To the editors:
Going back to the classics is always a good idea. Revisiting long-established theses through a contemporary lens informed by recent developments in science both helps track progress and advances our understanding of the quo vadis of a discipline. Anna Maria Di Sciullo made an excellent choice in selecting Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax as a landmark text in linguistics. It deserves both to be reread from such a contemporary lens and to be paid a tribute.
Di Sciullo raises several important points that highlight the revolutionary character of Aspects, the magnitude of its contribution not only in relation to syntax, but to linguistic theory in general, its meticulous effort to develop technical aspects of generative processes in detail, and its focus on approaching language through uncovering its intrinsic properties. For all these and many more reasons, Di Sciullo is right to argue that the impact of Aspects is unparalleled. I believe that few scholars would take issue with this claim. To this day, scientific discussions about human language and its initial state often involve some discussion of what Chomsky discusses in Aspects as the language-acquisition device, a notion later known as Universal Grammar (UG).
Having established the major points of agreement with Di Sciullo’s presentation of Aspects, I will not in this letter address the minor differences that may be found across the various approaches within Minimalism.1 I will instead focus on four somewhat controversial points that seem to me to be relevant to the broader field of generative linguistics and the way it is seen from the outside.
The first point concerns the notions of competence and performance. Di Sciullo writes, “[I]f the performance of a native speaker—what he says—is compromised in various ways, how might he have acquired the underlying system of rules that makes his performance possible?” This is not exactly the issue surrounding competence and performance in Aspects. The issue has to do with the input the learner receives when figuring out his target language, not with the output the mature learner produces. Di Sciullo makes reference to the latter in mentioning performance, but it is a problem of induction, not of constraints on performance such as the ones she mentions—i.e., repetitions, throat clearing, verbal tics, hesitations, etc. She elaborates on this point, making a potentially controversial claim:
It is hardly possible that children perform a remarkable inductive feat on being presented with data that are compromised and thus degenerate, and under circumstances that are characterized by what Chomsky, with his gift for memorable formulations, called the poverty of the stimulus.
Two comments are due.
First, it is not hardly possible that children perform this task; it is an incontestable fact that they do. Children successfully extrapolate a target grammar, even though the input they receive involves noise. Di Sciullo probably means that it is unlikely that this process happens without the aid of certain innate factors that assist child learners in the acquisition task. This would be a valid point, actually very close to a truism. The only objection here is that this framing does not really acknowledge the elephant in the room. The issue at stake is not innateness. Scholars who work in different frameworks than Chomsky and Di Sciullo recognize the role of innateness too. The issue at stake is language specificity: to what extent these innate factors are specific to language or are properties and mechanisms that belong to general cognition. As William O’Grady put it, “A theory of language acquisition that incorporates some version of the ‘innateness hypothesis’ is not the same thing as a theory of language acquisition that incorporates a version of UG.”2 He correctly suggested that the debate is over the formulation of the hypothesis of innateness that one assumes and that disagreements between universalist and emergentist approaches are disagreements over the character and not over the existence of an innate endowment for language.3
Second, Di Sciullo links the generative system to poverty of the stimulus (PoS) considerations, but neither are these considerations specific to generative linguists,4 nor is PoS a claim that supports the theories of innateness proposed by generativists. The logical problem of language acquisition amounts to the question of how successful acquisition occurs despite the noisy input. From this perspective, PoS is an important piece in the puzzle of acquisition, but it is not evidence that attests to the superiority of the generativist approach of innateness over other approaches that may assume some version of innateness too.
