The Syntax-Semantics Divide

THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS DIVIDE

Nirmalangshu Mukherji Department of Philosophy Delhi University, Delhi 110007, INDIA

Mailing Address: 38/2 Probyn Road Delhi 110007, INDIA Phone: +91-11-27666253 Syntax-Semantics Divide 2

THE SYNTAX-SEMANTICS DIVIDE

1. INTRODUCTION

Contemporary generative linguistics, often called 'biolinguistics,' has raised problems for the rest of the approaches to the study of human languages. Traditionally, the study of language was said to be divided into three broad parts: syntax or the study of form; semantics or the study of meaning; pragmatics or the study of use. In this paper, I will be concerned with the legitimacy of the division of the study of language into syntax and semantics. The broad study of meaning of linguistic expressions itself divides into many parts. One of the parts is captured in the classical notion of semantics: the study of how language relates to the world. There is growing doubt as to whether this study applies to natural languages at all, although there could be such a study for artificial languages. 'It is possible,' Noam Chomsky suspects, 'that natural language has only syntax and pragmatics;' 'there will be no provision for what [some call] “the central semantic fact about language, ... that it is used to represent the world,” because it is not assumed that language is used to represent the world, in the intended sense.' (Chomsky 2000b, 132). From this perspective, the classical problem of Intentionality – how language relates to the world – basically falls out of biolinguistics. Is there a meaningful problem of Intentionality outside of biolinguistics? I will not attempt to summarize Chomsky's complex and penetrating analysis of this question (Chomsky 2000b, Chapters 2 and 7). For my purposes, it is enough to mention his basic position that words do not refer, people do; in fact, 'I can refer to India without using any word, or any thought, that has any independent connection to it' (Chomsky 2001a). The classical problem of Intentionality is thus subsumed under mind-external language-use – pragmatics proper – which I will set aside for the purposes of this paper, as noted. Chomsky's conclusion may be viewed as a rejection of what Jerry Fodor and Ernst Lepore (1991, 155) have called 'Old Testament Semantics': 'semantic relations hold between lexical items and the world and only between lexical items and the world.' Much of Fodor's recent work is a defense of Old Testament Semantics against any other Syntax-Semantics Divide 3 form of semantics (Fodor 1994; 1998). If Fodor and Lepore are right about New Testament semantics, and if Chomsky is right about Old Testament Semantics, no intelligible concept of Intentionality survives. I will take this result for granted. These considerations do not affect a residual conception of semantics pursued with much vigour largely outside the biolinguistics framework. For want of a better term, we will adopt its familiar name, formal semantics. Formal semanticists work within a very restricted notion of semantics, namely, that part of the semantic component which immediately accesses the output of grammar; hence, they are concerned only with what is known as conditions on semantic interface. This restriction is indeed useful since ‘semantics’ is a thick notion covering all of word-meaning, phrase-meaning, sentence- meaning, idioms and proverbs, contextual interpretation, speaker’s intentions, and much else. Arguably, each of the items just listed involve mind-external language-use in any case. The interest of formal semantics is that it (apparently) avoids mind-external language-use, and is able to focus only on the structural conditions that enter into computation of meaning. In other words, the programme grants that words mean whatever they do; the programme just looks at the general conditions they must meet on entering the semantic part of the computational system. This abstract end is achieved by spelling out these conditions with (versions of) logical theory. Once the conditions are so spelt out, the standard schemes of interpretation, which are available in any case in the form of semantic metatheories in logic, are then attached to the expressions of the language. That’s the programme I question in this paper to extend the scope of Chomsky’s rejection of the very idea of semantics. From the preceding sketch, it ought to be clear what our target should be. Formal semantics is formal, as noted, in that versions of logical theory are invoked to generate structural conditions. The use of logic also guarantees that the programme is restricted to considerations of meaning prior to external language-use. So, the issue is: is the use of logical theory, even as a tool, justified in naturalistic inquiry in which we are attempting to discover some properties of the mind/brain? I will proceed as follows to answer this question. Syntax-Semantics Divide 4

There is a clear tension between the concepts of naturalization and normativity in that we cannot have them both within the same inquiry: nature is what it is, we cannot stipulate how we would like it to be. In some domains such as those of physics and biology, we may be reasonably confident that the separation of the two notions has been reached.1 Maybe, in some domains, such as those of economics or history, we cannot peel them apart at all. In contrast, some domains, such as language, mathematics and music, look as though they are open to naturalistic inquiry, yet we might be using largely normative tools to pursue it. In these domains then, what goes by the name of ‘naturalistic inquiry’ may turn out, on closer inspection, to be an expression of how we want things to be. I will argue that some of the recent work on the so-called semantics of natural language illustrate the confusion. I will state a number of assumptions under which I am working. I assume that language is a biological phenomenon and, as such, it is open to naturalistic inquiry. In assuming this I am setting various other concepts of language aside. I also assume that the central task of a theory of language is to give a principled account of sound-meaning correlations for individual expressions of a language. The broad issue then is whether, and how far, this task may be accomplished naturalistically. Further, I assume that a Chomsky-type grammatical theory is naturalistic in character. It is naturalistic in at least two ways. (a) It imposes usual scientific abstractions on actual verbal behavior across a vast range of languages to isolate the initial state (hence, the genetically-determined part) of language; it imposes no a priori notion of language. (b) It is open to refutation not only from actual linguistic behavior, but also from acquisition and neural research.2

