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. 396-400; PyC, pp. 535-540); Nunes (2004) builds on paracyclic movement to develop his side- ward movement proposal (see R&R, pp. 311-316; PyC, pp. 431-435); Boškoviü (2007), Gallego (2007), and Chomsky (2008) consider the possibility for dis- placement transformations to take place in parallel (see R&R, pp. 391-392; PyC, pp. 530-531). The list could go on and on (and we are sure some more will be adopted or revamped in time), but this should suffice as an indication of the impact of Uriagereka’s proposals. Minimalism has forced us to rethink syntax from the ground up (and promises to do the same for phonology [see Samuels (in progress)] and se- mantics [see Hinzen (2007), Pietroski (in progress), and Uriagereka (2008)] and find out what is most fundamentally true of, or constitutive of what Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) have dubbed the faculty of language in the narrow sense. At the same time, the Strong Minimalist Thesis requires us to make informed hypotheses about the nature of the external systems that FL serve, which form the faculty of language in the broad sense. As soon as one says that the core computational system of language meets interface demands in an optimal manner, one is forced to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language. Unsurprisingly, the Minimalist Program is character- ized on the dust jacket of Chomsky (1995) as an “attempt to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences.” If indeed much of the specificity of language turns out to be the result of its place in the topography of the mind, it won’t do to restrict one’s atten- tion to linguistic data to understand FL. The systems with which language in- teracts are bound to be illuminated by minimalist inquiry. Consequently, questions of meaning, and the relationship between syntactic form and con- ceptual structures have made an emphatic come-back [see Reinhart (2006), Hinzen (2007), Pietroski (2006), Boeckx (2008), Borer (2005), Uriagereka Chomsky’s Lost Dialogue 195

(2008), Hale and Keyser (2002)], and they figure prominently in PyC. At dif- ferent points along the way, Uriagereka delves into complex (and very con- troversial) issues concerning the internal structure of words, the referential properties of nouns, the role of (a) D-structure (component), semantic conse- quences of derivational alternatives, or surface semantics interpretation (topi- calization and similar processes). In one form or another, most of these topics touch on to the ‘linguistics wars’ that became popular in the 60s – 70s, and address deep questions about the nature of the syntax-semantics interaction: Where does syntax bottom out? How much structure do we need to account for meaning? How internally structured are words? What is the relation be- tween the Lexicon and the syntactic component? Where (and how many times) is syntax accessed by the interfaces? What is the relation between language and the external world? How many interfaces does syntax interact with? As several authors have noted [see Boeckx (2006) and Hornstein (2009)], the search for basic principles of organization render FL cognitively and biologically more plausible. It is not too far-fetched to think that the fo- cus on basic, elementary operations and representations in minimalism may help bridge this gap between the mind and brain sciences, and allow one to entertain more plausible scenarios concerning the evolution of language than its theoretical predecessors did. As Uriagereka himself points out in the pref- ace of Syntactic Anchors (in many ways an extension of PyC), minimalism, when it is done as it is in PyC, “makes language searchable within brains, ge- nomes, and proteomes.” At the heart of PyC is the claim that the core of human language is not an adaptation.2 PyC makes this claim by emphasizing the role of principles of growth and laws of form that transcend the limits of ‘genomic’ nativism. In PyC we find for (what in the English version was) the first time references to works and projects that have become familiar, such as Cherniak, and the evo- devo literature. In this respect, we believe PyC did start something big. Reading PyC is, to us, like entering the world of Da Vinci’s notebooks. We find there a lot that has become standard, and a lot that will take us a lot of time to recognize was on the right track. This is not an isolated trait of PyC, but in fact a constant in Juan Uriagereka’s insightful work, where dif- ferent influences (from Cervantes to Gould, going through Torrente Ballester, Charlie Parker, Velázquez, Chuck Jones, or even Star Trek) collapse into a pic- ture that is hard to describe – perhaps because Uriagereka is not just a linguist. We have no doubt that PyC – like R&R – will be enjoyed by different generations of linguists, and also by readers outside the linguistics domain. Some will love it, and some will hate it (that’s the fate of major works, which usually leave none indifferent), but it will continue to be read, as it has al- ready become a contemporary classic. In his Other Inquisitions, Borges claims that a classic is not a book that has such and such merits, but rather “a book that the generations of men, 196 Cedric Boeckx and Ángel J. Gallego urged by different reasons, read with previous enthusiasm and with a myste- rious loyalty”. Perhaps there is something about Borges’ claim that explains why we, time after time, re-read PyC.

