Philosophy of Linguistics

Philosophy of Linguistics Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Three approaches to linguistic theorizing 2 2.1 TheExternalists................................. ........ 4 2.2 TheEmergentists ................................. ....... 5 2.3 TheEssentialists ................................ ........ 6 2.4 Comparing the three approaches . ........... 7 2.4.1 Essentialism: Larson (1988) . ......... 8 2.4.2 Emergentism: Goldberg (1995) . ........ 11 2.4.3 Externalism: Bresnan et al. (2007) . ........... 13 3 The subject matter of Essentialist theories 15 3.1 Competence and performance . ......... 16 3.2 ‘I-Language’ and ‘E-Language’ . ........... 17 3.2.1 ‘E-language’ .................................. 17 3.2.2 ‘I-language’.................................. ..... 19 3.3 The faculty of language in narrow and broad senses . ................ 21 3.4 KatzianPlatonism................................ ........ 24 3.5 Components of linguistic theories . ............. 25 4 Linguistic methodology and data 27 4.1 Acrimony over linguistic intuitions . ............... 28 4.2 Grammaticality and acceptability judgments . ................. 31 4.3 Assessing degrees of acceptability . .............. 32 4.4 Informal and experimental elicitation . ................ 34 4.5 What informal methods actually are . ............ 36 4.6 Corpusdata ...................................... ..... 39 5 Whorfianism 41 5.1 BanalWhorfianism ................................. ...... 44 5.2 The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis . .............. 44 5.3 Anti-Whorfianrhetoric . ......... 45 5.4 StrongandweakWhorfianism . ........ 45 5.5 Constructing and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses . ................. 46 6 Language acquisition 49 6.1 Linguisticnativism .............................. ......... 49 6.2 Language learnability . .......... 50 6.2.1 TheGoldparadigm............................... 50 6.2.2 Gold’sparadox ................................. 53 6.2.3 The claimed link to ‘rationalism’ versus ‘empiricism’................. 54 1 7 Language evolution 56 7.1 Phylogenetic emergence . ......... 56 7.2 Historical evolution . .......... 59 1 Introduction Philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science as applied to linguistics. This differentiates it sharply from the philosophy of language, traditionally concerned with matters of meaning and reference. As with the philosophy of other special sciences, there are general topics relating to matters like methodology and explanation (as with statistical explanations in psychology and sociology, or the physics/chemistry relation in philosophy of chemistry), and more specific philosophical issues that come up in the special science at issue (simultaneity for philosophy of physics; individuation of species and ecosystems for the philosophy of biology). General topics of the first type in the philosophy of linguistics include (i) what the subject matter is, (ii) what are the theoretical goals are, (iii) what form theories should take, and (iv) what counts as data. Specific topics include issues in language learnability, language change, the competence-performance distinction, and the expressive power of linguistic theories. There are also topics that fall on the borderline between philosophy of language and philosophy of linguistics: of “linguistic relativity” (see SEP: Appendix to Relativism), language vs. idiolect (see SEP: Idiolect), speech acts (including the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts), the language of thought, implicature, and the semantics of mental states (see SEP entries Assertion: Speech Acts; Analysis; Mental Representation; Pragmatics; Defaults in Semantics and Pragmatics). In these cases it is often the kind of answer given and not the inherent nature of the topic itself that determines the classification. Topics that we consider to be more in the philosophy of language than the philosophy of linguistics include intensional contexts, direct reference, and empty names (see SEP entries: Propositional Attitude Reports; Intensional Logic; Rigid Designators; Reference; Descriptions). This entry is not a general introduction to linguistics for philosophers; readers seeking that should consult a suitable textbook such as Akmajian et al. (2010) or Napoli (1996). For a general history of Western linguistic thought, including recent theoretical linguistics, see Seuren (1998). Newmeyer (1986) is useful additional reading for post-1950 American linguistics. Toma- lin (2006) traces the philosophical, scientific, and linguistic antecedents of Chomsky’s magnum opus (1955/1956; published 1975), and Scholz and Pullum (2007) provide a critical review. 2 Three approaches to linguistic theorizing The issues we discuss have been debated with vigor and sometimes venom. Some of the people involved have had famous exchanges in the linguistics journals, in the popular press, and in public forums. To understand the sharp disagreements between advocates of the approaches it may be useful to have a sketch of the dramatis personae before us, even if it is undeniably an oversimplifi- cation. 2 We see three tendencies or foci, dividedby what they take to be the subject matter, the approach they advocate for studying it, and what they count as an explanation. We characterize them roughly in Table 1. Externalists Emergentists Essentialists Primary phenomena: actual Primary phenomena: facts of Primary phenomena: intuitions utterances as produced by social cognition, interaction, and of grammaticality and literal language users communication meaning Primary subject matter: Primary subject matter: Primary subject matter: abstract language use; structural linguistic communication, universal principles that explain properties of expressions and cognition, variation, and change the properties of specific languages languages Aim at describing attested Aim at explaining structural Aim at articulating universal expression structure and properties of languages in terms principles and providing interrelations, and predicting of general cognitive mechanisms explanations for deep and properties of unattested and communicative functions cross-linguistically constant expressions linguistic properties Linguistic structure is a system Linguistic structure is a system Linguistic structure is a system of patterns, inferrable from of constructions that range from of highly abstract operations and generally accessible, objective fixed idiomatic phrases to highly constraints not at all apparent features of the use of language abstract productive types from evidence of language use Value accurate modeling of Value cognitive, cultural, Value highly abstract, linguistic form that accords with historical, and evolutionary covering-law explanations for empirical data and permits explanations of phenomena properties of language as prediction concerning found in linguistic inferred from linguistic unconsidered cases communication systems intuitions See young children’s language See young children’s language See young children’s language as a nascent form of language, as a series of stages in an as very similar to adult linguistic very different from adult ontogenetic process of competence though obscured by linguistic competence developing adult communicative cognitive, articulatory, and competence lexical limits Assume that what is acquired is Assume that what is acquired is Assume that what is acquired is a grasp of the distributional a mainly conventional and an internalized generative device properties of the constituents of culturally transmitted system for that characterizes an infinite set expressions of a language linguistic communication of expressions Table 1: Three approaches to the study of natural language A broad and varied range of distinct research projects can be pursued within any of these approaches; one advocate may be more motivated by some parts of the overall project than others are. So the tendencies should not be taken as sharply honed, well-developed research programs or theories. Rather, they provide background biases for the development of specific research programs — biases which sometimes develop into ideological stances or polemical programs or lead to the branching off of new specialisms with separate journals. In the judgment of Phillips (2009), “Dialog between adherents of different approaches is alarmingly rare.” 3 The names we have given these approaches should be taken as mnemonic tags, but not descriptions. The Externalists, for example, might well have been called ‘structural descriptivists’ instead, since they tend to be especially concerned to develop models that can be used to predict the structure of natural language expressions. The Externalists have long been referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’ (and sometimes apply that term to themselves), though this is highly misleading, as Scholz and Pullum (2006: 60–63) point out: the ‘empiricist’ tag comes with an accusation of denying the role of learning biases in language acquisition (see Matthews 1984, Laurence and Mar- golis 2001), but that is no part of the Externalists’ creed (see e.g. Elman 1993, Lappin and Shieber 2007). Emergentists are also sometimes referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’, but they either use the Emergentist label for themselves (Bates et al. 1998, O’Grady 2008, MacWhinney 2005) or call themselves ‘usage-based’ linguists (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Tomasello 2003). Newmeyer (1991), like Tomasello, refers to the Essentialists as ‘formalists’, because of their tendency to employ abstractions, and to use tools from mathematics

Load more