2. THE GENERAL PROBLEM

To get a feel of the general problem about the programme I have in mind, consider first the remark, once made by Chomsky, that the Peano axioms are actually embedded in the (child’s) mind.3 The postulation was supposed to explain why, pathology aside, children are able to acquire the standard number system without fail. Arguments from Syntax-Semantics Divide 5 the poverty of the stimulus suggest that children must have internalized a system that recursively generates numbers, and other discrete infinities. With regard to numbers, Peano axioms also do the same. Yet, it will need a lot more than just these two facts to conclude that children have internalized these axioms. Peano axioms are ‘rational reconstructions’ of some body of mathematics; hence they are essentially normative in character. They are useful for studying various formal properties of arithmetic; they are not intrinsically useful for studying the nature of mathematical knowledge as it originates in a child’s mind. If anything, Peano axioms are products of what Chomsky calls the ‘science-forming capacity’ (Chomsky 1980) whose object in this case is the body of arithmetic, not the child’s mind. It is not at all obvious that the same ‘axioms’ will show up when the capacity shifts its gaze to the child.What children do is a matter of fact, and a very different line of inquiry is needed to account for it. Now consider Richard Montague’s work of the early ‘70s on semantics of English (Montague 1973). Montague came up with a complex theory of how the notion ‘interpretation-in-a-model’ may be applied recursively to a certain class of English sentences, especially those with a quantificational structure. Basically, the idea was to translate expressions of English into those of intensional logic such that the latter, in turn, may be assigned interpretations in a richly structured model. Montague insisted that the theory is entirely mathematical – and, hence, normative – in nature in that no psychological implications should be read in it. He was not giving an account of how English speakers in fact attach interpretations to sentences; he was merely assigning logical interpretations to a class of English sentences taken as objects of inquiry by themselves. The programme is thus suitably called ‘formal semantics.’ The merits of this general programme and its specific implementation need not concern us here.4 What is puzzling is that a number of recent and influential monographs on the subject (Larson and Segal 1995, Heim and Kratzer 1998 etc.) pursue the topic exactly as Montague did, differing only in the specific logical theory they adopt5; but now the claim is that they are studying ‘I-languages.’ That is, they are studying knowledge of language as internalized by native speakers.6 Suddenly then a purely mathematical inquiry has turned into a psychological one without any noticeable change in the internal vocabulary of the enterprise.7 Syntax-Semantics Divide 6

It seems then that the programme of formal semantics will have naturalistic value only if it can be linked to the psychological make-up of humans. Since we have already granted naturalistic basis to the grammatical part of the programme, which each of the authors just cited use as the starting point for their semantic goals, we need to inquire whether the same can be held about the logical part of the programme. In other words, given the use of (versions of) logical theory in each work cited above, the general problem is: how should we view the discipline of formal logic in the context of a naturalistic inquiry on languages? I assumed that the task for a naturalistic theory of language is to give an account of sound-meaning relationships. The issue is whether logical theory is the correct vehicle for such an account.

