## 1. Three Approaches to Linguistic Theorizing: Externalism, Emergentism, and Essentialism



The issues we discuss have been debated with vigor and sometimes
venom. Some of the people involved have had famous exchanges in the
linguistics journals, in the popular press, and in public forums. To
understand the sharp disagreements between advocates of the approaches
it may be useful to have a sketch of the dramatis personae before us,
even if it is undeniably an oversimplification.



We see three tendencies or foci, divided by what they take to be the
subject matter, the approach they advocate for studying it, and what
they count as an explanation. We characterize them roughly in Table
1.





|  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
|  | externalists | emergentists | essentialists |
| *Primary phenomena* | Actual utterances as produced by language users | Facts of social cognition, interaction, and communication | Intuitions of grammaticality and literal meaning |
| *Primary subject matter* | Language use; structural properties of expressions and
languages | Linguistic communication, cognition, variation, and change | Abstract universal principles that explain the properties of
specific languages |
| *Aim* | To describe attested expression structure and interrelations,
and predicting properties of unattested expressions | To explain structural properties of languages in terms of
general cognitive mechanisms and communicative functions | To articulate universal principles and provide explanations for
deep and cross-linguistically constant linguistic properties |
| *Linguistic structure* | A system of patterns, inferrable from generally accessible,
objective features of language use | A system of constructions that range from fixed idiomatic
phrases to highly abstract productive types | A system of abstract conditions that may not be evident from the
experience of typical language users |
| *Values* | Accurate modeling of linguistic form that accords with empirical
data and permits prediction concerning unconsidered cases | Cognitive, cultural, historical, and evolutionary explanations
of phenomena found in linguistic communication systems | Highly abstract, covering-law explanations for properties of
language as inferred from linguistic intuitions |
| *Children's language* | A nascent form of language, very different from adult linguistic
competence | A series of stages in an ontogenetic process of developing adult
communicative competence | Very similar to adult linguistic competence though obscured by
cognitive, articulatory, and lexical limits |
| *What is acquired* | A grasp of the distributional properties of the constituents of
expressions of a language | A mainly conventional and culturally transmitted system for
linguistic communication | An internalized generative device that characterizes an infinite
set of expressions |



Table 1. Three Approaches to the Study
of Language




A broad and varied range of distinct research projects can be pursued
within any of these approaches; one advocate may be more motivated by
some parts of the overall project than others are. So the tendencies
should not be taken as sharply honed, well-developed research programs
or theories. Rather, they provide background biases for the
development of specific research programs--biases which sometimes
develop into ideological stances or polemical programs or lead to the
branching off of new specialisms with separate journals. In the
judgment of Phillips (2010), "Dialog between adherents of
different approaches is alarmingly rare."



The names we have given these approaches are just mnemonic tags, not
descriptions. The Externalists, for example, might well have been
called 'structural descriptivists' instead, since they
tend to be especially concerned to develop models that can be used to
predict the structure of natural language expressions. The
Externalists have long been referred to by Essentialists as
'empiricists' (and sometimes Externalists apply that term
to themselves), though this is misleading (see Scholz and Pullum 2006:
60-63): the 'empiricist' tag comes with an
accusation of denying the role of learning biases in language
acquisition (see Matthews 1984, Laurence and Margolis 2001), but that
is no part of the Externalists' creed (see e.g. Elman 1993,
Lappin and Shieber 2007).



Emergentists are also sometimes referred to by Essentialists as
'empiricists', but they either use the Emergentist label
for themselves (Bates et al. 1998, O'Grady 2008, MacWhinney
2005) or call themselves 'usage-based' linguists (Barlow
and Kemmer 2002, Tomasello 2003) or 'construction
grammarians' (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001). Newmeyer (1991), like
Tomasello, refers to the Essentialists as 'formalists',
because of their tendency to employ abstractions, and to use tools
from mathematics and logic.



Despite these terminological inconsistencies, we can look at what
typical members of each approach would say about their vision of
linguistic science, and what they say about the alternatives. Many of
the central differences between these approaches depend on what
proponents consider to be the main project of linguistic theorizing,
and what they count as a satisfying explanation.



Many researchers--perhaps most--mix elements from each of
the three approaches. For example, if Emergentists are to explain the
syntactic structure of expressions by appeal to facts about the nature
of the use of symbols in human communication, then they will
presuppose a great deal of Externalist work in describing linguistic
patterns, and those Externalists who work on computational parsing
systems frequently use (at least as a starting point) rule systems and
'structural' patterns worked out by Essentialists.
Certainly, there are no logical impediments for a researcher with one
tendency from simultaneously pursuing another; these approaches are
only general centers of emphasis.


### 1.1 The Externalists



If one assumes, with the Externalists, that the main goal of a
linguistic theory is to develop accurate models of the structural
properties of the speech sounds, words, phrases, and other linguistic
items, then the clearly privileged information will include corpora
(written and oral)--bodies of attested and recorded language use
(suitably idealized). The goal is to describe how this public record
exhibits certain (perhaps non-phenomenal) patterns that are
projectable.



American structural linguistics of the 1920s to 1950s championed the
development of techniques for using corpora as a basis for developing
structural descriptions of natural languages, although such work was
really not practically possible until the wide-spread availability of
cheap, powerful, and fast computers. Andre Martinet (1960: 1)
notes that one of the basic assumptions of structuralist approaches to
linguistics is that "nothing may be called
'linguistic' that is not manifest or manifested one way or
another between the mouth of the speaker and the ears of the
listener". He is, however, quick to point out that "this
assumption does not entail that linguists should restrict their field
of research to the audible part of the communication
process--speech can only be interpreted as such, and not as so
much noise, because it stands for something else that is not
speech."



American structuralists--Leonard Bloomfield in
particular--were attacked, sometimes legitimately and sometimes
illegitimately, by certain factions in the Essentialist tradition. For
example, it was perhaps justifiable to criticize Bloomfield for
adopting a nominalist ontology as popularized by the logical
empiricists. But he was later attacked by Essentialists for holding
anti-mentalist views about linguistics, when it is arguable that his
actual view was that the science of linguistics should not commit
itself to any particular psychological theory. (He had earlier been an
enthusiast for the mentalist and introspectionist psychology of
Wilhelm Wundt; see Bloomfield 1914.)



Externalism continues to thrive within computational linguistics,
where the American structuralist vison of studying language through
automatic analysis of corpora has enjoyed a recrudescence, and very
large, computationally searchable corpora are being used to test
hypotheses about the structure of languages (see Sampson 2001, chapter
1, for discussion).


### 1.2 The Emergentists



Emergentists aim to explain the capacity for language in terms of
non-linguistic human capacities: thinking, communicating, and
interacting. Edward Sapir expressed a characteristic Emergentist theme
when he wrote:



> 
> Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be
> understood as such... It is peculiarly important that linguists,
> who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond
> the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of
> what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in
> general. (Sapir 1929: 214)
> 



The "pretty patterns" derided here are characteristic of
structuralist analyses. Sociolinguistics, which is much closer in
spirit to Sapir's project, studies the influence of social and
linguistic structure on each other. One particularly influential
study, Labov (1966), examines the influence of social class on
language variation. Other sociolinguists examine the relation between
status within a group on linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989). This
interest in variation within languages is characteristic of
Emergentist approaches to the study of language.



Another kind of Emergentist, like Tomasello (2003), will stress the
role of theory of mind and the capacity to use symbols to change
conspecifics' mental states as uniquely human preadaptations for
language acquisition, use, and invention. MacWhinney (2005) aims to
explain linguistic phenomena (such as phrase structure and constraints
on long distance dependencies) in terms of the way conversation
facilitates accurate information-tracking and
perspective-switching.



Functionalist research programs generally fall within the broad
tendency to approach the study of language as an Emergentist.
According to one proponent:



> 
> The functionalist view of language [is] as a system of communicative
> social interaction... Syntax is not radically arbitrary, in this
> view, but rather is *relatively motivated* by semantic,
> pragmatic, and cognitive concerns. (Van Valin 1991, quoted in Newmeyer
> 1991: 4; emphasis in original)
> 



And according to Russ Tomlin, a linguist who takes a functionalist
approach:



> 
> Syntax is not autonomous from semantics or pragmatics...the
> rejection of autonomy derives from the observation that the use of
> particular grammatical forms is strongly linked, even
> deterministically linked, to the presence of particular semantic or
> pragmatic functions in discourse. (Tomlin 1990, quoted by Newmeyer
> (1991): 4)
> 



The idea that linguistic form is autonomous, and more specifically
that syntactic form (rather than, say, phonological form) is
autonomous, is a characteristic theme of the Essentialists. And the
claims of Van Valin and Tomlin to the effect that syntax is
*not* independent of semantics and pragmatics might tempt some
to think that Emergentism and Essentialism are logically incompatible.
But this would be a mistake, since there are a large number of
nonequivalent autonomy of form theses.



Even in the context of trying to explain what the autonomy thesis is,
Newmeyer (1991: 3) talks about five formulations of the thesis, each
of which can be found in some Essentialists' writings, without
(apparently) realizing that they are non-equivalent. One is the
relatively strong claim that the central properties of linguistic form
*must not* be defined with essential reference to
"concepts outside the system", which suggests that no
primitives in linguistics could be defined in psychological or
biological terms. Another takes autonomy of form to be a
*normative* claim: that linguistic concepts *ought* not
to be defined or characterized in terms of non-linguistic concepts.
The third and fourth versions are ontological: one denies that central
linguistic concepts *should* be ontologically reduced to
non-linguistic ones, and the other denies that they *can* be.
And in the fifth version the autonomy of syntax is taken to deny that
syntactic patterning can be *explained* in terms of meaning or
discourse functions.



For each of these versions of autonomy, there are Essentialists who
agree with it. Probably the paradigmatic Essentialist agrees with them
all. But Emergentists need not disagree with them all. Paradigmatic
functionalists like Tomlin, Van Valin and MacWhinney could in
principle hold that the explanation of syntactic form, for example,
will ultimately be in terms of discourse functions and semantics, but
still accept that syntactic categories cannot be reduced to
non-linguistic ones.


### 1.3 The Essentialists



If Leonard Bloomfield is the intellectual ancestor of Externalism, and
Sapir the father of Emergentism, then Noam Chomsky is the intellectual
ancestor of Essentialism. The researcher with predominantly
Essentialist inclinations aims to identify the intrinsic properties of
language that make it what it is. For a huge majority of practitioners
of this approach--researchers in the tradition of
**generative grammar** associated with Chomsky--this
means postulating universals of human linguistic structure, unlearned
but tacitly known, that permit and assist children to acquire human
languages. This generative Essentialism has a preference for finding
surprising characteristics of languages that cannot be inferred from
the data of usage, and are not predictable from human cognition or the
requirements of communication.



Rather than being impressed with language variation, as are
Emergentists and many Externalists, the generative Essentialists are
extremely impressed with the idea that very young children of almost
any intelligence level, and just about any social upbringing, acquire
language to the same high degree of mastery. From this it is inferred
that there must be unlearned features shared by all languages that
somehow assist in language acquisition.



A large number of contemporary Essentialists who follow
Chomsky's teaching on this matter claim that semantics and
pragmatics are not a central part of the study of language. In
Chomsky's view, "it is possible that natural language has
only syntax and pragmatics" (Chomsky 1995: 26); that is, only
"internalist computations and performance systems that access
them"; semantic theories are merely "part of an interface
level" or "a form of syntax" (Chomsky 1992:
223).



Thus, while Bloomfield understood it to be a sensible practical
decision to assign semantics to some field other than linguistics
because of the underdeveloped state of semantic research, Chomsky
appears to think that semantics as standardly understood is not part
of the essence of the language faculty at all. (In broad outline, this
exclusion of semantics from linguistics comports with Sapir's
view that form is linguistic but content is cultural.)



Although Chomsky is an Essentialist in his approach to the study of
language, excluding semantics as a central part of linguistic theory
clearly does not follow from linguistic Essentialism (Katz 1980
provides a detailed discussion of Chomsky's views on semantics).
Today there are many Essentialists who *do* hold that semantics
is a component of a full linguistic theory.



For example, many linguists today are interested in the
syntax-semantics interface--the relationship between the surface
syntactic structure of sentences and their semantic interpretation.
This area of interest is generally quite alien to philosophers who are
primarily concerned with semantics only, and it falls outside of
Chomsky's syntactocentric purview as well. Linguists who work in
the kind of semantics initiated by Montague (1974) certainly focus on
the essential features of language (most of their findings appear to
be of universal import rather than limited to the semantic rules of
specific languages). Useful works to consult to get a sense of the
modern style of investigation of the syntax-semantics interface would
include Partee (1975), Jacobson (1996), Szabolcsi (1997), Chierchia
(1998), Steedman (2000).


### 1.4 Comparing the three approaches



The discussion so far has been at a rather high level of abstraction.
It may be useful to contrast the three tendencies by looking at how
they each would analyze a particular linguistic phenomenon. We have
selected the syntax of **double-object** clauses like
*Hand the guard your pass* (also called
**ditransitive** clauses), in which the verb is
immediately followed by a sequence of two noun phrases, the first
typically denoting a recipient and the second something transferred.
For many such clauses there is an alternative way of expressing
roughly the same thing: for *Hand the guard your pass* there is
the alternative *Hand your pass to the guard*, in which the
verb is followed by a single object noun phrase and the recipient is
expressed after that by a preposition phrase with *to*. We will
call these **recipient-PP** clauses.


#### 1.4.1 A typical Essentialist analysis



Larson (1988) offers a generative Essentialist approach to the syntax
of double-object clauses. In order to provide even a rough outline of
his proposals, it will be very useful to be able to use **tree
diagrams** of syntactic structure. A tree is a mathematical
object consisting of a set of points called **nodes**
between which certain relations hold. The nodes correspond to
syntactic units; left-right order on the page corresponds to temporal
order of utterance between them; and upward connecting lines represent
the relation 'is an immediate subpart of'. Nodes are
labeled to show categories of phrases and words, such as noun phrase
(NP); preposition phrase (PP); and verb phrase (VP). When the internal
structure of some subpart of a tree is basically unimportant to the
topic under discussion, it is customary to mask that part with an
empty triangle. Consider a simple example: an active transitive clause
like (Ai) and its passive equivalent (Aii).



(A)


i.
*The guard checked my pass.* [active clause]
ii.
*My pass was checked by the guard.* [passive
clause]
 


A tree structure for (Ai) is shown in (T1).



![A tree structure for sentence (Ai)](T1.png "A tree structure for sentence (Ai)")


In analyses of the sort Larson exemplifies, the structure of an
expression is given by a **derivation**, which consists
of a sequence of successively modified trees. Larson calls the
earliest ones **underlying** structures. The last (and
least abstract) in the derivation is the surface structure, which
captures properties relevant to the way the expression is written and
pronounced. The underlying structures are posited in order to better
identify syntactic generalizations. They are related to surface
structures by a series of operations called
**transformations** (which generative Essentialists
typically regard as mentally real operations of the human language
faculty).



One of the fundamental operations that a transformation can effect is
**movement**, which involves shifting a part of the
syntactic structure of a tree to another location within it. For
example, it is often claimed that passive clauses have very much the
same kinds of underlying structures as the synonymous active clauses,
and thus a passive clause like (Aii) would have an underlying
structure much like (T1). A movement transformation would shift
*the guard* toward the end of the clause (and add *by*),
and another would shift *my pass* into the position before the
verb. In other words, passive clauses look much more like their active
counterparts in underlying structure.



In a similar way, Larson proposes that a double-object clause like
(B.ii) has the same underlying structure as (B.i).



(B)


i.
*I showed my pass to the guard.* [recipient-PP]
ii.
*I showed the guard my pass.* [double object]
 


Moreover, he proposes that the transformational operation of deriving
the surface structure of (B.ii) from the underlying structure of (B.i)
is essentially the same as the one that derives the surface structure
of (A.ii) from the underlying structure of (A.i).



Larson adopts many assumptions from Chomsky (1981) and subsequent
work. One is that all NPs have to be assigned **Case** in
the course of a derivation. (Case is an abstract syntactic property,
only indirectly related to the morphological case forms displayed by
nominative, accusative, and genitive pronouns. Objective Case is
assumed to be assigned to any NP in direct object position, e.g.,
*my pass* in (T1), and Nominative Case is assigned to an NP in
the subject position of a tensed clause, e.g., *the guard* in
(T1).)



He also makes two specific assumptions about the derivation of passive
clauses. First, Case assignment to the position immediately after the
verb is "suppressed", which entails that the NP there will
not get Case unless it moves to some other position. (The subject
position is the obvious one, because there it will receive Nominative
Case.) Second, there is an unusual assignment of semantic role to NPs:
instead of the subject NP being identified as the agent of the action
the clause describes, that role is assigned to an adjunct at the end
of the VP (the *by*-phrase in (A.ii); an adjunct is a
constituent with an optional modifying role in its clause rather than
a grammatically obligatory one like subject or object).



Larson proposes that both of these points about passive clauses have
analogs in the structure of double-object VPs. First, Case assignment
to the position immediately after the verb is suppressed; and since
Larson takes the preposition to to be the marker of Case, this means
in effect that *to* disappears. This entails that the NP after
*to* will not get Case unless it moves to some other position.
Second, there is an unusual assignment of semantic role to NPs:
instead of the direct object NP being identified as the entity
affected by the action the clause describes, that role is assigned to
an adjunct at the end of the VP.



Larson makes some innovative assumptions about VPs. First, he proposes
that in the underlying structure of a double-object clause *the
direct object precedes the verb*, the tree diagram being (T2).



![A tree diagram for the sentence (B.ii)](T2.png "A tree diagram for the sentence (B.ii)")


This does not match the surface order of words (*showed my pass to
the guard*), but it is not intended to: it is an underlying
structure. A transformation will move the verb to the left of *my
pass* to produce the surface order seen in (B.i).



Second, he assumes that there are two nodes labeled VP in a
double-object clause, and two more labeled V', though there is
only one word of the verb (V) category. (Only the smaller VP and
V' are shown in the partial structure (T2).)



What is important here is that (T2) is the basis for the double-object
surface structure as well. To produce that, the preposition
*to* is erased and an additional NP position (for *my
pass*) is attached to the V', thus:



![Transforming the tree T2 by erasing a preposition and adding a new NP](T3.png)


The additional NP is assigned the affected-entity semantic role. The
other NP (*the guard*) does not yet have Case; but Larson
assumes that it moves into the NP position before the verb. The result
is shown in (T4), where '*e*' marks the empty
string left where some words have been moved away:



![Positioning the new NP before the verb](T4.png)


Larson assumes that in this position *the guard* can receive
Case. What remains is for the verb to move into a higher V position
further to its left, to obtain the surface order:



![Moving the verb to a higher V position](T5.png)


The complete sequence of transformations is taken to give a deep
theoretical explanation of many properties of (B.i) and (B.ii),
including such things as what could be substituted for the two NPs,
and the fact there is at least rough truth-conditional equivalence
between the two clauses.



The reader with no previous experience of generative linguistics will
have many questions about the foregoing sketch (e.g., whether it is
really necessary to have *the guard* after *showed* in
(T3), then the opposite order in (T4), and finally the same order
again in (T5)). We cannot hope to answer such questions here;
Larson's paper is extremely rich in further assumptions, links
to the previous literature, and additional classes of data that he
aims to explain. But the foregoing should suffice to convey some of
the flavor of the analysis.



