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Chomsky's Lost Dialogue teorema Vol. XXVIII/1, 2009, pp. 191-197 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2009) 28:1; pp. 191-197] Chomsky’s Lost Dialogue Cedric Boeckx and Ángel J. Gallego Pies y Cabeza. Una introducción a la sintaxis minimalista, de JUAN URIAGEREKA, traducción de JUAN ROMERO MORALES. MADRID, ANTONIO MACHADO LIBROS, 2005, 906 pp., 37,50 € (Versión original: Rhyme and rea- son. An introduction to minimalist syntax, Cambridge, MA., MIT Press, 1998.) The Socratic dialogues we owe to Plato are standardly described as an inquiry strategy whereby a questioner (who knows a lot, but pretends not to) explores the implications of others’ positions to promote rational thinking and spark the mind. Juan Uriagereka’s Pies y Cabeza (PyC) goes back precisely to such tradition (which includes Galileo and Hume), combining old and new methods to offer the reader a piece that guides her in a journey through the most defining property of human beings: language (or, as Noam Chomsky called it, the faculty of language). That is certainly the aim of PyC, but the re- sult is not quite that, since Uriagereka’s book is something else entirely. On the surface, PyC is an exploration of the faculty of language (FL) from the innatist perspective stemming from Chomskyan theorizing. The book contains a detailed discussion (molded as a dialogue between the Lin- guist – Socrates’ questioner– and the Other) that reviews the key aspects be- hind Chomsky’s thesis that language is an innate capacity, genetically encoded – an ‘organ’ or ‘faculty’, as just said. These aspects include well- known topics, like how language is acquired and put to use by children (re- viewing along the way key concepts such as critical period, poverty of stimu- lus, negative data, triggering, etc.), how language varies (both in the individual, and in time and space), or how many of the patterns of language can be found in other natural phenomena (plant growth, animal skeleton, etc.) The Linguist and the Other spend pages and pages (615, to be precise) discussing the architecture of FL and its interaction with other cognitive modules (known as sensorimotor and conceptual-intentional systems). As- suming the so-called Principles and Parameters framework, this odd couple (imagine Chomsky and Borges at a table) dedicate 6 entire days discussing both the philosophical foundations and technical details of generative grammar, 191 192 Cedric Boeckx and Ángel J. Gallego with intricate explorations of topics that have been in the linguistic arena for decades (e.g. movement, islands, cycles, phrase structure, morphology). PyC’s dialectic structure is coupled with continuous references and smooth jumps into other fields (physics, chemistry, philosophy, biology, art, etc.). The impression one has (certainly the impression we had) is not that of reading a linguistics textbook, but that of reading a book of sand where every- thing appears to be connected to everything, almost pantheistically. Juan Uriagereka’s PyC is the Spanish translation of Rhyme and Reason (R&R), published in 1998 by the MIT Press, some ten years ago.1 Given the expert consulting processes behind it, it took the linguist Juan Romero about two years to translate the English manuscript (which was originally designed as a dialogue between Noam Chomsky and Stephen Hawking), and the final result had to wait on the bench some more time to be released. Overall, PyC seems to us to be a fine version of the original piece: it is more manageable actually, since the format is that of regular books (R&R’s shape was much bulkier and Atlas-like,), but, stylistically speaking, the outcome reveals a somewhat careless editing – typos abound –, and the final index is far from straightforward. This should not, though, detract the reader from the bril- liance of the work. In our eyes, Uriagereka’s R&R quickly became the paradigm example of what one may call a new wave in biolinguistics. Biolinguistics has become something of a scientific buzzword in the area of language studies, but it rests on established ideas (and ideals), firmly rooted in what is often called the cog- nitive revolution of the 1950s spearheaded by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and Eric Lenneberg. These individuals caused a paradigm change in the study of language. They took as their central goals the following five questions: 1. What is Knowledge of Language? 2. How is that Knowledge acquired? 3. How is that Knowledge put to use? 4. How is that Knowledge implemented in the brain? 