3. SYNTAX, SEMANTICS AND SEARLE

The direct way of addressing this issue is to take some specific work in the formal semantics programme, such as Larson and Segal (1995), and examine whether it stands up to naturalistic scrutiny. However, I doubt if it is a workeable suggestion. The cited literature simply assumes that what is done there is psychologically significant: no attempt is made either to defend the issue in general terms, or to show how psychological significance is achieved in the internal details of the programme. It is no part of my argument here that formal semantics cannot be ‘done.’ Of course it can be done, perhaps as a ‘rational reconstruction’ of some aspect of use of language. My concern is whether what is done is naturalistically significant. That question cannot be answered by looking into the internal details of the programme. Therefore, we have to look at its roots. We need to find a foundational idea in the formal semantics programme which links up with the issue of psychological significance sketched above. Then we can proceed to examine the idea.8 If upon examination we find that the idea is motivated only from normative grounds, then it will follow that the very formal semantics programme is infected with normativity, notwithstanding the specific way(s) in which it is pursued. The formal semanticist will then be unable to argue that he is using logical theory only as a tool to investigate a natural phenomenon since the incorporation of the idea in his programme will turn the putative naturalistic programme into a normative one. In other words, the Syntax-Semantics Divide 7 normative character of the tools itself forces a certain picture of natural languages which may not be independetly available when the tools are withdrawn. One idea that seems to me to be central to the programme arises as follows. Logical theory is essentially invoked in the programme so that some semantic account may be attached to the syntactic account already available via grammatical theory. This assumes that there is a sharp syntax-semantics divide in natural languages even for the restricted domain under consideration, that is, even without entering the area of word- meanings, sentence-meanings and the like. Further, it assumes that grammatical theory supplies the syntax part of the picture, while logical theory supplies the semantic part. Is this division between syntax and semantics naturalistically justified? Does this division enter into our understanding of natural languages for the restricted domain under consideration? I am emphasizing the restricted domain since, for the purposes of this paper, I do not wish to rule out the possibility that the syntax-semantics divide may be available for natural languages in different ways for more extended domains. The issue is whether the divide is available for pre-conceptual structural conditions that enter into computations of meaning. In other words, the issue is whether the divide is available for conditions on the semantic interface. This way of addressing the general problem also brings out what we need to delink the formal semantics and related programmes from a naturalistic theory of language. Since the programme upholds a sharp syntax-semantics divide, we need to see whether the prelogical grammatical component of language is already shot through with semantic information of the sort that allegedly motivates additional semantic conditions on the interface. In other words, the alternative to the syntax-semantics divide will be to think of the grammatical system as capturing semantic information from the very beginning. The divide then, if any, will lie outside the linguistic system. I will suggest that both the divide and its alternative can be fruitfully examined via John Searle’s celebrated argument from the Chinese room. In fact Searle is in favour of the divide. For Searle, syntax alone cannot supply a genuine account of understanding of natural languages; to have that account is to invoke semantics. In that sense, Searle thinks of the syantax-semantics divide as psychologically significant. Further, I will suggest that Searle’s conception of the syntax-semantics divide is squarely based on Syntax-Semantics Divide 8 lessons from logical theory. It follows that, according to Searle, the logical distinction between syntax and semantics is the least we need to furnish a psychologically significant account of natural languages. From this angle, Searle’s position on these issues fits in nicely with our project of inquiring whether logical theory is psychologically significant. An examination of Searle’s argument thus will give us a broad hold on the very programme of formal semantics independently of specific formulations within it. In fact, much beyond the formal semantics programme, the examination will cover all programmes that begin by upholding the divide; to my knowledge, the formal semantics programme is the most widely accepted one among them. I am not suggesting, however, that Searle, or anyone else, who upholds the divide, would automatically approve of the formal semantics programme as it is typically pursued. In fact, from what I can make of Searle’s position on the issue, he would want to go much beyond merely the interface conditions to capture his notion of semantics: ultimately, it will involve communication-intentions, illocutionary acts and the like. So Searle is likely to think of the formal semantics programme, just as Chomsky does, as so much more of syntax. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Searle’s notion of semantics begins to get captured with the interface conditions themselves. In that sense, I am suggesting that a Searle-type argument is necessary for launching the formal semantics programme.

4. SEMANTIC GLOW

Suppose we view mental systems (knowledge of language, knowledge of arithmetic, etc.) to be symbol-manipulating devices of a certain kind, insofar as they are cognitive systems made up of principles operating on representations. In a very influential essay, Searle proposed a thought-experiment to evaluate the extent of this general idea (Searle 1980). Searle invites us to imagine a room which contains a monolingual English speaker S, a number of baskets filled with Chinese symbols and a ‘rulebook’ that contains explicit instructions in English regarding how to match Chinese symbols with one another. Now suppose S is handed in a number of questions in Chinese and is instructed to consult the Syntax-Semantics Divide 9 rulebook and hand out answers in Chinese. Suppose the Chinese speakers find that these answers are eminently plausible; hence, S passes the Turing test. Yet, according to Searle, for all that S knows, he does not understand Chinese. He simply matched one unintelligible symbol with another and produced unintelligible strings on the basis of the rulebook. A symbol-manipulating device, therefore, cannot represent genuine understanding. Since Chinese speakers by definition understand Chinese, Chinese speakers cannot (just) be symbol-manipulating devices. I will not enter into the internal merits of this argument insofar as it concerns the specific features of the Chinese room. Just too many details of the parable need to be clarified before one can begin to draw general lessons from the argument.9 In any case, these questions have been extensively discussed in the literature. Instead, I will be concerned directly with the general conclusion, notwithstanding its source, Searle draws. Thus Searle says:

Having the symbols by themselves – just having the syntax – is not sufficient for having the semantics. Merely manipulating symbols is not enough to guarantee knowledge of what they mean … syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics. (Searle 1990:27, emphasis added)

