that the intellectual climate was right for Chomsky, though I’m skeptical about his analysis.

Golumbia goes on to suggest that nascent neoliberalism provided the ideological matrix in which Chomsky’s ideas flourished (p. 32). More specifically (p. 32):

Chomsky insists that the only reasonable focus for analysis of cognitive and linguistic matters is the human individual, operating largely via a specific kind of rationality [...]; second, specifically with regard to the substance both of cognition and of language, Chomsky argues that the brain is something very much like one of the most recent developments in Western technology; the computer.

What is vital to see in this development is not merely the presence of these two views but their conjunction: for while one can imagine any number of configurations according to which the brain might be a kind of computer without operating according to classical rationalist principles (a variety of recent cognitive-scientific approaches, especially connectionism [...] offer just such alternatives), there is a natural fit between the computationalist view and the rationalist one, and this fit is what proves so profoundly attractive to the neoliberal academy.

Before going on, note that parenthetical remark in the second paragraph. We will return to it in a moment.

It is one thing to argue that Chomskyian linguistics dovetails nicely with neoliberalism, but it is something else to argue that it is attractive only to neoliberalism, and it is this latter that Golumbia seems to be arguing. And there he encounters an immediate problem: Chomsky’s own politics. For Chomsky’s own “real-world politics” (my scare quotes) are quite unlike the politics Golumbia finds lurking in his linguistics. He unconvincingly glosses over this by pointing out that Chomsky’s “institutional politics are often described as exactly authoritarian, and Chomsky himself is routinely described as engaged in ‘empire building’” (p. 33). Authoritarian empire building is common enough in the academy, but what has that to do with the radical left views that Chomsky has so consistently argued in his political essays?

To be sure, Chomsky is only a single case of divergence between real-world politics and ideology, but it is an important one as Golumbia has made Chomsky himself the center of his argument for the confluence between computationalist ideology and conservative politics. If the center does not hold, is the connection between real-world politics and computationalist ideology as close as Golumbia argues?

There’s a problem with this story, which is after all a historical one. And history implies change. That parenthetical reference to connectionism as providing an alternative to “classical rationalist principles”, that gives us a clue about the history. While it’s not at all clear to me that connectionism is meaningfully different from and opposed to those classical rationalist principles, let’s set that aside. While connectionism has roots in the 1950s and 1960s (if not earlier), the same time that Chomsky’s ideas broke through, it didn’t really become popular until the 1980s, by which time neoliberalism was no longer nascent. It was visibly on the rise. Shouldn’t a visible and powerful neoliberalism have been able to suppress conceptions inconsistent with it? Shouldn’t those classical rationalist principles become more prevalent with the rise of neoliberalism rather than retreating to the status of but one conception among many?

Connectionist ideas flourished within an intellectual space that originated in the 1950s, and Chomsky’s ideas were catalytic, but certainly not the only ones (as we’ll soon see). As a variety of thinkers began to explore that space, some of them were attracted to different ideas; at the same time, the originating ideas, often grounded in classical logic, ran into problems. Consequently this new conceptual space became populated with ideas often at odds with those that brought the space into existence.

I suggest that at the primaryintellectual attractiveness of newly emerging computing technology is the simple fact that it gave thinkers a way to conceputalize how mind could be implemented in matter, how Descartes’ res cogitans could be realized in res extensa. Computing had been around for a long time, but not computing machines. The computing machines that emerged after World War II promised to be far more powerful and flexible than all others. That is what was attractive, not nascent neoliberalism, though that neoliberalism may have been waiting in the wings and shouting encouragement.

Golumbia Fails to Understand Chomsky, Computation, and Computational Linguistics

Edit Note, 7.16.16: I've added two substantial paragraphs near the end of the section, "Computing, Abstract and Real." Check the Golumbia tag for further thoughts, as I'm in the processing of adding new material to a revised version of this piece.

As many of you know, David Golumbia is one of three authors of a recent article that that offered a critique of the digital humanities (DH), Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities [1]. The article sparked such vigorous debate within the DH community that I decided to investigate Golumbia’s thinking. I’ve known about him for some time but had not read his best known book:

David Golumbia. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Harvard University Press, 2009.