The second potentially controversial point that merits unpacking is a claim Di Sciullo makes in passing in her concluding paragraph. She argues that “the most robust system of assessment in studying grammar is a native speaker’s intuitions.” Of course, she is right in pointing out the reliability of such intuitive judgments. Yet since the concluding paragraph summarizes the revolutionary ideas presented in Aspects, one may be led to misattributing this claim to the latter. The idea in Aspects is quite different though. Chomsky suggested that “tacit knowledge may very well not be immediately available to the user of the language,”5 that “no adequate formalizable techniques are known for obtaining reliable information concerning the facts of linguistic structure,”6 and that
every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.7
As these excerpts make clear, Chomsky in Aspects did not emphasize the robustness of intuitions. In fact, he left open the possibility that such judgments are inaccurate, unreliable, or unavailable to the native speaker. Of course, Aspects was published fifty-six years ago. Today we know that intuitive judgments about acceptability can be reliable and robust under the right experimental conditions. Di Sciullo does not elaborate on what those conditions are, probably due to space constraints, but recent advances in the field of experimental linguistics have suggested that the type of intuitions and the way these are gathered matters. Put succinctly, robustness is not an innate property of all intuitions. The crux of the matter boils down to what intuitions one uses to tap into a linguistic phenomenon. What about adequately powered controlled experiments that consist of meticulously designed tasks administered to randomly selected participants? Or elicitation experiments with four informants who are not selected randomly? Or dropping a message to two colleagues who work on similar linguistic phenomena and have their own theoretical agendas? Or casually asking a friend in an informal context whether a single sentence sounds fine? The people in all of these scenarios have intuitions about their native language. But do all these testing contexts lead to equally robust intuitions? Fifty-six years ago, perhaps Chomsky was right to suggest that this question did not matter—probably because different questions had to be addressed first.8 But today we know it does. As Carson Schütze put it, “What is to stop linguists from (knowingly or unknowingly) manipulating the introspection process to substantiate their own theories?”9 The answer lies in employing standard scientific procedures: rigorous testing, sensitive tasks, open-access availability of tasks and datasets that enables scrutiny of both the data and the collection process, and possibly pre-registration.
The third and fourth points that may spark some controversies are interconnected. They relate to Di Sciullo’s description of language as a mystery on the one hand, and her mention of the promotion of linguistics into a science on the other. With respect to the former point, she writes that “the ability of every human being to use his language for creative means is a mystery that we have not penetrated and may never understand.” The latter point refers to how Chomsky, through Aspects, transformed linguistics into a science. Di Sciullo writes: “Aspects introduced a revolution within linguistics. The subject has never been the same again. It promoted linguistics into a science, one that accepted the methods and the standards of the serious sciences themselves.” Although the first two sentences are uncontroversial, the last one is not. Compare this claim to what Chomsky wrote in Aspects:
One may ask whether the necessity for present-day linguistics to give such priority to introspective evidence and to the linguistic intuition of the native speaker excludes it from the domain of science. The answer to this essentially terminological question seems to have no bearing at all on any serious issue.10
Evidently, not only was Chomsky aware of potential issues related to the use of informally elicited introspective judgments, but he even alluded to the fact that this method of collecting data might contribute to the exclusion of linguistics from the domain of science, further suggesting that this was not an issue with an important bearing at that moment.11
If we endorse the claim that linguistics was promoted into science by Chomsky in 1965, don’t we imply that the field had no scientific standards before that? Although the revolutionary character of Aspects is of course not questioned, the field existed before it. To suggest that the work carried out within this field before 1965 belongs to a pre-scientific era has several implications. First, it has implications about the importance of Chomsky’s earlier work. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, it is far from Di Sciullo’s intentions to offer grounds that may enable questioning the scientific validity of Chomsky’s writings before Aspects. Still, words get easily twisted especially in the mouths of critics, and Chomsky’s work has long sparked heated controversies. Second, going beyond Chomsky, the foundational text of biolinguistics, which is the research area of Di Sciullo, was written roughly around the same time as Aspects. Eric Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language was published two years later, in 1967. Chomsky in Aspects discusses one of the key contributions of Lenneberg’s work: the notion of a critical period in language acquisition.12 It is hard to reconcile the great influence Lenneberg had on Chomsky with the idea that his work is based on experiments conducted before the transformation of the field into science.
Aspects is not unique in its revolutionary force. This is a general characteristic of Chomsky’s work. For obvious reasons of space and coherence, Di Sciullo had to focus on one text—and it seems to me that she made the right choice—but still, this is a matter of subjective opinion. For some scholars, it is Chomsky’s review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior that brought forward the true revolution in the field, and this happened ten years before the publication of Aspects.13 This review has been described as one of the foundational documents of cognitive psychology as well as “the most important refutation of behaviorism.”14 According to Jerome Bruner, the review should be considered in “the same category as St. George slaying the dragon!”15 From this perspective, it is not fruitful to single out a piece of Chomsky’s work as a unique transformation point that marks the end of a pre-scientific era. Quite likely, it was not an instant of change; it was a process of development, and Chomsky’s role in it has been pivotal throughout the years.
Perhaps the truly revolutionary character of Aspects lies in Chomsky’s unique ability to resynthesize concepts from various fields, give them a novel twist, and frame them into an overall theory. For instance, PoS is not a term introduced by him in Aspects, though Di Sciullo discusses it in her essay dedicated to Aspects. The term appeared in Chomsky’s writings in 1978 and, as Howard Lasnik and Jeffrey Lidz observe, is equivalent to Hume’s problem of induction.16 Universal Grammar is not Chomsky’s term either; it goes back to the Port-Royal grammarians. The idea of the infinite creativity of language goes back to Humboldt. Yet Chomsky reinvented all these notions, by means of embedding them into the right context and developing them as part of a bigger, revolutionary framework. In this sense, Aspects was like a chemical reaction that transformed and fundamentally altered the nature of its composing elements. Di Sciullo is thus right in observing that Chomsky did what revolutionaries often do: they reinvent and create their predecessors.