These impressions are routinely taken for granted in philosophical10, hermeneutical, literary, and even in some linguistic circles, explaining the phenomenal popularity of Searle’s argument. Notice that the remark contains what we needed: it supplies some notion of syntax, and some way of distinguishing it from semantics. Unfortunately, the notion of semantics continues to be uncomfortably thick: all we have been told is that semantics is not syntax. But, at least, we have been told what syntax is: it is mere manipulation of symbols. Although the statement isn’t exactly clear, it’s a start. Churchland and Churchland (1990, 35) have questioned Searle’s impressions from an interesting angle. They invite us to imagine a dark room with an unlit bulb in it. In this room a person is holding some charged object. Think of the person as moving the object up and down manually. This motion should initiate a spreading circle of electromagnetic waves. Now, since light waves and electromagnetic waves, according to Maxwell’s theory, are identical, the motion of the charged object should light up the Syntax-Semantics Divide 10 bulb. Yet, if we do this experiment ourselves with a bar magnet or a similar object, we wouldn’t see any light at all. Should we conclude that a mere manipulation of electromagnetic forces cannot generate luminance and, hence, that Maxwell’s theory is false? The proper response, of course, is that there is some luminance in the room but, due to the extremely low frequency of oscillation of the charged object, the luminance is too low for the human eyes to capture. Again, I will not be concerned with the specific features of the ‘luminous room,’ as Churchlands call it. It could be that the analogy misses some crucial features of Searle’s thought-experiment.11 What interests me is the general lesson drawn by them, if only because it offers an interesting alternative to the standard view encapsuled in Searle’s remarks. Thus they conclude: ‘(e)ven though Searle’s Chinese room may appear to be “semantically dark”, he is in no position to insist, on the strength of this appearance, that rule-governed symbol manipulation can never constitute semantic phenomena.’ The Churchlands complain that Searle has no case for his drastic conclusion, ‘especially when people have only an uninformed common-sense understanding of the semantic and cognitive phenomena that need to be explained.’ ‘Rather than exploit one’s understanding of these things’, they continue, ‘Searle’s argument freely exploits one’s ignorance of them.’ For the Churchlands, the ‘understanding of these things’ lie in neural connectivity and the like. I hope to exploit the understanding already reached in grammatical theory.

5. GRAMMAR AND SEMANTICS

According to the image just suggested, even a rudimentary grammatical system cannot fail to have some ‘semantic glow’ although the glow will not be detected by the thick notion of semantics we uncritically wear. This idea may be elaborated, perhaps even extended, as follows. A computational system, viewed as an information-processor, will not, by itself, generate anything; the system is activated once it is supplied with pieces of information. In the context of a computational system then, the metaphorical notion of ‘increasing glow’ translates into (progressive) increase in the information fed into the system. The computational system responsible for language processes, broadly speaking, two types Syntax-Semantics Divide 11 of information: (a) information consisting of properties of (monomorphemic) words which are displayed as ‘features’ subclassified into various types; (b) information contained in larger units which are composed of lexical items but which may have global properties that can not be predicted from properties of words alone. Strictly then the lexicon consists of both words and ‘frozen’ phrases such as idioms; in Williams (1994), the scope of idioms has been extended to include the word transmission, structures containing the word notwithstanding, and much else. In what follows, I shall be concerned only with lexical information of type (a). The assumption that all computationally salient information may be traced to lexical features is a strong one, especially in view of William’s extension, but since the issues facing us here arise primarily within this assumption, I will hold on to it nevertheless.12 In any case, a prior account of word-processing is needed for the more complex issue of idiom- processing. Interpretation thus comes in layers only the topmost of which is labeled ‘understanding’ by Searle. Searle’s labeling, no doubt, makes a good deal of common sense since Searle, the language-user, is consciously aware of only the topmost layer that directly enters into (his) language-use. The task of the computational system, like any good ‘expert’ system, is to work behind the scenes to make language available for use in a way such that much of the preparatory work is not visible to the user. But then, by the same token, from the fact that Searle doesn’t see something, it does not follow that it is not there. When we turn to serious theory, the common notion of understanding breaks down into so many uncommon parts that it becomes doubtful whether thick notions such as syntax and semantics continue to be useful. To probe these largely intuitive ideas with bit more detail, let us grant the point that the person inside the Chinese room does not understand Chinese insofar as, ex hypothesi, he does not know what the various Chinese symbols stand for; we agreed that these symbols are, for S, unintelligible. Until we are told more about the contents of the ‘rulebook,’ this is the only sense in which S does not understand Chinese; no other sense of his lack of understanding of Chinese has been proposed. So, it emerges that, according to Searle, a linguistic system executes two functions: a syntactic function that establishes purely formal relationships (PFRs) between a collection of lexical items and Syntax-Semantics Divide 12 a semantic function that relates the collection to what it stands for (SFRs). According to Searle, S ‘understands’ a language L just in case both the functions, in order, are executed. Let us examine what PFR and SFR mean, if anything, in the context of grammatical theory.

