CHOMSKY.

I have occasionally made offhand remarks indicating my dislike for Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories and, still worse, his effect on the field, but I have not had the heart to go into detail; I’m worn out from all the arguing I did about him back when I was an actual linguist (now, I just play one on the internet). Fortunately, my procrastination has paid off (as it so often does), and Scott Martens has done the job for me. I direct anyone who wants to know exactly how wrong and destructive Chomsky has been to go forthwith to Pedantry and scroll down to “Friday, July 25, 2003: My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky” (I won’t even try to provide a permalink, Blogger being what it is). Quick summary: “His principles ultimately produced nothing, and may well have set linguistics back decades. The day will come when his legacy is compared to Skinner’s, and when historians of the social sciences will debate which one ultimately caused the most damage.” But there’s much, much more.

Addendum. Scott expands on the subject in the comments to this entry.

A caveat: after sixteen paragraphs, you will reach the sentence “There was some more stuff I was going to say about Cambodia.” You can stop there, unless you’re particularly interested in the still-simmering argument over exactly what Uncle Noam said about the Khmer Rouge 25 years ago and whether it was justified given what was known at the time. As Scott says, “There’s something about that country that seems to drive its students mad.”

Comments

  1. *does happy dance*
    Just goes to show that my husband’s linguistics department is deeply retrograde in its Chomskybottism — or is that Chomskybotulism? Which is encouraging, I must say.
    (No worries; my husband is NOT a Chomskybot.)
    The bit about proof-shifting was evident to me even in the basic syntax class. Pfeh.

  2. thanks for the link! As a BA (cum laude) in linguistics, now doing an MA in TESOL, and thinking about a MA/PH.D program in linguistics again, I am glad to see I’m not the only one who despises Noam.
    I teach ESL to adults, and many of them like his politics. Whenever they mention Chomsky, I have the unfortunate reaction of blurting out, “I hate him!” and they are shocked. Then I have to explain why, but I don’t know if many of them believe me that my distaste — gut-level distaste -is caused exactly by what is discussed in that well-reasoned post. Plus a couple of other points, too..

  3. Maybe I missed something, but the post seemed to make lots of sweeping claims without any support for any of its points. Not that I like Chomsky – as a linguistic anthropologist I’m quite put-off by the idea that linguistics is so removed from how language is actually used – but still, having studied a little linguistics, I find it hard to believe the claim that Chomsky contributed “nothing”. For one thing, there does seem to be some empirical verification of some of his theories within the fields of child language acquisition as well as studies on people with brain injuries, not to mention comparative work across langauges. For instance, the fact that children never make certain kinds of linguistic “mistakes” and that certains structures don’t exist in any langauge seems to support some of Chomsky’s basic claims. I’m not at all familiar with the arguments within linguistics against Chomsky – but, unfortunately, reading this link didn’t really do much to change that. So, LH, I’m afraid you are still not “off the hook”… something still needs to be written which makes the case against Chomsky to a non-specialist. Like I said, I personally come from a very different tradition, in which “dialog” not “the sentence” is the basic unit of analysis and my gripe with Chomsky is that he considers actual language use to be outside the scope of linguistics. But it seems that the linked post is arguing that at the level of the “sentence” there are significant failings with Chomsky, I’d like to know what those are specifically…

  4. Kerim, I am not familiar enough with the studies you cite to try dealing with them; I can only assure you that from within the linguistic tradition in the strict (non-anthropological/sociological) sense there is every reason to suppose that whatever data may seem to support him are likely to have been chosen for that purpose. I’m afraid I can’t improve on Scott’s formulation. But if you dislike Chomsky anyway, you may as well just take our word for it that there are even more reasons to do so!

  5. Kerim, you’re point is fair criticism. I did not offer supporting grounds for my case against Chomsky’s linguistics. On a blog, in short format, when I know that most of my readers are not in the language business, if I had written such a post it would have taken more of my time and resources than I can offer it, and no one would have read it. But you probably shouldn’t take my word for it.
    I can’t just point to a book on linguistics for the non-specialist that really dedicates itself to dismantling Chomsky and Chomsky-inspired approaches. Frankly, most of the books in English about linguistics for non-specialists are written by people from within the Chomskyan tradition (e.g. Pinker). The most important single exception I can think of is George Lakoff’s books. In Philosophy in the Flesh, he spends a fair amount of time attacking a number of key Chomskyan principles. It is the only resource off the top of my head that I can point you to.
    I can only assure you that there are contesting interpretations of all those studies. I can offer you a few brief pointers.
    For the brain lesion studies, I personally have a soft spot for the notion of “emergent modularity” advanced by Annette Karmiloff-Smith in Beyond Modularity. The primary data in support of her conclusion is that young children who suffer brain damage to the “language centres” of the brain are very often capable of learning language just as well as children without lesions. The MRI evidence shows fairly conclusively that they just use a different part of the brain to do language. This suggests that even if language is identified to some degree with one area of the brain (to what degree is still an open question), localisation seems to be the result of learning a language, not its precondition. This undermines the idea of innate modularity in language which is so central to Chomsky and to post-Chomskyans like Pinker.
    As for the types of morphological errors children make as they learn their first language, I wrote my second last school thesis on neural network solutions to this problem, starting with Jeff Elman’s work in the early 90’s. The debate ran through the late 90’s but seems to have faded out of view recently. In 1997, Gert Westermann showed how a certain kind of neural network produced results that explained those errors in English quite effectively without pre-existing linguistic knowledge or any kind of explicitly encoded rules. His conclusion claims to preserve one aspect of Pinker’s model: the “two-track” model of morphology. However, he does not seem to understand that Pinker means something very different from Westermann when he says “two-track.”
    I work mostly in empirical computational linguistics. How language actually gets used is exactly what I study. If I didn’t compeletly ignore the competence/performance distinction, what I do would be impossible.

  6. Cliff Crawford says

    Hi Kerim,
    You might also be interested in Geoffrey Sampson’s “Educating Eve: The `Language Instinct’ Debate”, which criticizes Chomsky’s and Pinker’s theories of language innateness.

  7. One of Chomsky’s strengths, too, is his utter inability to write well. It’s very tedious to criticise a work if halfway through you find yourself obliged to kill yourself from exposure to ugly syntax and an absolute disregard for standard idioms. (a comment)
    BWAH!
    Excuse me, I thought I was the only one who had ever had that reaction to Chomsky.

  8. Thanks Scott,
    From what I know, Chomsky himself is quite upset with Pinker’s characterizations of his arguments. I think the “modular” aspect and the “instinct” aspect does need to be separated. Chomsky clearly makes an argument about the former, but the latter seems somewhat incidental to his theory. But it seems as if Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s book attacks the modularity argument as well (hence the title) so that seems worth looking into.
    I’m also somewhat familiar with nural network approaches to phonology, having studied phonology under someone who was very into optimality theory – but that wasn’t presented as being anti-Chomskian. In fact, it was simply presented as a better tool to do the job. I would need to understand more to see how one invalidated the other.
    I guess my problem comes down to the fact that I see “empirical” as good, but “empiricist” as bad. The competence/performance distinction far predates Chomsky and goes back at least as far as Saussure. Chomksy’s work certainly re-engergized attemts to describe what competence means and to try to formally describe what such competence entails. That he has had to try several times and keeps starting again with some new model is certainly a good reason to be sceptical of the whole enterprise – and I do think it needs a more empirical focus. However, I worry about tossing the baby out with the bathwater and denying the very existence of such a distinction or its utility.

  9. It’s true that some of the ideas I have attributed to Chomsky do predate him – not just the competence/performance distinction but headless phrase structure grammar as well. Chomsky’s argument is very much for an account of language which is quite strictly modular and innate to the point where there ought to be no genuine distinction in linguistic abilities between healthy people. Where he and Pinker go their separate ways is on the evolution of language. Chomsky thinks – if I understand him correctly – that innate linguistic competence is the result of some other cognitive capacity being turned to some novel end, while Pinker advocates a strictly adaptationist account.
    The constraint satisfaction school of neural networking is borderline compatible with some aspects of the Chomskyan approach. It is fairly neutral with regard to modularity and innateness. However, there is no easy way to take a neural network approach and explicitly encode rules of language. There are a couple of really hard ways. Pinker has, as a result, rejected the usefulness of connectionist modelling completely. I have to admit, I’ve never seen a word from Chomsky about neural networks per se, but I just can’t see anything that can be salvaged of his work in syntax without explicit rules, and neural networks just don’t afford themselves to explicit rules.
    As for the competence/performance distinction – I’ll agree that there is a principled position that only admits that perhaps the distinction has been overblown. The thing is, I just don’t think one can separate any aspect of language from communicative context. People communicate in a manner predicated by their abilities and the communicative demands placed on them. There are several different ideas of what competence means, but at the core of all the ones I can think of is a notion that there exists a kind of language-as-abstraction in people’s heads, and any failure to live up to that abstraction is due to flawed communication channels.
    I agree with you about empiricism. I’m not an empiricist. Most of the time I’m a sort of environmental engineer, designing software to feed texts to translators in the manner most conducive to them, and the stream of text flowing through the system I work on is a sort of environmental restriction on my activities. Even when I did more theoretical work (and in the future, when I hope to be doing so again), there is an engineering aspect to it. I build machines, and I like theories that help me build machines, not merely data-driven observations. I know it’s not the only way to work, but it’s the one that works for me.

  10. As a recovering linguist, I, too, have always had to explain my aversion to the world of “Norm” (as an old friend at Berkeley refers to him.
    The Chomskyan revolution, to my mind, is simply part of a larger (lemming-like) drive throughout the social sciences and humanities to introduce “rigor”–hence, the concentration on theory and theory construction to the exclusion of all else.
    Remember, most of Chomsky’s fiercest critics were once his disciples.