I’ve still not read it in full. But I’ve read enough to arrive at a conclusion.

Thus this piece is not a book review. I focus on the second chapter, “Chomsky’s Computationalism,” with forays into the first, “The Cultural Functions of Computation,” and a look at the fourth, “Computationalist Linguistics.”

Why Chomsky?

Chomsky is one of the seminal thinkers in the human sciences in the last half of the twentieth century. The abstract theory of computation is at the center of his work. His early work played a major role in bringing computational thinking to the attention of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers and thus helped catalyze the so-called cognitive revolution. At the same time Chomsky has been one of our most visible political essayists. This combination makes him central to Golumbia’s thinking, which is concerned with the relationship between the personal and the political as mediated by ideology. Unfortunately his understanding of Chomsky’s thinking is so tenuous that his enterprise is flawed from its inception. I am not prepared to say whether or not the rest of the book redeems its dismal beginning.

First I consider the difference between abstract computing theory and real computing, a distinction to which Golumbia gives scant attention. Then I introduce his concept of computationalist ideology and criticize his curious assertion that computational linguistics “is almost indistinguishable from Chomskyan generativism” (p. 47). From there I move to his treatment of the Chomsky Hierarchy, pointing out that it is a different kind of beast from hierarchical power relations in society. The last two sections examine remarks that are offered almost as casual asides. The first remark is a speculation about the demise of funding for machine translation in the late 1960s. Golumbia gets it wrong, though he lists a book in his bibliography that gets it right. I conclude with some corrective observations in response to his off-hand speculation about the ideological demographics of linguistics.

Computing, Abstract and Real

I want to start by making a standard distinction between computing in the abstract and embodied computation, “real” if you will. This distinction is important in the context of Golumbia’s book because Chomsky concerned himself only with computing in the abstract. In contrast, computational linguistics (hereafter CL) is about real computing, though computational linguists may avail themselves of abstract theory as an analytical tool. The so-called Chomksy Hierarchy, which we’ll get to a bit later, is one of those analytical tools, and an important one.

Real computation is a physical activity. It is bounded in time – it must come to an end or it has failed – and space – it is realized in physical stuff, Descartes’ res extensa. In decades stretching from the present back into the 19th century, that physical stuff has been some kind of mechanical, electrical, or electronic system. Starting roughly in the middle of the previous century various disciplines have been entertaining the idea that computation might also be realized in animal nervous systems, the human brain in particular, and even the molecular machinery of DNA and RNA.

Computing in the abstract is not physically realized. It is a mathematical activity concerned with purely abstract machines, often called automata. The abstract theory is concerned about the powers of abstract machines as a function of the symbols available to a machine, the states the machine can take, and the operations through which the machine moves from one state to the next.

We can appreciate the difference between real and abstract computing with a relatively simple example, the contrast between tic-tac-toe on the one hand and chess on the other. Abstractly considered they are the same kind of game, and a trivial one at that. They are both finite. As real activities, that is, as activities realized in physical matter, they are quite different. Tic-tac-toe remains trivial, though perhaps not so for a six-year old; but chess becomes profoundly difficult and challenging for even the most brilliant of humans.

Chomsky, Hockett, Behaviorism and Statistics in Linguistics Theory

Here's an interesting (and recent) article that speaks to statistical thought in linguistics: The Unmaking of a Modern Synthesis: Noam Chomsky, Charles Hockett, and the Politics of Behaviorism, 1955–1965, by Gregory Radick (abstract below). Commenting on it at Dan Everett's Facebook page, Yorick Wilks observed: "It is a nice irony that statistical grammars, in the spirit of Hockett at least, have turned out to be the only ones that do effective parsing of sentences by computer."

Abstract: A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the abandonment of behaviorism for cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a scientific borderland, muddy and much traveled. This essay relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of behaviorism. His antibehaviorism emerged only in the course of what became a systematic repudiation of the work of the Cornell linguist C. F. Hockett (1916–2000). In the name of the positivist Unity of Science movement, Hockett had synthesized an approach to grammar based on statistical communication theory; a behaviorist view of language acquisition in children as a process of association and analogy; and an interest in uncovering the Darwinian origins of language. In criticizing Hockett on grammar, Chomsky came to engage gradually and critically with the whole Hockettian synthesis. Situating Chomsky thus within his own disciplinary matrix suggests lessons for students of disciplinary politics generally and—famously with Chomsky—the place of political discipline within a scientific life.