6. LOGIC AND GRAMMAR

The conceptions of PFR and SFR are deeply ingrained in the logical tradition from where, presumably, Searle and others (for example, Fodor 2000:12-3) cull their conception of how language works. A logical theory is usually conceived of in two stages. The first stage is called ‘syntax’ which states the rules of well-formedness defined over the primitive symbols of the system to execute PFRs where a PFR is understood to be just an arrangement of ‘noise’ or marks on paper. A logical theory also contains a stage of what is called ‘semantics,’ which is viewed as a scheme of interpretation that gives the satisfaction-conditions (in a model) of the well-formed strings supplied by syntax. That is, SFRs are executed when the scheme of interpretation is applied to the well-formed strings. For example, syntax says that the string ‘P  Q’ is well-formed and semantics says that ‘P  Q’ is true just in case each of ‘P’and ‘Q’ is true. In other words, syntax outputs a set of structures which are taken to be interpretable, and semantics says, in general terms, what that interpretation is. In this picture, sound-meaning correlation is taken to be direct since, by stipulation, a logical ‘language’ has no room for ambiguity: a given string has exactly one interpretation. So, there is no need either to correlate different interpretations with the same string or to attach the same interpretation to different strings. I feel, tentatively for the moment, that this property of direct correlation between sound and meaning is part of the motivation for thinking that syntax and semantics are strictly distinct; it encourages a ‘syntax first, semantics next’ picture. This may have given rise to the idea that there is an absolute distinction between syntax and semantics in natural languages as well.

6.1. PFR: Little thought is needed to see that, in a logical theory, the conception of syntax is entirely stipulative. Only those rules are called ‘syntactic rules’ which in fact generate strings that the logician takes to be interpretable. In other words, no Syntax-Semantics Divide 13

(explanatory) account is given as to why ‘P  Q’ is well-formed; it is just stipulated to be so, precisely because the desired truth-conditions may be attached to it. The logician wants his syntax to mirror truth-conditions. Logic, thus, is a normative discipline, not an explanatory discipline, in the sense under discussion here.13 No component of the theory explains why interpretations attach to the well-formed formulae in the first place. Hence the rather deep fact that we entertain a pair of notions (well-formedness, interpretability) such that we expect them to converge is not accounted for at all. The fact is deep, since actual convergence may not be uniformly available. For a flavour of this very complex issue, consider the following. The expression who you met is John is (immediately) interpretable without being well-formed (Chomsky 1965:151); there seems to a man that Bill left, on the other hand, is not immediately interpretable without being ungrammatical (Hornstein 1995:70, following Chomsky 1993). We would like to think that, at these points, the system ‘leaks’ in that it allows generation of various grades of gibberish. Thus an empirically significant theory will include a sub- theory of gibberish. Logical theory, on the other hand, blocks all gibberish by stipulation.14 The logician uses his semantic intuitions to set up his syntactic scheme rather than giving an account of those intuitions; hence the logician’s execution of PFRs, despite appearances, is far from being semantically innocent. It is unclear therefore that the notion of PFR (purely formal relations) captures the notion of syntax independently of semantics even in the context of logical theory, which, we saw, is largely stipulative in character. However, its stipulative character hides the unclarity just noted. This confusion grows as we turn to grammatical theory of natural languages. According to a widely-accepted view (Chomsky 1995), a grammatical theory takes the lexicon as given and generates a pair of representations, PF and LF, as output. A PF representation constrains, roughly, how a string is going to sound, while an LF (‘logical form’) representation captures the grammatically-sensitive information that enters into the meaning of a string. A phonological representation (PF) of a string is the closest we get to the notion of PFR since the LF representation of a string obviously contains more semantic information, or, at least, LF contains more information geared to semantic interpretation; therefore, LF representations can not just be arrangements of ‘noise.’ Syntax-Semantics Divide 14