  11. How about a list, AP? 🙂
    Something to cheer my husband up when he’s talked to his Chomskybot department chair.

  12. Dorothea: Post-Chomskian Feuding in linguistics? How long have you got?
    Paul Postal honed his debating style (aptly summarised as “calling everyone else stupid”) in the service of the Chomskter before his apostacy. Jim McCawley, George Lakoff and other Generative Semanticists acromoniously split from the Mothership – there’s a book called “The Linguistics Wars” about this. Pullum’s “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (and other essays)” is repeatedly scathing. Gary Gazdar of the Second Great Heresy (renouncing transformations in favour of a return to PSGs) is dismissive of Chomsky’s contribution in this interview.
    Instances could, as they say, be multiplied.

  13. This debate reminds me of the unfortuantely unattributed quote, “people get ahead in other disciplines by standing on each other’s shoulders, but linguists get ahead by standing on each other’s necks.”

  14. I am an undergraduate linguistics student at the University of Arizona, and, as a beginning student, it is odd for me to read such vitriolic statements against Chomsky and his theories. Of the three professors I’ve had in class thus far, all of them are Chomskyan (Chomskian?) supporters with two of them being avid Chomsky freaks. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’! Very irritating. The consensus among my classmates seems to be mostly students who are sick of hearing about him but accept his theories as valid and a few who would (desperately, in some cases) like to be pointed in the direction of some anti-Chomsky literature, if only for a change of pace. As for myself, I think I’ll pick up a copy of ‘Educating Eve’ since ‘the Language Instinct’ was “highly recommended” (ie required) reading for my 201 class.

  15. Of the three professors I’ve had in class thus far, all of them are Chomskyan
    And you wonder why people are vitriolic? The man has cornered the market! Of course the students “accept his theories as valid”; students (except for the usual malcontents) accept what they’re given. And in this case it’s bull hockey.

  16. No scientifical founding is beyond contestation, Chomsky contributed a lot to the development of linguistic: He raised questions which we must be thankful of 🙂 Eventhough chomky’s work generates lots of “whats” and “the hecks” they all brought linguistics to a majuscule scale.
    Just like when Einstein came and step on Newton, someone might come and do the same thing to Chomsky. So, rather than yack whether his ideas are valid or not, it will be better if we do a research or study then come up with something that can counter chomsky’s foundings, and the same time contribute to the linguistics society.

  17. hmmm. i think you are all a bit unfair to chomsky to say he has contributed nothing goes a bit far, everyone in any field of study has contributed something whether it be simply a theory for people to reject, they have still contributed to people coming up with alternative theories.
    i myself dont totally agree with chomsky’s innateness theory but i think it cant simply be rejected as it does make sense on some levels and attempts to explain how babies and small children learn correct grammar despite deficient data around them to learn from (eg adults who talk usuing slang, abbreviations, make grammatical errors, use jargon and produce incomplete or abbreviated sentences. Behavioural theories cannot explain this…
    i think chomsky should be given some credit at least for attempting to explain what others haven’t and for coming up with a feasible theory.

  18. Richard Weavers says

    CHOMCIDIA
    I’ve just stumbled across this site, maybe two and a half years too late. Y’aull still there?
    I’m particularly interested in Scott Martens’s comment:
    “Friday, July 25, 2003: My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky”…,
    which I think is a prevalent enough feeling to deserve a name. If you’re there, Scott Martens, could you email me, please?
    Richard Weavers
    spamequalsdeath@yahoo.com

  19. We are of course still here, and while Dorothea refers to human Chomskybots, she did not link to the One True Chomskybot:

    Of course, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier suffices to account for nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. If the position of the trace in (99c) were only relatively inaccessible to movement, the notion of level of grammaticalness is to be regarded as an abstract underlying order. However, this assumption is not correct, since the natural general principle that will subsume this case is not subject to a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. Presumably, this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features is not quite equivalent to the levels of acceptability from fairly high (eg (99a)) to virtual gibberish (eg (98d)). Notice, incidentally, that the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction appears to correlate rather closely with a general convention regarding the forms of the grammar.

    As the bot says about itself, look on his works, ye mighty, and despair. The code was written originally by John Lawler and rewritten for the Web by Kevin McGowan, and the underlying phrases collected by John F. Sowa, but the phrases themselves — they are the work of the Master.

  20. Thanks for reviving this; I replaced the Pedantry link in the post with an archived one. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine!

  21. My eyes got to “parasitic gap”, and stuck there as to the Tar Baby. It represents to me the essence of advanced flapdoodle French prose – and in English even ! It means, and it don’t.

    Here be much to ponder. Or maybe I’ll just blow it off. My rural network can take only so much.

  22. David Marjanović says

    Knowing the bot had composed this, I watched how far I would get in before encountering the first phrase I could recognize as nonsense.

    It is “subject to a corpus”.

    Checking again, I find a grammar mismatch in “if […] were […], the notion […] is to be regarded […]”. But other than that I can’t tell the first five lines from the real thing.

  23. David Eddyshaw says

    @Stu:

    “Parasitic gap” does actually mean something.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_gap

    The problem (IMHO) is not so much the peculiar terminology as the elaborate theoretical superstructure erected on the basis of such linguistically contingent and frankly marginal oddities. My own response to Chomskyism in this, its Blue Period, is basically: “Fascinating. So what?”

  24. @David Eddyshaw:

    Thanks for the link, but the entire article is a mystery to me. What I find is this: one takes a complete sentence, removes one word, and calls it a “gap” in the sentence. Then decades are spent in search of a theoretical acount of how gaps can arise when they are introduced. This deserves a gold WTF.

    A footnote says “Parasitic gaps have been studied most using English and Swedish data”, and I see another one referring to Romanian. Does all of this make more sense with examples from German, French or Spanish ?

    This is parasitic on the intelligence, that’s for sure. Now where are my tick tweezers ?

  25. Wow, I wonder what happened to poor B. Cummings, Sept 3, 2003 10:07pm. Disillusioned, of Arizona.

  26. January First-of-May says

    What I find is this: one takes a complete sentence, removes one word, and calls it a “gap” in the sentence.

    I don’t think it’s quite that – my impression was that “gaps” were located where a restructuring of the sentence had plucked a word out of its place, kind of like a syntactic version of those runaway vowels from Russian grammar.

    The runaway vowels are, of course, the places where the fall of the yers (or, rarely, another sound change) had left a vowel in some parts of the paradigm but not in others. Presumably the Chomskyan linguists were trying to figure out what the syntactic yers that fell to leave the gaps might have been (if they ever existed, which they probably didn’t, but good luck telling this to the Chomskyans).

  27. David Eddyshaw says

    @January:

    Yes, that’s quite right. This business of “gaps” left by words being moved around is no mere Chomskyan fad but a perfectly real phenomenon in lots of languages, and the idea is actually often quite useful in real-life grammatical description. The gaps often preserve a sort of ghostly afterlife, interfering with the grammar of the sentence in ways which a mere absence would not. I’d give examples but it’s too boring.

    Gaps do indeed often show puzzling behaviour in English in ways which really do cry out for explanation. The trouble was that the Chomskyites early on got very adept in spinning ever more elaborate theories on the basis of such behaviours, and they soon developed a bad habit of elevating these interesting but frankly peripheral aspects of particular languages into supposed keys to the structure of Language in general. Since those days, Chomsky himself has generalised the program to the point where to muggles like me it seems to have no discernible predictive power at all. A cynic might suppose this has something to do with so many past predictions having turned out to be, like, wrong, but I prefer to think that it’s more a case of future-proofing against any possible refutation.

  28. Gaps are very straightforward and ordinary and appear in many languages. “I wanted to go to the store” is a simple example. Who do I want to go to the store? Myself, of course, although the sentence doesn’t say so. We know this is a gap because there are similar sentences where the gap is filled, as in “I wanted Alice to go to the store.” So we can show the gap as “I wanted ___ to go to the store”.

    English and Swedish are odd because they can have two gaps in a sentence, one of which (the parasitic gap) depends on the other. The Wikipedia example “Which explanation did you reject without first really considering?” has a gap after reject, which is what was rejected, but there is another one after considering, which is what was not really considered. Of course, they are the same thing, so we can notate it as “Which explanation did you reject __1 without first really considering __1?”, where the numbers show that the two gaps refer to the same thing.

    In this sentence, we can replace one of the gaps with the pronoun it, but not the other. We can say “Which explanation did you reject without first really considering it?”, but “*Which explanation did you reject it without first really considering?” is ungrammatical, at least for me. So the first gap is parasitic on the second gap. Easy-peasy.

    Of course, I am not a Chomskyite, or a theorist of any sort, and don’t draw any theoretical conclusions from this. But the data is clear and descriptive adequacy is plenty for me.

  29. We know this is a gap because there are similar sentences where the gap is filled, as in “I wanted Alice to go to the store.” So we can show the gap as “I wanted ___ to go to the store”.

    We don’t “know” any such thing; this is an analysis, and not an especially convincing one if you ask me. I do not feel anything missing in the original sentence; the fact that you can have a similar sentence with an object like “Alice” does not prove anything.

  30. January First-of-May says

    I personally was only thinking of gaps like “Whom did you want ___ to go to the store?”, or perhaps slightly more realistically “Where did you want to go to ___?”. I’m not sure if there are non-question examples of that sort of thing.

  31. David Eddyshaw says

    Yes there are, for example in relative constructions and clefting.
    The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by no stretch of the imagination a Chomskyan work, uses the notion quite extensively. I’ll give some examples from English and Kusaal presently. (Not at a computer just now.)