For the Historical Record: Cog Sci and Lit Theory, A Chronology

Another reprint from The Valve, though slightly revised. I'm bumping this to the top of the queue in view of this interesting post in which Scott Enderle meditates on loose conjunctions between perceptrons, post-structuralist thought, and data mining.

Back in the ancient days of the Theory's Empire event at The Valve I contributed a comment paralleling the rise of Theory with that of cognitive science. That parallel seems - at least to me - of general interest. So I decided to dig it out from that conversation and present it here, in lightly edited form. The parallel I present does not reflect extensive scholarship on my part, no digging in the historical archives, etc. Rather, it is an off-the-top-of-my-head sketch of the multifaceted intellectual milieu in which I have lived much of my intellectual life.

I take 1957 as a basic reference point. That's when Northrop Frye published his Anatomy and that's when Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures. 1957 is also when the Russians launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the globe. The Cold War was in full swing at that time and Sputnik triggered off a deep wave of tech anxiety and tech envy in America. One consequence was more federal money going into the university system and a move to get more high school students into college. So we see an expansion of college and university enrollments through the 60s and an expansion of the professorate to accommodate. Cognitive science (especially its AI side) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Theory rode in on this wave. By the time the federal money began contracting in the early 70s an initial generation of cognitivists and Theorists was becoming tenured in, and others were in the graduate school and junior faculty pipe-line. Of course, the colleges and universities couldn't simply halt the expansion once the money began to dry up. These things have inertia.

We may take cognitive science for granted now, but the fact is that there are precious few cognitive science departments. There are some, but mostly we've got interdisciplinary programs pulling faculty from various departments. These programs grant PhDs by proxy; you get your degree in a traditional department but are entitled to wear a cog sci gold seal on your forehead. As Jerry Fodor remarked somewhere (I forget where) in the last year or three, most cognitive psychologists don't practice cognitive science. They do something else, something that most likely was in place before cognitive science came on the scene.

Public Intellectuals, through Partisan Review to the present

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Marl Greif discusses "public intellectuals" through the lens of The Partisan Review, the touchstone of discourse about public intellectualism.

During World War II PR benefitted from the influx of first-rank European writers and thinkers:

The combination of knowledgeable, left-wing anti-Communism with firsthand possession of a European émigré inheritance, all hammered together through American literary and artistic networks in the great metropolis, was a rare alloy. And as the United States emerged as the lone Western superpower, and its State Department sought to woo a rebuilt Europe away from the Soviet alternative, this metal came increasingly into demand. PR gained a kind of establishment support. This source of its success has been regretted by historians as often as the magazine’s outsized authority has been saluted. To critics, it was as if the recalcitrant stuff of critical thought had been weaponized. The establishment link marks the somewhat uncomfortable side of Richard Hofstadter’s famous statement in 1963’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that Partisan Review, against much philistinism elsewhere, had become a "house organ of the American intellectual community." But had the house organ become a consensus mouthpiece?

As for the current moment (emphasis mine):

At the arrival of the Great Recession, in 2007-8, I ruefully reminded friends and students that the Depression of the 20th century, despite its miseries, had been surprisingly good for intellect. I think we have all the dislocation, injustice, and economic inequality we need, when we look at our America—and the classes of writers, teachers, arguers, dreamers, "petty bourgeois" or proletarian, have indeed even been flattened and equalized a bit, in their salaries and prospects. Maybe they need to be flattened even more, to truly take the measure of popular life in America. But the outrages on offer are surely outrageous enough. As for depoliticization: Students stew in philosophies of radical social change on one side, and observations of the corruption in the present order on the other. I don’t know anyone’s bookshelf without its Marx and Wollstonecraft, its Chomsky and Naomi Klein. The thing we’ve lost is really party politics, and it has been replaced by music-centered subculture as the main beacon for the organizing (and self-organizing) of youth. Scratch through the surface of any little magazine of the last 30 years and you’ll find the inspiration of ’zines and DIY punk rock (hip hop may serve a parallel function through different channels). But that may be a subject for another occasion.

