>>CB: Yes. I'm trying to distinguish between the syntax of a specific human language like English, which I don't think you or Chomsky is inscribed in human genetics and the brain , and a ,what shall we call it, meta-syntax? or some more general genetically inscribed ability, faculty for learning any specific syntax such as that of English or Chinese or Choctaw. Clearly no one is born with knowledge of English syntax. But all humans are born with a much greater ability than chimps or other species to learn English or any other syntax, a specific faculty and genetically based part of the brain which all humans have, whether they are born in England or not. I human born in China has this special in born ability to learn English syntax.
I'm sure we agree on this. But it is all I was getting at in what you quote of me above.<< Yes, it has been a long-running debate in post-Chomskian traditions/theoretical frameworks/approaches/programs/schools of thought/sub-schools of thought etc. If there is this universal grammar, then aren't all natural languages more alike than they are different? Chomsky's later 'minimalist program' moves away from 'representational' towards 'derivational'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Chomsky.27s_theory Chomsky's theory Further information: Language acquisition device, Generative grammar, X-bar theory, Government and Binding, Principles and parameters, and Minimalist Program Linguist Noam Chomsky made the argument that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis. This set of rules is known as universal grammar. Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions that violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. This absence of negative evidence—that is, absence of evidence that an expression is part of a class of the ungrammatical sentences in one's language—is the core of the poverty of stimulus argument. For example, in English one cannot relate a question word like 'what' to a predicate within a relative clause (1): (1) *What did John meet a man who sold? Such expressions are not available to the language learners, because they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical for speakers of the local language. Speakers of the local language do not utter such expressions and note that they are unacceptable to language learners. Universal grammar offers a solution to the poverty of the stimulus problem by making certain restrictions universal characteristics of human languages. Language learners are consequently never tempted to generalize in an illicit fashion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticism Sampson, Roediger, Elman and Hurford are hardly alone in suggesting that several of the basic assumptions of Universal Grammar are unfounded. Indeed, a growing number of language acquisition researchers argue that the very idea of a strict rule-based grammar in any language, flies in the face of what is known about how languages are spoken and how languages evolve over time. For instance, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater have argued that the relatively fast-changing nature of language would prevent the slower-changing genetic structures from ever catching up, undermining the possibility of a genetically hard-wired universal grammar.[6] In addition, it has been suggested, that people learn about probabilistic patterns of word distributions in their language, rather than hard and fast rules (see the distributional hypothesis).[7] It has also been proposed that the poverty of the stimulus problem can be largely avoided, if we assume that children employ similarity-based generalization strategies in language learning, generalizing about the usage of new words from similar words that they already know how to use.[8] Another way of defusing the poverty of the stimulus argument, is to assume that if language learners notice the absence of classes of expressions in the input, they will hypothesize a restriction (a solution closely related to Bayesian reasoning). In a similar vein, language acquisition researcher Michael Ramscar has suggested that when children erroneously expect an ungrammatical form that then never occurs, the repeated failure of expectation serves as a form of implicit negative feedback that allows them to correct their errors over time.[9] This implies that word learning is a probabilistic, error-driven process, rather than a process of fast mapping, as many nativists assume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program Chomsky presents MP as a program, and not as a theory, following Imre Lakatos's distinction.[2] The MP seeks to be a mode of inquiry, characterized also by the flexibility of the multiple directions that its minimalism enables. That is, ultimately, the MP provides the conceptual framework guiding the development of grammatical theory. For Chomsky, there are just minimalist questions, and the answers can be framed in any theory. Of all these questions, the one that plays a crucial role is this: why language has the properties it has.