  32. I can see how the concept can be useful for analysis, but that’s not the same as claiming it clearly exists. Cf. the notorious contortions quantum theorists go through.

  33. David Eddyshaw says

    I have no axe to grind re the ontological status of gaps (I’m a thoroughgoing philosophical nominalist when it comes to grammar), but I think it really does simplify not so much analysis as the statement of grammar. For example, CGEL p1082 talks about the syntactic function of gaps. using the examples

    What did you buy []?
    What are you referring to []?
    Where did you see them []?
    Who do you think [] was responsible?
    *Whose did you borrow [] car?
    *How many did they receive [] applications?
    *How serious will it be [] a problem?
    *Who have they shortlisted [] and KIm?

    … saying that the gap can only function in such constructions (in English) as a post-head dependent or a subject.

    There are certainly alternative ways of putting the same facts, but within the already existing descriptive framework of CGEL, this is a very neat way of doing it.

    Kusaal is consistently SVO, but there are nevertheless two ways of getting the object first. One happens with objects which are long and complex (“heavy shift”): the object just gets plonked first, and then must be picked up by an object pronoun:

    Gbigimkanɛ sa kʋ niigi la, ti na kʋ o.
    “The lion that killed the cows yesterday, we’re going to kill him.”

    The other way is by putting the object first, followed by ka, which is a foregrounding construction. The object may then not be picked up by an explicit object pronoun:

    Gbigim la ka ti na kʋ.
    “The lion, we’re going to kill him.”

    This despite the fact that kill is obligatorily transitive: the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” in Kusaal has to be expressed:

    Mid ka ya kʋ nid
    “See that you don’t kill a person.”

    So it seems natural to say there is a “gap” functioning as the object in Gbigim la ka ti na kʋ.

  34. True. I just have scars left from my long-ago experiences in the Gulag mandatory transformational-ling class.

  35. Indeed, for me as well a concept exists just in case it is useful for analysis. There is oxygen, and there isn’t phlogiston, because it’s more helpful to understand combustion in one way than in the other. LIkewise, with Dennett I take the self to be a theoretical posit too, myself just as much as any other self.

  36. David Eddyshaw says

    Man tɛn’ɛsid la pa’al ye m bɛ!

    (“That I am thinking has shown that I exist.” Arini Dikaatu, Kusaasi philosopher.)

  37. January First-of-May says

    On the subject of Kusaasi philosophy – are lizards actually supposed to be masculine in Kusaal?

    Because I keep occasionally quoting that one Kusaasi proverb about lizards, trousers, and tails, but I have to change the lizard to feminine, because that makes much more sense in the context where I’m quoting it, and I’m not sure how much is this a disruption of proper Kusaasi philosophy.

  38. David Eddyshaw says

    Like all advanced modern languages, Kusaal does not grammaticalise sex.
    However, women do not wear trousers. Where would it end?

  39. Maybe, lizard is the one who got into someone else’s trousers? January, will you be so kind to enlighten us?

  40. January First-of-May says

    The context has to do with a maybe-sorta-urban-fantasy-ish story that I regularly comment on. TL/DR is that there’s a kinda-lizardy teenage girl, and, IIRC, she wears trousers because that’s what teenage girls do in the USA in the 2010s, but because she’s kinda-lizardy, she has to include a tail space in said trousers.

    I don’t recall the exact details offhand, but the existence of said tail space was actively plot-relevant at some point, and this is when I started quoting the proverb.

    But the version of the proverb that I knew referred to the lizard as “he”, so I had to change that word to “she” to fit the context. Sometimes I remembered to mention that the original had “he”, sometimes I didn’t.

     
    Lizards do have a grammatical gender in some languages (but not in others, such as English) – but which grammatical gender they have might as well be random; just quoting from Wiktionary, they’re feminine in Russian, German, Italian, and Hebrew, but masculine in French, Spanish, Serbian, and Lithuanian.

    Obviously, I didn’t know enough about Kusaal to tell whether it was plausible for lizards to be masculine in that language.

    In any case, I sincerely apologize for any misuse of Kusaasi philosophy; it certainly was not intended to be disrespectful.

  41. Thanks, but what is the proverb? My google search ended up with such pearls of wisdom as “Just because the lizard nods its head doesn’t mean it’s in agreement” (I guess, it could serve as demonstration of its/it’s distinction) and “a lizard can be caught with the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces”

  42. David Eddyshaw says

    “If you see a lizard wearing trousers, you can be sure that he knows what he’s done with his tail.”

    It is a proverb warning against the Fundamental Attribution Error.
    While human females do not wear trousers, I do not think the rule is strictly applied to lizards. The matter never came up.
    Kusaal pronouns do not distinguish sex.

  43. Lounge lizard is masculine in English.

  44. Wow, I wonder what happened to poor B. Cummings, Sept 3, 2003 10:07pm. Disillusioned, of Arizona.

    He became an Electrical Technician at the LA Times printing facility.

    That knowledge was shockingly easy to acquire, btw.

  45. We know this is a gap because there are similar sentences where the gap is filled, as in “I wanted Alice to go to the store.”

    This seems to me like an example of how Chomskyites are led astray by their lack of knowledge of foreign languages. “I wanted to go to the store” has no gap, and the construction is the same in any Indo-European language – “Ich wollte zum Laden gehen”, “Volevo andare al negozio”, “Chociałem iść do sklepu”, etc. The fact that you can want someone else to go, rather than want THAT someone else goes, is what is odd about English.

    I also cannot see where the gaps are in David Eddyshaw’s examples. That just looks like word order.

  46. “gaps” left by words being moved around is no mere Chomskyan fad but a perfectly real phenomenon

    I would say that already the notion of “words being moved around” IS precisely the core of “the Chomskyan fad”.

    The two basic ideas that all this presumes are (1) one sentence might be more primitive and another being derived from it, and (2) this happens synchronically within the grammar. The first is quite plausible, but then the second not very: syntactic derivation must certainly exist also a diachronically, and then that seems to be an entirely sufficient account of the facts already. If all derivation is instead crammed into synchronic grammar, then “gaps” end up as a sort analogue of null morphemes that can be inserted at will if the evidence doesn’t fit one’s essentially internally reconstructed generalizations about word order.

    There is oxygen, and there isn’t phlogiston, because it’s more helpful to understand combustion in one way than in the other.

    Combustion as such is just as easy to understand either way, it is other concepts of chemistry such as specific gravity or the isolatability of substances where oxygen fits into the established picture and phlogiston does not.

  47. David Eddyshaw says

    This seems to me like an example of how Chomskyites are led astray by their lack of knowledge of foreign languages. “I wanted to go to the store” has no gap, and the construction is the same in any Indo-European language

    No, it’s not. Check out modern Greek or Welsh for a start. It seems that you may be being led astray by lack of knowledge of foreign languages.

    I am no Chomskyan and neither are the very much more learned editors of CGEL. Them’s fighting words.

    Interestingly, the English modal verbs are often analysed these days as taking “catenative complement” stripped-down clauses, which may or may not have their own independent subjects. I was struck by this because it has interesting analogies with Kusaal constructions which have been traditionally (but wrongly in my view) described as serial verb constructions.

    In any case, however, just because one construction does not lend itself to a useful analysis with “gaps”, it hardly follows that no construction does. You might as well say that the fact that there are no elephants native to Greenland proves that there are no elephants in Africa.

  48. Yes, I forgot Welsh, sorry. Still, even in a sentence like “Rydw i eisiau mynd i’r siop”, is there really a gap? A gap is an ellipsis, and I don’t perceive any missing information in that statement.

    I understand that an utterance like “She went to the party and Tom too” demonstrates a gap. I’m not saying gaps don’t exist, just that I don’t see any in Cowan’s example or in yours and it is unclear to me how those are supposed to be examples. The examples on Wikipedia make a lot more sense to me.

    Is the claim that “I wanted [] to go the shop” contains a gap just because you could add a direct object after “wanted”?

  49. David Eddyshaw says

    I would say that already the notion of “words being moved around” IS precisely the core of “the Chomskyan fad”.

    Would that the Chomskyans had indeed stopped at that point!
    Far from the case, unfortunately. And they’ve long since abandoned that particular idea, anyway.

    Personally, I find the idea quite intuitive, but I take absolutely no stand on whether (for example) interrogative sentences are synchronically “derived” from assertions by a process involving movement in English, not least because I can’t see how taking a stand would make a blind bit of difference to anything that matters. On the other hand, it seems a bit perverse to refuse on ideological grounds to accept some sort of synchronic derivational connection between e.g.

    “I am not a linguist.” and
    “He says he’s not a linguist.”

    To do so has been a standard grammarian’s explanatory manoeuvre since long before Noam met Zellig. I don’t see the harm in it unless you arbitrarily object to all abstraction in syntactic description on principle.

    However, the idea of “gaps” needn’t actually logically imply any sort of movement anyway. Whether there’s any value in talking about gaps boils down pretty much entirely to whether it elucidates your description of syntax or not. It’s at least worth pondering why people with absolutely no ideological axe to grind might have come to the conclusion that it does. Explaining syntax is hard.

  50. David Eddyshaw says

    @Vanya:

    The supposed gap represents the embedded subject of the infinitive:

    “I wanted [me] to go to the shop.”

    Gaps are not ellipses, or at least not what is normally meant by that slightly slippery term.

    CGEL (source of all wisdom) has a whole section on “catenative complements” which goes into their rationale for reanalysing English constructions like these in great depth. I found it entirely convincing, not least because of cross-linguistic parallels. I can’t do justice to the argument here, what with (a) not being clever enough and (b) typing on a phone, but there is no whiff of the Chomskys about it at all.

    https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-catenative-verb-1689832

  51. Lot lizard is feminine in English.

  52. I wanted to go to the store” has no gap

    I protest that to me gap means no more than a place where something could be but isn’t, like a gap in the teeth. No implications of word-shuffling in the brain or elsewhere.