The key point to note is that Essentialists seek underlying symmetries
and parallels whose operation is not manifest in the data of language
use. For Essentialists, there is positive explanatory virtue in
hypothesizing abstract structures that are very far from being
inferrable from performance; and the posited operations on those
structures are justified in terms of elegance and formal parallelism
with other analyses, not through observation of language use in
communicative situations.


#### 1.4.2 A typical Emergentist analysis



Many Emergentists are favorably disposed toward the kind of
**construction grammar** expounded in Goldberg (1995). We
will use her work as an exemplar of the Emergentist approach. The
first thing to note is that Goldberg does not take double-object
clauses like (B.ii) to be derived alternants of recipient-PP
structures like (B.i), the way Larson does. So she is not looking for
a regular syntactic operation that can relate their derivations;
indeed, she does not posit derivations at all. She is interested in
explaining correlations between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic
aspects of clauses; for example, she asks this question:



> 
> How are the semantics of independent constructions related such that
> the classes of verbs associated with one overlap with the classes of
> verbs associated with another? (Goldberg 1995: 89)
> 



Thus she aims to explain why some verbs occur in both the
double-object and recipient-PP kinds of expression and some do
not.



The fundamental notion in Goldberg's linguistic theory is that
of a **construction**. A construction can be defined very
roughly as a way of structurally composing words or phrases--a
sort of template--for expressing a certain class of meanings.
Like Emergentists in general, Goldberg regards linguistic theory as
continuous with a certain part of general cognitive psychological
theory; linguistics emerges from this more general theory, and
linguistic matters are rarely fully separate from cognitive matters.
So a construction for Goldberg has a mental reality: it corresponds to
a generalized concept or scenario expressible in a language, annotated
with a guide to the linguistic structure of the expression.



Many words will be trivial examples of constructions: a single concept
paired with a way of pronouncing and some details about grammatical
restrictions (category, inflectional class, etc.); but constructions
can be much more abstract and internally complex. The double-object
construction, which Goldberg calls the Ditransitive Construction, is a
moderately abstract and complex one; she diagrams it thus (p. 50):



![Goldberg's Ditransitive Construction](fig1.png)


This expresses a set of constraints on how to use English to
communicate the idea of a particular kind of scenario. The scenario
involves a ternary relation CAUSE-RECEIVE holding between an agent
(**agt**), a recipient (**rec**), and a
patient (**pat**). PRED is a variable that is filled by
the meaning of a particular verb when it is employed in this
construction.



The solid vertical lines downward from **agt** and
**pat** indicate that for any verb integrated into this
construction it is required that its subject NP should express the
agent participant, and the direct object (OBJ2) should
express the patient participant. The dashed vertical line downward
from rec signals that the first object (OBJ) may express the recipient
but it does not have to--the necessity of there being a recipient
is a property of the construction itself, and not every verb demands
that it be made explicit who the recipient is. But if there are two
objects, the first is obligatorily associated with the recipient role:
*We sent the builder a carpenter* can only express a claim
about the sending of a carpenter over to the builder, never the
sending of the builder over to where a carpenter is.



When a particular verb is used in this construction, it may have
obligatory accompanying NPs denoting what Goldberg calls
"profiled participants" so that the match between the
participant roles (**agt**, **rec**,
**pat**) is one-to-one, as with the verb *hand*.
When this verb is used, the agent ('hander'), recipient
('handee'), and item transferred ('handed')
must all be made explicit. Goldberg gives the following diagram of the
"composite structure" that results when *hand* is
used in the construction:



![Instance of Goldberg's Ditransitive Construction](fig2.png)


Because of this requirement of explicit presence, *Hand him your
pass* is grammatical, but \**Hand him* is not,
and neither is \**Hand your pass*. The verb
*send*, on the other hand, illustrates the optional syntactic
expression of the recipient role: we can say *Send a text
message*, which is understood to involve some recipient but does
not make the recipient explicit.



The R notation relates to the fact that particular verbs may express
either an *instance* of causing someone to receive something,
as with *hand*, or a *means* of causing someone to
receive something, as with *kick*: what *Joe kicked Bill the
ball* means is that Joe caused Bill to receive the ball by means
of a kicking action.



Goldberg's discussion covers many subtle ways in which the
scenario communicated affects whether the use of a construction is
grammatical and appropriate. For example, there is something odd about
?*Joe kicked Bill the ball he was trying to kick to
Sam*: the Ditransitive Construction seems best suited to cases of
volitional transfer (rather than transfer as an unexpected side effect
of a blunder). However, an exception is provided by a class of cases
in which the transfer is not of a physical object but is only
metaphorical: *That guy gives me the creeps* does not imply any
volitional transfer of a physical object.



Metaphorical cases are distinguished from physical transfers in other
ways as well. Goldberg notes sentences like *The music lent the
event a festive air*, where *the music* is subject of the
verb lend despite the fact that music cannot literally lend anything
to anyone.



Goldberg discusses many topics such as metaphorical extension,
shading, metonymy, cutting, role merging, and also presents various
general principles linking meanings and constructions. One of these
principles, the No Synonymy Principle, says that no two syntactically
distinct constructions can be both semantically and pragmatically
synonymous. It might seem that if any two sentences are synonymous,
pairs like this are:



(C)


i.
*She gave her husband an iPod.* [double object]
ii.
*She gave an iPod to her husband.* [recipient-PP]
 


Yet the two constructions cannot be fully synonymous, both
semantically and pragmatically, if the No Synonymy Principle is
correct. And to support the principle, Goldberg notes purported
contrasts such as this:



(D)


i.
*She gave her husband a new interest in music.* [double
object]
ii.
?*She gave a new interest in music to her
husband.* [recipient-PP]
 


There is a causation-as-transfer metaphor here, and it seems to be
compatible with the double object construction but not with the
recipient-PP. So (in Goldberg's view) the two are not fully
synonymous.



It is no part of our aim here to provide a full account of the content
of Goldberg's discussion of double-object clauses. But what we
want to highlight is that the focus is not on finding abstract
elements or operations of a purely syntactic nature that are
candidates for being essential properties of language per se. The
focus for Emergentists is nearly always on the ways in which meaning
is conveyed, the scenarios that particular constructions are used to
communicate, and the aspects of language that connect up with
psychological topics like cognition, perception, and
conceptualization.


#### 1.4.3 A typical Externalist analysis



One kind of work that is representative of the Externalist tendency is
nicely illustrated by Bresnan et al. (2007) and Bresnan and Ford
(2010). Bresnan and her colleagues defend the use of
corpora--bodies of attested written and spoken texts. One of
their findings is that a number of types of expressions that linguists
have often taken to be ungrammatical do in fact turn up in actual use.
Essentialists and Emergentists alike have often, purely on the basis
of intuition, asserted that sentences like *John gave Mary a
kiss* are grammatical but sentences like *John gave a kiss to
Mary* are no, as we see above with Goldberg's (D)(ii).
Bresnan and her colleagues find numerous occurrences of the latter
sort on the World Wide Web, and conclude that they are not
ungrammatical or even unacceptable, but merely dispreferred.



Bresnan and colleagues used a three-million-word collection of
recorded and transcribed spontaneous telephone conversations known as
the Switchboard corpus to study the double-object and recipient-PP
constructions. They first annotated the utterances with indications of
a number of factors that they thought might influence the choice
between the double-object and recipient-PP constructions:


* Discourse accessibility of NPs: does a particular NP refer to
something already mentioned, or to something new to the
discourse?
* Relative lengths of NPs: what is the difference in number of words
between the recipient NP and the transferred-item NP?
* Definiteness: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs definite
like *the bishop* or indefinite like *some members*
* Animacy: do the recipient and transferred-item NPs denote animate
beings or inanimate things?
* Pronominality: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs
pronouns?
* Number: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs singular or
plural?
* person: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs first-person or
second-person pronouns, or third person?



They also coded the verb meanings by assigning them to half a dozen
semantic categories:


* Abstract senses (*give it some thought*);
* Transfer of possession (*give him an armband*);
* Future transfer of possession (*I owe you a dollar*);
* Prevention of possession (*They denied me my rights*);
* Communication verb sense (*tell me your name*).



They then constructed a statistical model of the corpus: a
mathematical formula expressing, for each combination of the factors
listed above, the ratio of the probabilities of the double object and
the recipient-PP. (To be precise, they used the natural logarithm of
the ratio of *p* to 1 [?] *p*, where *p* is
the probability of a double-object or recipient-PP in the corpus being
of the double-object form.) They then used logistic regression to
predict the probability of fit to the data.



To determine how well the model generalized to unseen data, they
divided the data randomly 100 times into a training set and a testing
set, fit the model parameters on each training set, and scored its
predictions on the unseen testing set. The average percent of correct
predictions on unseen data was 92%. All components of the model except
number of the recipient NP made a statistically significant
difference--almost all at the 0.001 level.



What this means is that knowing only the presence or absence of the
sort of factors listed above they were reliably able to predict
whether double-object or recipient-PP structures would be used in a
given context, with a 92% score accuracy rate.



The implication is that the two kinds of structure are not
interchangeable: they are reliably differentiated by the presence of
other factors in the texts in which they occur.



They then took the model they had generated for the telephone speech
data and applied it to a corpus of written material: the *Wall
Street Journal* corpus (WSJ), a collection of 1987-9
newspaper copy, only roughly edited. The main relevant difference with
written language is that the language producer has more opportunity to
reflect thoughtfully on how they are going to phrase things. It was
reasonable to think that a model based on speech data might not
transfer well. But instead the model had 93.5% accuracy. The authors
conclude is that "the model for spoken English transfers
beautifully to written". The main difference between the corpora
was found to be a slightly higher probability of the recipient-PP
structure in written English.



In a very thorough subsequent study, Bresnan and Ford (2010) show that
the results also correlate with native speakers' metalinguistic
judgments of naturalness for sentence structures, and with lexical
decision latencies (speed of deciding whether the words in a text were
genuine English words or not), and with a sentence completion task
(choosing the most natural of a list of possible completions of a
partial sentence). The results of these experiments confirmed that
their model predicted participants' performance.



Among the things to note about this work is that it was all done on
directly recorded performance data: transcripts of people speaking to
each other spontaneously on the phone in the case of the Switchboard
corpus, stories as written by newspaper journalists in the case of
WSJ, measured responses of volunteer subjects in a laboratory in the
case of the psycholinguistic experiments of Bresnan and Ford (2010).
The focus is on identifying the factors in linguistic performance that
permit accurate prediction of future performance, and the methods of
investigation have a replicability and checkability that is familiar
in the natural sciences.



However, we should make it clear that the work is not some kind of
close-to-the-ground collecting and classifying of instances. The
models that Bresnan and her colleagues develop are sophisticated
mathematical abstractions, very far removed from the records of
utterance tokens. They claim that these models "allow linguistic
theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and
to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and
allied fields of cognitive science" (Bresnan et al. 2007:
69).


#### 1.4.4 Conclusion



It is important to see that the contrast we have drawn here is not
just between three pieces of work that chose to look at different
aspects of the phenomena associated with double-object sentences. It
is true that Larson focuses more on details of tree structure,
Goldberg more on subtle differences in meaning, and Bresnan et al. on
frequencies of occurrence. But that is not what we are pointing to.
What we want to stress is that we are illustrating three different
broad approaches to language that regard different facts as likely to
be relevant, and make different assumptions about what needs to be
accounted for, and what might count as an explanation.



Larson looks at contrasts between different kinds of clause with
different meanings and see evidence of abstract operations affecting
subtle details of tree structure, and parallelism between derivational
operations formerly thought distinct.



Goldberg looks at the same facts and sees evidence not for anything to
do with derivations but for the reality of specific
constructions--roughly, packets of syntactic, semantic, and
pragmatic information tied together by constraints.



Bresnan and her colleagues see evidence that readily observable facts
about speaker behavior and frequency of word sequences correlate
closely with certain lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties of
words.



Nothing precludes defenders of any of the three approaches from paying
attention to any of the phenomena that the other approaches attend to.
There is ample opportunity for linguists to mix aspects of the three
approaches in particular projects. But in broad outline there are
three different tendencies exhibited here, with stereotypical views
and assumptions roughly as we laid them out in Table 1.


## 2. The Subject Matter of Linguistic Theories



The complex and multi-faceted character of linguistic phenomena means
that the discipline of linguistics has a whole complex of
distinguishable subject matters associated with different research
questions. Among the possible topics for investigation are these:


1. the capacity of humans to acquire, use, and invent languages;
2. the abstract structural patterns (phonetic, morphological,
syntactic, or semantic) found in a particular language under some
idealization;
3. systematic structural manifestations of the use of some particular
language;
4. the changes in a language or among languages across time;
5. the psychological functioning of individuals who have successfully
acquired particular languages;
6. the psychological processes underlying speech or linguistically
mediated thinking in humans;
7. the evolutionary origin of (i), and/or (ii).



There is no reason for all of the discipline of linguistics to
converge on a single subject matter, or to think that the entire field
of linguistics cannot have a diverse range of subject matters. To give
a few examples:


* The influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916)
distinguished between *langue*, a socially shared set of
abstract conventions (compare with (ii)) and *parole*, the
particular choices made by a speaker deploying a language (compare
(iii)).
* The anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (1921, 1929) thought
that human beings have a seemingly species-universal capacity to
acquire and use languages (compare (i)), but his own interest was
limited to the systematic structural features of particular languages
(compare (ii)) and the psychological reality of linguistic units such
as the phoneme (an aspect of (vi)), and the psychological effects of
language and thought (an aspect of (v)).
* Bloomfield (1933) showed a strong interest in historical
linguistic change (compare (iv)), distinguishing that sharply (much as
Saussure did) from synchronic description of language structure ((ii)
again) and language use (compare (iii)), arguing that the study of
(iv) presupposed (vi).
* Bloomfield famously eschewed all dualistic mentalistic approaches
to the study of language, but since he rejected them on materialist
ontological grounds, his rejection of mentalism was not clearly a
rejection of (vi) or (vii): his attempt to cast linguistics in terms
of stimulus-response psychology indicates that he was sympathetic to
the Weissian psychology of his time and accepted that linguistics
might have psychological subject matter.
* Zellig Harris, on the other hand, showed little interest in the
psychology of language, concentrating on mathematical techniques for
tackling (ii).



Most saliently of all, Harris's student Chomsky reacted strongly
against indifference toward the mind, and insisted that the principal
subject matter of linguistics was, and had to be, a narrow
psychological version of (i), and an individual, non-social, and
internalized conception of (ii).



In the course of advancing his view, Chomsky introduced a number of
novel pairs of terms into the linguistics literature: competence vs.
performance (Chomsky 1965); 'I-language' vs.
'E-language' (Chomsky 1986); the faculty of language in
the narrow sense vs. the and faculty of language in the broad sense
(the 'FLN' and 'FLB' of Hauser et al. 2002).
Because Chomsky's terminological innovations have been adopted
so widely in linguistics, the focus of sections 2.1-2.3 will be
to examine the use of these expressions as they were introduced into
the linguistics literature and consider their relation to
(i)-(vii).


### 2.1 Competence and performance



Essentialists invariably distinguish between what Chomsky (1965)
called **competence** and **performance**.
Competence is what knowing a language confers: a tacit grasp of the
structural properties of all the sentences of a language. Performance
involves actual real-time use, and may diverge radically from the
underlying competence, for at least two reasons: (a) an attempt to
produce an utterance may be perturbed by non-linguistic factors like
being distracted or interrupted, changing plans or losing attention,
being drunk or having a brain injury; or (b) certain capacity limits
of the mechanisms of perception or production may be overstepped.



Emergentists tend to feel that the competence/performance distinction
sidelines language use too much. Bybee and McClelland put it this
way:



> 
> One common view is that language has an essential and unique inner
> structure that conforms to a universal ideal, and what people say is a
> potentially imperfect reflection of this inner essence, muddied by
> performance factors. According to an opposing view...language use
> has a major impact on language structure. The experience that users
> have with language shapes cognitive representations, which are built
> up through the application of general principles of human cognition to
> linguistic input. The structure that appears to underlie language use
> reflects the operation of these principles as they shape how
> individual speakers and hearers represent form and meaning and adapt
> these forms and meanings as they speak. (Bybee and McClelland 2005:
> 382)
> 



And Externalists are often concerned to describe and explain not only
language structure, but also the workings of processing mechanisms and
the etiology of performance errors.



However, every linguist accepts that some idealization away from the
speech phenomena is necessary. Emergentists and Externalists are
almost always happy to idealize away from sporadic speech errors. What
they are not so keen to do is to idealize away from limitations on
linguistic processing and the short-term memory on which it relies.
Acceptance of a thoroughgoing competence/performance distinction thus
tends to be a hallmark of Essentialist approaches, which take the
nature of language to be entirely independent of other human cognitive
processes (though of course capable of connecting to them).



The Essentialists' practice of idealizing away from even
psycholinguistically relevant factors like limits on memory and
processing plays a significant role in various important debates
within linguistics. Perhaps the most salient and famous is the issue
of whether English is a finite-state language.



The claim that English is not accepted by any finite-state automaton
can only be supported by showing that every grammar for English has
center- embedding to an unbounded depth (see Levelt 2008: 20-23
for an exposition and proof of the relevant theorem, originally from
Chomsky 1959). But even depth-3 center-embedding of clauses (a clause
interrupting a clause that itself interrupts a clause) is in practice
extraordinarily hard to process. Hardly anyone can readily understand
even semantically plausible sentences like *Vehicles that engineers
who car companies trust build crash every day*. And such sentences
virtually never occur, even in writing. Karlsson (2007) undertakes an
extensive examination of available textual material, and concludes
that depth-3 center-embeddings are vanishingly rare, and no genuine
depth-4 center-embedding has ever occurred at all in naturally
composed text. He proposes that there is no reason to regard
center-embedding as grammatical beyond depth 3 (and for spoken
language, depth 2). Karlsson is proposing a grammar that stays close
to what performance data can confirm; the standard Essentialist view
is that we should project massively from what is observed, and say
that depth-*n* center-embedding is fully grammatical for all
*n*.


### 2.2 'I-Language' and 'E-Language'



Chomsky (1986) introduced into the linguistics literature two
technical notions of a language: 'E-Language' and
'I-Language'. He deprecates the former as either
undeserving of study or as a fictional entity, and promotes the latter
as the only scientifically respectable object of study for a serious
linguistics.


#### 2.2.1 'E-language'



Chomsky's notion 'E-language' is supposed to suggest
by its initial 'E' both 'extensional'
(concerned with which sentences happen to satisfy a definition of a
language rather than with what the definition says) and
'external' (external to the mind, that is, non-mental).
The dismissal of E-language as an object of study is aimed at critics
of Essentialism--many but not all of those critics falling within
our categories of Externalists and Emergentists.