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is an isolated phonological processor whose task is to process just the phonological information contained in a string of lexical items. Could we say that this processor executes just PFRs? The task faced by the processor is not merely to list the phonological properties of the given items, but to decide whether the sequence of lexical items is phonologically licit. Therefore, a phonological processor can not process even the phonological properties of a collection of lexical items unless it is supplied with categorial information as well. In other words, a lexical element will not be recognized as a proper input to the computational system unless the element carries this information in the form of its formal feature.15 Therefore, although the phonetic properties of individual lexical items are distinct from its non-phonetic properties (which are loosely classified into categorial and semantic properties), the notion of a ‘purely’ phonological representation of a string is without any clear sense in the grammatical framework within which we are working. There could be other linguistic frameworks which allow isolated phonological processors, but their notion of organization of language is likely to be very different from what is under consideration here. Central to the present approach is the idea of syntax-governed phonological phrase which enters into the possible interpretation of a string (Nespor 2001). In contrast, we may well imagine an isolated LF-processor (Chomsky 1997). The idea will be that the mind, beginning with the lexicon, generates an abstract and interpretable expression, yet no articulation takes place. According to Chomsky, most of language-use is in fact geared to unarticulated ‘inner thought’ (Chomsky 2001a).16 To take a simple example, the generation of the licit sound Mary was kissed involves an application of a spelling rule, which is an element of PF, that converts the abstract structure [INFL kiss-en e] to the sound was kissed. The rule applies precisely because the structure is (categorially) licit and, therefore, interpretable. Categorial information, thus, ‘bootstraps’ phonological and semantic information in a uniform scheme. The basic idea is that if you know that a given string is, say, an English sentence, then you can not fail to attach some interpretation to it. It is not ruled out though that the interpretation you attach holds the sentence to be gibberish. Syntax-Semantics Divide 15

The notion of bootstrapping proposed here needs to be distinguished from Grimshaw’s related notion, in which semantic information, such as agent of an action, bootstraps with categorial information regarding agent of a verb (Grimshaw 1981). Notice that Grimshaw’s notion applies to the lexicon; I am proposing bootstrapping in the computational system. I must note here that various notions of bootstrapping routinely appear in the literature on language, not surprisingly.17 The idea of bootstrapping may be further brought out by considering an example in which both the licit and the illicit sequences are meaningless in Searle’s sense. This will enable us to control for the distinction between (the grammatical) notion of interpretability and the thick notion of semantics Searle is working with. Consider the classic collection of lexical items green, ideas, sleep, colorless and furiously. It is clear that, given categorial information regarding the features N(ominal) and V(erbal), the computational system will decide that the string colorless green ideas sleep furiously is fine since it satisfies, say, X-bar theory, c-selection, number agreement etc., while sleep green colorless furiously ideas is not fine although, in Searle’s thick sense of meaning, both the strings are meaningless. The string colorless green ideas sleep furiously is accepted precisely because it is interpretable – it has a dim semantic glow – and, hence, it is phonologically licit. This point is illustrated by the fact that anyone who listens to the string for the first time tries to attach some meaning to it by stretching imagination, invoking metaphors, and the like. This is true of most of the popular examples of ‘deviant’ strings such as this stone is thinking of Vienna, John frightens sincerity, they perform their leisure with diligence, and so on. In each case, some interpretation seems to be available after a little thought. The point is: a phonological representation, unlike an acoustic representation, is computationally connected with meaning – the connection being largely indirect in the case of natural languages. For natural languages then the syntax/semantics divide, even if there is one, does not cut the joints of language in ways that logical theory demands. This raises doubts regarding the applicability in grammatical theory of the logical notion of syntax and the related notion of well-formedness. These pretheoretical notions do not play any significant role in grammatical theory since, whatever these are, the theory attempts to unpack them. Except for serving some expository purposes, the Syntax-Semantics Divide 16 widespread pretheoretical idea that grammatical theory partitions the class of strings into grammatical and ungrammatical subclasses is quite unnecessary (Chomsky 1993). Every theory, of course, will naturally partition strings in theory-internal terms. As we saw, the global notion of acceptability of a string is the only one that matters for grammatical theory since this notion directly attaches to data. However, even this notion is quite suspect. The language system may pass strings which are not immediately ‘acceptable’ to the native speaker, or are acceptable on wrong grounds; on the other hand, a speaker may ‘accept’ strings which are rejected by the system. Here is a (well-known) example of each: complex structures with central embedding are often difficult to accept; ‘garden path’ sentences such as the horse raced past the barn fell are typically accepted because raced is wrongly identified to be the main verb; the child seems sleeping is accepted for further conversation even if the string is rejected by grammar due to the violation of the selectional properties of the verb seems. These examples suggest that the notion of acceptability, being a global property of strings, is extremely thick. The acceptance or the rejection of a string might involve grammatical factors, contributions from non-linguistic factors, performance factors and so on. The divide between these factors is essentially theoretical in nature; the data do not wear the divides on their sleeves. The theory, in turn, attempts the best possible explanation of how, and which aspects of, lexical information is accessed and processed by which component of the mind. In this sense, the notion of lexical information is the only salient notion for a language theory.