    I wanted to go to the store” has no gap, and the construction is the same in any Indo-European language

    I think this might be part of the pervasive effects of the European Sprachbund on linguists’ thinking. German, along with French, is a nuclear Sprachbund language, and the others you exemplify are at least part of the core. (Greek is also core, but Welsh is definitely outside.) You really have to look at the Indo-Iranian languages before you generalize like that (not that I have).

    The fact that you can want someone else to go, rather than want THAT someone else goes, is what is odd about English.

    Although there are a handful of earlier examples, English seems to have borrowed the accusative and infinitive construction directly from Latin, probably as part of the revival of learning.

  53. English seems to have borrowed the accusative and infinitive construction directly from Latin, probably as part of the revival of learning.

    I thought of that, but it seems very unlikely. Isn’t that construction more likely a Celtic substrate?

  54. Yeah, I find it a little hard to believe that a learned grammatical borrowing from Latin would become part of basic grammar.

  55. David Eddyshaw says

    The construction is not the same in modern Greek, which doesn’t have an infinitive. I believe it’s a Balkan Sprachbund thing.

  56. David Eddyshaw says

    The English “accusative and infinitive” (so-called) can hardly be from a Celtic substrate: there’s nothing comparable in Insular Celtic.

    The (colloquial modern) Welsh example Vanya gave is actually calqued on English, btw: eisiau is actually a noun, not a verb, modal or otherwise.

  57. David Eddyshaw says

    (And I’ve just discovered it’s a loanword from the Latin exiguus. I Did Not Know That.)

  58. David Eddyshaw says

    Before the Romans came, my forebears evidently not only did not have children (plant, from Latin) but also lacked the concept “want” (eisiau, also from Latin.) An earthly paradise. Curse you, Julius Caesar!

  59. But they wanted for children, by your own analysis. Caesar deserves a break here.

  60. How did one say “I want you to go to the shop/well/smithy” in medieval Welsh?

  61. On the other hand, it seems a bit perverse to refuse on ideological grounds to accept some sort of synchronic derivational connection (…) I don’t see the harm in it unless you arbitrarily object to all abstraction in syntactic description on principle

    I have little objection to any arbitrary amount of epicycles as long as this is kept within syntactic description and not reified to an entity existing in language itself.

    I protest that to me gap means no more than a place where something could be but isn’t, like a gap in the teeth.

    Ah, following Subtractive Universal Grammar you will then no doubt agree that e.g. “I protest that…” also has an adverb gap as can be proven by the feliciticity of “I loudly protest that…”, a conjuction gap as proven by “I and my mother protest that…”, which in turn has, among others, two adjective gaps for each member of the conjunction, a grand- prefixation gap in the latter member, an /or gap in the conjunction itself…; also several of these are in fact indeed parasitic gaps, as in e.g. “I and my mother protest in unison that…” but **”I __ protest in unison that…”

  62. I am agape!

  63. PlasticPaddy says

    @DE
    I do not know if this is relevant to Welsh but in Irish “want” is a bit elusive. You never “want” someone else to do something: you “would like” this.
    Ba mhaith liom go ndéanfá suas d’intinn féin = i want [would like] you to make up (dreadful english calque but ok) your own mind
    In the past you have to either use
    “I asked/was looking for you to” (polite) or “I needed you to” (rather less so) or something like “I would have liked” or more pragmatically “I wanted whatever it is done, without mentioning you at all”.

  64. I am agree !

  65. David Eddyshaw says

    @Vanya:

    I am not fluent in Mediaeval Welsh since I left Arthur’s court, but I’d say it’s something like

    Mi a vynnaf vynet ohonot i’r ffynnawn.
    “I want you to go to the well.”

    The main point is that Welsh doesn’t have infinitives; it has a ubiquitous verbal noun, which turns up all the time and is the basis of all sorts of periphrastic tenses, but the subject of it is either expressed as a possessive or with a following preposition.

  66. David Eddyshaw says

    I have little objection to any arbitrary amount of epicycles as long as this is kept within syntactic description and not reified to an entity existing in language itself.

    We are then in complete agreement (see my remark on nominalism above.)

    I am glad to see that you are progressing in the way of SUG, my Padawan. But beware of the Dark Side!

  67. But “eisiau” even less so, since (at least in ‘good’/not-too-English-calqued Welsh) it doesn’t fill the “yn” slot after the main verb: “Dw’n hoffi caffi” (I like coffee) vs “dwi eisiau caffi” (I need [a] coffee).

    But whither dialectical “moyn”?

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    (Y)mo(f)yn seems to be a well-behaved verbal noun, at least. Not like those camouflaged Englishmen eisiau and angen. I imagine it’s related to gofyn and thus to the highly respectable mynnu that I mediaevalised above.

  69. David Eddyshaw says

    Quirk and Wrenn’s Old English Grammar describes “accusative and infinitive” constructions:

    ne hyrde ic snotorlicor guman þingian
    “I have not heard a man speak more wisely”

    do hit us to witanne
    “make us learn it”

    het his heafod ofaslean
    “ordered his head to be cut off”

  70. If you are really interested:

    Alternative expressions of “want” complements.

    It doesn’t work in Japanese…

  71. Ah, the GPC gives the chain go-mynnaf > gofynnaf; ym-gofynnaf > ymofynnaf > moyn. All from the PIE root *mendh-.

    Also with respect to moyn.

  72. David Eddyshaw says

    @Bathrobe:

    Nor in Kusaal. Bɔɔd “want” takes either a noun-phrase object or a purpose-clause, and in Kusaal such clauses never delete the subject pronoun regardless of its reference. There are plenty of cases where Kusaal consistently does omit same-subject pronouns: after ka “and” in narrative this is so consistent that if a pronoun is present it signals a change of subject by default. The Kusaal facts just fall out inevitably from the syntax of the construction that bɔɔd takes, and semantics doesn’t come into it. (Same as modern Greek, in fact.)

    I doubt that speakers of Uto-Aztecan languages really have a radically different notion of “wanting” from speakers of Kusaal (or Greek.) It seems to me that the author is in danger of “explaining” different “want” constructions by attributing subtly different meanings to them without any very clear independent evidence for those meaning differences. Looking for that difference in terms of whether the subjects are the same or different looks awfully like a circular argument.

  73. In Japanese different forms are used.

    ikitai (I) want to go.

    itte hoshii (I) want him/you to go.

    Mongolian doesn’t have a single standard form to express wanting.

    I suspect the Anglocentrism of the generativists is somehow involved in all this.

  74. David Eddyshaw says

    You’ll know orders of magnitude more than I about it, but I seem to recall that Japanese regards mental states in general as inaccessible to everyone except their owner, and this is grammaticalised, so “I am happy” but “he seems happy.” So the “wanting” difference in Japanese could reflect a broader phenomenon.

    I wonder if some of these Uto-Aztecan languages do something similar?

  75. That’s ikitagatte iru you’re talking about.

    It means ‘he is showing signs of wanting to go’. Yes, ikitai does express one’s internal state, and you can’t express someone else’s internal state (because you aren’t them), but I think there are grammatical contexts where you could use ikitai of another person (surmise, quoting). Ikitagatte iru means only that you have witnessed expressions of interest and you’re pretty sure that that represents his internal state. It does not mean ‘He wants to go’; it means ‘He has shown strong signs of wanting to go (or he has said he wants to go)’.

    It seems to me that you could say Kare wa ikitai deshō ne ‘I guess he would want to go’, surmising about that person’s feelings, which would be different from Kare wa ikitagaru deshō ne ‘I guess he would indicate a desire to go, be keen to go’.

    The Japanese difference I was talking about is that iki-tai expresses the desire of the person speaking using the suffix -tai, while itte hoshii uses the verb hoshii meaning ‘to want’. Other verbs could be used, like itte moraitai. Morau means ‘receive from someone’, -tai is ‘want’. So the meaning is ‘I want to receive that [you] go’. Or Itte morau, which could virtually be a command meaning ‘you go’ (literally ‘I will receive that [you] go’).

    So the aspect that you mention is relevant but in terms of form they are quite different.

  76. I should add to the above, which I wrote as I was thinking:

    Hoshii is similar to -tai in that it represents the internal feelings of the speaker.

    What is significant is that a different construction, including a different verb, is used for the two (‘I want to go’, ‘I want you to go’). When speaking of someone else’s desires you would have to add a distancing mechanism such as quoting them or describing their behaviour objectively. Hoshii is no different from -tai in that respect.

    And the other point is the use of the verb morau or similar, in the expression itte moraitai. You could say that it is really the same as English if you strain out all the inessential parts, and that the only difference is the existence of the suffix -tai that attaches directly to the verb, obviating the need for a verb meaning ‘want’, but it’s a bit different from debating whether the subject of the clause you go is ‘gapped’ or not.

  77. David Marjanović says

    The construction is not the same in modern Greek, which doesn’t have an infinitive. I believe it’s a Balkan Sprachbund thing.

    “I want that I go” is Balkan.

    Quirk and Wrenn’s Old English Grammar describes “accusative and infinitive” constructions:

    The first works exactly the same way in German. Same for “see”, and I think that’s the complete list of verbs that tolerate AcI in German.

    The second… “it” is the accusative, and “us” is a dative. In the very archaic German cognate tu es uns zu wissen, I’ve always interpreted uns as a dative. “Put it to us to know”, basically.

