Further Answers to Questions from Weeks of 02 and 09 Nov:

1. In his lecture, Noam Chomsky mentioned that our grammatical system has a syntactic
and a pragmatic side, and probably not a semantic part -if I recall correctly.

But there are linguistic elements/phenomena that we would analyse from a semantic
rather than from a pragmatic perspective, for example: negation particles, "traces",
anaphora, etc. My question is: Is the separation of semantics and pragmatics not a useful
feature in the architecture of language, since we can separate (semantic) phenomena, that
can be analysed without taking the context into account, vs pragmatic phenomena, which
could probably include contextual interferences?

We will return to these questions in detail in a future lecture. So just a few

comments to lay out the terrain a little.

We have to begin by deciding what we mean by the terms. There is a standard

picture established by great 19th century logicians and philosophers (Gottlob Frege,
Charles Sanders Peirce), with much earlier roots, and on to the present. Syntax is
concerned with symbolic manipulations within the formal system under
investigation; semantics with its relations to entities outside the system
(reference/denotation and truth); pragmatics with how the system is used. One
component of syntax is logical syntax, which is concerned with formal relations
among such logical particles as “not,” “and,” “or”, “all,” “some” – e.g., de Morgan’s
laws: not(p or q) = not-p and not-q. These properties are often described in terms of
truth but can also be formulated in pure syntax. Same with anaphora and the
functions of empty elements (like ‘trace’).

In the biolinguistics program, syntax deals with symbolic manipulations involving

the internal language (I-language)– what’s going on in the head – including logical
syntax. Semantics has to do with how elements of I-language pick out mind-
independent elements of the world (reference, denotation). Pragmatics deals with
how the elements of I-language are used by speakers (in particular, how they are
used to refer or denote). For a biological object like I-language, it is an empirical
question whether the relations reference/denotation exist, a topic we’ll look into.

The term “semantics” is also used to deal with problems of meaning, a much looser
concept: for example, the difference between the fates of the chicken if the chicken is
eager to eat or is easy to eat (and the ambiguity if the chicken is ready to eat). We
can ask how the syntax of I-language and intrinsic properties of the lexical items
enter into accounting for these properties, and what else might be involved.

We will be returning to such questions in a later lecture.

2. Is there a theory regarding innateness in evolution? Is it related to survival?

 We will treat the issue of evolution and of language evolution in a future lecture.
Let’s anticipate that the relation between genes and phenotypes is extremely
complex for almost all traits. Many traits in many species are not related to survival.
For reasons that we will see, language evolution was not driven by survival.

3. In the lecture you answered that perception is easier than generation. But for example,
what just happened, Professor Chomsky was able to construct the sentence and the
structure of the question from (Professor Piattelli-Palmarini’s) answer. And that would
require large computational complexity, and it is super recursive in its nature. What I am
saying is that it isn't clear to me that perception is just a reflex. I think they are very
intertwined, that most of the operations used by one are used by the other.

The observation that perception is basically a reflex is due to Merrill Garrett,

emeritus professor here, one of the founders of modern psycholinguistics and a
leading specialist on perception and production of language who did pathbreaking
work with Tom, among other contributions.

Perception is a kind of reflex in that it is an input-output process, which takes place

unconsciously and virtually instantaneously, though to unravel it is no simple
matter, as Tom has illustrated and will discuss further. Production is a very
different matter. There are circumstances that influence what is produced in the
mind (and sometimes externalized) but it is essentially a process of free creation, a
matter that remains mysterious. Perception and production are indeed intertwined.
The analysis-through-synthesis theory of sentence perception exploits this
interaction. And both perception and production access the same system of
knowledge, the same internal language (I-language) and its mechanisms, though
considerably more is involved. Perceptual strategies, for example.

4. To which extent are parameters still assumed to belong to UG? Are parameters simple
enough (and also too many) to meet the evolvability condition? Furthermore -as far as I
understood- according to Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch 2002, recursion is the "only uniquely
human component of the faculty of language". That is, what is the current role of
parameters with respect to our faculty of language and to UG?

We’ll return to this in a full lecture, but just a few words. The principles and
parameters approach was a very important step forward in many ways that we’ll
discuss, but it posed the problem that you bring up: if the parameters are part of
UG, then how could they have evolved? The optimal answer is that they didn’t,
possibilities that we will explore.

The HCF article suggested as one possibility that recursion might be the only
uniquely human component of the faculty of language, but didn’t claim that it is
true. It was then (and is now) an open question how close we can come to that goal.

I should add that the published article is somewhat misleading. The editors of
Science insisted that we remove all technical linguistics from the paper, claiming
 that it would be “too difficult” for their readers – unlike papers on quantum theory,
for example. I was inclined to withdraw the paper but my co-authors felt it should
be published anyway, and I reluctantly agreed. The full paper would not have lent
itself to this misinterpretation, and many others.

5. Do the temporal systems have great impact in L1 acquisition? My boy is about 5 years’
old. He can understand most of time expressions but cannot express it correctly
occasionally. (Mandarin)

It is a universal fact, in language acquisition, that understanding always precedes

and exceeds production. At all ages, children can understand linguistic expressions
that are only going to produce later. Sometimes much later.

6. Re: the Traxler article, could you provide a lay definition for the following:
categorization, subcategorization, and garden path effect?

Categorization involves grouping together elements that function in similar ways in

significant respects. Thus the words “John” and “music” are alike, and different
from “climb,” in that they form grammatical sentences in the context “I like ----”
and many others. So we categorize them as Nouns. “John” and “music” differ in
that the former but not the latter can occur in “—fell asleep,” so we subcategorize
Nouns into animate and inanimate. Just what are the right categories and
subcategories is a non-trivial question.