**Extensional**. First, there is an attempt to impugn the
extensional notion of a language that is found in two radically
different strands of Externalist work. Some Externalist investigations
are grounded in the details of attested utterances (as collected in
corpora), external to human minds. Others, with mathematical or
computational interests, sometimes idealize languages as extensionally
definable objects (typically infinite sets of strings) with a certain
structure, independently of whatever device might be employed to
characterize them. A set of strings of words either is or is not
regular (finite-state), either is or is not recursive (decidable),
etc., independently of forms of grammar statement. Chomsky (1986)
basically dismissed both corpus-based work and mathematical
linguistics simply on the grounds that they employ an extensional
conception of language that is, a conception that removes the object
of study from having an essential connection with the mental.



**External**. Second, a distinct meaning based on
'external' was folded into the neologism
'E-language' to suggest criticism of any view that
conceives of a natural language as a public, intersubjectively
accessible system used by a community of people (often millions of
them spread across different countries). Here, the objection is that
languages as thus conceived have no clear criteria of individuation in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On this conception, the
subject matter of interest is a historico-geographical entity that
changes as it is transmitted over generations, or over mountain
ranges. Famously, for example, there is a gradual valley-to-valley
change in the language spoken between southeastern France and
northwestern Italy such that each valley's speakers can
understand the next. But the far northwesterners clearly speak French
and the far southeasterners clearly speak Italian. It is the
politically defined geographical border, not the intrinsic properties
of the dialects, that would encourage viewing this continuum as two
different languages.



Perhaps the most famous quotation by any linguist is standardly
attributed to Max Weinreich (1945): 'A shprakh iz a dialekt mit
an armey un flot' ('A language is a dialect with an army
and navy'; he actually credits the remark to an unnamed
student). The implication is that E-languages are defined in terms of
non-linguistic, non-essential properties. Essentialists object that a
scientific linguistics cannot tolerate individuating French and
Italian in a way that is subject to historical contingencies of wars
and treaties (after all, the borders could have coincided with a
different hill or valley had some battle had a different outcome).



Considerations of intelligibility fare no better. Mutual
intelligibility between languages is not a transitive relation, and
sometimes the intelligibility relation is not even symmetric (smaller,
more isolated, or less prestigious groups often understand the
dialects of larger, more central, or higher-prestige groups when the
converse does not hold). So these sociological facts cannot
individuate languages either.



Chomsky therefore concludes that languages cannot be defined or
individuated extensionally or mind-externally, and hence the only
scientifically interesting conception of a 'language' is
the 'I-language' view (see for example Chomsky 1986: 25;
1992; 1995 and elsewhere). Chomsky says of E-languages that "all
scientific approaches have simply abandoned these elements of what is
called 'language' in common usage" (Chomsky 1988,
37); and "we can define E-language in one way or another or not
at all, since the concept appears to play no role in the theory of
language" (Chomsky 1986: 26; in saying that it appears to play
no role in the theory of language, here he means that it plays no role
in the theory he favours).



This conclusion may be bewildering to non-linguists as well as
non-Essentialists. It is at odds with what a broad range of
philosophers have tacitly assumed or explicitly claimed about language
or languages: '[A language] is a practice in which people
engage...it is constituted by rules which it is part of social
custom to follow' (Dummett 1986: 473-473); 'Language
is a set of rules existing at the level of common knowledge' and
these rules are 'norms which govern intentional social
behavior' (Itkonen 1978: 122), and so on. Generally speaking,
those philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein also take the view that
a language is a social-historical entity. But the opposite view has
become a part of the conceptual underpinning of linguistics for many
Essentialists.



Failing to have precise individuation conditions is surely not a
sufficient reason to deny that an entity can be studied
scientifically. 'Language' as a count noun in the
extensional and socio-historical sense is vague, but this need not be
any greater obstacle to theorizing about them than is the vagueness of
other terms for historical entities without clear individuation
conditions, like 'species' and 'individual
organism' in biology.



At least some Emergentist linguists, and perhaps some Externalists,
would be content to say that languages are collections of social
conventions, publicly shared, and some philosophers would agree (see
Millikan 2003, for example, and Chomsky 2003 for a reply). Lewis
(1969) explicitly defends the view that language can be understood in
terms of public communications, functioning to solve coordination
problems within a group (although he acknowledges that the
coordination could be between different temporal stages of one
individual, so language use by an isolated person is also
intelligible; see the appendix "Lewis's Theory of
Languages as Conventions" in the entry on
 idiolects,
 for further discussion of Lewis). What Chomsky calls E-languages,
then, would be perfectly amenable to linguistic or philosophical
study. Santana (2016) makes a similar argument in terms of scientific
idealization. He argues that since all sciences idealize their
targets, Chomsky needs to do more to show why idealizations concerning
E-languages are illicit (see also Stainton 2014).


#### 2.2.2 'I-language'



Chomsky (1986) introduced the neologism 'I-language' in
part to disambiguate the word 'grammar'. In earlier
generative Essentialist literature, 'grammar' was
(deliberately) ambiguous between (i) the linguist's generative
theory and (ii) what a speaker knows when they know a language.
'I-language' can be regarded as a replacement for
Bever's term 'psychogrammar' (see also George 1989):
it denotes a mental or psychological entity (not a grammarian's
description of a language as externally manifested).



I-language is first discussed under the sub-heading of
'internalized language' to denote linguistic knowledge.
Later discussion in Chomsky 1986 and 1995 makes it clear that the
'I' of 'I-language' is supposed to suggest at
least three English words: 'individual',
'internal', and 'intensional'. And Chomsky
emphasizes that the neologism also implies a kind of realism about
speakers' knowledge of language.



**Individual**. A language is claimed to be strictly a
property of individual human beings--not groups. The contrast is
between the idiolect of a single individual, and a dialect or language
of a geographical, social, historical, or political group. I-languages
are properties of the minds of individuals who know them.



**Internal**. As generative Essentialists see it, your
I-language is a state of your mind/brain. Meaning is
internal--indeed, on Chomsky's conception, an
I-language



> 
> is a strictly internalist, individualist approach to language,
> analogous in this respect to studies of the visual system. If the
> cognitive system of Jones's language faculty is in state L, we
> will say that Jones has the I-language L. (Chomsky 1995: 13)
> 



And he clarifies the sense in which an I-language is internal by
appealing to an analogy with the way the study of vision is
internal:



> 
> The same considerations apply to the study of visual perception along
> lines pioneered by David Marr, which has been much discussed in this
> connection. This work is mostly concerned with operations carried out
> by the retina; loosely put, the mapping of retinal images to the
> visual cortex. Marr's famous three levels of
> analysis--computational, algorithmic, and
> implementation--have to do with ways of construing such mappings.
> Again, the theory applies to a brain in a vat exactly as it does to a
> person seeing an object in motion. (Chomsky 1995: 52)
> 



Thus, while the speaker's I-language may be involved in
performing operations over representations of distal
stimuli--representations of other speaker's
utterances--I-languages can and should be studied in isolation
from their external environments.



Although Chomsky sometimes refers to this narrow individuation of
I-languages as 'individual', he clearly claims that
I-languages are individuated in isolation from both speech communities
and other aspects of the broadly conceived natural environment:



> 
> Suppose Jones is a member of some ordinary community, and J is
> indistinguishable from him except that his total experience derives
> from some virtual reality design; or let J be Jones's Twin in a
> Twin-Earth scenario. They have had indistinguishable experiences and
> will behave the same way (in so far as behavior is predictable at
> all); they have the same internal states. Suppose that J replaces
> Jones in the community, unknown to anyone except the observing
> scientist. Unaware of any change, everyone will act as before,
> treating J as Jones; J too will continue as before. The scientist
> seeking the best theory of all of this will construct a narrow
> individualist account of Jones, J, and others in the community. The
> account omits nothing... (Chomsky 1995: 53-54)
> 



This passage can also be seen as suggesting a radically intensionalist
conception of language.



**Intensional**. The way in which I-languages are
'intensional' for Chomsky needs a little explication. The
concept of intension is familiar in logic and semantics, where
'intensional' contrasts with 'extensional'.
The extension of a predicate like blue is simply the set of all blue
objects; the intension is the function that picks out in a given world
the blue objects contained therein. In a similar way, the extension of
a set can be distinguished from an intensional description of the set
in terms of a function: the set of integer squares is {1, 4, 9, 16,
25, 36, ...}, and the intension could be given in terms of the
one-place function *f* such that *f*(*n*) =
*n* x *n*. One difference between the two accounts
of squaring is that the intensional one could be applied to a
different domain (any domain on which the 'x'
operation is defined: on the rationals rather than the integers, for
example, the extension of the identically defined function is a
different and larger set containing infinitely many fractions).



In an analogous way, a language can be identified with the set of all
and only its expressions (regardless of what sort of object an
expression is: a word sequence, a tree structure, a complete
derivation, or whatever), which is the extensional view; but it can
also be identified intensionally by means of a recipe or formal
specification of some kind--what linguists call a grammar. Ludlow
(2011) considers the first I (individual) to be the weakest link and
thus the most expendable. He argues in its stead for a concept of a
"\(\Psi\)-language" which allows for the possibility of
the I-language relating to external objects either constitutively or
otherwise. 



In natural language semantics, an intensional context is one where
substitution of co-extensional terms fails to preserve truth value
(*Scott is Scott* is true, and *Scott is the author of
Waverley* is true, but the truth of *George knows that Scott is
Scott* doesn't guarantee the truth of *George knows that
Scott is the author of Waverly*, so *knows that*
establishes an intensional context).



Chomsky claims that the truth of an I-language attribution is not
preserved by substituting terms that have the same extension. That is,
even when two human beings do not differ at all on what expressions
are grammatical, it may be false to say that they have the same
I-language. Where H is a human being and L is a language (in the
informal sense) and R is the relation of knowing (or having, or using)
that holds between a human being and a language, Chomsky holds, in
effect, that R establishes an intensional context in statements of the
theory:



> 
> [F]or H to know L is for H to have a certain I-language. The
> statements of the grammar are statements of the theory of mind about
> the I-language, hence structures of the brain formulated at a certain
> level of abstraction from mechanisms. These structures are specific
> things in the world, with their properties... The I-language L
> may be the one used by a speaker but not the I-language L' even
> if the two generate the same class of expressions (or other formal
> objects) ... L' may not even be a possible human
> I-language, one attainable by the language faculty. (Chomsky 1986: 23)
> 



The idea is that two individuals can know (or have, or use) different
I-languages that generate exactly the same strings of words, and even
give them exactly the same structures. This situation forms the basis
of Quine's (1972) infamous critique of the psychological reality
of generative grammars (see Johnson 2015 for a solution in terms of
invariance of 'behaviorally equivalent grammar formalisms, to
use Quine's terminology, see also Nefdt 2021 for a similar
resolution in terms of structural realism in the philosophy of
science).



The generative Essentialist conception of an I-language is
antithetical to Emergentist research programs. If the fundamental
explanandum of scientific linguistics is how actual linguistic
communication takes place, one must start by looking at both internal
(psychological) and external (public) practices and conventions in
virtue of which it occurs, and consider the effect of historical and
geographic contingencies on the relevant underlying processes. That
would not rule out 'I-language' as part of the explanans;
but some Emergentists seem to be *fictionalists* about
I-languages, in an analogous sense to the way that Chomsky is a
fictionalist about E-languages. Emergentists do not see a child as
learning a generative grammar, but as learning how to use a symbolic
system for propositional communication. On this view grammars are mere
artifacts that are developed by linguists to codify aspects of the
relevant systems, and positing an I-language amounts to projecting the
linguist's codification illegitimately onto human minds (see,
for example, Tomasello 2003).



The I-language concept brushes aside certain phenomena of interest to
the Externalists, who hold that the forms of actually attested
expressions (sentences, phrases, syllables, and systems of such units)
are of interest for linguistics. For example, computational
linguistics (work on speech recognition, machine translation, and
natural language interfaces to databases) must rely on a conception of
language as public and extensional; so must any work on the utterances
of young children, or the effects of word frequency on vowel
reduction, or misunderstandings caused by road sign wordings. At the
very least, it might be said on behalf of this strain of Externalism
(along the lines of Soames 1984) that linguistics will need careful
work on languages as intersubjectively accessible systems before
hypotheses about the I-language that purportedly produces them can be
investigated.



It is a highly biased claim that the E-language concept "appears
to play no role in the theory of language" (Chomsky 1986: 26).
Indeed, the terminological contrast seems to have been invented not to
clarify a distinction between concepts but to nudge linguistic
research in a particular direction.


### 2.3 The faculty of language in narrow and broad senses



In Hauser et al. (2002) (henceforth HCF) a further pair of contrasting
terms is introduced. They draw a distinction quite separate from the
competence/performance and
'I-language'/'E-language' distinctions: the
"language faculty in the narrow sense" (FLN) is
distinguished from the "language faculty in the broad
sense" (FLB). According to HCF, FLB "excludes other
organism-internal systems that are necessary but not sufficient for
language (e.g., memory, respiration, digestion, circulation,
etc.)" but includes whatever is involved in language, and FLN is
some limited part of FLB (p. 1571) This is all fairly vague, but it is
clear that FLN and FLB are both internal rather than external, and
individual rather than social.



The FLN/FLB distinction apparently aims to address the uniqueness of
one component of the human capacity for language rather than (say) the
content of human grammars. HCF say (p. 1573) that "Only FLN is
uniquely human"; they "hypothesize that most, if not all,
of FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals"; and
they say:



> 
> [T]he computations underlying FLN may be quite limited. In fact, we
> propose in this hypothesis that FLN comprises only the core
> computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax
> and the mappings to the interfaces. (ibid.)
> 



The components of FLB that HCF hypothesize are not part of FLN are the
"sensory-motor" and "conceptual-intentional"
systems. The study of the conceptual-intentional system includes
investigations of things like the theory of mind; referential vocal
signals; whether imitation is goal directed; and the field of
pragmatics. The study of the sensory motor system, by contrast,
includes "vocal tract length and formant dispersion in birds and
primates"; learning of songs by songbirds; analyses of vocal
dialects in whales and spontaneous imitation of artificially created
sounds in dolphins; "primate vocal production, including the
role of mandibular oscillations"; and "[c]ross-modal
perception and sign language in humans versus unimodal communication
in animals".



It is presented as an empirical hypothesis that a core property of the
FLN is "recursion":



> 
> All approaches agree that a core property of FLN is recursion,
> attributed to narrow syntax...FLN takes a finite set of elements
> and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions. This
> capacity of FLN yields discrete infinity (a property that also
> characterizes the natural numbers). (HCF, p. 1571)
> 



HCF leave open exactly what the FLN includes in addition to recursion.
It is not ruled out that the FLN incorporates substantive universals
as well as the formal property of "recursion". But
whatever "recursion" is in this context, it is apparently
not domain-specific in the sense of earlier discussions by generative
Essentialists, because it is not unique to human natural language or
defined over specifically linguistic inputs and outputs: it is the
basis for humans' grasp of the formal and arguably non-natural
language of arithmetic (counting, and the successor function), and
perhaps also navigation and social relations. It might be more
appropriate to say that HCF identify recursion as a cognitive
universal, not a linguistic one. And in that case it is difficult to
see how the so-called 'language faculty' deserves that
name: it is more like a faculty for cognition and communication.



This abandonment of linguistic domain-specificity contrasts very
sharply with the picture that was such a prominent characteristic of
the earlier work on linguistic nativism, popularized in different ways
by Fodor (1983), Barkow et al. (1992), and Pinker (1994). And yet the
HCF discussion of FLN seems to incline to the view that human language
capacities have a unique human (though not uniquely linguistic)
essence.



The FLN/FLB distinction provides earlier generative Essentialism with
an answer (at least in part) to the question of what the singularity
of the human language faculty consists in, and it does so in a way
that subsumes many of the empirical discoveries of paleoanthropology,
primatology, and ethnography that have been part of highly influential
in Emergentist approaches as well as neo-Darwinian Essentialist
approaches. A neo-Darwinian Essentialist like Pinker will accept that
the language faculty involves recursion, but also will also hold (with
Emergentists) that human language capacities originated, via natural
selection, for the purpose of linguistic communication.



Thus, over the years, those Essentialists who follow Chomsky closely
have changed the term they use for their core subject matter from
'linguistic competence' to 'I-language' to
'FLN', and the concepts expressed by these terms are all
slightly different. In particular, what they are counterposed to
differs in each case.



The challenge for the generative Essentialist adopting the FLN/FLB
distinction as characterized by HCF is to identify empirical data that
can support the hypothesis that the FLN "yields discrete
infinity". That will mean answering the question: discrete
infinity of what? HCF write that FLN "takes a finite set of
elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete
expressions" (p. 1571), which makes it clear that there must be
a recursive procedure in the mathematical sense, perhaps putting
atomic elements such as words together to make internally complex
elements like sentences ("array" should probably be
understood as a misnomer for 'set'). But then they say,
somewhat mystifyingly:



> 
> Each of these discrete expressions is then passed to the sensory-motor
> and conceptual-intentional systems, which process and elaborate this
> information in the use of language. Each expression is, in this sense,
> a pairing of sound and meaning. (HCF, p. 1571)
> 



But the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems are concrete
parts of the organism: muscles and nerves and articulatory organs and
perceptual channels and neuronal activity. How can each one of a
"potentially infinite array" be "passed to"
such concrete systems without it taking a potentially infinite amount
of time? HCF may mean that for any one of the expressions that FLN
defines as well-formed (by generating it) there is a possibility of
its being used as the basis for a pairing of sound and meaning. This
would be closer to the classical generative Essentialist view that the
grammar generates an infinite set of structural descriptions; but it
is not what HCF say.



At root, HCF is a polemical work intended to identify the view it
promotes as valuable and all other approaches to linguistics as
otiose.



> 
> In the varieties of modern linguistics that concern us here, the term
> "language" is used quite differently to refer to an
> internal component of the mind/brain (sometimes called internal
> language or I-language).... However, this biologically and
> individually grounded usage still leaves much open to interpretation
> (and misunderstanding). For example, a neuroscientist might ask: What
> components of the human nervous system are recruited in the use of
> language in its broadest sense? Because any aspect of cognition
> appears to be, at least in principle, accessible to language, the
> broadest answer to this question is, probably, "most of
> it." Even aspects of emotion or cognition not readily verbalized
> may be influenced by linguistically based thought processes. Thus,
> this conception is too broad to be of much use. (HCF, p. 1570)
> 



It is hard to see this as anything other than a claim that approaches
to linguistics focusing on anything that could fall under the label
'E-language' are to be dismissed as useless.



Some Externalists and Emergentists actually reject the idea that the
human capacity for language yields "a potentially infinite array
of expressions". It is often pointed out by empirically inclined
computational linguists that in practice there will only ever be a
finite number of sentences to be dealt with (though the people saying
this may underestimate the sheer vastness of the finite set involved).
And naturally, for those who do not believe there are generative
grammars in speakers' heads at all, it holds a fortiori that
speakers do not have grammars in their heads generating infinite
languages (see Nefdt 2019c for a scientific modeling perspective on
the infinity postulate). Externalists and Emergentists tend to hold
that the "discrete infinity" that HCF posits is more
plausibly a property of the generative Essentialists' model of
linguistic competence, I-language, or FLN, than a part of the human
mind/brain. This does not mean that non-Essentialists deny that actual
language use is creative, or (of course) that they think there is a
longest sentence of English. But they may reject the link between
linguistic productivity or creativity and the mathematical notion of
recursion (see Pullum and Scholz 2010).