    The third – no, that’s active, not passive: “he told [his audience in general] to cut his head off”. Er befahl (archaic: hieß), ihm den Kopf abzuschlagen. The head is not the A of an AcI, and the order is given to a missing dative, not a missing accusative.

  78. David Eddyshaw says

    Quirk and Wrenn cite het his heafod ofaslean specifically in a context where they say “we often find the infinitive used with passive meaning”, cross-referencing other examples of passive use like heht hine læran “commanded him to be taught” and þas þing sint to donne “these things are to be done.” Of course, they may be wrong; the first example in particular looks susceptible to the same kind of reanalysis you suggest.

  79. David Marjanović says

    Diese Dinge sind zu tun “these things are to be done” isn’t grammatically passive in German either. They probably contain a gap where some “for”-construction or dative has fallen out: “these things are for us/somebody to do”.

    hine is accusative, right? In that case it must be “ordered to teach him” – hieß, ihn zu lehren.

  80. David Eddyshaw says

    it’s a bit different from debating whether the subject of the clause you go is ‘gapped’ or not.

    Sure. I brought it up because I thought it might shed light on the sort of meaning differences Guerrero asserts in “want” concepts which she tries to correlate with different constructions, some of which involve “gapping” if you want to call it that. There doesn’t really seem to be enough data there to say: More research needed!

    Given that Japanese personal pronouns are poor marginalised creatures avoided in polite conversation anyway, any invocation of “gapping” in Japanese would have to involve quite stratospheric levels of abstraction, and J Pystynen would be gravely displeased. I’m not prepared to take that risk.

  81. David Eddyshaw says

    In Kusaal you can use bɔɔd “want” with an abstract noun regularly derived from a verb as object (Kusaal doesn’t have infinitives either), but it means “be about to”, not “want to”, and the subject doesn’t even have to be capable of volition:

    Tiig la bɔɔd liig.
    “The tree is about to fall.”

    Bɛog bɔɔd nier.
    “Morning is about to appear.”

    not *Bɛog bɔɔd ye li nie *”Morning wants to appear.”

    [Actually, you probably could say Tiig la bɔɔd ye li lu “The tree wants to fall” in an appropriate context; in the traditional Weltanschauung trees can be both personal and spiritually powerful. I expect living in Sudanian savanna gives you a different perspective on these things.]

  82. Diese Dinge sind zu tun “these things are to be done” isn’t grammatically passive in German either. They probably contain a gap where some “for”-construction or dative has fallen out: “these things are for us/somebody to do”.

    That damned “gap” again. What happened to “ellipsis” ?

    I see sinning against Pystynen principles here, reification right and left. It’s easy to imagine some top dog courtier inventing these German locutions from whole cloth: not as a gapping or ellipsiotomy of an eternal sentence, but as a polite (veiled, threatening) equivalent of one – equivalent in the sense of conveying the same information and commands. There is no need to reify an “original sentence” that has acquired holes.

    Diese Dinge sind zu tun can be seen as an equivalent to, say, Diese Dinge sind euch aufgegeben zu tun. The latter may precede the former in time, but not in being and dignity. It can be taken out for disciplinary or explanatory purposes, otherwise it’s kept in the attic.

    It’s just as easy to imagine the “shorter” form as the original form, traditional in the days of oracular rule. Prove it ain’t so. Maybe there’s no temporal precedence at all, at least not one measurable in units of length. I could live with that.

  83. David Eddyshaw says

    @ə:

    V moyn T

    Bah. Kids today.

  84. but it means “be about to”, not “want to”

    Cf. will in English vs. German.

  85. Khalkha Mongolian -маар байна -maar baina originally meant something like ‘about to’. Now it means ‘want to’. (Still means ‘about to’ in Inner Mongolian.)

  86. David Marjanović says

    hine is accusative, right?

    *facepalm* Completely irrelevant, if Old English was like 18th-century literary German in this respect: heißen goes with the accusative anyway, so heht hine læran is perfectly ambiguous between hieß ihn(,) zu lehren “told him to teach” and hieß, ihn zu lehren “said/ordered to teach him”.

    That damned “gap” again. What happened to “ellipsis” ?

    I’m perfectly fine with “ellipsis” here. We’ve just been talking about “gaps” much lately, and I didn’t sleep well. 🙂

    It’s just as easy to imagine the “shorter” form as the original form, traditional in the days of oracular rule. Prove it ain’t so. Maybe there’s no temporal precedence at all, at least not one measurable in units of length. I could live with that.

    Me too.

  87. Could someone please pass me a reliable hint as to whether “Pystynen” is stressed on any particular syllable(s), and if so is it the first, second or third, or a combination of the aforementioned ?

  88. David Eddyshaw says

    That damned “gap” again. What happened to “ellipsis” ?

    Ellipsis usually means omitting something redundant, in the sense that the omission makes no difference to the original meaning. It varies from very informal (“Can’t see the point”) to quite stylised (“Thank you”), where you could reasonably argue that calling it ellipsis at all is not appropriate synchronically.

    Gaps aren’t like that: if you fill the gap you either get an ungrammatical sentence or you change the original meaning.

    So in English, “I want me to go to the shops” is weird, whereas “I want you to go to the shops” is normal (and less effort.)

    In Kusaal (I checked this specifically with a very clued-up informant):

    Pu’a la da’ daka ka [GAP] kɛŋ Bɔk.

    is “The woman has bought a box and gone to Bawku”, whereas

    Pu’a la da’ daka ka o kɛŋ Bɔk.

    is “The woman has bought a box and it’s gone to Bawku.”

    with the implication of subject change being so strong that it overrides the fact that boxes are inanimate and would normally be referred to with the pronoun li “it”, not o “he/she” (even this residual natural gender system is tending to break down in modern informal speech, which is how this interpretation gets to be possible at all.)

  89. Pystynen is Finnish. Initial stress.

  90. January First-of-May says

    Could someone please pass me a reliable hint as to whether “Pystynen” is stressed on any particular syllable(s), and if so is it the first, second or third, or a combination of the aforementioned ?

    Wikipedia says that stress is non-phonemically initial in Finnish, so presumably the first. I’m not entirely sure, though.

    [EDIT: ninja-ed by Trond Engen.]

  91. PlasticPaddy says

    There is a sort of inverse gap in German, where the verb at the end of a clause is uniquely constrained by some of the preceding words. For comic effect a different verb can be substituted.

  92. Bɔk … Bawku

    Presumably the former is a reduced form of the latter; is Bawku from a different language? Wikipedia tells me the kusaasi are the indigenous inhabitants of the area.

  93. David Eddyshaw says

    Ah! I’m glad you asked me that! Plagiarising my own work with a shameless cut-and-paste:

    When speaking English or French, Kusaasi normally cite Kusaal personal and place names without apocope [ref to relevant subsection of grammar]: À-Wɩ̄n from Wɩ̀dɩ̀-n̆yá’aŋ will introduce himself as “Awini” from “Woriyanga.” Similarly “Kusaasi” for Kʋ̄sâas, “Bawku” for Bɔ̀k etc. “Woriyanga” also shows a Mampruli rather than Kusaal form for the initial combining form “horse”: Mampruli wuri-, Kusaal wɩ̀d-. This reflects the origin of the convention in the use of Mamprussi guides and interpreters by the British in their initial explorations of the area. A parallel development took place earlier in Mamprussi country when the British arrived with Dagomba guides: thus “Gambaga” (Dagbani Gambaɣa) for the Mampruli place name Gambaa (Naden.) The convention has been generalised by analogy, and many forms show distinctively Kusaal phonology, morphology or vocabulary. Simple reproduction of Kusaal forms is also sometimes seen, e.g. “Aruk” for the personal name À-Dʋ̄k, and the language name “Kusaal” Kʋ̄sâal itself.

  94. Thanks! So the spelling Bawku represents /bɔku/?

  95. David Eddyshaw says

    The actual Mampruli form is /bɔkku/; in English, people say [bɔ:’kʰu:]. Like most local place names, its meaning is transparent: it has the uplifting translation “pit.” Mampruli and Kusaal are closely related, so the relationship between a Mampruli word and its Kusaal equivalent is usually obvious to locals. However, some placenames meaning nothing in Mampruli and the English-context forms are just artificially Mamprulicated by analogy: “Tilli”, for example, is not a Mampruli word; the name is from Toende Kusaal til “tree trunk.”

    The ‘apocope’ thing I refer to is the major distinguishing mark of Kusaal over against its close relatives: in most contexts, including citation, words appear with their final vowels deleted and any resulting final consonant clusters simplified. However, this is a synchronic thing: the full forms still appear in certain contexts, such as the end of clauses involving a negation:

    Pu’a la pʋ kɛŋ Bɔkɔ.
    “The woman hasn’t gone to Bawku.”

    This means that the underlying final vowels are still accessible to Kusaal speakers, making it that much easier for them to match up the forms with Mampruli, which doesn’t have apocope. (Most Kusaasi cannot actually speak Mampruli.)

  96. Fascinating, thanks very much!

  97. Sounds sort of like the relationship between Finnish and Estonian (as I think somebody already remarked in another thread).

  98. David Eddyshaw says

    In many respects Kusaal seems to be particularly conservative within Western Oti-Volta (though this may be partly the illusion someone here once remarked on: the language you know best always turns out to be the most conservative.) It preserves the original vowel system almost completely intact in root syllables, and the Agolle Kusaal dialect and Mooré are the only languages of the whole group which preserve inherited /r/ as a separate phoneme (but its loss elsewhere is probably late, as the reflexes differ even between very closely related languages.) I think Kusaal is probably unique in preserving a whole distinct conjugation of mostly-stative verbs, though it’s difficult to be certain of this given the underdescription of most of the languages. Mooré has kept more of the original noun class system intact though, and Farefare, Talni and Mampruli have partly maintained the old grammatical gender system, which all the other languages have ditched.