Department of Linguistics Departament de Filologia Espanyola Harvard University Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Boylston Hall, 08193 Bellaterra Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Barcelona, Spain E-mail: [email protected] [email protected]

NOTES

1 For a previous and in depth review, we refer the reader to Mendívil (2006). 2 A point reinforced in Piattelli-Palmarini’s foreword to the book; see also Longa and Lorenzo (2003), Lorenzo (2006), and references therein.

REFERENCES

BOECKX, C. (2006), Linguistic minimalism. Origins, concepts, methods and aims, Ox- ford, Oxford University Press. –– (2008), Bare syntax, Oxford, Oxford University Press. BOECKX, C and GROHMANN, K. (2007), “The Biolinguistic manifesto”, Biolinguistics, 1, pp. 1-8. BORER, H. (2005), Structuring sense (2 vols.), Oxford, Oxford University Press. BOŠKOVIû, Z. (2007), “Don’t feed your movements: Object shift in Icelandic”, Work- ing Papers in Scandinavian Syntax, 80, pp. 1-15. CHOMSKY, N. (1993), “A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory”, in K. Hale and S. J. Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20: essays in linguistics in honour of Sylvain Bromberger, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, pp. 1-52. –– (1995), The Minimalist Program, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press. –– (2004), “Beyond explanatory adequacy”, in A. Belletti (ed.), Structures and be- yond. The cartography of syntactic structures (vol. 3), Oxford (NY), Oxford University Press, pp. 104-131. –– (2008), “On phases”, in C. Otero et al. (eds.), Foundational issues in linguistic the- ory, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press, pp. 133-166. GALLEGO, Á. J. (2007), Phase theory and parametric variation, Doctoral dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. HALE, K. and KEYSER, S. J. (2002), Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press. HAUSER,M.D.,CHOMSKY, N., and FITCH, T. (2002), “The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?”, Science, 298, pp. 1569-1579. HINZEN, W. (2007), An essay on names and truths, Oxford, Oxford University Press. HORNSTEIN, N. (2009), A theory of syntax. Minimal operations and Universal Gram- mar, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Chomsky’s Lost Dialogue 197

IDSARDI, W. (2008), “Combinatorics for metrical feet”, Biolinguistics, 2, pp. 233-236. LONGA, V. M. (2005), “Filosofía de la ciencia y ciencia no lineal”, Teorema, 24, pp. 19-34. LONGA,V.M andLORENZO, G. (2003), Homo loquens: biología y evolución el len- guaje, Lugo, Tris Tram. LORENZO, G. (2006), El vacío sexual, la tautología natural y la promesa minimalista, Madrid, Antonio Machado. –– (2007), “Lo que no hace falta comprender y lo que no se necesita saber”, Teorema, XXVI/, pp. 141-148. MEDEIROS, D. P. (2008), “Optimal growth in phrase structure”, Biolinguistics, 2, pp. 152-195. MENDÍVIL, J. L. (2006), “El lenguaje como un objeto natural”, Revista de libros, 118, pp. 26-28. NUNES, J. (2004), Linearization of chains and sideward movement, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press. PIETROSKI, P. (2006), Events and semantic architecture, Oxford, Oxford University Press. –– (to appear), Semantics without truth values, Oxford, Oxford University Press. REINHART, T. (2006), Interface strategies: optimal and costly computations, Cam- bridge (MA), MIT Press. SAMUELS, B. (in progress), The structure of phonological theory, Doctoral disserta- tion, Harvard University. SOSCHEN, A. (2008), “On the nature of syntax”, Biolinguistics, 2, pp. 196-224. URIAGEREKA, J. (1998), Rhyme and reason. An introduction to minimalist syntax, Cambridge (MA), MIT Press. –– (2005), Pies y cabeza. Una introducción a la sintaxis minimalista, Madrid, Anto- nio Machado Libros. –– (2008), Syntactic anchors. On semantic structuring, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

RESUMEN: En esta nota ofrecemos una revisión crítica de la obra de Juan Uriagereka Pies y cabeza. Una introducción a la sintaxis minimalista, traducción al español de Rhyme and reason. An introduction to minimalist syntax, un trabajo seminal y profun- do sobre la facultad del lenguaje que marcó un punto de inflexión no solo para la lin- güística en general, sino también para lo que ha dado en llamarse biolingüística.

PALABRAS CLAVE: biolingüística, Chomsky, gramática generativa, ciencias de la vida minimalismo.

ABSTRACT: In this note we review Juan Uriagereka's Pies y cabeza. Una introducción a la sintaxis minimalista, the Spanish translation of Rhyme and reason. An introduc- tion to minimalist syntax, a seminal and insightful exploration of the faculty of lan- guage that signaled a turning point for work not only on linguistics in general, but also on what has been referred to as biolinguistics.

KEYWORDS: biolinguistics, Chomsky, generative grammar, life sciences, minimalism.