HCF's remarks about how FLN "yields" or
"generates" a specific "array" assume that
languages are clearly and sharply individuated by their generators.
They appear to be committed to the view that there is a fact of the
matter about exactly which generator is in a given speaker's
head. Emergentists tend not to individuate languages in this way, and
may reject generative grammars entirely as inappropriately or
unacceptably 'formalist'. They are content with the notion
that the common-sense concept of a language is vague, and it is not
the job of linguistic theory to explain what a language is, any more
than it is the job of physicists to explain what material is, or of
biologists to explain what life is. Emergentists, in particular, are
interested not so much in identifying generators, or individuating
languages, but in exploring the component capacities that facilitate
linguistic communication, and finding out how they interact.



Similarly, Externalists are interested in the linguistic structure of
expressions, but have little use for the idea of a discrete infinity
of them, a view that is not, and cannot be empirically supported,
unless one thinks of simplicity and elegance of theory as empirical
matters. They focus on the outward manifestations of language, not on
a set of expressions regarded as a whole language--at least not
in any way that would give a language a definite cardinality. Zellig
Harris, an archetypal Externalist, is explicit that the reason for not
regarding the set of utterances as finite concerns the elegance of the
resulting grammar: "If we were to insist on a finite language,
we would have to include in our grammar several highly arbitrary and
numerical conditions" (Harris 1957: 208). Infinitude, on his
view is an unimportant side consequence of setting up a
sentence-generating grammar in an uncluttered and maximally elegant
way, not a discovered property of languages (see Pullum and Scholz
2010 for further discussion).


### 2.4 Linguistic Ontology



Not all Essentialists agree that linguistics studies aspects of what
is in the mind or aspects of what is human. There are some who do not
see language as either mental or human, and certainly do not regard
linguists as working on a problem within cognitive psychology or
neurophysiology. The debate on the ontology of language has seen three
major options emerging in the literature. Besides the mentalism of
Chomskyan linguistics, Katz (1981), Katz and Postal (1991) and Postal
(2003) proffered a platonistic alternative and finally nominalism was
proposed by Devitt (2006).



However, the Katzian trichotomy is no longer a useful characterisation
of the state-of-the-art in linguistic ontology. For one thing,
Katzian-style linguistic Platonism has very few if any extant
adherents. One reason for this situation is that linguistic platonists
attempt to restage the debate on the foundations and metaphysics of
natural language within the philosophy of mathematics (see Katz
1996). But even if this move was legitimate, it would only have opened
up a range of possibilities including nominalism (Field 1980; Azzouni
2004), structuralism (Hellman 1989; Shapiro 2007; Nefdt 2016), and
forms of mentalism in the guise of intuitionism. For instance, while
Richard Montague is often attributed with the view that linguistics
can be viewed as a branch of mathematics, it is unclear whether or not
he endorsed a platonistic ontology. Devitt (2006: 26) describes the
possibility of a 'methodological platonism' in the
following manner:



> 
> 
> It is often convenient to talk of objects posited by these theories as
> if they were types not tokens, as if they were Platonic objects, but
> this need be nothing more than a manner of speaking: when the chips
> are down the objects are part of the spatiotemporal physical
> world.
> 
> 
> 



Devitt's nominalism or 'linguistic conception' was
not around at the time of the original Katzian tripartite analysis. He
argues that linguistics is an empirical science which studies
languages as they are spoken by linguistic communities and viewing
sentences as 'idealised tokens'. Devitt's
'linguistic view' (as opposed to the 'psychological
view' or Chomskyan mentalism) claims that grammars map onto
behavioural output of language production, of which speakers are
generally ignorant.



Katz took nominalism to have been refuted by Chomsky in his critiques
of American structuralists in the 1960s. But, in Katz's opinion,
Chomsky had failed to notice that conceptualism was infected with many
of the same faults as nominalism, because it too localized language
spatiotemporally (in contingently existing, finite, human brains).
Since contemporary Minimalist theories share in the earlier
ontological commitment, Katz' argument would presumably extent
to them. Through an argument by elimination, Katz concluded that only
platonism remained, and must be the correct view to adopt. But this is
a false trichotomy and besides predating Devitt's more
philosophically grounded nominalism, it also fails to take linguistic
pluralism into account.



Recent adherents of pluralism are Stainton (2014) and Santana (2016).
Santana (2016) argues in favour of a pluralistic ontology for natural
language based on all of the major foundational approaches, including
sociolinguistic ontology. His approach is thoroughly naturalistic in
asking the ontological question through the lens of "what sort
of roles the concept of language plays in linguistic theory and
practice" (Santana, 2016: 501).



The first thing Santana does is to separate the discussion into two
related questions, one scientific and the other metascientific or
'descriptive' and 'normative' in his terms. He
claims that "[l]anguage, the scientific concept, is thus
descriptively whatever it is that linguists take as their primary
object of study, and normatively whatever it is they should be
studying" (Santana, 2016: 501). Eventually he advocates a union
of various ontologies based on the ineliminable status of each
perspective (in that way the oppose of Katz' eliminative
strategy).



Stainton (2014) similarly proposes a pluralistic ontology but with a
more intersectional approach. His additional argument relates to how
all of the views are indeed compatible. This argument is a response to
an immediate objection along the lines of Postal (2003, 2009) as to
the incompatibility of the various ontologies associated with
mentalism, Platonism, physicalism and public language views. Stainton
begins the pluralist apology in this way.



> 
> 
> There is an obvious rebuttal on behalf of pluralism, namely that
> "the linguistic" is a complex phenomenon with parts that
> belong to distinct ontological categories. This shouldn't
> surprise, since even "the mathematical" is like this: Two
> wholly physical dogs plus two other wholly physical dogs yields four
> dogs; there certainly is the mental operation of multiplying 26 by 84,
> the mental state of thinking about the square root of 7, and so on.
> (2014: 5)
> 
> 
> 



His main argument against incompatibility, and in favour of
intersection, is that the former rests on an equivocation of the terms
'mental', 'abstract' and even
'physical'. Once the equivocation is cleared up, it is
argued, hybrid ontological objects are licensed. The argument goes
that appreciating the nuanced physical and mental and what he calls
'abstractish' nature of natural language will dissolve
worries about ontological inconsistency and open the door for
intersection. Consider some other members of this category of
objects.



> 
> 
> Indeed, our world is replete with such hybrid objects: psychocultural
> kinds (e.g. dining room tables, footwear, bonfires, people, sport
> fishing [...]; intellectual artifacts (college diplomas,
> drivers' licenses, the Canadian dollar [...]; and institutions
> (MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Disneyworld
> [...] (Stainton, 2014: 6).
> 
> 
> 



Despite the decline in interest in the ontology of language itself,
philosophers have recently embraced a subset of this debate in the
philosophy of linguistic objects with a special focus on words. There
is a recent debate in philosophy on the philosophy of what Rey (2006,
2020) calls 'Standard Linguistic Entities' (SLEs) or
tokens of word, sentence, morpheme, and phonemes types. Rey then
defines a position called 'physical tokenism' or PT as the
assumption that SLEs can be identified with physical (acoustic)
spatio-temporal phenomena. He doesn't think that SLEs share the
same kind of existence as his trusty Honda. In fact he thinks that
they are 'intentional inexistents' (borrowed from
Brentano, see the
 SEP entry
 on 'Brentano's Theory of Judgement, see also the section
entitled 'Intentional Inexistence' in the
 entry on Intentionality)
 or purely intentional uses of the term 'represents' which
denote fictions of a particular sort. Linguistic theory according to
him is only committed to the intentional contents of things like
nouns, verbs, verb phrases etc. where "an (intentional) content
is whatever we understand x to be when we use the idiom
'represent(ation of) x' but there is no real x"
(2006: 242).



There has been some theoretical work on the nature of entities like
phrases and words in linguistics. For example, Ross (2010) argues that
the concept of parts of speech is fuzzy. Similarly, Szabo
(2015) rejects the idea that parts of speech should be identified by
distributional analysis as is common in syntax. Instead he offers a
semantic approach based on predicate logic where the aim is to model
the major lexical categories directly in terms of open class
constants. This, he claims, results in a reduction of the gap between
grammar and logic. So, for instance, nouns become not types
corresponding to distributionally defined syntactic objects but rather
open lexical constants used for reference such that the semantic
clause only needs to involve a universal quantifier and a variable
specified in terms of reference. Verbs, on the other hand, are
constants which purport to predicate (for more details, see
Szabo 2015 and Nefdt 2020). For Haspelmath (2011) a central
problem is the concept of wordhood. He identifies ten morphosyntactic
criteria for words as the best possible candidates over seemingly
inferior semantic or phonological options. He shows all of them to be
wanting, with the result among other things being that "the
notion of lexical integrity is not well supported and should not be
appealed to in explaining grammatical phenomena" (Haspelmath,
2011: 33). The very notion of wordhood, although intuitive and
central, is unclear upon further scrutiny. Yet, in linguistics there
is continual hope for a resolution, that there is something more than
essential inexistence at stake. Haspelmath thinks this is a vain hope,
and attributes it to the influence of orthography on the thought of
linguist researchers.



Philosophers have been traditionally interested in the metaphysics of
SLEs with a special focus on the ontological status of words.
Interestingly, this literature showcases variations on the
foundational debates on the ontology of language. As Miller (2020)
notes:



> 
> 
> Words play various roles in our lives. Some insult, some inspire, and
> words are central to communication. The aim of an ontology of words is
> to determine what entities, if any, can play those roles and possess
> (or instantiate) these properties. (2)
> 
> 
> 



However the positions advocated are somewhat more nuanced than the
original Katzian trichotomy suggests. They usually start with the
problem of word individuation expressed in the following manner:



> 
> 
> Think of the following line: A rose is a rose is a rose. How many
> words are there in this line? If we were to count words themselves,
> not their instances, the answer is three: rose, is, and a. If we were
> to count the concrete instances we see on a piece of paper, the answer
> is eight. The line, however, can be taken as an abstract type; a
> sequence of shapes. (Irmak, 2019: 1140)
> 
> 
> 



Further complications are introduced by reference to words like
"color" and "colour". Here the idea is that
the phonological profile of a word is a guide to its identity. But
this fails in other cases.



> 
> 
> Now take the name MOHAMMED. Since Arabic does not notate vowels, the
> name has been transcribed in a wide variety of ways in English, and
> some of such transcriptions present important discrepancies: For
> example, "Mohammad" and "Mehmood." Even if we
> know that they originated from the same source, the difference between
> the two forms is considerable, and intuitions about their being
> variants of the same name are less clear. What is the point up to
> which differences in spelling are consistent with word identity?
> (Gasparri, 2021: 594)
> 
> 
> 



Word individuation goes beyond this initial characterisation and it is
not always clear how the many accounts deal with the more complex
questions directly in their metaphysical pursuits. For instance,
issues not usually mentioned in the literature, but which seem equally
important are related to whether pitch in 'They poured pitch all
over the parking lot' and 'The players swarmed the pitch
after they won the game' are different words. What about words
within different syntactic categories, such as 'watch'
(time-telling device) and 'watch' (observe)? Are
"ain't" and "isn't" and
"aren't" different words? What about simple cases of
inflectional morphology such as like 'toy' and
'toys'? 



According to Nefdt (2019b), the identity of a word is tied to its role
in the sentence structure. In which case, "ain't"
and "isn't" come out as the same word (at least in
the singular use) but 'watch' (noun) and
'watch' (verb) do not. However, counterintuitively, his
account might license the identity of words like 'truck'
and 'lorry'.



There are two strong but separate traditions which can both lay claim
to being the 'received position'. Within linguistics, the
idea of a word as a LEXEME or mental dictionary entry is commonplace
(with stipulations for senses, irregular forms, and selectional
criteria). Most introductory textbooks assume something of this sort.
In the philosophical literature, on the other hand, a mild or
methodological version of platonism is often presupposed. This view
has it that words can be separated into types and tokens, where the
former lack specific spatiotemporal features and the latter
instantiate these forms somehow.



The latter intuition seems to characterize most views on the ontology
of words. Bromberger (1989) defines what he calls "the Platonic
Relationship Principle" or the principle that allows us to
'impute properties to types after observing and judging some of
their tokens' (Bromberger 1989, 62). While Bromberger (1989,
2011) represents the pinnacle of the classical philosophy of
linguistics approach to these questions. In a more metaphysical mode,
David Kaplan (1990, 2011) constructs a thoroughly physicalist proposal
in which words are modelled in terms of a stages and continuants:



> 
> 
> I propose a quite different model according to which utterances and
> inscriptions are stages of words, which are the continuants made up of
> these interpersonal stages along with some more mysterious
> intrapersonal stages. (Kaplan 1990: 98)
> 
> 
> 



For him, what individuates words is the intention of the user (see
Cappelen (1999) for an objection to intentional accounts tout court).
Unfortunately, fascinating as Kaplan's proposal is, it does not
attempt to reflect on linguistic theory directly. In fact, one major
criticism of his view, courtesy of Hawthorne and Lepore (2011), is
that it fails to account for uninstantiated word-types whose existence
is guaranteed by derivational morphology, whether or not they've
been tokened or baptized in the real world. Other notable accounts are
Wetzel's (2009) Platonism (see the
 SEP entry on abstract objects)
 and Szabo's (1999) representational/nominalist view.



The philosophy of words has recently seen a resurgence in interest
among philosophers, especially on the ontological issues. Miller
(2021), for example, attempts to apply a bundle theory to the task of
word individuation and identification. Irmak (2019) suggests that
words are abstract artifacts (similarly to Katz and Wetzel) but
insists that they are more akin to musical scores or works of fiction
which have temporal components ("temporal abstracta" as he
calls it). Mallory (2020) advocates the position that words are not
really objects in the ordinary sense. However, he opts for an
action-theoretic approach in which tokens provide instructions for the
performance of action-types where our normal understanding of
'word' is to be identified with those types. His view is
overtly naturalistic and focuses on the concept of words which is
drawn from contemporary linguistic theory. Similarly, Nefdt (2019b)
proffers a mathematical structuralist interpretation of SLEs in which
the definition of words is continuous with the ontology of phrases and
sentences. Here he follows Jackendoff (2018) who uses model-theoretic
(Pullum 2013) or constraint-based grammar formalisms to argue for a
continuum between words and linguistic rules. In other words, these
latter two authors reject the idea that words are somehow sui generis
entities in need of discontinuous explanation. Gasparri (2020)
suggests pluralism is a more solid foundation for the ontology of
words. He evaluates both "bundlistic" views such as
Miller's and causal-historical accounts such as Irmak's
before offering an alternative "view that there is a plurality
of epistemically virtuous ways of thinking about the nature of
words" (608).



These are of course complex issues and they offer a lens through which
to appreciate the erstwhile debate on the ontology of language but
with a contemporary and more focused flavor. Not all of the authors
who work on the philosophy of words consider the role of linguistic
theory to be central. Hence their work might be related but it does
not quite qualify as the philosophy of linguistics, where this is
viewed as a subfield of the philosophy of science. By contrast, we
have focused on the authors who directly engage with linguistic theory
in their accounts of the ontology of SLEs. There is also no clear
mapping between the various ontological accounts mentioned here and
the characterizations of linguistic theorizing in terms of
Externalism, Emergentism and Essentialism. No particular metaphysical
view unifies any of our three groupings. For example, not all
Externalists incline toward nominalism; numerous Emergentists as well
as most Essentialists take linguistics to be about mental phenomena;
and our Essentialists include Katz's platonism alongside the
Chomskyan 'I-language' advocates and pluralists embrace
aspects of all of the above.


### 2.5 Components of linguistic theories



Linguists' conception of the components of the study of language
contrast with philosophers' conceptions (even those of
philosophers of language) in at least three ways. First, linguists are
often intensely interested in small details of linguistic form in
their own right. Second, linguists take an interest in whole topic
areas like the internal structure of phrases, the physics of
pronunciation, morphological features such as conjugation classes,
lexical information about particular words, and so on--topics in
which there is typically little philosophical payoff. And third,
linguists are concerned with relations between the different
subsystems of languages: the exact way the syntax meshes with the
semantics, the relationship between phonological and syntactic facts,
and so on.



With regard to form, philosophers broadly follow Morris (1938), a
foundational work in semiotics, and to some extent Peirce (see SEP
entry: Peirce, semiotics), in thinking of the theory of language as
having three main components:


* *syntax*, which treats of the form of signs;
* *semantics*, which deals with the relations of signs to
their denotations; and
* *pragmatics*, which concerns the contextualized use of
interpreted signs.



Linguists, by contrast, following both Sapir (1921) and Bloomfield
(1933), treat the syntactic component in a more detailed way than
Morris or Peirce, and distinguish between at least three kinds of
linguistic form: the form of speech sounds (phonology), the form of
words (morphology), and the form of sentences. (If syntax is about the
form of expressions in general, then each of these would be an element
of Morris's syntax.)



Emergentists in general deny that there is a distinction between
semantics and pragmatics--a position that is familiar enough in
philosophy: Quine (1987: 211), for instance, holds that "the
separation between semantics and pragmatics is a pernicious
error." And generally speaking, those theorists who, like the
later Wittgenstein, focus on meaning as use will deny that one can
separate semantics from pragmatics. Emergentists such as Paul Hopper
& Sandra Thompson agree:



> 
> [W]hat is called semantics and what is called pragmatics are an
> integrated whole. (Hopper and Thompson 1993: 372)
> 



Some Essentialists--notably Chomsky--also deny that
semantics can be separated from pragmatics, but unlike the
Emergentists (who think that semantics-pragmatics is a starting point
for linguistic theory), Chomsky (as we noted briefly in section 1.3)
denies that semantics and pragmatics can have any role in
linguistics:



> 
> 
> It seems that other cognitive systems--in particular, our system
> of beliefs concerning things in the world and their
> behavior--play an essential part in our judgments of meaning and
> reference, in an extremely intricate manner, and it is not at all
> clear that much will remain if we try to separate the purely
> linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in technical
> discussion we call 'the meaning of [a] linguistic
> expression.' (Chomsky 1979; 142)
> 
> 
> 



Regarding the theoretical account of the relation between words or
phrases and what speakers take them to refer to, Chomsky says,
"I think such theories should be regarded as a variety of
syntax" (Chomsky 1992: 223).



Not every Essentialist agrees with Chomsky on this point. Many believe
that every theory should incorporate a linguistic component that
yields meanings, in much the same way that many philosophers of
language believe there to be such a separate component. Often,
although not always, this component amounts to a truth-theoretic
account of the values of syntactically-characterized sentences. This
typically involves a translation of the natural language sentence into
some representation that is "intermediate" between natural
language and a truth-theory--perhaps an augmented version of
first-order logic, or perhaps a higher-order intensional language. The
Essentialists who study semantics in such ways usually agree with
Chomsky in seeing little role for pragmatics within linguistic theory.
But their separation of semantics from pragmatics allows them to
accord semantics a legitimacy within linguistics itself, and not just
in psychology or sociology.