Which leaves the question of the university. The economics of higher education in the contemporary moment may be bad for many of us—teachers, students, and temporary passers-through. But, again—this should not be a priori bad for public intellect or public debate. Quite the opposite. A large pool of disgruntled free-thinking people who are not actually starving, gathered in many local physical centers, whose vocation leads them to amass an enormous quantity of knowledge and skill in disputation, and who possess 24-hour access to research libraries, might be the most publicly argumentative the world has known.

Why I’d Abandoned Chomskian Linguistics before I Got to Graduate School and Where I am Now

It wasn’t a matter of deep and well-thought princple. It was simpler than that. Chomsky's approach to linguistics didn’t have the tools I was looking for. Let me explain.

* * * * *

Dan Everett’s kicked off two discussions on Facebook about Chomksy. This one takes Christina Behme’s recent review article, A ‘Galilean’ science of language, as its starting point. And this one’s about nativism, sparked by Vyv Evans’ The Language Myth.

* * * * *

I learned about Chomsky during my second year as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I took a course in psycholinguistics taught by James Deese, known for his empirical work on word associations. We read and wrote summaries of classic articles, including Lee’s review of Syntactic Structures and Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. My summary of one of them, I forget which, prompted Deese to remark that my summary was an “unnecessarily original” recasting of my argument.

That’s how I worked. I tried to get inside the author’s argument and then to restate it in my own words.

In any event I was hooked. But Hopkins didn’t have any courses in linguistics let alone a linguistics department. So I had to pursue Chomsky and related thinkers on my own. Which I did over the next few years. I read Aspects, Syntatic Structures, Sound Patterns of English (well, more like I read at that one), Lenneberg’s superb book on biological foundations (with an appendix by Chomsky), found my way to generative semantics, and other stuff. By the time I headed off to graduate school in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo I was mostly interested in that other stuff.

I became interested in Chomsky because I was interested in language. While I was interested in language as such, I was a bit more interested in literature and much of my interest in linguistics followed from that. Literature is made of language, hence some knowledge of linguistics should be useful. Trouble is, it was semantics that I needed. Chomsky had no semantics and generative semantics looked more like syntax.

So that other stuff looked more promising. Somehow I’d found my way to Syd Lamb’s stratificational linguistics. I liked that for the diagrams, as I think diagrammatically, and for the elegance. Lamb used the same vocabulary of structural elements to deal with phonology, morphology, and syntax. That made sense to me. And the s work within his system actually looked like semantics, rather than souped up syntax, though there wasn’t enough of it.

The History of Modern Linguistic Theory: Seuren on Chomsky

For those interested in the history of modern linguistic theory, Noam Chomsky is a major figure, though one whose influence is rapidly waning. I recommend the recent series of blog posts by Pieter Seuren. I quoted from his first post in Chomsky's Linguistics, a Passing Fancy?, but you can go directly to Seuren's first post: Chomsky in Retrospect – 1. What's particularly interesting to me at this moment is that Chomsky had been associated with machine translation:

While at Harvard during the early 1950s, and later at the MIT department of machine translation, he engaged—as an amateur—in some intensive mathematical work regarding the formal properties of natural language grammars, whereby the notion that a natural language should be seen as a recursively definable infinite set of sentences took a central position. One notable and impressive result of this work was the so-called Chomsky hierarchy of algorithmic grammars, original work indeed, as far as we know, but which has now, unfortunately, lost all relevance..

I of course have known about the Chomsky hierarchy for decades, but hadn't realized that Chomsky was that close to people actually working in computational linguistics. For Chomsky computation obviously was a purely abstract activity. Real computation, computation that starts somewhere, goes through a succession of states, and then produces a result, that is NEVER an abstract activity. It may be arcane, complex, and almost impossible to follow, but it is always a PHYSICAL process taking place in time and consuming resources (memory space and energy).