    It would make some sense for Kusaal to be conservative overall if the spread of Western Oti-Volta was largely the result of the expansion of the Mossi-Dagomba empires; the original capital was in what is now Kusaasi territory (though it was relocated south a generation later after successful Kusaasi and Bisa revolts.) The timescale doesn’t seem to work out very well: the original empire was probably founded about seven hundred years ago, and the Western Oti-Volta languages are collectively about as different from one another as the Romance languages. Still, there’s no law that languages have to change at the exactly the same rate in West Africa and in Western Europe. There might well be substrate effects involved too.

  99. It would make some sense for Kusaal to be conservative overall […]; the original capital was in what is now Kusaasi territory

    It seems to vary. Italian is certainly conservative, but on the other hand RP is innovative.

  100. David Eddyshaw says

    Yeah, I’m not dead set on the idea myself, and there are quite a number of problems with it in this particular case.

    The Dagomba and Mossi kingdoms by common consent are cadet branches of the Mamprussi state, and while Dagbani and Mampruli are strikingly innovative phonologically, Mooré is very conservative. Mooré is also on the other side of the major split in Western Oti-Volta between northern and southern groups. So the political and linguistic histories don’t match well.

    Furthermore, the original Mossi-Dagomba chiefly elite probably spoke a different language (or languages) from their subjects (still the case with the neighbouring Gonja kingdoms.) Mossi-Dagomba chiefs still speak to their subjects on official occasions via a “linguist”, despite there being no actual language difference; however, this is a pan-Ghanaian thing (the Ashanti do it too) and one should probably not draw too many conclusions from it.

  101. David Eddyshaw says

    I see that the Wikipedia entry for “Ellipsis” cites Anne Toner’s Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission; while this is not in the same league as the philosopher J Austin’s decision to call his work Sense and Sensibilia, I feel it deserves an honourable mention. The only consistent fix of horrible intellectual puns I get for the most part is picture captions and article subheadings in the Economist.

  102. Quirk and Wrenn: “we often find the infinitive used with passive meaning”

    Does that explain why LIHT MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN means “The Light ordered that I should be made”? (Written on the Sign of Fire in The Dark Is Rising, inspired by a real Anglo-Saxon artwork inscribed AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN.)

  103. David Eddyshaw says

    Well, I would say yes; David M will presumably say that there is a dative pronoun referring to the actual artisans lurking in the ginnunga-gap.

  104. David Marjanović says

    Heh. Where else!

    Yes, I do think this is “Ælfred ordered to make me” – not idiomatic in modern English, but still unremarkable in German.

    (…other than the fact that it has fallen almost completely out of fashion for objects to talk about themselves.)

    Fascinating, thanks very much!

    + 1

  105. Gaps are mere visions fugitives, fleeting glimpses of the Ur-Dative from which all explanations flow.

    Glad I got that figured out. Couldn’t have done it without you guys, though !

  106. David Eddyshaw says

    the Ur-Dative

    It’s ra.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language#Nominal_morphology

    If only Thor Heyerdahl could have known!

  107. David Eddyshaw says
  108. I see a steep learning curve that appears to terminate abruptly. This is not for the masses.

    # Additional spatial or temporal meanings can be expressed by genitive phrases like “at the head of” = “above”, “at the face of” = “in front of”, “at the outer side of” = “because of” etc.: bar udu ḫad2-ak-a = “outer.side sheep white-genitive-locative” = “in the outer side of a white sheep” = “because of a white sheep”. #

  109. How did white sheep get on the agenda ? Help me out here, David. I had believed the completive of “omit unnecessary” to be “white sheep”, yet now they appear to have been paradigmatic in Sumerian. Not a completive but a becausative.

  110. Omit needless sheep!

    There is only one god / He is the sun god / Ra! Ra! Ra!

  111. Sis Boom Ba !

  112. David Eddyshaw says

    The People’s Republic of Wales indignantly repudiates the hegemonic Saxon concept of “Needless Sheep”, which is offensive to the feelings of our citizens.

  113. a reliable hint as to whether “Pystynen” is stressed on any particular syllable(s)

    You can hear Tiina Pystysen at the very beginning of this video:

    https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2010/01/14/kirjailija-ja-graafikko-tiina-pystynen

  114. Thanks, juha. In speaking she seems to use a number of words that end in “ta”, this being uttered fairly forcefully after a brief pause/stop. Like a kind of emphasis, but at the other end of the word from what I’m used to.

  115. David Marjanović says

    I think that’s -tta.

  116. which is offensive to the feelings of our citizens

    Do you mean the citizens belonging to Homo sapiens, or the others?

  117. Surely all citizens of the People’s Republic of Wales find it offensive, humans and ruminants alike.

  118. David Eddyshaw says

    Indeed. We in the PRW have no truck with reactionary ovinism.

  119. a number of words that end in “ta”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitive_case#Finnish

  120. David Eddyshaw says

    In re my vague speculation about the spread of the Western Oti-Volta languages perhaps being related to the political expansion of the Mossi-Dagomba states: I thought that one difficulty was that the foundation of those empires was only about seven hundred years ago, and it seems difficult to square that with the current Romance-level diversity of the languages.

    However, I was just reading Juha Janhunen’s Mongolian, wherein he points out that despite the various Mongolian languages all being descended from the koine of Chinggis Khan’s empire, they differ very considerably from one another, including two (Mongolian and Santa) “structurally almost as different […] as is possible within the context of a single language family.” So I spoke too soon.

    It also occurred to me somewhat belatedly that the author may very well be our Juha (see above.)

  121. I don’t think it’s our Juha… but I could be wrong.

  122. Lars (the original one) says

    Juha was the John of Finnish in the mid and late 19th, so a coincidence is very likely. (Before and after that it was Juho, it seems).

    Most Danes (or Germans) called Lars are not me, and most Germans (or Danes) called Hans aren’t our Hans either.

  123. Stu Clayton says

    Most Danes (or Germans) called Lars are not me

    I see. That explains the need to distinguish yourself as “the original one” !

  124. SFReader@yahoo.com says

    Santa is a seven centuries old Mongolian-based creole. You might as well wonder why French and Haitian Creole are so different. Or English and Saramaccan.

  125. (Mongolian and Santa) “structurally almost as different […] as is possible within the context of a single language family.”

    Santa (and a few other neighboring languages) is a seven centuries old Mongolian-based creole.

    It is spoken by a racially mixed group of Sunni Muslim farmers. Their ancestors are believed to have been brought by Mongols to the Gansu province of China from Muslim Central Asia in 13th century (as slaves I presume) and originally they probably spoke various Iranian or Turkic languages. In Gansu they further were intermixed with people speaking Tibetan (and likely Tangut too) and several varieties of Chinese. And as Muslims, they were of course heavily influenced by Arabic.

    All these languages on top of imperfectly learned Mongolian which initially served as common lingua franca.

  126. Re: Juha Janhunen

    The prominent Finnish Mongolist for some reason looks Mongolian.

    Maybe if you study a language long enough you’ll start looking like a native speaker.

  127. David Eddyshaw says

    Hasn’t worked for me so far. I could have saved a fortune on sunblock.

  128. David Eddyshaw says

    Santa is a seven centuries old Mongolian-based creole. You might as well wonder why French and Haitian Creole are so different. Or English and Saramaccan.

    I got the impression from Janhunen’s book that even the core Mongolian languages differ quite markedly from one another, but several Hatters will Actually Know and can tell me.

    In the case of Western Oti-Volta, a fair bit turns on what one means by the all-too-malleable term “creole” (exhibit A, John McWhorter.) None of the languages is creole-like in the way that Haitian or Tok Pisin or Nigerian Pidgin or KiNuba is; on the other hand, the entire group shows loss of several noun classes morphologically, verb flexion is the simplest in all of Oti-Volta after Buli/Konni (which hasn’t got any) and shows abundant signs of levelling, and most languages have lost grammatical gender altogether. The trouble is that the most striking simplifications apply to all the Western Oti-Volta languages (except the geographically isolated Boulba, as far as I can tell), so they either were already there in the protolanguage or have spread across the distinct languages later, which seems to imply a rather more complex dynamic than the sort of language-contact-induced simplification that McWhorter likes to posit. “Contagious creolisation”, as it were.

  129. Trond Engen says

    Same-lexifier creoles can have similar results on different substrates. I’ll suggest a two-step creolization where the lexifier of the attested local creoles was itself a creole, e.g. an imperial army language or a regional lingua franca. I think this is pretty mainstream in the explanation of the various Romance-based creoles, and also Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier creoles and the various West African “Pidgins”? Wihout modern communications, local langiuages in Papua New Guinea might have been creolized with Tok Pisin rather than replaced by it. Actually I suspect they are, even if these local creoles end up being absorbed rather than establishing themselves as independent systems.

  130. even the core Mongolian languages differ quite markedly from one another

    Not really. Just Scots/English, Scandinavian, East Slavic, Spanish/Portuguese level of differentiation.

    Everything outside of Gansu-Qinghai languages, Dagur and Moghol is basically one language (or not very wide dialect continuum with several codified literary languages).

  131. David Eddyshaw says

    I’ll suggest a two-step creolization where the lexifier of the attested local creoles was itself a creole

    With the proviso that Proto-Western-Oti-Volta wasn’t very creole-like sensu stricto, and that the various modern Western Oti-Volta languages aren’t either, maybe yes.