Such Essentialists, as well as the Emergentists, differ in important
ways from classical philosophical logic in their attitudes towards
"the syntactic-semantic interface", however. Philosophers
of language and logic who are not also heavily influenced by
linguistics tend to move directly--perhaps by means of a
"semantic intuition" or perhaps from an intuitive
understanding of the truth conditions involved--from a natural
language sentence to its "deep, logical" representation.
For example, they may move directly from (EX1) to (LF1):



(EX1)
Every linguist admires Panini.
(LF1)
*x*(Linguist(*x*) [?] Admires(*x*,
***p***))


And from there perhaps to a model-theoretic description of its
truth-conditions. A linguist, on the other hand, would aim to describe
how (EX1) and (LF1) are related. From the point of view of a
semantically-inclined Essentialist, the question is: how should the
syntactic component of linguistic theory be written so that the
semantic value (or, "logical form representation") can be
assigned? From some Emergentist points of view, the question is: how
can the semantic properties and communicative function of an
expression explain its syntactic properties?



Matters are perhaps less clear with the Externalists--at least
with those who identify semantic value with distribution in terms of
neighboring words (there is a tradition stemming from the
structuralists of equating synonymy with the possibility of
substitution in all contexts without affecting acceptability).



Matters are in general quite a bit more subtle and tricky than (EX1)
might suggest. Philosophers have taken the natural language sentence
(EX2) to have two logical forms, (LF2a) and (LF2b):



(EX2)
Every linguist admires a philosopher.
(LF2a)
[?]*x*(Linguist(*x*) [?]
[?]*y*(Philosopher(*y*) [?]
Admires(*x*,*y*)))
(LF2b)
[?]*x*(Philosopher(*x*) [?]
[?]*y*(Linguist(*y*) [?]
Admires(*y*,*x*)))


But for the linguist interested in the syntax-semantics interface,
there needs to be some explanation of how (LF2a) and (LF2b) are
associated with (EX2). It could be a way in which rules can derive
(LF2a) and (LF2b) from the syntactic representation of (EX2), as some
semantically-inclined Essentialists would propose, or a way to explain
the syntactic properties of (EX2) from facts about the meanings
represented by (LF2a) and (LF2b), as some Emergentists might want. But
that they should be connected up in some way is something that
linguists would typically count as non-negotiable.


## 3. Linguistic Methodology and Data



The strengths and limitations of different data gathering methods
began to play an important role in linguistics in the early to
mid-20th century. Voegelin and Harris (1951: 323) discuss several
methods that had been used to distinguish Amerindian languages and
dialects:


* **Informal elicitation**: asking an informant for a
metalinguistic judgment on an expression. [E.g., "Is this
sentence grammatical?" "Do these two sentences mean the
same thing?"]
* **Corpus collection**: gathering a body of naturally
occurring utterances.
* **Controlled experimentation**: testing informants in
some way that directly gauges their linguistic capacities.



They note that the anthropological linguists Boas and Sapir (who we
take to be proto-Emergentists) used the 'ask the
informant' method of informal elicitation, addressing questions
"to the informant's perception rather than to the data
directly" (1951: 324). Bloomfield (the proto-Externalist), on
the other hand, worked on Amerindian languages mostly by collecting
corpora, with occasional use of monolingual elicitation.



The preferred method of Essentialists today is informal elicitation,
including elicitation from oneself. Although the techniques for
gathering data about speakers and their language use have changed
dramatically over the past 60 or more years, the general strategies
have not: data is still gathered by elicitation of metalinguistic
judgments, collection of corpus material, or direct psychological
testing of speakers' reactions and behaviors. Different
linguists will have different preferences among these techniques, but
it is important to understand that data could be gathered in any of
the three ways by advocates of any tendency. Essentialists,
Emergentists, and Externalists differ as much on how data is
interpreted and used as on their views of how it should be
gathered.



A wide range of methodological issues about data collection have been
raised in linguistics. Since gathering data by direct objective
experimental testing of informants is a familiar practice throughout
the social, psychological, medical, and biological sciences, we will
say little about it here, focusing instead on these five issues about
data:


1. Disputes over the use of linguistic intuitions as linguistic
data;
2. Differences between grammaticality and acceptability
judgments;
3. Differences between scales for measuring acceptability
judgments;
4. Debates about the reliability of informal judgment elicitation
methods; and
5. Issues concerning the relevance and reliability of corpus
evidence.


### 3.1 Acrimony over linguistic intuitions



The debate in linguistics over the use of linguistic intuitions
(elicited metalinguistic judgments) as data, and how that data should
be collected has resulted in enduring, rancorous, often ideologically
tinged disputes over the past 45 years. The disputes are remarkable,
if only for their fairly consistent venomous tone.



At their most extreme, many Emergentists and some Externalists cast
the debate in terms of whether linguistic intuitions should ever count
as evidence for linguistic theorizing. And many Essentialists cast it
in terms of whether anything but linguistic intuitions are ever really
needed to support linguistic theorizing.



The debate focuses on the Essentialists' notion of a mental
grammar, since linguistic intuitions are generally understood to be a
consequence of tacit knowledge of language. Emergentists who deny that
speakers have innate domain-specific grammars (competence,
I-languages, or FLN) have raised a diverse range of objections to the
use of reports of intuitions as linguistic data. (But see Devitt 2006
for an understanding of linguistic intuitions that does not base them
on inferred tacit knowledge of competence grammars.) The following
passages are representative Emergentist critiques of intuitions
(elicited judgments):



> 
> 
> Generative linguists typically respond to calls for evidence for the
> reality of their theoretical constructs by claiming that no evidence
> is needed over and above the theory's ability to account for
> patterns of grammaticality judgments elicited from native speakers.
> This response is unsatisfactory on two accounts. First, such judgments
> are inherently unreliable because of their unavoidable meta-cognitive
> overtones... Second, the outcome of a judgment (or the analysis
> of an elicited utterance) is invariably brought to bear on some
> distinction between variants of the current generative theory, never
> on its foundational assumptions. (Edelman and Christiansen 2003:
> 60)
> 
> 
> 
> The data that are actually used toward this end in Generative Grammar
> analyses are almost always disembodied sentences that analysts have
> made up ad hoc, ... rather than utterances produced by real
> people in real discourse situations... In diametric opposition to
> these methodological assumptions and choices, cognitive-functional
> linguists take as their object of study all aspects of natural
> language understanding and use... They (especially the more
> functionally oriented analysts) take as an important part of their
> data not disembodied sentences derived from introspection, but rather
> utterances or other longer sequences from naturally occurring
> discourse. (Tomasello 1998: xiii)
> 
> 
> 
> [T]he journals are full of papers containing highly questionable data,
> as readers can verify simply by perusing the examples in nearly any
> syntax article about a familiar language. (Wasow and Arnold 2005:
> 1484)
> 
> 
> 



It is a common Emergentist objection that linguistic intuitions (taken
to be reports of elicited judgments of the acceptability of
expressions not their grammaticality) are bad data points because not
only are they not usage data, i.e., they are metalinguistic, but also
because they are judgments about linguist's invented example
sentences. On neither count would they be clear and direct evidence of
language use and human communicative capacities--the subject
matter of linguistics on the Emergentist view. A further objection is
to their use by theorists to the exclusion of all other kinds of
evidence. For example,



> 
> [Formal linguistics] continues to insist that its method for gathering
> data is not only appropriate, but is superior to others. Occasionally
> a syntactician will acknowledge that no one type of data is
> privileged, but the actual behavior of people in the field belies this
> concession. Take a look at any recent article on formal syntax and see
> whether anything other than the theorist's judgments constitute
> the data on which the arguments are based. (Ferreira 2005: 372)
> 



"Formal" is Emergentist shorthand for referring to
generative linguistics. And it should be noted that the practice by
Essentialists of collapsing various kinds of acceptability judgments
under the single label 'intuitions' masks important
differences. In principle there might be significant differences
between the judgments of (i) linguists with a stake in what the
evidence shows; (ii) linguists with experience in syntactic theory but
no stake in the issue at hand; (iii) non-linguist native speakers who
have been tutored in how to provide the kinds of judgments the
linguist is interested in; and (iv) linguistically naive native
speakers.



Many Emergentists object to all four kinds of reports of intuitions on
the grounds that they are not direct evidence language use. For
example, a common objection is based on the view that



> 
> [T]he primary object of study is the language people actually produce
> and understand. Language in use is the best evidence we have for
> determining the nature and specific organization of linguistic
> systems. Thus, an ideal usage-based analysis is one that emerges from
> observation of such bodies of usage data, called corpora....
> Because the linguistic system is so closely tied to usage, it follows
> that theories of language should be grounded in an observation of data
> from actual uses of language. (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Introduction)
> 



But collections of linguists' reports of their own judgments are
also criticized by Emergentists as "arm-chair data
collection," or "data collection by introspection".
All parties tend to call this kind of data collection
"informal"--though they all rely on either formally
or informally elicited judgments to some degree.



On the other side, Essentialists tend to deny that usage data is
adequate evidence by itself:



> 
> More than five decades of research in generative linguistics have
> shown that the standard generative methodology of hypothesis formation
> and empirical verification via judgment elicitation can lead to a
> veritable goldmine of linguistic discovery and explanation. In many
> cases it has yielded good, replicable results, ones that could not as
> easily have been obtained by using other data-gathering methods, such
> as corpus-based research...[C]onsider the fact that parasitic gap
> constructions...are exceedingly rare in corpora.... [T]hese
> distributional phenomena would have been entirely impossible to
> distill via any non-introspective, non-elicitation based data
> gathering method. Corpus data simply cannot yield such a detailed
> picture of what is licit and, more crucially, what is not licit for a
> particular construction in a particular linguistic environment. (den
> Dikken et al. 2007: 336)
> 



And Essentialists often seem to deny that they are guilty of what the
Emergentist claims they are guilty of. For example, Chomsky appears to
be claiming that acceptability judgments are performance data, i.e.
evidence of use:



> 
> Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance,
> whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence...
> Like acceptability, grammaticalness is, no doubt, a matter of
> degree...but the scales of grammaticalness and acceptability do
> not coincide. Grammaticalness is only one of many factors that
> interact to determine acceptability. (Chomsky 1965: 11)
> 



Chomsky means to deny that acceptability judgments are direct evidence
of *linguistic competence*. But it does not follow that
elicited acceptability judgments are direct evidence of language
use.



And as for the charge of "arm-chair" collection methods,
some Essentialists claim to have shown that such methods are as good
as more controlled experimental methods. For example, Sprouse and
Almeida report:



> 
> We formally tested all 469 data points from a popular generative
> syntax textbook (Adger 2003) on 440 naive participants. Using
> three different statistical analysis approaches (traditional
> statistical tests, linear mixed-effects models, and Bayes factor
> analysis), and adopting the assumption of critics that formal results
> are more 'true' than informal judgments, we estimated a
> maximum replication failure rate of 2% for the 469 data points in
> Adger (2003)...A replication rate of 98% suggests that the
> empirical foundation of generative syntactic theory is sound, at least
> for the topics covered in Adger (2003). (p. 13 of Sprouse and Almeida,
> ms 2010: see Other Internet Resources)
> 



(When they say "formal results" they apparently mean
"results obtained by controlled experiments".) This can be
read as either defending Essentialists' consulting of their own
intuitions simpliciter, or their self-consultation of intuitions on
uncontroversial textbook cases only. The former is much more
controversial than the later.



Finally, both parties of the debate engage in ad hominem attacks on
their opponents. Here is one example of a classic ad hominem (tu
quoque) attack on Emergentists in defense of constructed examples by
Essentialists:



> 
> [The charge made concerning "armchair data collection"]
> implies that there is something intrinsic to generative grammar that
> invites partisans of that framework to construct syntactic theories on
> the evidence of a single person's judgments. Nothing could be
> farther from the truth. The great bulk of publications in cognitive
> and functional linguistics follow the same practice. Of course,
> *rhetorically* many of the latter decry the use of
> linguists' own intuitions as data. For example, in ... an
> important collections [sic] of papers in cognitive-functional
> linguistics, ... only two contributors to the volume ...
> present segments of natural discourse, neither filling even a page of
> text. All of the other contributors employ examples constructed by the
> linguists themselves. It is quite difficult to find *any* work
> in cognitive linguistics (and functional linguists are only slightly
> better) that uses multiple informants. It seems almost disingenuous
> ... to fault generativists for what (for better or worse) is
> standard practice in the field, regardless of theoretical allegiance.
> (Newmeyer 2007: 395)
> 



Clearly, the mere fact that some Emergentists may in practice have
made use of invented examples in testing their theories does not tell
against any cogent general objections they may have offered to such
practice. What is needed is a decision on the methodological point,
not just a cry of "You did it too!".



Given the intolerance of each other's views, and the crosstalk
present in these debates, it is tempting to think that Emergentism and
Essentialism are fundamentally incompatible on what counts as
linguistic data, since their differences are based on their different
views of the subject matter of linguistics, and what the phenomena and
goals of linguistic theorizing are. There is no doubt that the
opposing sides think that their respective views are incompatible. But
this conclusion may well be too hasty. In what follows, we try to
point to a way that the dispute could be ameliorated, if not
adjudicated.


### 3.2 Grammaticality and acceptability judgments



Essentialists who accept the competence/performance distinction of
Chomsky (1965) traditionally emphasize elicited acceptability judgment
data (although they need not reject data that is gathered using other
methods). But as Cowart notes:



> 
> In this view, which exploits the distinction between competence and
> performance, the act of expressing a judgment of acceptability is a
> kind of linguistic performance. The grammar that a [generative
> Essentialist] linguistic theory posits in the head of a speaker does
> not exercise exhaustive control of judgments... While forming a
> sentence judgment, a speaker draws on a variety of cognitive
> resources... The resulting [acceptability] judgments could
> pattern quite differently than the grammaticality values we might like
> them to reflect. (Cowart 1997: 7)
> 



The grammaticality of an expression, on the standard generative
Essentialist view, is the status conferred on it by the competence
state of an ideal speaker. But competence can never be exercised or
used without potentially interfering performance factors like memory
being exercised as well. This means that judgments about
grammaticality are never really directly available to the linguist
through informant judgments: they have to be inferred from judgments
of acceptability (along with any other relevant evidence).
Nevertheless, Essentialists do take acceptability judgments to provide
fairly good evidence concerning the character of linguistic
competence. In fact the use of informally gathered acceptability
judgment data is a hallmark of post-1965 Essentialist practice.



It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that only Essentialists
make use of such judgments. Many contemporary Externalists and
Emergentists who reject the competence/performance distinction still
use informally gathered acceptability judgments in linguistic
theorizing, though perhaps not in theory testing. Emergentists tend to
interpret experimentally gathered judgment data as performance data
reflecting the interactions between learned features of communication
systems and general learning mechanisms as deployed in communication.
And Externalists use judgment data for corpus cleaning (see
below).



It should be noted that sociolinguists and anthropological linguists
(and we regard them as tending toward Emergentist views) often
informally elicit informant judgments not only about acceptability but
also about social and regional style and variation, and meaning. They
may ask informants questions like, "Who would typically say
that?", or "What does X mean in context XYZ?", or
"If you can say WXY, can you say WXZ?" (see Labov 1996:
77).


### 3.3 Assessing degrees of acceptability



A generative grammar gives a finite specification of a set of
expressions. A psychogrammar, to the extent that it corresponds to a
generative grammar, might be thought to equip a speaker to know (at
least in principle) absolutely whether a string is in the language.
However, elicited metalinguistic judgments are uncontroversially a
matter of degree. A question arises concerning the scale on which
these degrees of acceptability should be measured.



Linguists have implicitly worked with a scale of roughly half a dozen
levels and types of acceptability, annotating them with prefixed
symbols. The most familiar is the asterisk, originally used simply to
mark strings of words as ungrammatical, i.e., as not belonging to the
language at all. Other prefixed marks have gradually become
current:




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| prefix | approximate meaning |
| # | semantically anomalous: unacceptable in virtue of a bizarre
meaning |
| % | subject to a 'dialect' split: judged grammatical
only by some speakers |



But other annotations have been used to indicate a gradation in the
extent to which some sentences are unacceptable. No scientifically
validated or explicitly agreed meanings have been associated with
these marks, but a tradition has slowly grown up of assigning prefixes
such as those in Table 2 to signify degrees of unacceptability:





|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| prefix | approximate meaning |
| (no prefix) | acceptable and thus presumably grammatical |
| ? | of dubious acceptability, though probably grammatical |
| ?? | clearly unacceptable but possibly grammatical |
| ?\* | unacceptable enough to suggest probable ungrammaticality |
| \* | unacceptable enough to suggest clear ungrammaticality |
| \*\* | grossly unacceptable, suggesting extreme ungrammaticality |



Table 2: Prefixes used to mark levels of
acceptability




Such markings are often used in a way that suggests an **ordinal
scale**, i.e. a partial ordering that is silent on anything
other than equivalence in acceptability or ranking in degree of
unacceptability.



By contrast, Bard et al. (1996: 39) point out, it is possible to use
**interval scales**, which additionally measure distance
between ordinal positions. Interval scales of acceptability would
measure *relative distances* between strings--how much
more or less acceptable one is than another. **Magnitude
estimation** is a method developed in psychophysics to measure
subjects' judgments of physical stimuli on an interval scale.
Bard et al. (1996) adapted these methods to linguistic acceptability
judgments, arguing that interval scales of measurement are required
for testing theoretical claims that rely on subtle judgments of
comparative acceptability. An ordinal scale of acceptability can
represent one expression as being less acceptable than another, but
cannot support quantitative questions about how much less. Many
generative Essentialist theorists had been suggesting that violation
of different universal principles led to different degrees of
unacceptability. According to Bard et al. (34-35), because there
may be "disproportion between the fineness of judgments people
can make and the symbol set available for recording them" it
will not suffice to use some fixed scale such as this one:



? < ?? < ?\* < \* < \*\*



indicating absolute degrees of unacceptability. Degrees of relative
unacceptability must be measured. This is done by asking the informant
how much less acceptable one string is than another.



Magnitude estimation can be used with both informal and experimental
methods of data collection. And data that is measured using interval
scales can be subjected to much more mathematically sophisticated
tests and analyses than data measured solely by an ordinal scale,
provided that quantitative data are available.



It should be noted that the value of applying magnitude estimation to
the judgment of acceptability has been directly challenged in two
recent papers. Weskott and Fanselow (2011) and Sprouse (2011) both
present critiques of Bard et al. (1996). Weskott and Fanselow compared
magnitude estimation data to standard judgments on binary and 7-point
scales, and claim that magnitude estimation does not yield more
information than other judgment tasks, and moreover can produce
spurious variance. And Sprouse, on the basis of recent formalizations
of magnitude estimation in the psychophysics literature, presents
experimental evidence that participants cannot make ratio judgments of
acceptability (for example, a judgment that one sentence is precisely
half as acceptable as another), which suggests that the magnitude
estimation task probably provides the same interval-level data as
other judgment tasks.


### 3.4 Informal and experimental elicitation



Part of the dispute over the reliability of informal methods of
acceptability judgment elicitation and collection is between different
groups of Essentialists. Experimentally trained psycholinguists
advocate using and adapting various experimental methods that have
been developed in the cognitive and behavioral sciences to collect
acceptability judgments. And while the debate is often cast in terms
of which method is absolutely better, a more appropriate question
might be when one method is to be preferred to the others. Those
inclined toward less experimentally controlled methods point out that
there are many clear and uncontroversial acceptability judgments that
do not need to be shown to be reliable. Advocates of experimental
methods point out that many purportedly clear, uncontroversial
judgments have turned out to be unreliable, and led to false empirical
generalizations about languages. Both seem to be right in different
cases.