That sense of the physical is completely missing in the Chomsky tradition, and in its offshoots – I'm thinking particularly of the Lakoff line of work on embodied cognition. There is embodiment and there is embodiment. It is one thing to assert that the meanings of words and phrases are to be found in human perception and action, which is what Lakoff asserts, and quite something else to figure out how to get a physical device – whether a bunch of cranks and gears, a huge vacuum-tube  based electrical contraption, a modern silicon-based digital computer, or an animal brain – to undertake computation.

But that's a distraction from the main object of this note, which is to list the further posts in Seuren's Chomsky retrospect.

• Chomsky in retrospect — 2
• Chomsky in retrospect — 3
• Chomsky in retrospect — 4
• Chomsky in retrospect — 5

* * * * *

Chomsky's Linguistics, a Passing Fancy?

Dismissing Chomsky's political writing as ephemeral, albeit effective, journalism, Pieter Seuren begins an assessment of his work in linguistics:

He dominated linguistics for four full decades, from 1960 till 2000 and since 2000 his influence has still been reverberating in many ways... [But] it looks very much as if his influence is rapidly declining, and with good reason, because his theoretical approach has been shown to be flawed in too many ways by a large variety of critics. For all we know, his reputation may turn out, sub specie humanitatis, to have been a momentary flare.

And this, more or less, is the Chomsky I read during my undergraduate years in the mid-60s and had abandoned by the time I entered SUNY Buffalo in 1973 for my Ph. D. work:

Chomsky subsequently tried to reinterpret the notion of an algorithmic generative grammar in realist terms, that is, as a theory of how the human mind deals with language, and no longer in the purely instrumentalist terms current in the brand of structuralism that he had been taught and according to which all that counts is to provide a precise and concise statement of the facts of each language, regardless of how they are implemented in human brains. This move from instrumentalism to realism was brought about by his contacts with a small group of young Harvard psychologists, headed by Jerome Bruner and George Miller, who were in the process of creating the new cognitive science in opposition to behaviourism. The incorporation of the concept of a generative grammar into the new paradigm of cognitive science provided him with the opportunity of being part of a much more general and more profound revolution affecting the whole of society, the passing from ‘inhuman’ behaviourism to ‘human’ cognitive science and thus the reinstatement of human values in the modern world, giving impetus to a new and wide-ranging emancipatory movement.

This is the Chomsky of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965).

Chomksy: Lit Crit at the Top & Engineering Has Changed

There's an interesting interview with Noam Chomsky in The Atlantic. Among other things, he puts literary criticism at the top of a 'pyramind' of knowledge:

If a molecule is too big, you give it to the chemists. The chemists, for them, if the molecule is too big or the system gets too big, you give it to the biologists. And if it gets too big for them, they give it to the psychologists, and finally it ends up in the hands of the literary critic, and so on.

I would not, of course, take that as a considered judgment about the place of literary criticism in academic intellectual life. But it's a reasonable statement about how difficult the task is.

Later in the interview he makes an interesting observation about engineering:

And it's kind of interesting to see what happened to engineering. So like when I got to MIT, it was 1950s, this was an engineering school. There was a very good math department, physics department, but they were service departments. They were teaching the engineers tricks they could use. The electrical engineering department, you learned how to build a circuit. Well if you went to MIT in the 1960s, or now, it's completely different. No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it. But that's a very different approach.

Chomsky Sends Skinner to the Showers

During my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins I took a course on psycholinguistics taught by James Deese. The course work consisted of writing weekly synopses of classic articles in psycholinguistics. One of those was a review of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. Another was Chomsky's 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Those two reviews rocked my world. I became a Chomskyian, at least for a few years. And then it wore thin and I jumped ship.

But that's another story.

During the 1950s B. F. Skinner was the leading light of behaviorist psychology, the reigning paradigm in academic psychology in American universities. Behaviorists believed that science was necessarily grounded in empirical observation. Since the mind could not be observed, psychological science could not talk about it. Behavior was observable, and so THAT's what psychology must study.

In Verbal Behavior Skinner set out to explain language in behaviorist terms. Chomsky demolished Skinner's theorizing by introducing arguments of a new type into psychology, arguments about computational complexity. Rather than attempting to summarize Chomsky's arguments here and now–it's 6:30 in the morning and I've not even finished my first cup of tea–I'll let you read them for yourself. The whole review is online along with a 1967 preface by Chomsky. Enjoy.