    Not only is the diversity of the languages within Oti-Volta concentrated in the east, so is (broadly speaking) the morphological complexity of individual languages. The (perhaps) left-behind-in-Benin Western-Oti-Volta language Boulba hasn’t participated in the reduction of noun classes that the rest of Western Oti-Volta has, and as far as I can tell from the minimal data available it has full-blown gender agreement to a degree unknown even in such of the other languages as retain grammatical gender at all. So the Western-Oti-Volta branch that went to what is now Ghana and Burkina Faso (if that’s what happened) was already somewhat stripped-down morphosyntactically.

    It’s tempting to attribute the sweeping vowel system simplifications seen in Mampruli and Dagbani to speakers of Gurunsi languages balking at getting their tongues round nine distinct vowel qualiities with distinctive length, nasalisation and glottalisation. The Gurunsi group is divided in two by a wedge of mainly Mampruli-Dagbani type Western Oti-Volta, so it’s no great stretch to imagine Gurunsi as a substratum there. However, most extant Gurunsi languages have distinctly more complex vowel systems than Mampruli-Dagbani.

    Gurma languages would be another possibility for substrates, but again, most have more complex vowel systems than Mampruli-Dagbani. The Gurma language in geographical contact with Kusaal and Mampruli, Moba, looks very much like it’s been influenced by Western Oti-Volta, rather than the other way about. The Gurma languages, moreover, all have grammatical gender systems which are very much alive and well.

    Mooré also rather spoils the picture by being spread over a wide area in the north, and also being strikingly conservative in phonology; however, there are independent historical reasons for thinking Mooré has expanded relatively rapidly and relatively recently, and that the area was not previously heavily populated, so you could argue that substratum influences would be less anyway.

    My main concern is that although it’s fairly easy to make quite nice just-so stories, which may even be true, it’s difficult to see how any of it could be really testable (much the same objection as I have to John McWhorter’s “explanation” of Kwa, in fact.)

  132. David Marjanović says

    What are all these vowel systems like? I’m reminded of East Yiddish having precisely those 5 vowels that Polish (6) and German (10 minimum) have in common.

    Similarly, how do the gender systems work? McWhorter’s argument about how the Vikings burned the English one to the ground is that lots of obvious cognates (usually slightly different derivatives of the same roots) have unpredictably different genders in North and West Germanic, so people basically got confused and gave up except, notably, for social gender, where the systems of course agreed.

  133. David Eddyshaw says

    The commonest vowels systems locally have seven basic vowels, usually more or less a e o ɪ ʊ i u, very often actually written a ɛ ɔ e o i u respectively. Proto-Western-Oti-Volta had the nine a ɛ ɔ e o ɪ ʊ i u. Agolle Kusaal still does, structurally; the original ɛ ɔ are actually realised as [ja] [wa] when short, [iə] [uɵ] when long, but nevertheless behave throughout like monophthongs. The original e o have expanded into the vacated phonetic space and are realised [ɛ] [ɔ].

    All the languages have distinctive vowel length; many have distinctive nasalisation. Glottalised vowels appear exclusively in the contiguous Western Oti-Volta languages Farefare, Talni, Nabit and Kusaal, but were definitely features of the Western Oti-Volta protolanguage, and correspond regularly to sequences in the much less closely related Nawdm; despite the absence of anything like this in any other Oti-Volta languages, the feature must go all the way back to the Oti-Volta protolanguage: it’s just been repeatedly independently lost in the vast majority of languages – unsurprisingly in view of its unusual character.

    All the languages show very marked positional prominence, with the full set of vowel distinctions found only in root syllables. Affixes typically show only a three-way a i u contrast, where even the i/u contrast may be secondary. Epenthetic vowels usually show no contrasts at all, but may develop them secondarily, as they do in Kusaal because of allophone-conditioning final vowels being deleted by apocope.

    The gender systems are all inherited and ultimately cognate; cognate nouns usually have the same gender in the different languages unless simplification of agreement has led to complete loss of that gender. The system is well preserved in Gurma, much reduced and often absent in Western Oti-Volta, and variably reduced in Gurunsi largely as a result of the tendency of that group to fairly marked phonological attrition.

    Gurma is quite far from Western Oti-Volta in terms of obviously cognate vocabulary, not to the degree that distinct branches of Indo-European are, but much more than French vs Romanian, say; Gurunsi is much more distant, about on the level of Germanic vs Slavonic. So it is indeed the case that if (say) a Gurma speaker was imperfectly acquiring a still gender-rich Proto-Western-Oti-Volta, the gender systems would not be at all helpfully congruent; all the more so for a Gurunsi speaker.

    The equivalent of “social gender” would be the distinction between the “human” ba-plural noun class and all the others, which occurs in some form throughout all the languages; languages like Kusaal which have abandoned grammatical gender have a natural gender system contrasting “human” (or sometimes “big and animate”) gender with pronouns based on the old human gender/class, and “non-human/inanimate” with pronouns based on the numerically largest of the remaining noun classes.

  134. David Eddyshaw says

    I forgot to add the fairly central fact the the Mampruli-Dagbani-Hanga-KaMara-UncleTomCobbley subgroup has reduced the Proto-Western system to a five-vowel a e i o u with contrastive length but no nasalisation or glottalisation; it’s a particularly small system in local terms.

    Dagbani has partly lost contrastive vowel length, too; long vowels in originally open syllables have become short, so you get sana “stranger” vs plural saamba, and maani “okra” vs plural mana, where the singular has simplified an older consonant cluster: *maanni.

  135. Stu Clayton says

    the original ɛ ɔ are actually realised as [ja] [wa] when short, [iə] [uɵ] when long, but nevertheless behave throughout like monophthongs. The original e o have expanded into the vacated phonetic space and are realised [ɛ] [ɔ].

    A gap !

  136. David Eddyshaw says

    No longer. Phonology abhors a vacuum.

  137. Stu Clayton says

    So “words” are the segments between gasping for air ?

    I’ve just realized that phonology explains how vacuum cleaners work.

  138. David Marjanović says

    long vowels in originally open syllables have become short

    That is amazing.

  139. In speaking she seems to use a number of words that end in “ta”

    0:33 tota part. sg. of toi ‘that’ [used here as a filler word]
    0:39 julistaa ‘to proclaim’
    0:40 että ‘(so) that’
    0:50 pitää 3PS of ‘to hold’
    0:51 huolta part. sg. of huoli ‘care’
    0:53 niistä elative pl. of se ‘that’ (nom. pl. ne)
    1:05 sitä työtä part. sg. of se ‘that’, työ ‘work’
    1:06 niitä part. pl. of ne
    1:08 joilta ablative pl. of joka ‘who’
    1:09 alta lative of ala ‘under’
    1:17 tosta kirjasta elative sg. of toi, kirja ‘book’
    1:20 mielestä elative sg. of mieli ‘mind’
    1:43 kauneutta part. sg. of kauneus ‘beauty’

    (No relation, incidentally, and even her ex-husband Harri who died young is from a fairly different branch of the Pystynen family tree.)

    long vowels in originally open syllables have become short

    That’s amusingly backwards, but sure, why not (something something bimoraic feet).

  140. David Eddyshaw says

    What I think happened in Dagbani was that a three-way length distinction has been collapsed into two: long vowels in closed syllables having been extra-long. That’s less far-fetched than it sounds: in Dagbani only long vowels in closed syllables can carry two tonemes, all other vowels, whether originally short or long, carrying just one.

    The Kusaal tone system is actually quite similar, though I’ve found it leads to a simpler synchronic description if you make the Kusaal tone-bearing-unit the syllable. Kusaal has also contrived to create a three-tone system out of the local industry-standard two-tone-with-terracing-and-emic-downsteps system, which Dagbani still keeps.

  141. Stu Clayton says

    Thanks, JP. But

    1:09 alta lative of ala ‘under’

    seems to be slightly defective. I can’t fit it in with this. What is the missing part of “lative” ? This is my first Finnish lesson.

  142. It is indeed defective: -ta nonproductively appears in this and a few other postpositions in its old local case sense, in this case giving the meaning ‘from under’. There is no standardized case terminology for these really, sorry for the confusion.

    (Other examples that remain in use: kaukaa ‘from afar’, kotoa ‘from home’, luota ‘from the vicinity of’, takaa ‘from behind’, ulkoa ‘from outside’, yltä ‘from above’; they have also likewise fossilized locatives in -na: kaukana ‘afar’, kotona ‘at home’, luona ‘at, in the vicinity of’, takana ‘behind’, ulkona ‘outside’; also alla ‘under’, yllä ‘above’ from *alna, *ülnä).

  143. Stu Clayton says

    No problem, grammatical categories are just stupid crutches as far as I’m concerned. The sooner you cast them aside, the better. The patterns I see at work in Finnish make good sense.

  144. David Eddyshaw says

    As I have no doubt that many (perhaps double figures?) will be interested in how you can get a three-tone system (in this case, only apparently so) with only two tones (and just because it’s a nice paper and I felt like plugging it):

    http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/PDF/Mandenkan56/56morris.pdf

    Bisa is the language to the immediate north of Kusaal; it’s a Mande language, and thus related to Kusaal only distantly, if at all. Kusaal has produced three tonemes from two by a different route. In both languages, though, the underlying L tone always surfaces as a falling tone before pause, whereas the underlying H tone is always level.

    The Bisa word sáánà “stranger” cited in the paper, is a loanword, appropriately enough (from Mooré.)

  145. I don’t know why I find the Mande languages so attractive, but I do. I once started teaching myself Bambara, but got sidetracked.

  146. David Eddyshaw says

    There’s a superb reference grammar of its Great Manding sister-dialect Mandinka by the excellent Denis Creissels, and a nice short grammarette here:

    http://www.deniscreissels.fr/public/Creissels-sketch_of_Mandinka.pdf

  147. David Eddyshaw says

    … from which, on rereading, I discover that the Mandinka word for “window” is palantéeri. Spooky …

  148. There’s a superb reference grammar of its Great Manding sister-dialect Mandinka by the excellent Denis Creissels, and a nice short grammarette here

    Thanks!