[3] That said, MP lays out a very specific specification of the basis of syntactic grammar that when compared to other formalisms looks very much like a theory. --------------------- Bare Phrase Structure A major development of MP inquiry is the so called Bare Phrase Structure (often abbreviated BPS), a new theory of phrase structure (or sentence building in simple terms) developed by Noam Chomsky.[9] This theory contrasts with X-bar theory, which preceded it, in four important ways: 1. BPS structure is derivational. That is, it is built from the bottom up, bit by bit. X-Bar Theory, on the other hand, is representational. That is, a structure for a given construction is built in one fell swoop, then the lexical items are inserted into the structure. 2. BPS does not have a preconceived structure, while in X-Bar Theory, every phrase has a specifier and a complement. 3. BPS has only binary branching while X-Bar Theory permits both binary and unary branching. 4. BPS does not distinguish between a "head" and a "terminal". BPS operates with two basic operations, Merge and Move. Although there is current debate on exactly how Move is to be formulated, the differences between the current proposals are minute. The following discussion follows Chomsky's original proposal. Merge is a function that takes two objects (say α and β) and merges them into an unordered set with a label (either α or β, in this case α). The label identifies the properties of the phrase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_Theory Input and GEN: the candidate set Optimality theory supposes that there are no language-specific restrictions on the input. This is called richness of the base. Every grammar can handle every possible input. For example, a language without complex clusters must be able to deal with an input such as /flask/. Languages without complex clusters differ on how they will resolve this problem; some will epenthesize (e.g. /falasak/, or /falasaka/ if all codas are banned) and some will delete (e.g. /fas/, /fak/, /las/, /lak/). Given any input, GEN generates an infinite number of candidates, or possible realizations of that input. A language's grammar (its ranking of constraints) determines which of the infinite candidates will be assessed as optimal by EVAL. ---------------------------- A more serious objection to optimality theory is the claim that it cannot account for phonological opacity (see Idsardi 2000, e.g.). In derivational phonology effects may be seen that are inexplicable at the surface level but which are explainable through "opaque" rule ordering; but in optimality theory, which has no intermediate levels for rules to operate on, these effects are difficult to explain. For example, in Québécois French high front vowels triggered affrication of /t/, (e.g. /tipik/ → [tspɪk]) but the loss of high vowels (visible at the surface level) leaves the affrication with no apparent source. Derivational phonology can explain this by saying that vowel syncope (the loss of the vowel) "counterbled" affrication - that is, instead of vowel syncope occurring and "bleeding" (i.e. preventing) affrication, we say that affrication applies before vowel syncope, so that the high vowel is removed and the environment destroyed which had triggered affrication. Such counterbleeding rule orderings are therefore termed opaque (instead of transparent), because their effects are not visible at the surface level. The opacity of such phenomena finds no straightforward explanation in optimality theory, since intermediate forms are not accessible (constraints refer only to the surface form and/or the underlying form). There have however been a number of proposals designed to account for it; but most of these proposals significantly alter optimality theory's basic architecture, and therefore tend to be highly controversial. Frequently, such alterations add new types of constraints (which are not universal faithfulness or markedness constraints), or change the properties of GEN (such as allowing for serial derivations) or EVAL. Some well-known examples of these include John J. McCarthy's sympathy theory and candidate chains theory, and there are many others. A relevant issue is the existence of circular chain shifts, i.e. cases where input /X/ maps to output [Y], but input /Y/ maps to output [X]. Many versions of optimality theory predict this to be impossible (see Moreton 2004, Prince 2007). It is not certain whether patterns of this sort occur in natural languages. Optimality theory is also criticized as being an impossible model of speech production/perception: computing and comparing an infinite number of possible candidates would take an infinitely long time to process. Idsardi (2006) argues this position, though other linguists dispute this claim on the grounds that Idsardi makes unreasonable assumptions about the constraint set and candidates, and that more moderate instantiations of optimality theory do not present such big computational problems (see Kornai (2006) and Heinz, Kobele, and Riggle (2009)). Another common rebuttal to this criticism of optimality theory is that the framework is purely representational. In this view, optimality theory is taken to be a model of linguistic competence and is therefore not intended to explain the specifics of linguistic performance.[1][2] _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