5. How did that Knowledge emerge in the species? Today these five questions constitute the conceptual core and focus of inquiry in fields like theoretical linguistics (the traditional areas of syntax, semantics, morphology, and phonology), language acquisition, pragmatics, psycholinguis- tics, neurolinguistics, evolutionary studies on language, and beyond. What these research questions emphasize is the fact that language can, and should be studied like any other attribute of our species, and more spe- cifically, as an organ of the mind/brain. The past fifty years have shown, un- controversially in our opinion, that it makes eminent sense, at various levels, to regard the study of the FL as a branch of biology, at a suitable level of ab- straction – hence the term bio-linguistics. Chomsky’s Lost Dialogue 193 As Boeckx and Grohmann [(2007), p. 1] point out in their inaugural is- sue of the Biolinguistics journal, there is both a weak and a strong sense to the term ‘biolinguistics.’ The weak sense of the term refers to ‘business as usual’ for linguists, so to speak, to the extent they are seriously engaged in discovering the properties of grammar, in effect carrying out the research program Chomsky initiated in Syntactic Structures. The strong sense of the term ‘biolinguistics’ refers to attempts to provide explicit answers to ques- tions that necessarily require the combination of linguistic insights and in- sights from related disciplines (evolutionary biology, genetics, neurology, psychology, etc.). PyC is a brilliant demonstration of how to formulate hy- potheses about the biology of language in this strong sense, and as such should serve as a reference point for future studies. The recent resurgence of interest in ‘biolinguistics’ is due in large part to the advent of the Minimalist Program in linguistic theory [see Chomsky (1993) and subsequent work] , which PyC intends to introduce to a wide au- dience. At the heart of the minimalist program is the question of how much of the architecture of the language faculty can be given a principled explana- tion [See Longa (2005) and Lorenzo (2007)]. Specifically, minimalism asks how well the structure of language meets design requirements imposed by the cognitive systems it subserves (sound/sign and meaning). As such, linguists working in the context of the Minimalist Program are forced to address and sharpen questions of cognitive specificity, ontogeny, and phylogeny, etc., to even begin to understand the design requirements imposed on the LF. This is not to say that previous generations of linguists were not interested in such is- sues but in practice biolinguistics issues had little effect on empirical inquiry into questions of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. In a minimalist con- text, they are inevitable. Chomsky formulated this attempt to make sense of properties of lan- guage in the most ambitious form (what is known as the Strong Minimalist Thesis), in the form of a challenge to the linguistic community: Can it be shown that the computational system at the core of FL is optimally or per- fectly designed to meet the demands on the systems of the mind/brain it in- teracts with? By optimal or perfect design Chomsky meant to explore the idea that all properties of the computational system of language can be made to fol- low from minimal design specifications, a.k.a. ‘bare output conditions’ – the sort of properties that the system would have to have to be usable at all (e.g. all expressions generated by the computational system should be legible, i.e., formatted in a way that the external systems can handle/work with). Put yet another way, the computational system of language, minimalistically con- strued, would consist solely of the most efficient algorithm to interface with the other components of the mind, the simplest procedure to compute (generate) its outputs (expressions) and communicate them to the organs of the mind that will interpret them and allow them to be enter into thought and action. 194 Cedric Boeckx and Ángel J. Gallego As even a quick look at the current minimalist literature would reveal, the specific proposals made in PyC remain among the most promising ave- nues of inquiry within minimalism. They have inspired numerous research papers, monographs, and doctoral dissertations. And given the size and ambi- tion of the work, we think that it contains much more that remains to be ex- plored. To name but a few: Chomsky (2004) takes adjuncts to occupy “a different plane” (see R&R, pp. 281-281; PyC, pp. 395-397); both Medeiros (2008) and Soschen (2008) argue that the Fibonacci series is found in phrasal dependencies, an idea that was first explored with respect to phonological combinatorics (see R&R, pp. 191-193, pp. 482-488; PyC, pp. 283-286, pp. 642-647; and also Idsardi (2008) for the formal proof of PyC’s early conjec- ture); Chomsky (2001) endorses the hypotheses that (i) the operation of Spell-Out can take place more than one time (R&R, pp. 232-238; PyC, pp. 336-342) and (ii) morphology acts like a virus, forcing the system to close off a cycle (see R&R, p. 207; PyC, p. 306); Boeckx (2008) entertains the idea that chains and projections can be collapsed (see R&R, pp.
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