6.2 SFR: So far I have been arguing that the notion of PFR does not play any sensible role in grammatical theory. Similar remarks apply to the notion of SFR, the stands-for relationship. From what we know about the role of categorial information in grammar, it is not clear at all whether the properties of ‘having a -role’, ‘having a case’, ‘having subject agreement’, ‘having the feature of an anaphor’ etc. belong to the PFR part or to the SFR part, although each of these properties are progressively invoked and formally established by the grammar. In other words, all we know is that the grammar specifies which formal requirements are met by lexical items in having these properties; just this much does not make the computations purely formal since many of these properties clearly have semantic significance. For example, to say that an element Syntax-Semantics Divide 17 is an anaphor is to say that it is dependent upon some other formally-identified element for interpretation; in other words, an anaphor does not by itself ‘stand for’ anything. An r-expression, on the other hand, may stand for some object (in a model). Binding theory does not use the notion of SFR but it takes interpretations very close to this notion. The property of having a -role is particularly interesting from this point of view. For example, if the grammar assigns the agent-role to John, then John stands for an agent in a fairly full-blooded sense. The grammar does not quite do that since it assigns -roles arbitrarily. Yet once a role, any role, is assigned, the concerned item cannot fail to stand for something even if a -role is assigned to, say, a trace, an empty element. In grammatical theory, an empty element is always viewed as a dependent element linked to an antecedent. A -role is thus assigned to a chain consisting of the dependent element and its antecedent which ultimately is a lexical element which, in turn, will have a reference (in a model); what that thing is will depend upon accessing further information from the concerned lexical item by further cognitive capacities of the mind that are designed to process that information.18 This point about -roles is illustrated by the following example from Jackendoff (1983:207) although Jackendoff himself does not use this example to that end. There is something in the thematic structure of the verb grow that allows the pair every oak grew out of an acorn/ every acorn grew into an oak, but it does not allow the pair an oak grew out of every acorn/ *an acorn grew into every oak. The grammatical phenomenon of quantifier scope seems to be sensitive to the (full-blooded) semantic phenomenon of which QP has what -role. We have two options here: either the grammar is enlarged to accommodate full-blooded semantic information, or, we think of an acorn grew into every oak as gibberish passed by the grammar (compare a bird flew into every house), but rejected by the concept of growth. We are working under the second option.19 Thus, even with respect to the information processed by grammar, as currently conceived, not only the general non-phonetic interpretability of a string is determined, but also some cues about how it is to be interpreted is partly determined as well.20 This is one way of thinking that grammar progressively executes parts of SFR. Since there is no natural joint in grammar where the execution of PFR ends and the execution of SFR Syntax-Semantics Divide 18 begins, these notions have no real meaning in grammatical theory. Hence, Searle-type parables are not likely to apply to this theory. I am not suggesting that all formal properties have semantic significance. Structural case has no semantic significance. Thematic roles and binding properties, we saw, have semantic significance. Some agreement features, such as number feature of nouns, have semantic significance, while other agreement features, such as number feature of verbs, have no semantic significance. In the recent Minimalist Program, these variations are handled in terms of legibility conditions at the LF interface. Roughly, those features which enter into ‘understanding’ are brought to the interface; the rest are systematically wiped out during computation.21 There is no prior syntax/semantics division here. There are lexical features and there are legibility conditions; together they generate interpretable expressions. In the Minimalist Program, this part of the computation is often called ‘N  LF computation,’ meaning that part of the computation that begins with a numeration N of lexical items and generates LF phrase markers; there are no intermediate stages. To emphasize, there are nothing like separate PFR- and SFR-stages in the computational process. The main thrust of the preceding way of looking at the grammatical system is that the traditional syntax/semantics divide needs to be given up since, otherwise, it is difficult to make sense of the claim that LF is the level where semantic (that is, non-phonetic) information begins to cluster. I return to the point. In an earlier conception of grammatical theory (Chomsky 1981), there indeed was a syntax/semantics divide between computation upto s-structure and computations from s-structure to LF. But that distinction was entirely internal to theory and is no longer maintained in more recent conceptions of grammar. By parity of enterprise, therefore, the traditional syntax/semantics divide ought to be viewed as an artifact of naïve, commonsensical theory rather than as a fact about languages. Are we overemphasizing the semantic nature of LF in the picture just sketched? The notion of semantics allegedly captured in LF is narrowly defined in terms of a list of phenomenon such as quantifier scope, pronoun binding, variable binding, adverbial modification and the like. It may be argued that since these things have nothing to do with SFRs, as Searle and others construe them, I have overstreched the idea that Syntax-Semantics Divide 19 grammatical theory already executes parts of SFRs. I think this argument basically raises terminological issues. Let me explain. The only problem I have been discussing is whether grammatical theory gives an account of some non-phonetic understanding of a string. If it does, then, by Searle’s definition, we cannot equate grammar with a system executing PFRs. If, on the other hand, execution of SFRs is viewed as the only legitimate semantic enterprise, then grammatical theory certainly does not contain semantics. But then, the non-phonetic understanding that a grammatical theory does capture escapes the PFR/SFR divide. In other words, the PFR/SFR distinction does not apply to natural languages, if the phonetic/non-phonetic distinction is to apply to them. As a corollary, it follows that if semantics is viewed as a theoretical construct defined in terms of SFRs, then grammatical theory shows that this construct is dispensable. There is no doubt that, in logical theory, some of the phenomena handled at LF (pronoun binding, quantifier scope etc.) are often accounted for in terms of such traditional semantic notions as truth, reference and entailment: Russell’s theory of descriptions is a classic case in point. However, we also know that when, say, binding theory accounts for the same phenomena, these notions are no longer needed.22 That surely does not make a grammatical explanation any less semantic as long as the relevant facts are explained. This only shows that, so far, such notions are not needed at all even for semantic explanation. The burden now is on the logician to show that there are other significant uses of these notions for a theory of language. At this point, then, the issue of whether LF is ‘really’ semantic turns out to be a verbal one. Similar remarks apply to the question, ‘does interpretation take place at LF?’ If by ‘interpretation’ we mean non-phonetic understanding, then interpretation does take place at LF. However, if interpretations require full-blooded SFRs by definition, then LF continues to be an ‘uninterpreted’ ‘syntactic’ level of representation. Needless to say, the second (logical) notion of interpretation is typically taken to be the only available notion without any empirical support, to my knowledge. All we know is that the computational system accesses certain types of lexical information and the rest are accessed by other systems. Syntax-Semantics Divide 20