Chomsky has frequently stated his view that the experimental
data-gathering techniques developed in the behavioral sciences are
neither used nor needed in linguistic theorizing. For example:



> 
> The gathering of data is informal; there has been little use of
> experimental approaches (outside of phonetics) or of complex
> techniques of data collection and data analysis of a sort that can
> easily be devised, and that are widely used in the behavioral
> sciences. The arguments in favor of this informal procedure seem to me
> quite compelling; basically, they turn on the realization that for the
> theoretical problems that seem most critical today, it is not at all
> difficult to obtain a mass of crucial data without use of such
> techniques. Consequently, linguistic work, at what I believe to be its
> best, lacks many of the features of the behavioral sciences. (Chomsky
> 1969: 56)
> 



He also expressed the opinion that using experimental behavioral data
collection methods in linguistics "would be a waste of time and
energy" (1969: 81).



Although many Emergentists--the intellectual heirs of
Sapir--would accept 'ask-the-informant' data, we
might expect them to tend to accept experimental data-gathering
methods that have been developed in the social sciences. There is
little doubt that strict followers of the methodology preferred by
Bloomfield in his later career would disapprove of 'ask the
informant' methods. Charles Hockett remarked:



> 
> A language, as a set of habits, is a fragile thing, subject to minor
> modification in the slightest breeze of circumstance; this, indeed, is
> its great source of power. But this is also why the
> transformationalists (like the rest of us!), using themselves as
> informants, have such a hard time deciding whether certain candidates
> for sentencehood are really 'in their dialect' or not; and
> it is why Bloomfield, in his field work, would never elicit paradigms,
> for fear he would induce his informant to say something under the
> artificial conditions of talking with an outsider that he would never
> have said in his own everyday surroundings. (Hockett 1968:
> 89-90, fn. 31)
> 



We might expect Bloomfield, having abandoned his earlier Wundtian
psychological leanings, to be suspicious of any method that could be
cast as introspective. And we might expect many contemporary
Externalists to prefer more experimentally controlled methods too. (We
shall see below that to some extent they do.)



Derwing (1973) was one early critic of Chomsky's view (1969)
that experimentally controlled data collection is useless; but it was
nearly 25 years before systematic research into possible confounding
variables in acceptability judgment data started being conducted on
any significant scale. In the same year that Bard et al. (1996)
appeared, Carson Schutze (1996) published a monograph with the
following goal statement:



> 
> I aim to demonstrate...that grammaticality judgments and other
> sorts of linguistic intuition, while indispensable forms of data for
> linguistic theory, require new ways of being collected and used. A
> great deal is known about the instability and unreliability of
> judgments, but rather than propose that they be abandoned, I endeavor
> to explain the source of their shiftiness and how it can be minimized.
> (1996: 1)
> 



In a similar vein, Wayne Cowart stated that he wanted to
"describe a family of practical methods that yield demonstrably
reliable data on patterns of sentence acceptability." He
observes that the stability and reliability of acceptability judgment
collection is



> 
> complicated by the fact that there seems to be no consensus on how to
> gather judgments apart from a widespread tolerance for informal
> methods in which the linguist consults her own intuitions and those of
> the first handy informant (what we might call the "Hey,
> Sally" method). (Cowart 1997: 2)
> 



Schutze also expresses the importance of using experimental
methods developed in cognitive science:



> 
> [M]y claim is that *none* of the variables that confound
> metalinguistic data are peculiar to judgments about language. Rather
> they can be shown to operate in some other domain in a similar way.
> (This is quite similar to Valian's (1982) claim that the data of
> more traditional psychological experiments have all the same problems
> that judgment data have.) (Schutze 1996: 14)
> 



The above can be read as sympathetic to the Essentialist preference
for elicited judgments.



Among the findings of Schutze and Cowart about informal judgment
collection methods are these:


* There is really no agreement in linguistics on what counts as an
informal method (though see Sprouse and Almeida 2010 (Other Internet
Resources) for a flat contradiction of this claim).
* The collection of acceptability judgment data is just as
vulnerable to the influence of extraneous variables as are other kinds
of psychological data.
* Judgment samples can be biased in informal judgment
collection.
* Experimenter bias is often not controlled for in informal judgment
collection.
* Judgment materials are often not carefully prepared to present a
relevant, well-ordered, contrasting set of minimal pairs.
* The instability of one-off speaker judgments can be controlled for
by gathering judgments from a given speaker across time.



Although Schutze (1996) and Cowart (1997) are both critical of
traditional Essentialist informal elicitation methods, their primary
concern is to show how the claims of Essentialist linguistics can be
made less vulnerable to legitimate complaints about informal data
collection methods. Broadly speaking, they are friends of
Essentialism. Critics of Essentialism have raised similar concerns in
less friendly terms, but it is important to note that the debate over
the reliability of informal methods is a debate within Essentialist
linguistics as well.


### 3.5 What informal methods actually are



Informal methods of acceptability judgment data have often been
described as excessively casual. Ferreira described the informal
method this way:



> 
> An example sentence that is predicted to be ungrammatical is
> contrasted with some other sentence that is supposed to be similar in
> all relevant ways; these two sentences constitute a "minimal
> pair". The author of the article provides the judgment that the
> sentence hypothesized to be bad is in fact ungrammatical, as indicated
> by the star annotating the example. But there are serious problems
> with this methodology. The example that is tested could have
> idiosyncratic properties due to its unique lexical content.
> Occasionally a second or third minimal pair is provided, but no
> attempt is made to consider the range of relevant extraneous variables
> that must be accounted for and held constant to make sure there
> isn't some correlated property that is responsible for the
> contrast in judgments. Even worse, the "subject" who
> provides the data is not a naive informant, but is in fact the
> theorist himself or herself, and that person has a stake in whether
> the sentence is judged grammatical or ungrammatical. That is, the
> person's theory would be falsified if the prediction were wrong,
> and this is a potential source of bias. (Ferreira 2005: 372)
> 



(It would be appropriate to read 'grammatical' and
'grammaticality' in Ferreira's text as meaning
'acceptable' and 'acceptability'.)



This critical characterization exemplifies the kind of method that
Schutze and Cowart aimed to improve on. More recently, Gibson and
Fedorenko describe the traditional informal method this way:



> 
> As has often been noted in recent years (Cowart, 1997; Edelman &
> Christiansen, 2003; Featherston, 2007; Ferreira, 2005; Gibson &
> Fedorenko, 2010a; Marantz, 2005; Myers, 2009; Schutze, 1996;
> Wasow & Arnold, 2005), the results obtained using this method are
> not necessarily generalisable because of (a) the small number of
> experimental participants (typically one); (b) the small number of
> experimental stimuli (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part
> of the researcher and participants; and (d) the effect of the
> preceding context (e.g., other constructions the researcher may have
> been recently considering). (Gibson and Fedorenko, 2013)
> 



While some Essentialists have acknowledged these problems with the
reliability of informal methods, others have, in effect, denied their
relevance. For example, Colin Phillips (2010) argues that "there
is little evidence for the frequent claim that sloppy data-collection
practices have harmed the development of linguistic theories".
He admits that not all is epistemologically well in syntactic theory,
but adds, "I just don't think that the problems will be
solved by a few rating surveys." He concludes:



> 
> I do not think that we should be fooled into thinking that informal
> judgment gathering is the root of the problem or that more formalized
> judgment collection will solve the problems. (Phillips 2010: 61)
> 



To suggest that informal methods are as fully reliable as controlled
experimental ones would be a serious charge, implying that researchers
like Bard, Robinson, Sorace, Cowart, Schutze, Gibson, Fedorenko,
and others have been wasting their time. But Phillips actually seems
to be making a different claim. He suggests first that informally
gathered data has not actually harmed linguistics, and second that
linguists are in danger of being "fooled" by critics who
invent stories about unreliable data having harmed linguistics.



The harm that Phillips claims has not occurred relates to the charge
that "mainstream linguistics" (he means the current
generative Essentialist framework called 'Minimalism') is
"irrelevant" to broader interests in the cognitive
sciences, and has lost "the initiative in language study".
Of course, Phillips is right in a sense: one cannot insure that
experimental judgment collection methods will address every way in
which Minimalist theorizing is irrelevant to particular endeavors
(language description, language teaching, natural language processing,
or broader questions in cognitive psychological research). But this
claim does not bear on what Schutze (1996) and Cowart (1997) show
about the unreliability of informal methods.



Phillips does not fully accept the view of Chomsky (1969) that
experimental methods are useless for data gathering (he says, "I
do not mean to argue that comprehensive data gathering studies of
acceptability are worthless"). But his defense of informal
methods of data collection rests on whether these methods have damaged
Essentialist theory testing:



> 
> 
> The critiques I have read present no evidence of the supposed damage
> that informal intuitions have caused, and among those who do provide
> specific examples it is rare to provide clear evidence of the supposed
> damage that informal intuitions have caused...
> 
> 
> 
> What I am specifically questioning is whether informal (and
> occasionally careless) gathering of acceptability judgments has
> actually held back progress in linguistics, and whether more careful
> gathering of acceptability judgments will provide the key to future
> progress.
> 
> 
> 



Either Phillips is fronting the surprising opinion that generative
theorizing has never been led down the wrong track by demonstrably
unreliable data, or he is changing the subject. And unless clear
criteria are established for what counts as "damage" and
"holding back," Phillips is not offering any testable
hypothesis about data collection methodology. For example, Phillips
discounts the observation of Schutze (1996) that conflicting
judgments of relative unacceptability of violations of two linguistic
universals held back the development of Government and Binding (GB),
on the grounds that two sets of conflicting judgments and their
analyses "are now largely forgotten, supplanted by theories that
have little to say about such examples." But the fact that the
proposed universals are discarded principles of UG is irrelevant to
the effect that unreliable data once had on the (now largely
abandoned) GB theory. A methodological concern cannot be dismissed on
the basis of a move to a new theory that abandons the old theory but
not its methods!



More recently, Bresnan (2007) claims that many theoretical claims have
arguably been supported by unreliable informally gathered syntactic
acceptability judgments. She observes:



> 
> Erroneous generalizations based on linguistic intuitions about
> isolated, constructed examples occur throughout all parts of the
> grammar. They often seriously underestimate the space of grammatical
> possibility (Taylor 1994, 1996, Bresnan & Nikitina 2003, Fellbaum
> 2005, Lodrup 2006, among others), reflect relative frequency
> instead of categorical grammaticality (Labov 1996, Lapata 1999,
> Manning 2003), overlook complex constraint interactions (Green 1971,
> Gries 2003) and processing effects (Arnon et al. 2005a, b), and fail
> to address the problems of investigator bias (Labov 1975, Naro 1980,
> Chambers 2003: 34) and social intervention (Labov 1996, Milroy 2001,
> Cornips & Poletto 2005). (Bresnan 2007: 301)
> 



Her discussion supports the view that various highly abstract
theoretical hypotheses have been defended through the use of
generalizations based on unreliable data.



The debate over the harm that the acceptance of informally collected
data has had on theory testing is somewhat difficult to understand for
Essentialist, Externalist, and Emergentist researchers who have been
trained in the methods of the cognitive and behavioral sciences. Why
try to support one's theories of universal grammar, or of the
grammars of particular languages, by using questionably reliable
data?



One clue might be found in Culicover and Jackendoff (2010), who
write:



> 
> [T]heoreticians' subjective judgments are essential in
> formulating linguistic theories. It would cripple linguistic
> investigation if it were required that all judgments of ambiguity and
> grammaticality be subject to statistically rigorous experiments on
> naive subjects. (Culicover and Jackendoff 2010)
> 



The worry is that use of experimental methods is so resource
consumptive that it would impede the formulation of linguistic
theories. But this changes the subject from the importance of using
reliable data as evidence in theory *testing* to using only
experimentally gathered data in theory *formulation*. We are
not aware of anyone who has ever suggested that at the stage of
hypothesis development or theory formulation the linguist should
eschew intuition. Certainly Bard et al., Schutze, Cowart, Gibson
& Fedorenko, and Ferreira say no such thing. The relevant issue
concerns what data should be used to *test* theories, which is
a very different matter.



We noted earlier that there are clear and uncontroversial
acceptability judgments, and that these judgments are reliable data.
The difficulty lies in distinguishing the clear, uncontroversial, and
reliable data from what only appears to be clear, uncontroversial, and
reliable to a research community at a time. William Labov, the founder
of modern quantitative sociolinguistics, who takes an Emergentist
approach, proposed a set of working methodological principles in Labov
(1975) for adjudicating when experimental methods should be
employed.



> 
> 
> **The Consensus Principle**: If there is no reason to
> think otherwise, assume that the judgments of any native speaker are
> characteristic of all speakers.
> 
> 
> 
> **The Experimenter Principle**: If there is any
> disagreement on introspective judgments, the judgments of those who
> are familiar with the theoretical issues may not be counted as
> evidence.
> 
> 
> 
> **The Clear Case Principle**: Disputed judgments should
> be shown to include at least one consistent pattern in the speech
> community or be abandoned. If differing judgments are said to
> represent different dialects, enough investigation of each dialect
> should be carried out to show that each judgment is a clear case in
> that dialect. (Labov 1975, quoted in Schutze 1996: 200)
> 
> 
> 



If we accept that 'introspective judgments' are
acceptability judgments, then Labov's rules of thumb are guides
for when to deploy experimental methods, although they no doubt need
refinement. However, it seems vastly more likely that careful
development of such methodological rules of thumb can serve to improve
the reliability of linguistic data and adjudicate these methodological
disputes that seem largely independent of any particular approach to
linguistics.


### 3.6 Corpus data



In linguistics, the goal of collecting corpus data is to identify and
organize a representative sample of a written and/or spoken variety
from which characteristics of the entire variety or genre can be
induced. Concordances of word usage in linguistic context have long
been used to aid in the translation and interpretation of literary and
sacred texts of particular authors (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas)
and of particular texts (e.g. the Torah, the rest of the Old
Testament, the Gospels, the Epistles). Formal textual criticism, the
identification of antecedently existing oral traditions that were
later redacted into Biblical texts, and author identification (e.g.
figuring out which of the Epistles were written by Paul and which were
probably not) began to develop in the late 19th century.



The development of computational methods for collecting, analyzing,
and searching corpora have seen rapid development as computer memory
has become less expensive and search and analysis programs have become
faster. The first computer searchable corpus of American English, the
Brown Corpus, developed in the 1960s, contained just over one million
word tokens. The British National Corpus (BNC) is a balanced corpus
containing over 100 million words--a hundredfold size
increase--of which 90% is written prose published from 1991 to
1994 and 10% is spoken English. Between 2005 and 2007, billion-word
corpora were released for British English (ukWaC), German (deWaC), and
Italian (itWaC)--a thousand times bigger than the Brown corpus.
And the entire World Wide Web probably holds about a thousand times as
much as that--around a trillion words. Thus corpus linguistics
has gone from megabytes of data ([?] 103kB) to terabytes
of data ([?] 109kB) in fifty years.



Just as a central issue concerning acceptability judgment data
concerns its reliability as evidence for empirical generalizations
about languages or idiolects, a central question concerning the
collection of corpus data concerns whether or not it is representative
of the language variety it purports to represent. Some linguists make
the criterion of representativeness definitional: they call a
collection of samples of language use a corpus only if it has been
carefully balanced between different genres (conversation, informal
writing, journalism, literature, etc.), regional varieties, or
whatever.



But corpora are of many different kinds. Some are just very large
compilations of text from individual sources such as newspapers of
record or the World Wide Web--compilations large enough for the
diversity in the source to act as a surrogate for representativeness.
For example, a billion words of a newspaper, despite coming from a
single source, will include not only journalists' news reports
and prepared editorials but also quoted speech, political rhetoric,
humor columns, light features, theater and film reviews,
readers' letters, fiction items, and so on, and will thus
provide examples of a much wider variety of styles than one might have
thought.



Corpora are cleaned up through automatic or manual removal of such
elements as numerical tables, typographical slips, spelling mistakes,
markup tags, accidental repetitions (*the the*), larger-scale
duplications (e.g., copies on mirror sites), boilerplate text
(*Opinions expressed in this email do not necessarily
reflect*...), and so on (see Baroni et al. 2009 for a fuller
discussion of corpus cleaning).



The entire web itself can be used as a corpus to some degree, despite
its constantly changing content, its multilinguality, its many tables
and images, and its total lack of quality control; but when it is, the
outputs of searches are nearly always cleaned by disregarding unwanted
results. For example, Google searches are blind to punctuation,
capitalization, and sentence boundaries, so search results for *to
be* will unfortunately include irrelevant cases, such as where a
sentence like *Do you want to?* happens to be followed by a
sentence like *Be careful*.



Corpora can be annotated in ways that permit certain kinds of analysis
and grammar testing. One basic kind of annotation is part-of-speech
tagging, in which each word is labeled with its syntactic category.
Another is lemmatization, which classifies the different
morphologically inflected forms of a word as belonging together
(*goes*, *gone*, *going*, and *went*
belong with *go*, for example). A more thoroughgoing kind of
annotation involves adding markup that encodes trees representing
their structure; an example like *That road leads to the
freeway* might be marked up as a Clause within which the first two
words make up a Noun Phrase (NP), the last four constitute a Verb
Phrase (VP), and so on, giving a structural analysis represented
thus:



![Structural analysis of 'That road leads to the highway'](clause.png)


Such a diagram is isomorphic to (and the one shown was computed
directly from) a labeled bracketing like this:



(.Clause. (.NP. (.D. 'that' ) (.N. 'road' ) )
(.VP. (.V. 'leads' ) (.PP. (.P. 'to' ) (.NP.
(.D. 'the' ) (.N. 'freeway' ) ) ) ) )



and this in turn could be represented in a markup language like XML
as:




```

<clause>
 <nounphrase>

<determiner>that</determiner>

<noun>road</noun>
 </nounphrase>

<verbphrase>
 <verb>leads</verb>

<prepphrase>
 <prep>to</prep>

<nounphrase>
 <determiner>the</determiner>

<noun>freeway</noun>
 </nounphrase>

</prepphrase>

</verbphrase>
</clause>

```



A corpus annotated with tree structure is known as a
**treebank**. Clearly, such a corpus is not a raw record
of attested utterances at all; it is a combination of a collection of
attested utterances together with a systematic attempt at analysing
their structure. Whether the analysis is added manually or
semi-automatically, it is ultimately based on native speaker
judgments. (Treebanks are often developed by graduate student
annotators tutored by computational linguists; naturally, consistency
between annotators is an issue that needs regular attention. See
Artstein and Poesio, 2008, for discussion of the methodological
issues.).



One of the purposes of a treebank is to permit the further
investigation of a language and the checking of further linguistic
hypotheses by searching a large database of previously established
analyses. It can also be used to test grammars, natural language
processing systems, or machine learning programs.