7. In regard to language acquisition I want to briefly describe my own experience. I was

born in Kannada (Dravidian South Indian language) linguistic environment. However,
since I was studying in a federal government school where they did not teach the local
language Kannada and only formally taught Hindi and English, my expression in those
two languages developed much more than my own mother tongue. Specifically, I struggle
to make grammatical statements in Kannada much more than I do for Hindi and English.
This observation itself was revealing and surprising when I put within the framework of
competence-performance distinction which I learnt in this course. My interpretation of
my own observed bad performance in Kannada indicates that I have a competence to
understand what is right or grammatical in Kannada. So, my question to you all is -
firstly, is my interpretation correct and secondly, can there be a dissociation between
competence and performance?

Competence is possession of knowledge, performance is use of what is possessed.

Your arithmetical competence determines that 837 x 9647 = 8074539 (confession: I
looked it up). It’s a rare person who can perform the operation without external
memory). Similar problems in linguistic performance tell us quite a lot about how
use of language works, and poses interesting problems.

Independently, my performance of English falls far short of that of great writers.

Turning to your case, one would want to know more about what you mean by “bad
performance” and struggle with “grammatical sentences.” That might involve a
difference between the actual language and what we are taught in school is “the
right way to speak and write the language.” The latter is a matter of power,
prestige, etiquette, not linguistic science. In English, for example, children are often
taught that they should say “it is I” instead of “it’s me,” or “he and I were here”
instead of “him and me were here.” The “wrong way,” which children use naturally,
is more true to the actual rules of English. The “right way” was invented by
grammarians who felt that English should look like Latin. That leads to much
confusion. One often hears things like “between you and I,” overgeneralizations by
people trying to apply the artificial and mistaken rules. You might ask yourself
whether something like that might be happening in your case.

Various different kinds of cases demonstrate the distinction between competence

(linguistic knowledge) and performance (actual sequences).

There are instances in which people say sentences that they do not easily understand
when someone else says them. For (hypothetical) examples:

“No one really cares who the book just placed in the library in an obscure way was
actually written by, nor who chose it, but everyone wants to know nonetheless.”
“The oyster, the baby seal the motorboat scared ate, had a hidden pearl inside it”

The issue here is that the speaker of such sentences knows what s/he has in mind, and
can access his/her linguistic knowledge and speech production performance system to
externalize them. But the comprehension mechanism may freeze up.

There are also utterances that clearly are ungrammatical, but uttered because they
communicate because (perhaps) easy alternatives do not exist (actual examples):

“….Let’s use a hook, so we won’t have keys lying around that we don't know where
they are.”
“I really liked flying in an airplane that I understand how it works”

The problem in these cases is that the sentence beginning seems fine….
“…. Let’s use a hook, so we wont have keys lying around that we don't know…”
“….I really liked flying in an airplane that I understand….

What to say at that point….”the location of which”? Or “the workings of which”?

The speaker has backed him/herself into a corner grammatically, and stumbles
through a communicative but ungrammatical finish.

There are cases that often seem ungrammatical, but have been argued to actually be
grammatical:

“The horse raced past the barn fell” (contrast: “the horse ridden past the barn fell”)
 “The cheese the salesman the mouse the cat chased ate tried to sell is rotten.” (it means
”the cat chased the mouse that ate the rotten cheese that the salesman tried to sell”).

And there are cases that seem grammatical, and are comprehensible, but are arguably
ungrammatical:

“the weather is good and warm today” (meaning….”very warm”, not “both good and
warm”)
“We got a not unfavorable reply to our request” (meaning….”a moderately favorable
reply….”

And finally, the coups de grace are cases that arguably mean the opposite of what they
say (actual example):

“No eye injury is too trivial to ignore”

8. In terms of AI, and the event Horizon, will humans need to adapt to learn to communicate
with machines as machines will freely communicate with one another but without human
language?

This has been happening to some extent, for almost a century, e.g., when someone uses
a computer programming language to instruct or change a computer program.

9. What about context? Doesn’t context help in disambiguating the ambiguous garden path
sentences as Ted Gibson’s work has shown?

There’s no problem contriving circumstances that lead to the choice of one or

another alternative. The significance of the example lies in what it tells us about
perception of language, and at another level, that it provides more evidence that
language design privileges computational efficiency over communicative efficiency –
universally it seems, where there is a conflict. A conclusion with many
consequences.

Take the example –

“these lobsters are readier to eat than those ducks”….
Context could steer the interpretation towards the view that they are all hungry, or are
all well cooked. But grammatical knowledge blocks the interpretation that one group
is hungry and the other is well cooked. So everyday interpretations of ambiguous
sequences may be practically constrained by context or prior beliefs, but syntactic
constraints define the interpretive options.

10. Why cannot we consider the movement of a monkey climbing a tree a creative process,
with an infinite number of possibilities?
What might be creative is why the monkey is climbing….and indeed if the monkey is
making a choice between climbing frontwards, or by pulling up with its tail….but how
will we know?

When discussing the relation between language and thought in this course, the notion
of ‘creativity’, refers to the idea that language is used to externalize thought, and there
is neither a limit on what can be thought: there may be “traffic” constraints on how a
thought can be externalized with language, but the choice of external overall “route”
for expression is also up to the speaker. Consider the following thought, and just a few
of its possible implementations:

The monkey ate the fruit

The fruit was eaten by the monkey

What happened was that the fruit eaten by the monkey….
The monkey that ate the fruit….
The monkey the fruit was eaten by….
This is the monkey that ate the fruit
This is the fruit that the monkey ate
It’s the monkey that the fruit was eaten by
What the monkey did to the fruit was eat it

And so on.