NOTES 1Setting normative issues of elegance, simplicity, unification etc. aside. These are common features of any theoretical enterprise anyway. I am also setting the vexing issue of use of mathematics in physical theories aside. It is quite possible that use of mathematics in any discipline endows some normativity to it. 2 See Smith 1999, Jenkins 2000, Chomsky et al. 2000 for defense of these ideas. 3To be fair, we need not assume that Chomsky was making a serious empirical proposal. All he could have meant was that, in order to account for this universal ability displayed by children, we need to postulate something like the Peano axioms. 4See Partee (1979, 1980, 1992 etc.) for more on these matters. 5Heim and Kratzer use the extensional part of Montague’s model theory; Larson and Segal use only first-order logic and its familiar scheme of interpretation. 6The claim is explicit in Laron and Segal (1995); as far as I can tell it is at least implicit in Heim and Kratzer (1998). 7I am using ‘psychological’ more or less synonymously with ‘naturalistic’ in this paper. There are other notions of psychological significance, which do not concern me here. See Bresnan (1978) for one such notion. 8I am not suggesting that there is only one idea that needs to be examined. There are several others. For example, we could ask whether the notation of logical theory is naturalistically significant. One could also ask if, for the restricted domain under consideration, logical theory is able to handle any further semantic information at all that is not already captured in grammatical theory. I will not enter into these questions in this paper. 9For example, if the argument warns against taking computer simulations too realistically, then we might readily agree with the spirit of the argument. If, on the other hand, Searle’s argument is designed to be a global refutation of computational theories of mind and language, then we would want to be clear about several details. For example, what is the content of the rulebook? What notion of S’s understanding enters into his understanding the instructions of the rulebook? Why should we infer, from the activity of matching unintelligible symbols, to a total lack of understanding on S’s part? See Dennett (1991) and Block (1995) for similar queries from a somewhat different angle. 10Donald Davidson, for example, takes it for granted that recursive syntax plus a dictionary does not amount to semantics (Davidson 1967). Notice that this remark simply assumes, first, that there is an indisputable syntax/semantics divide, and it then holds that just adding a dictionary cannot fill the divide. 11Searle obviously thinks so; see Searle (1990). 12See Chomsky (1995, 4.2.2) for a general defence of this assumption. 13This is not a criticism of logic since a logical theory has other important uses. 14See Heim and Kratzer (1998, 47-53) for some remarks on this issue. It is not clear to me what lesson they draw regarding the syntax/semantics divide, since their notion of interpretability is explicitly drawn from logical theory. 15This additional information is what makes a certain sound a symbol and a phonological representation a mental construct. 16Also see Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) for similar suggestions regarding ‘thought-systems’ in the context of non-human species. 17See Fisher et al. (1994, 337), Calvin and Bickerton (2000), and Nespor (2001). 18The idea of progressive semantics suggests that popular notions such as ‘autonomy of syntax’ and ‘autonomy of meaning’ basically reduce to the general issue of modularity, that is, which computational principles apply to what domain. See Chomsky (2000a, note 22) for similar remarks. 19As far as I can see, Jackendoff (2002, 85) is working under the option as well but, since he has recently given up ‘syntactocentrism,’ the data remains very much within the scope of a theory of language for him. 20Higginbotham (1989, Section 1) thinks of the thematic structure of a sentence as a ‘partial determination of (its) meaning.’ 21 See the distinction between ‘valued’ and ‘unvalued’ features in Chomsky (2001b). 22See Hornstein (1995, 155) for a particularly telling example.

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