Going beyond syntactic parse trees, it is possible to annotate corpora
further, with information of a semantic and pragmatic nature. There is
ongoing computational linguistic research aimed at discovering
whether, for example, semantic annotation that is semi-automatically
added might suffice for recognition of whether a product review is
positive or negative (what computational linguists call
'sentiment analysis').



Notice, then, that using corpus data does not mean abandoning or
escaping from the use of intuitions about acceptability or grammatical
structure: the results of a corpus search are generally filtered
through the judgments of an investigator who decides which pieces of
corpus data are to be taken at face value and which are just bad hits
or irrelevant noise.



Difficult methodological issues arise in connection with the
collection, annotation, and use of corpus data. For example, there is
the issue of extremely rare expression tokens. Are they accurately
recorded tokens of expression types that turn up only in consequence
of sporadic errors and should be dismissed as irrelevant unless the
topic of interest is performance errors? Are they due to errors in the
compilation of the corpus itself, corresponding to neither accepted
usage nor sporadic speech errors? Or are they perfectly grammatical
but (for some extraneous reason) very rare, at least in that
particular corpus?



Many questions arise about what kind of corpus is best suited to the
research questions under consideration, as well as what kind of
annotation is most appropriate. For example, as Ferreira (2005: 375)
points out, some large corpora, insofar as they have *not* been
cleaned of speech errors, provide relevant data for studying the
distribution of speech disfluencies. In addition, probabilistic
information about the relation between a particular verb and its
arguments has been used to show that "verb-argument preferences
[are] an essential part of the process of sentence
interpretation" (Roland and Jurafsky 2002: 325): acceptability
judgments on individual expressions do not provide information about
the distribution of a verb and its arguments in various kinds of
speech and writing. Studying conveyed meaning in context and
identification of speech acts will require a kind of data that
decontextualized acceptability judgments do not provide but
semantically annotated corpora might.



Many Essentialists have been skeptical of the reliability of
uncleaned, unanalyzed corpus data as evidence to support linguistic
theorizing, because it is assumed to be replete with strings that any
native speaker would judge unacceptable. And many Emergentists and
Externalists, as well as some Essentialists, have charged that
informally gathered acceptability judgments can be highly unreliable
too. Both worries are apposite; but the former does not hold for
adequately cleaned and analyzed corpora, and the latter does not hold
for judgment data that has been gathered using appropriately
controlled methods. In certain contested cases of acceptability, it
will of course be important to use both corpus and controlled
elicitation methods to cross-compare.



Notice that we have not in any way suggested that our three broad
approaches to linguistics should differ in the kinds of data they use
for theory testing: Essentialists are not limited to informal
elicitation; nor are Emergentists and Externalists denied access to
it. In matters of methodology, at least, there is in principle an open
market--even if many linguists seem to think otherwise.


## 4. Language Acquisition



The three approaches to linguistic theorizing have at least something
to say about how languages are acquired, or could in principle be
acquired. Language acquisition has had a much higher profile since
generative Essentialist work of the 1970s and 1980s gave it a central
place on the agenda for linguistic theory.



Research into language acquisition falls squarely within the
psychology of language; see the entry on
 language and innateness.
 In this section we do not aim to deal in detail with any of the
voluminous literature on psychological or computational experiments
bearing on language acquisition, or with any of the empirical study of
language acquisition by developmental linguists, or the
'stimulus poverty' argument for the existence of innate
knowledge about linguistic structure (Pullum and Scholz 2002). Our
goals are merely to define the issue of **linguistic
nativism**, set it in context, and draw morals for our three
approaches from some of the mathematical work on inductive language
learning.


### 4.1 Linguistic nativism



The reader with prior acquaintance with the literature of linguistics
will notice that we have not made reference to any partitioning of
linguists into two camps called 'empiricists' and
'rationalists' (see e.g. Matthews 1984, Cowie 1999). We
draw a different distinction relating to the psychological and
biological prerequisites for first language acquisition. It divides
nearly all Emergentists and Externalists from most Essentialists. It
has often been confused with the classical empiricist/rationalist
issue.



**General nativists** maintain that the prerequisites for
language acquisition are just general cognitive abilities and
resources. **Linguistic nativists**, by contrast, claim
that human infants have access to at least some specifically
linguistic information that is not learned from linguistic experience.
Table 3 briefly sketches the differences between the two views.





|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| general nativists | linguistic nativists |
| Languages are acquired mainly through the exercise of defeasible
inductive methods, based on experience of linguistic
communication | Language cannot be acquired by defeasible inductive methods; its
structural principles must to a very large degree be unlearned |
| The unlearned capacities that underpin language acquisition
constitute a uniquely human complex of non-linguistic dispositions and
mechanisms that also subserve other cognitive functions | In addition to various broadly language-relevant cognitive and
perceptual capacities, language acquisition draws on an unlearned
system of 'universal grammar' that constrains language
form |
| Various non-human animal species may well have most or all of
the capacities that humans use for language acquisition--though
no non-human species seems to have the whole package, so interspecies
differences are a matter of degree | There is a special component of the human mind which has the
development of language as its key function, and no non-human species
has anything of the sort, so there is a difference in kind between the
abilities of humans and other animals |



Table 3: General and linguistic nativism
contrasted




There does not really seem to be anyone who is a complete
non-nativist: nobody really thinks that a creature with no unlearned
capacities at all could acquire a language. That was the point of the
much-quoted remark by Quine (1972: 95-96) about how "the
behaviorist is knowingly and cheerfully up to his neck in innate
mechanisms of learning-readiness". Geoffrey Sampson (2001, 2005)
is about as extreme an opponent of linguistic nativism as one can
find, but even he would not take the failure of language acquisition
in his cat to be unrelated to the cognitive and physical capabilities
of cats.



The issue on which empirical research can and should be done is
whether some of the unlearned prerequisites that humans enjoy have
specifically linguistic content. For a philosophically-oriented
discussion of the matter, see chapters 4-6 of Stainton (2006).
For extensive debate about "the argument from poverty of the
stimulus", see Pullum and Scholz (2002) together with the six
critiques published in the same issue of *The Linguistic
Review* and the responses to those critiques by Scholz and Pullum
(2002).


### 4.2 Language learnability



Linguists have given considerable attention to considerations of
in-principle **learnability**--not so much the
course of language acquisition as tracked empirically (the work of
developmental psycholinguists) but the question of how languages of
the human sort could possibly be learned by any kind of learner. The
topic was placed squarely on the agenda by Chomsky (1965); and a
hugely influential mathematical linguistics paper by Gold (1967)has
dominated much of the subsequent discussion.


#### 4.2.1 The Gold paradigm



Gold began by considering a reformulation of the standard
philosophical problem of induction. The trouble with the question
'Which hypothesis is correct given the totality of the
data?' is of course the one that Hume saw: if the domain is
unbounded, no finite amount of data can answer the question. Any
finite body of evidence will be consistent with arbitrarily many
hypotheses that are not consistent with each other. But Gold proposed
replacing the question with a very different one: *Which tentative
hypothesis is the one to pick*, given the data provided so far,
assuming a finite number of wrong guesses can be forgiven?



Gold assumed that the hypotheses, in the case of language learning,
were generative grammars (or alternatively parsers; he proves results
concerning both, but for brevity we follow most of the literature and
neglect the very similar results on parsers). The learner's task
is conceived of as responding to an unending input data stream
(ultimately complete, in that every expression eventually turns up) by
enunciating a sequence of guesses at grammars.



Although Gold talks in developmental psycholinguistic terms about
language learners learning grammars by trial and error, his extremely
abstract proofs actually make no reference to the linguistic content
of languages or grammars at all. The set of all finite grammars
formulable in any given metalanguage is computably enumerable, so
grammars can be systematically numbered. Inputs--grammatical
expressions from the target language--can also be numerically
encoded. We end up being concerned simply with the existence or
non-existence of certain functions from natural number sequences to
natural numbers.



A successful learner is one who uses a procedure that is guaranteed to
eventually hit on a correct grammar. For single languages, this is
trivial: if the target language is *L* and it is generated by a
grammar *G*, then the procedure "Always guess
*G*" does the job, and every language is learnable. What
makes the problem interesting is applying it to *classes* of
grammars. A successful learner for a class *C* is one who uses
a procedure that is guaranteed to succeed no matter what grammar from
*C* is the target and no matter what the data stream is like
(as long as it is complete and contains no ungrammatical
examples).



Gold's work has interesting similarities with earlier
philosophical work on inductive learning by Hilary Putnam (1963; it is
not clear whether Gold was aware of this paper). Putnam gave an
informal proof of a sort of incompleteness theorem for inductive
regularity-learning devices: no matter what algorithm is used in a
machine for inducing regularities from experience, and thus becoming
able to predict events, there will always be some possible
environmental regularities that will defeat it. (As a simple example,
imagine an environment giving an unbroken sequence of presentations
all having some property *a*. If there is a positive integer
*n* such that after *n* presentations the machine will
predict that presentation number n + 1 will also have property
*a*, then the machine will be defeated by an environment
consisting of *n* presentations of *a* followed by one
with the incompatible property *b*--the future need not
always resemble the past. But if on the other hand there is no such
*n*, then an environment consisting of an unending sequence of
*a* presentations will defeat it.)



Gold's theorems are founded on certain specific idealizing
assumptions about the language learning situation, some of which are
intuitively very generous to the learner. The main ones are these:


* **Pre-set grammar class**. A class of grammars from
among which to select is fixed ab initio, and the learner's
strategy can be one that only works for that class.
* **Pre-set vocabulary**. A finite universal vocabulary
of elements *V* is fixed ab initio, and the learner can rely on
not encountering any other elements (though the learner does not know
which subset of *V* is used in the target language).
* **Unending input**. The input (the evidence presented
to the learner) goes on forever--though it may contain arbitrary
repetitions, and a successful learner will always reach a point where
no future evidence will cause a change of guess.
* **Exhaustive evidence**. Ultimately every expression
in the language will appear in the evidence presented to the
learner.
* **No noise**. Every input example is a grammatical
expression of the target language.
* **No ordering restrictions**. Any expression may
appear at any point in the input data stream.
* **No memory limit**. The learner can remember every
expression ever presented.
* **No time limit**. Learning must be achieved after
some finite time, but no fixed bound is set in advance.
* **Generative grammar target**. What is ultimately
learned is a generative grammar.
* **No statistics**. Frequency of particular
expressions in the input plays no role in the learning process.



The most celebrated of the theorems Gold proved (using some reasoning
remarkably similar to that of Putnam 1963) showed that a language
learner could be similarly hostage to malign environments. Imagine a
learner being exposed to an endless and ultimately exhaustive sequence
of presented expressions from some target language--Gold calls
such a sequence a 'text'. Suppose the learner does not
know in advance whether the language is infinite, or is one of the
infinitely many finite languages over the vocabulary *V*. Gold
reasons roughly thus:


* There must be some *n* such that an environment consisting
of a sequence of *n* presented expressions all taken from a
certain finite language *L*1 (possibly with many
repetitions) will cause the learner to guess the target language is
*L*1. (If there is not, then we already know how to
baffle the learner: the learner will be unable to learn
*L*1 from any text.)
* But if there is such an *n*, then the learner will be
baffled by any infinite target language that is a superset of them
all: a text consisting of *n* presentations of expressions from
*L*1 followed by *n* presentations of a
slightly larger finite language *L*2, and so on
forever (there is no largest finite language, and ex hypothesi the
learner will keep trying them all).



Leaping too soon to the conclusion that the target language is
infinite will be disastrous, because there will be no way to retrench:
no presented examples from a finite language
*L**k* will ever conflict with the hypothesis
that the target is some infinite superset of
*L**k*.



The relevance of all this to the philosophy of linguistics is that the
theorem just sketched has been interpreted by many linguists,
psycholinguists, and philosophers as showing that humans could not
learn languages by inductive inference based on examples of language
use, because *all* of the well-known families of languages
defined by different types of generative grammar have the crucial
property of allowing grammars for every finite language and for at
least some infinite supersets of them. But Gold's paper has
often been over-interpreted. A few examples of the resultant mistakes
follow.



**It's not about underdetermination**. Gold's
negative results are sometimes wrongly taken to be an unsurprising
reflection of the underdetermination of theories by finite bodies of
evidence (Hauser et al. 2002 seem to make this erroneous equation on
p. 1577; so do Fodor and Crowther 2002, implicitly--see Scholz
and Pullum 2002, 204-206). But the failure of
text-identifiability for certain classes of languages is different
from underdetermination in a very important way, because there are
infinite classes of infinite languages that *are* identifiable
from text. The first chapter of Jain et al. (1999) discusses an
illustrative example (basically, it is the class containing, for all
*n* > 0, the set of all strings with length greater than
*n*). There are infinitely many others. For example, Shinohara
(1990) showed that for any positive integer *n* the class of
all languages generated by a context-sensitive grammar with not more
than *n* rules is learnable from text.



**It's not about stimulus poverty**. It has also
sometimes been assumed that Gold is giving some kind of argument from
poverty of the stimulus (there are signs of this in Cowie 1999, 194ff;
Hauser et al. 2002, 1577; and Prinz 2002, 210). This is very clearly a
mistake (as both Laurence and Margolis 2001 and Matthews 2007 note):
in Gold's text-learning scenario there is no stimulus poverty at
all. Every expression in the language eventually turns up in the
learner's input.



**It's not all bad news**. It is sometimes
forgotten that Gold established a number of optimistic results as well
as the pessimistic one about learning from text. Given what he called
an 'informant' environment rather than a text environment,
we see strikingly different results. An informant environment is an
infinite sequence of presentations sorted into two lists, positive
instances (expressions belonging to the target language) and negative
instances (not in the language). Almost all major language-theoretic
classes are identifiable in the limit from an informant environment
(up to and including the class of all languages with a primitive
recursive characteristic function, which comes close to covering any
language that could conceivably be of linguistic interest), and all
computably enumerable languages become learnable if texts are allowed
to be sequenced in particular ways (see the results in Gold 1967 on
'anomalous text').



Gold did not give a necessary condition for a class to be identifiable
in the limit from text, but Angluin (1980) later provided one (in a
result almost but not quite obtained by Wexler and Hamburger 1973).
Angluin showed that a class *C* is text-identifiable iff every
language *L* in *C* has a finite "telltale"
subset *T* such that if *T* is also proper subset of
some other language in *C*, that other language is not a proper
subset of *L*. This condition precludes guessing too large a
language. Once all the members of the telltale subset for *L*
have been received as input, the learner can safely make *L*
the current conjecture. The language to be identified must be either
*L* or (if subsequent inputs include new sentences not in
*L*) some larger language, but it can't be a proper
subset of *L*.



Johnson (2004) provides a useful review of several other
misconceptions about Gold's work; e.g., the notion that it might
be the absence of semantics from the input that makes identification
from text impossible (this is not the case).


#### 4.2.2 Gold's paradox



Some generative Essentialists see a kind of paradox in Gold's
results--a reductio on one or more of the assumptions he makes
about in-principle learnability. To put it very crudely, learning
generative grammars from presented grammatical examples seems to have
been proved impossible, yet children do learn their first languages,
which for generative Essentialists means they internalize generative
psychogrammars, and it is claimed to be an empirical fact that they
get almost no explicit evidence about what is *not* in the
language (Brown and Hanlon 1970 is invariably cited to support this).
Contradiction. Gold himself suggested three escape routes from the
apparent paradox:


1. Assume tighter limits on the pre-set grammar class. Perhaps, for
example, learners have an 'innate' grasp of some
definition of the pre-set grammar class that guarantees its
learnability. (For example, identifiability in the limit from text
could be guaranteed by ensuring that the class of candidate languages
does not contain both (a) some infinite set of finite languages and
(b) some infinite language that is the union of all of them.)
2. Assume learners get systematic information about what is
*not* in the language (perhaps indirectly, in ways not yet
recognized), so that the environment is of the informant type rather
than the text type.
3. Assume some helpful feature is present in learning environments.
The 'no order restrictions' assumption might be false:
there could be regularities in the order of expressions in texts that
can support inferences about what is ungrammatical.



All three of these paths have been subsequently explored. Path (1)
appealed to generative Essentialists. Chomsky (1981) suggested an
extreme restriction: that universal grammar permitted only finitely
many grammars. This claim (for which Chomsky had little basis: see
Pullum 1983) would immediately guarantee that not all finite languages
are humanly learnable (there are infinitely many finite languages, so
for most of them there would be no permissible grammar). Osherson and
Weinstein (1984) even proved that under three fairly plausible
assumptions about the conditions on learning, finiteness of the class
of languages is necessary--that is, a class *must* be
finite if it is to be identifiable from text. However, they also
proved that this is not sufficient: there are very small finite
classes of languages that are *not* identifiable from text, so
it is logically possible for text-identification to be impossible even
given only a finite number of languages (grammars). These two results
show that Chomsky's approach cannot be the whole answer.



Path (2) proposes investigation of children's input with an eye
to finding covert sources of negative evidence. Various
psycholinguists have pursued this idea; see the entry on
 language and innateness
 in this encyclopedia, and (to cite one example) the results of
Chouinard and Clark (2003) on hitherto unnoticed sources of negative
evidence in the infant's linguistic environment, such as
parental corrections.



Path (3) suggests investigating the nature of children's
linguistic environments more generally. Making evidence available to
the learner in some fixed order can certainly alter the picture quite
radically (Gold proved that if some primitive-recursive generator
controls the text it can in effect encode the identity of the target
language so that all computably enumerable languages become
identifiable from text). It is possible in principle that limitations
on texts (or on learners' uptake) might have positive rather
than negative effects on learnability (see Newport 1988; Elman 1993;
Rohde and Plaut 1999; and the entry on
 language and innateness).


#### 4.2.3 The claimed link to 'rationalism' versus 'empiricism'



Gold's suggested strategy of restricting the pre-set class of
grammars has been interpreted by some as a defense of rationalist
rather than empiricist theories of language acquisition. For example,
Wexler and Culicover state:



> 
> Empiricist theory allows for a class of sensory or peripheral
> processing mechanisms by means of which the organism receives data. In
> addition, the organism possesses some set of inductive principles or
> learning mechanisms...Rationalist theory also assumes that a
> learner has sensory mechanisms and inductive principles. But
> rationalist theory assumes that in addition the learner possesses a
> rich set of principles concerning the general nature of the ability
> that is to be learned. (Wexler and Culicover 1980: 5)
> 



Wexler and Culicover claim that 'empiricist' learning
mechanisms are both weak and general: not only are they 'not
related to the learning of any particular subject matter or cognitive
ability' but they are not 'limited to any particular
species'. It is of course not surprising that empiricist
learning fails if it is defined in a way that precludes drawing a
distinction between the cognitive abilities of humans and fruit
flies.



Equating Gold's idea of restricting the class of grammars with
the idea of a 'rationalist' knowledge acquisition theory,
Wexler and Culicover try to draw out the consequences of Gold's
paradigm for the Essentialist linguistic theory of Chomsky (1965).
They show how a very tightly restricted class of transformational
grammars could be regarded as text-identifiable under extremely strong
assumptions (e.g., that all languages have the same innately known
deep structures).



