Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield‘s “Roll up for the mystery tour” is one. Unfortunately, the comments on that post are closed. I have a question, so let me just post it here, where the comments are open.

The commentary is entertainingly written. Basically, it agrees with E&L’s rallying cry for the need to describe and recognize diversity; but it argues that, due to certain misconceptions about UG on the part of E&L, “Universal Grammar … walks free from the courtroom.” The first point that E&L get wrong about UG according to Duffield is the status of the notion ‘subject’. He has an interesting quote from McCloskey to support this point; and he also points out that, ironically, the topic/agent/pivot distinction championed by E&L is in fact ‘commonly accepted, if differently formalized’ in (some) UG quarters.

But it is really the second point, about the ontology of UG, that piqued my interest. Duffield argues that “UG is a theory of the initial state, which Chomsky now terms FL (Faculty of Language), not of any particular endstate grammar (LEnglish, LJiwarli, LPiraha, etc.,).” But that is not all; he adds, “The problem is not merely that UG is not claimed to be a property of final state grammars, but that it need not even be definitional of these grammars.” (emphasis mine, MD). And then comes the crucial point, for me as well as for Duffield:

the crucial point here is that facts about attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on theories of UG. Baldly stated, the absence of Language Universals—granting for the sake of argument that these are a ‘myth’—does not imply the absence of UG.

To be honest, this baffled me. Not so much because I disagree, but rather because there is so little left to agree or disagree with! I have wondered before (in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek post on the ‘grammar of the gaps‘) about the gradual shift of UG to evermore abstract territories — compare for example the switch-like parameters of the Principles & Parameters approach (some of which clearly refer to concrete (endstate) grammatical phenomena) with the most recent claims that recursion and some form of Merge should be sufficient for the FLN (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). Duffield himself quotes Chomsky to the effect that ‘It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind.’ (Chomsky 1975:41). In my earlier post, I mention the question posed to Adele Goldberg by Jan-Wouter Zwart at the Nijmegen Lectures 2007. Zwart, in search of common ground between generative grammar and construction grammar, asked ‘Is it conceivable that underlying the structure of constructions are abstract principles of a simple kind, rooted in universal properties of human cognition?’ Goldberg’s answer was affirmative — but as I note in my discussion, the statement is sufficiently general to engender agreement from almost everyone.

But is it grammar?

The big question such abstract conceptions of UG raise for me is this: but is it grammar? That is, if it is indeed the case, as Duffield holds, that UG is not a property of endstate grammars; that it is not even definitional of these grammars; and moreover that ‘attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on UG’, what exactly is UG supposed to be, how do we go about empirically validating the UG hypothesis, and why are we calling it “universal grammar“?

My worry goes deeper than the apparent misnomer (though I do wonder whether the theory is not in need of a new name, if ‘endstate’ grammars have so little to do with it; but then I’m probably overlooking useful connotations of ‘grammar’ for the initial state). I find it difficult to see (1) how such an abstract concept could be isolated from more general cognitive abilities, and (2) why one would want to isolate it a priori. To isolate it —i.e. to show that UG is the ‘language faculty’ in some relevant sense— would one not need to show that its core business is language? (But how would one go about that if it doesn’t necessarily show in ‘endstate’ grammars?) And would one not need to show, conversely, that more general cognitive abilities cannot take care of language — in other words, that UG is necessary to explain (aspects of) language usage and language structure?

Excavating UG

A final issue, prodded by another statement from Duffield’s commentary:

No matter how deep one digs into mature grammatical systems, there is no logical reason to expect that one will excavate UG in any recognizable form, any more than one should discover universal principles of embryology through an in-depth study of mature organisms.

This does raise the question of what linguistics as a science is looking at. Following the analogy here (which is always a dangerous thing to do, but then, it is perhaps a dangerous analogy), Duffield seems to say that UG is to language structure what universal principles of embryology are to mature organisms. That would imply that UG is not about language structure (since digging into language structure is not going to yield UG ‘in any recognizable form’) but about the early ontogenesis of language in acquisition. I would agree that acquisition is of central importance (though again, I don’t see why we shouldn’t try and see how far we get with (1) domain-general cognitive abilities and (2) a socially grounded approach, before assuming there has to be a non-trivial ‘language organ’). But what of the flood of generativist literature that does dig deep into ‘mature grammatical systems’, purporting to learn things about UG (presumably in recognizable form)? Does this literature bear more than a tangential relation to the notion of UG espoused here?

Now, I expect there are interesting answers to these questions. No doubt I have overlooked some important ramifications, and perhaps I, too, have mistaken the ontology of UG. If so, set me straight! Comments are open.

Update

In a review of the debate, psychologist Michael Corballis puts it well:

In defense of Chomsky, we should note that universal grammar does not apply to the external languages (or E-languages) that we actually use, but is a feature of what he calls internal language, or I-language. In this view, diversity arises not in I-language itself, but in the mapping of I-language onto E-languages. So could there still be common principles within I-language that could accommodate the huge diversity of E-languages? In Chomsky’s most recent formulation, the so-called “minimalist program,” universal grammar reduces to what he calls “unbounded Merge.” That is, unspecified elements are merged in recursive fashion to create structures of any desired level of complexity.

Perhaps the question, then, is not so much whether universal grammar is dead, but whether it has sufficient vitality to be useful. Yes, all languages probably involve the merging of elements of various sorts-that’s what makes language generative. But rather than dwell on this simple idea, we might be better to study languages in all of their diversity, and understand how they are shaped by culture, and by the pressures of the everyday commerce of cooperation and competition.

I find a theory which locates the most important restrictions on language learning or language structure solely in some ill-defined innate organ uninteresting; at best it prejudges the issue and at worst it trivializes what is so interesting about language as a complex evolved system. Restrictions on evolved systems (and hence on our theories of evolved systems) come from a multifarious evolutionary landscape in which cultural transmission and social interaction are just as important as biology and cognition.

References

1. Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Reflections on Language. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
2. Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 429-492. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0999094X
3. Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve. Science 298: 1569-1579.