Going back to the view of language as a mystery, Di Sciullo’s claim echoes a similar observation made in Aspects:
To conclude this highly inconclusive discussion, I shall simply point out that the syntactic and semantic structure of natural languages evidently offers many mysteries, both of fact and of principle, and that any attempt to delimit the boundaries of these domains must certainly be quite tentative.17
Linguistic research in the generative tradition had just started flourishing in the sixties, so it is understandable, and perhaps even unsurprising, that Chomsky suggests that his discussion is inconclusive, tentative, and to a certain degree, still laden with mysteries. Di Sciullo’s claim was made half a century after Chomsky’s. Considerable progress has occurred in that time. Since Di Sciullo makes this observation in passing, it is hard to determine exactly which aspects of the human ability for language remain elusive. Having mysteries, or gaps in knowledge, is normal in all scientific fields. In mathematics there is no ignorabimus, according to David Hilbert, but Goldbach’s conjecture, formulated in 1742, remains unsolved. However, such gaps do not exist unidentified. Put another way, it is one thing to formulate a question or problem that does not have an answer yet, and it is another very different thing to suggest that a scientific discipline’s main object of study is a mystery in and of itself. In the first case, a knowledge gap is identified in the form of an open problem. In the second case, the implication is that a scientific field has as its primary object of inquiry something that may be inherently impenetrable to scientific research. The latter strikes me as an undesired and unfounded claim when made in relation to linguistics.
The last point I would like to raise goes beyond the contents of Di Sciullo’s essay. Although Chomsky is an excellent choice for an essay that serves as the first part of a series on classic texts that are seen as landmark achievements in their respective scientific fields, similar revolutionary texts in linguistics have been written both before and after Aspects. Lenneberg, William Labov, Leonard Bloomfield, and Paul Grice can all be viewed as pioneers in their eras and subfields. Importantly, this list of revolutionary figures in linguistics is intentionally gender biased. The reason is that such lists are usually gender biased, because the label of a pioneer in a scientific field is typically ascribed to men.18 This need not be so. In linguistics, many women have produced work that has transformed the field. Mary Haas, Jean Berko Gleason, Deirdre Wilson, Janet Fodor, and Anna Maria Di Sciullo are just a few of them. Hopefully, some of their works will be featured in the next installments of this series that pays tribute to landmark achievements in science.
Evelina Leivada
Anna Maria Di Sciullo replies:
I am pleased to receive Evelina Leivada’s letter. I will begin my reply by briefly elaborating on notions of competence and performance, language acquisition, and language assessment.
In Aspects, Chomsky writes:
The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior.19
Chomsky takes linguistic theory to be about competence: the language internal to the mind, or I-language, and not the externalized language, or E-language.20 Universal Grammar restricted to I-language is distinct from the system of externalization possessed by language users. Performance does not directly reflect competence. I-language is a computational system, consisting of a structure-building procedure for the generation of thought. The derived hierarchical structures provide instructions to other cognitive systems to interpret and externalized them. In his recent work, Chomsky writes: “Generation is a matter of possession of knowledge; production is use of knowledge. About the latter, we know very little though it seems reasonable to suppose that the thought precedes the utterance.”21
In this framework, going beyond the relation between competence and performance, language acquisition relies on three factors: genetic capacity, experience, and principles of efficient computation.22
Next, I agree with Leivada: the absence of a negation in a sentence of my conclusion escaped my attention. It should read, “The most robust system of assessment in studying grammar is not native intuition.” This cannot be otherwise as my essay mentions results in neurosciences aiming to probe properties of I-language. As Chomsky points out, we are not conscient I-language computations, given the limits of our cognitive capacities. It then comes as no surprise that native intuition is not the most robust system of assessment in studying grammar. As novel hypotheses arise in linguistics, new technology and methods for language assessment might become available.23
Finally, Aspects is revolutionary: it promoted linguistics into a science. But saying that I-language is a mystery that linguists might never fully understand is not incongruous, as Leivada implied in her letter. There are breaking points in the development of the sciences, call them revolutions, which change the way scientists analyze and explain natural phenomena. Given the limits of our understanding, there might be properties of language that linguists will never be able to understand.