Matthews (1984) follows Wexler and Culicover's lead and draws a
more philosophically oriented moral:



> 
> The significance of Gold's result becomes apparent if one
> considers that (i) empiricists assume that there are no constraints on
> the class of possible languages (besides perhaps that natural
> languages be recursively enumerable), and (ii) the learner employs a
> maximally powerful learning strategy--there are no strategies
> that could accomplish what that assumed by Gold cannot. These two
> facts, given Gold's unsolvability result for text data,
> effectively dispose of the empiricist claim that there exists a
> 'discovery procedure'. (1989: 60)
> 



The actual relation of Gold's results to the
empiricism/rationalism controversy seems to us rather different.
Gold's paradigm looks a lot more like a formalization of
so-called 'rationalism'. The fixed class of candidate
hypotheses (grammars) corresponds to what is given by universal
grammar--the innate definition of the essential properties of
language. What Gold actually shows, therefore, is not "the
plausibility of rationalism" but rather the inadequacy of a huge
range of rationalist theories: under a wide range of different choices
of universal grammar, language acquisition appears to remain
impossible.



Moreover, Matthews ignores (as most linguists have) the existence of
large and interesting classes of languages that are
text-identifiable.



Gold's result, like Putnam's earlier one, does show that a
certain kind of trial-and-error inductive learning is insufficient to
permit learning of arbitrary environmental regularities. There has to
be some kind of initial bias in the learning procedure or in the data.
But 'empiricism', the supposed opponent of
'rationalism', is not to be equated with a denial of the
existence of learning biases. No one doubts that humans have inductive
biases. To quote Quine again, "Innate biases and dispositions
are the cornerstone of behaviorism, and have been studied by
behaviorists" (1972: 95-96). As Lappin and Shieber (2007)
stress, there cannot be such a thing as a learning procedure (or
processing mechanism) with no biases at all.



The biases posited in Emergentist theories of language acquisition are
found, at least in part, in the non-linguistic social and cognitive
bases of human communication. And the biases of Externalist approaches
to language acquisition are to be found in the distributional and
stochastic structure of the learning input and the multitude of
mechanisms that process that input and their interactions. All
contemporary approaches to language acquistion have acknowledged
Gold's results, but those results do not by themselves vindicate
any one of our three approaches to the study of language.



Gold's explicit equation of acquiring a language with
identifying a generative grammar that exactly generates it naturally
makes his work seem relevant to generative Essentialists (though even
for them, his results do not provide anything like a sufficient reason
for adopting the linguistic nativist position). But another key
assumption, that nothing about the statistical structure of the input
plays a role in the acquisition process, is being questioned by
increasing numbers of Externalists, many of whom have used Bayesian
modeling to show that the absence of positive evidence can function as
a powerful source of (indirect) negative evidence: learning can be
driven by what is not found as well as by what is (see e.g. Foraker et
al. (2009)).



Most Emergentists simply reject the assumption that what is learned is
a generative grammar. They see the acquisition task as a matter of
learning the details of an array of constructions (roughly,
meaning-bearing ways of structurally composing words or phrases) and
how to use them to communicate. How such learning is accomplished
needs a great deal of further study, but Gold's paper did not
show it to be impossible.


## 5. Language Evolution



Over the past three decades a large amount of work has been done on
topics to which the term 'language evolution' is attached,
but there are in fact four distinct such topics:


1. the phylogenetic emergence of **non-human
communication** capacities, systems, and behaviors in various
animals;
2. the phylogenetic emergence of uniquely **human
communication** capacities, systems, and behaviors;
3. the phylogenetic emergence, unique in humans, of the capacity (or
capacities) to **develop**, **acquire**, and
**use** language;
4. the course of **historical evolution** through
intergenerational changes in particular languages as they are acquired
and used by humans.


### 5.1 Phylogenetic emergence



Emergentists tend to regard any of the topics (a)-(d) as
potentially relevant to the study of language evolution. Essentialists
tend to focus solely on (c). Some Essentialists even deny that (a) and
(b) have any relevance to the study of (c); for example:



> 
> There is nothing useful to be said about behavior or thought at the
> level of abstraction at which animal and human communication fall
> together... [H]uman language, it appears, is based on entirely
> different principles. This, I think, is an important point, often
> overlooked by those who approach language as a natural, biological
> phenomenon; in particular, it seems rather pointless, for these
> reasons, to speculate about the evolution of human language from
> simpler systems... (Chomsky 1968: 62)
> 



Other generative Essentialists, like Pinker and Bloom (1990) and
Pinker and Jackendoff (2005), seem open to the view that even the most
elemental aspects of topic (b) can be directly relevant to the study
of (c). This division among Essentialists reflects a division among
their views about the role of adaptive explanations in the emergence
of (b) and especially (c). For example:



> 
> We know very little about what happens when 1010 neurons
> are crammed into something the size of a basketball, with further
> conditions imposed by the specific manner in which this system
> developed over time. It would be a serious error to suppose that all
> properties, or the interesting properties of the structures that
> evolved, can be 'explained' in terms of 'natural
> selection'. (Chomsky 1975:59, quoted by Newmeyer 1998 and
> Jackendoff 2002)
> 



The view expressed here that all (or even most) interesting properties
of the language faculty are not adaptations conflicts with the basic
explanatory strategy of evolutionary psychology found in the
neo-Darwinian Essentialist views of Pinker and Bloom.
Piattelli-Palmarini (1989), following Chomsky, adopts a fairly
standard Bauplan critique of adaptationism. On this view the language
faculty did not originate as an adaptation, but more plausibly
"may have originally arisen for some purely architectural or
structural reason (perhaps overall brain size, or the sheer
duplication of pre-existing modules), or as a by product of the
evolutionary pressures" (p. 19), i.e., it is a kind of Gouldian
spandrel.



More recently, some Essentialist-leaning authors have rejected the
view that no analogies and homologies between animal and human
communication are relevant to the study of language. For example, in
the context of commenting on Hauser et al. (2002), Tecumseh Fitch
(2010) claims that "Although Language, writ large, is unique to
our species (many probably most) of the mechanisms involved in
language have analogues or homologues in other animals."
However, the view that the investigation of animal communication can
shed light on human language is still firmly rejected by some. For
example, Bickerton (2007: 512) asserts that "nothing resembling
human language could have developed from prior animal call
systems." 



Bickerton fronts the following simple argument for his view:



> 
> If any adaptation is unique to a species, the selective pressure that
> drove it must also be unique to that species; otherwise the adaptation
> would have appeared elsewhere, at least in rudimentary form. (2007:
> 514)
> 



Thus, the mere fact that language is unique to humans is sufficient to
rule out monkey and primate call systems as preadapations for
language. But, *contra* Bickerton, a neo-Darwinian like
Jackendoff (2002) appeals to the work of Dunbar (1998), Power (1998),
Worden (1998) to provide a selectionist story which assumes that
cooperation in hunting, defense (Pinker and Bloom 1990), and "
'social grooming' or deception" are selective forces
that operated on human ancestors to drive increases in expressive
power that distinguishes non-human communication and human linguistic
capacities and systems. Bickerton (2014), however, combines aspects of
Essentialism, Emergentism, and Externalism by taking equal parts of
Minimalism, primatology, and cultural evolution into a more holistic
account. He specifically tailors a niche construction theory to
explain the emergence of displaced, discrete symbolization in a
particular kind of primate, namely human beings. He thus allows for
(a) and (b) to figure in an explanation of (c). This is somewhat of a
departure from his earlier positions.



Within the general Essentialist camp, language evolution has taken
center stage since the inception of the Minimalist Program. An
explanation of the evolution of language now became one of the main
theoretical driving forces behind linguistic theory and explanation.
Again, the focus seems to have stayed largely on (c). Berwick and
Chomsky explicitly state:



> 
> 
> At some time in the very recent past, apparently sometime before
> 80,000 years ago, if we can judge from associated symbolic proxies,
> individuals in a small group of hominids in East Africa underwent a
> minor biological change that provided the operation Merge-an operation
> that takes human concepts as computational atoms and yields structured
> expressions that, systematically interpreted by the conceptual system,
> provide a rich language of thought. (2016: 87)
> 
> 
> 



Such theories rely heavily on the possibility of the evolution of
language being explained in terms of saltation or random mutation.
This postulate has come under significant scrutiny (see Steedman
2017). Saltation views, however, rely on one of the core assumptions
mentioned in the quote above, i.e. that language evolved circa 100 000
years old. This central claim has recently been challenged by Everett
(2017) who cites paleontological evidence from the alleged nautical
abilities of *Homo Erectus* to dismantle this timeline. If
true, this would mean that language evolved around two million years
ago and random mutation need not be the only viable explanation as
many in the Essentialist framework assume (see Progovac 2015 for a
particular gradualist account). 



While generative Essentialists debate among themselves about the
plausibility of adaptive explanations for the emergence of essential
features of a modular language capacity, Emergentists are perhaps best
characterized as seeking broad evolutionary explanations of the
features of languages (topic (c)) and communicative capacities (topics
(b) and (c)) conceived in non-essentialist, non-modular ways. And as
theorists who are committed to exploring non-modular views of
linguistic capacities (topic (c)), the differences and similarities
between (a) and (b) are potentially relevant to (c).



Primatologists like Cheney and Seyfarth, psychologists like Tomasello,
anthropologists like Terrence Deacon, and linguists like Phillip
Lieberman share an interest in investigating the communicative,
anatomical, and cognitive characteristics of non-human animals to
identify biological differences between humans, and monkeys and
primates. In the following paragraph we discuss Cheney and Seyfarth
(2005) as an example, but we could easily have chosen any of a number
of other theorists.



Cheney and Seyfarth (2005) emphasize that non-human primates have a
small, stimulus specific repertoire of vocal productions that are not
"entirely involuntary," and this contrasts with their
"almost openended ability to learn novel sound-meaning
pairs" (p. 149). They also emphasize that vocalizations in
monkeys and apes are used to communicate information about the
vocalizer, not to provide information intended to "rectify false
beliefs in others or instruct others" (p. 150). Non-human
primate communication consists in the mainly involuntary broadcasting
of the vocalizer's current affective state. Moreover, although
Cheney and Seyfarth recognize that the vervet monkey's
celebrated call system (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990) is
"functionally referential" in context, their calls have no
explicit meaning since they lack "any propositional
structure". From this they conclude:



> 
> The communication of non-human animals lacks three features that are
> abundantly present in the utterances of young children: a rudimentary
> ability to attribute mental states different from their own to others,
> the ability to generate new words, and lexical syntax. (2005: 151)
> 



By 'lexical syntax' Cheney and Seyfarth mean a kind of
semantic compositionality of characteristic vocalizations. If a
vocalization (call) were to have lexical syntax, the semantic
significance of the whole would depend on the relation of the
structure of parts of the call to the structure of what they signify.
The absence of 'lexical syntax' in call systems suggests
that it is illegitimate to think of them as having anything like
semantic structure at all.



Despite the rudimentary character of animal communication systems when
compared with human languages, Cheney and Seyfarth argue that monkeys
and apes exhibit at least five characteristics that are
pre-adaptations for human communication:


1. their vocalizations are representational;
2. they have competitive/cooperative relations in which alliances,
friendships, and rivalries that "create selective pressures for
the kind of complex, abstract conceptual abilities that are likely to
have proceeded the earlier linguistic communication";
3. because of (ii), their representations of social relations between
individuals and themselves are hierarchally structured;
4. certain monkeys, e.g. baboons, have open-ended, rule-governed
systems of social knowledge;
5. their knowledge is propositional.



It is, of course, controversial to claim that monkeys have
rule-governed propositional social knowledge systems as claimed in
(iv) and (v). For instance, Tomasello's (2008)
'Cooperative Communication' approach makes a case for
primate intentional systems not based on their vocalizations but on
their gestural systems. Therein he claims that "great ape
gestural communication shares with human linguistic communication
foundational aspects of its manner of functioning, namely, the
intentional and flexible use of learned communicative signals"
(2008: 21).



But Emergentists, Externalists, and Essentialists could all, in
principle, agree that there are both unique characteristics of human
communicative capacities and characteristics of such capacities that
are shared with non-humans. For example, by the age of one, human
infants can use direction of gaze and focus of attention to infer the
referent of a speaker's utterance (Baldwin and Moses 1994). By
contrast, this sort of social referencing capacity in monkeys and apes
is rudimentary. This suggests that a major component of humans'
capacity to infer a specific referent is lacking in non-humans.



Disagreements between the approaches might be due to the perceived
significance of non-human communicative capacities and their relation
to uniquely human ones.


### 5.2 Historical evolution



We mentioned earlier that both early 20th-century linguistics
monographs and contemporary introductory textbooks include discussions
of historical linguistics, i.e., that branch that studies the history
and prehistory of changes in particular languages, how they are
related to each other, and how and why they change. Again, this topic
is distinct from the emergence of language in hominoid species and
concerns mostly the linguistic changes that have occurred over a much
shorter period within languages.



The last decade has seen two kinds of innovations related to studying
changes in particular languages. One, which we will call
'linguistic phylogeny', concerns the application of
stochastic phylogenetic methods to investigate prehistoric population
and language dispersion (Gray and Jordan 2000, Gray 2005, Atkinson and
Gray 2006, Gray et al. 2009). These methods answer questions about how
members of a family of languages are related to each other and
dispersed throughout a geographic area. The second, which we will call
the effects of transmission, examines how interpreted artificial
languages (sets of signifier/signified pairs) change under a range of
transmission conditions (Kirby et al. 2008, Kirby 2001, Hurford 2000),
thus providing evidence about how the process of transmission affects
the characteristics, especially the structure, of the transmitted
interpreted system.


#### 5.2.1 Linguistic phylogeny



Russell Gray and his colleagues have taken powerful phylogenetic
methods that were developed by biologists to investigate molecular
evolution, and applied them to linguistic data in order to answer
questions about the evolution of language families. For example, Gray
and Jordan (2000) used a parsimony analysis of a large language data
set to adjudicate between competing hypotheses about the speed of the
spread of Austronesian languages through the Pacific. More recently,
Greenhill et al. (2010) used a NeighbourNet analysis to evaluate the
relative rates of change in the typological and lexical features of
Austronesian and Indo-European. These results bear on hypotheses about
the relative stability of language types over lexical features of
those languages, and how far back in time that stability extends. If
there were highly conserved typological and lexical features, then it
might be possible to identify relationships between languages that
date beyond the 8000 (plus or minus 2000) year limit that is imposed
by lexical instability.


#### 5.2.2 Effects of transmission



The computational and laboratory experiments of Kirby and his
collaborators have shown that under certain conditions of iterated
learning, any given set of signifier/signified pairs in which the
mapping is initially arbitrary will change to exhibit a very general
kind of compositional structure. Iterated learning has been studied in
both computational and laboratory experiments by means of diffusion
chains, i.e., sequences of learners. A primary characteristic of such
sequences of transmission is that what is transmitted from learner to
learner will change in an iterated learning environment, in a way that
depends on the conditions of transmission.



The children's game called 'Telephone' in the USA
('Chinese Whispers' in the UK), provides an example of
diffusion chains under which what is transmitted is not stable. In a
diffusion chain learning situation what a chain member has actually
learned from an earlier member of the chain is presented as the input
to the next learner, and what that learner has actually learned
provides the input to the following learner. In cases where the
initial learning task is very simple: i.e., where what is transmitted
is both simple, completely transmitted, and the transmission channel
is not noisy, what is transmitted is stable over iterated
transmissions even in cases when the participants are young children
and chimpanzees (Horner et al. 2006). That is, there is little change
in what is transmitted over iterated transmissions. However, in cases
where what is transmitted is only partially presented, very complex,
or the channel is noisy, then there is a decrease in the fidelity of
what is transmitted across iterations just like there is in the
children's game of Telephone.



What Kirby and colleagues show is that when the initial input to a
diffusion chain is a reasonably complex set of arbitrary
signal/signifier pairs, e.g. one in which 27 complex signals of 6
letters are randomly assigned to 27 objects varying on dimensions of
color, kind of motion, and shape, what is transmitted becomes more and
more compositional over iterated transmission. Here,
'compositional' is being used to refer to the high degree
to which sub-strings of the signals come to be systematically paired
with specific phenomenal sub-features of what is signified. The
transmission conditions in these experiments were free of noise, and
for each iteration of the learning task only half of the possible 27
signifier/signified pairs were presented to participants. Under this
kind of transmission bottleneck a high degree of sign/signified
structure emerged.



A plausible interpretation of these results is that the developing
structure of the collection of signs is a consequence of the repeated
forced inference by participants from 14 signs and signifieds in the
training set to the entire set of 27 pairs. A moral could be that
iterated forced prediction of the sign/signified pairs in the entire
set, on the basis of exposure to only about half of them, induced the
development of a systematic, compositional structure over the course
of transmission. It is reasonable to conjecture that this resulting
structure reflects effects of human memory, not a domain-specific
language module--although further work would be required to rule
out many other competing hypotheses.



Thus Kirby and his colleagues focus on something very different from
the prerequisites for language emergence. Linguistic nativists have
been interested in how primates like us could have become capable of
acquiring systems with the structural properties of natural languages.
Kirby and his colleagues (while not denying that human cognitive
evolution is of interest) are studying how *languages evolve to be
capable of being acquired by primates like us*.


#### 5.2.3 Trends in the Philosophy of Language Evolution



Lastly, language evolution has amassed a great deal of
interdisciplinary work in recent times. This has allowed philosophers
to directly contribute to this emerging field. The trends in the
philosophical work have only loosely followed the Externalist,
Emergentist and Essentialist divisions we advocate here. Most
philosophical work has largely been focused on Emergentist conceptions
within the evolution of linguistic meaning specifically.



Bar-On (2013) distinguishes between Gricean and Post-Gricean
approaches to the evolution of language. The former requires an
attribution of Gricean speaker meaning to our languageless ancestors
which in turn seems to assume intentional actions govern by
rationality ('nonnatural meaning'). This task is as
fraught as explaining the evolution of language itself. She thus
proposes the latter, specifically a Post-Gricean (Orrigi and Sperber
2000) approach which takes expressive communication (found widely in
non-human animal species) as a basis for the emergence of linguistic
meaning between signalers and receivers. She states:



> 
> 
> Expressive communication, I will argue, exhibits features that
> foreshadow significant aspects of linguistic communication. In its
> domain, we can identify legitimate natural precursors of meaningful
> linguistic communication. (For present purposes, by 'legitimate
> natural precursors', I mean behavioral interactions that at
> least: a. can be found in the natural world; b. go beyond
> Tomasello's mere 'communicative displays'; c. do not
> depend on crediting the relevant creatures with language-like
> propositional thought or post-Gricean communicative intentions, and;
> d. exhibit features that foreshadow important semantic and pragmatic
> features of linguistic communication so in that sense are
> proto-semantic and proto-pragmatic.) (2013: 354)
> 
> 
> 



Recent work in Evolutionary Game Theory has also lent credence to the
emergence of signaling systems involving non-intentional states.
Taking Lewis (1969) as a spring-board, Skyrms (2010) investigates the
structure of signaling behavior beyond the existence of mutual
conventions. His framework starts from the most basic non-trivial
cases and gradually introduces complexity (such as deception and the
introduction of new signals etc.). Skyrms' account views
propositional or semantic content as a special case of informational
content thereby reintroducing information theory as a tool to
philosophers of language and linguistics interested in the emergence
of linguistic communication and/or semantic meaning.