  149. Trond Engen says

    I was a little short on time. By two-step creolization, I don’t necessarily mean twice full-blown creole, as the Tok Pisin example would suggest, but new speakers acquiring an already morphologically simplified (and not necessarily internally consistent) version of the language — something like the second-language Hausa that was used by soldiers in British service in Northern Nigeria.

    Let’s say that a Benine (para-Bouma) ruler starts expanding his realm, and as the empire grows, his kinsmen become ministers and military commanders while large numbers of young men from the conquered areas are enrolled in the army. Maybe it’s even a deliberate policy to break down old tribal loyalties and forge a new imperial identity, because the recruits are put together in bands and garrisons where no single group can dominate and sent on missions far from their own native land. When the imperial system breaks down, as it often does after the momentum of the initial expansion wears out, the local imperial garrisons become independent tribal aristocracies. In that way, morpho-syntactic levelling may happen across a wide range of substrates, and still just be in its initial phase when the military jargon is split into several local varieties. Some of these varieties acquire local speakers and develop into daughter languages, others surely die out. Those that survive keep developing, but without the imperial community of speakers this plays out differently in different varieties, each being an uneven mix of innovative and conservative features.

    I agree that it ‘s a just-so story and probably untestable.

  150. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s an intrinsically perfectly possible scenario.

    The expansionary Mamprussi state set up by Naa Gbɛwaa certainly did set up local hereditary aristocracies, which exist to this day. But the traditional accounts pretty uniformly say that the original local clan leaders (who had religious rather than administrative roles) remained in place, and the story is much more Norman conquest than Anglo-Saxon invasion. The traditional accounts don’t suggest Völkerwanderungen, just warrior bands waltzing in and making themselves comfortable. Throughout the region, too, your ethnic group membership comes from your father, but your mother tongue comes from your mother: the many Mamprussi in the Bawku area are mostly in fact Kusaal-speaking (my Kusaal New Testament was a gift from a Mamprussi colleague who himself could not speak Mampruli at all.) The Western Oti-Volta languages do share quite a lot of distinctive vocabulary not seen elsewhere in Oti-Volta, but there’s zero evidence that it’s of foreign origin and it includes words as basic as “water.”

    What I wonder is whether these new statelets, having been reorganised on more military lines, would have successfully spread the languages of the non-chiefly commoners far and wide. In some cases, like Dagaare and Mooré, there’s actually supporting evidence for this in traditional histories. This could in principle have led to the sort of simplifications that McWhorter conjures with; but reconstructing Proto-Western-Oti-Volta along orthodox lines suggests that much of the simplification goes back to a period which seems too early. On the other hand, this could be artefactual (I’ve seen an obvious Hausa loanword reconstructed to Proto-Eastern-Oti-Volta by a careful scholar who just didn’t realise that the forms all corresponded so neatly because he was dealing with a recent borrowing.)

    I suppose the simplification-by-largescale-imperfect-acquisition scenario works pretty much regardless of the language of the acquirers; but that is part of my difficulty with it: it’s just unfalsifiable. I’d be happier with it if I could point to plausible substrate languages with features that made particular imperfect acquisitions plausible (like speakers of languages without tones failing to acquire tones.)

  151. Other examples that remain in use

    +tyköä

  152. John Cowan says

    Some huge fraction of accepted Proto-Berber reconstructions are in fact Arabic loans. Berber is somewhat like Basque: we have never seen it except when it was subaltern to some other language, albeit related in the Berber case and not in the Basque case.

  153. Trond Engen says

    SFReader: Santa […] is a seven centuries old Mongolian-based [C]reole.

    This is the basic premise of this year’s animated blockbuster from Disney..

  154. Trond Engen says

    But to bring this back to the original subject, in a new blow to chomskyist linguistics, Dan Everett claims that there’s no Santa clause.

  155. Ow!

  156. David Marjanović says

    Day saved, I should go to bed.

  157. John Cowan says

    Before the Romans came, my forebears evidently not only did not have children (plant, from Latin) but also lacked the concept “want” (eisiau, also from Latin.)

    Naah. What it means is that some of your ancestors, having adopted the tongue of the Invaders for prudential reasons, shifted back to (a variant of) the tongue of their ancestors, again for prudential reasons: better to live with, or under, Christian Civilized Barbarians than Heathen Barbarous Barbarians. They kept, however, many of their simple basic words like ‘children’ and ‘want’, and these spread even to the Christian Civilized Barbarians.

    But when the new Invaders had grown somewhat Christian and somewhat less Barbarous, the linguistically unified Fellow-Countrymen (as they now called themselves) mostly shifted to (a variant of) the new Invaders’ tongue — for prudential reasons. And this despite continued Barbarous insinuations that they were all thieves (“Dafyð wæs án Wælisc mann”, etc.), perhaps based on a long-held misunderstanding of the Fellow-Countrymen’s Law: that taking food without permission was lawful after one had starved for three days.

  158. David Eddyshaw says

    Dafyð wæs án Wælisc mann

    http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.htm

  159. David Eddyshaw says

    Huh. Link doesn’t do what I expected.
    Search for Trafferth mewn Tafarn (#73); if you find the right combination of buttons, it will Saxonicate it for you.

  160. David Eddyshaw says
  161. Just so. The story reminds me of the Miller’s Tale.

    Of course, one universe away, the use of the English verb welsh and the false reputation of the Kemrese for thievery did arise from Saeson misunderstanding of “ill llui di Hywel ill Bon” (some of it still being in effect) as a matter of historic fact. (Notes: ultimate stress as in Middle Welsh, y = i in all positions, unstressed vowels laxed as in English.) The word for ‘thief’, of course, is lladrun (u = [u]).

  162. Bathrobe says

    Gnome Chomsky (The Garden Noam)

  163. You have a thread called Chomsky!!!!!!!


    I see a problem with criticism: I do not understand why it is personal. What everyone wants from Chomsky? That he, the shepherd and the smart guy, lead linguists the sheep to a differnet direction? Changed the party line?

    You have a system/community problem. If you somehow convince Chomsky to think better, you will still have a community inclined to pick One Right Theory without leaving much place for anything else.

  164. If you actually read the thread, you should understand why it’s personal. Chomsky isn’t some random guy people happened to pick on, he personally imposed a stupid, counterfactual theory on a couple of generations of linguists, nearly destroying a useful field that had been developing productively for a century. He’s Stalin and Marr combined in a single asshole. If you think linguists were “inclined to pick One Right Theory” whether or not he existed, you’re wrong. Until he came along, they were happy with a multiplicity of approaches.

  165. @langaugehat, I think I have read the chomsky-related part of it (but maybe I could have missed somethign.

    Was there a comment specifically accusing Chomsky in unethical methods of promoting his theory (rather than criticizing the theory itself)?

  166. There have been many discussions of that and related issues here at the Hattery (an ancient hive of anti-Chomskyanism); see, for example, Etienne’s January 3, 2014 comment.

  167. David Marjanović says

    …Yes, but read the rest of that discussion; it goes on till the year jumps from 2014 to 2017 and the topic jumps to Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath numbers.

  168. Bathrobe says
  169. The God-Man himself comes in at 7:30, if one wants to skip the effusions of the acolytes.

  170. Bathrobe says

    He does agree with Mr Hat on one thing: the primary function of language is not communication. In fact, language is surprisingly inefficient at communication, due to the limitations of the motor-sensory system. (That’s why Chomsky sees it as peripheral to language.)

  171. It’s amazing to me that anyone could seriously think that the function of language was communication of information. It ignores virtually all uses of language. I guess that’s one of the sillier fruits of the Enlightenment.

  172. Bathrobe says

    I don’t think that the “communication of information” is the same as “communication”. Even telling a lie is falsehood disguised as “communication”. At any rate, I’m not sure that Chomsky’s rejection of this notion is quite the same as your own.

  173. David Eddyshaw says

    In fairness, it must be conceded that ANC practices what he preaches: he, too, does not use language to communicate information (and he discourages the practice among his disciples, too.)

  174. I don’t think that the “communication of information” is the same as “communication”.

    I know, I was going off in a slightly different direction. There are lots of people (though not Chomsky) who do actually believe that.

    At any rate, I’m not sure that Chomsky’s rejection of this notion is quite the same as your own.

    I’m quite sure it’s not, and I’d have to reconsider my choices in life if I turned out to have the same idea as the Big C.

  175. J.W. Brewer says

    My own view is that the “communicating information is the purpose/function of language yet I keep being surprised at how bad it is at that” people are particularly prevalent among scholars doing “philosophy of language” in the analytical tradition, who may be more likely to be found in philosophy departments than linguistics departments. There are bonus irony points in the overlap with the analytical philosophers who thought that many of the longstanding historical conundrums of Western philosophy were not real problems at all but just the result of people talking past each other because they didn’t have a clear enough set of agreed definitions.

  176. January First-of-May says

    There are bonus irony points in the overlap with the analytical philosophers who thought that many of the longstanding historical conundrums of Western philosophy were not real problems at all but just the result of people talking past each other because they didn’t have a clear enough set of agreed definitions.

    IIRC a lot of the time it turns out that definition A immediately leads to conclusion X, definition B immediately leads to conclusion Y, and the conundrum gets reshaped to whether A or B is more appropriate. (When this happens in math they often just keep both but call them a slightly different thing.)

    Occasionally it turns out that a very enticing definition C turns out to lead to a highly unpalatable conclusion Z, and the supporters of C end up hastily backtracking to avoid being perceived as supporting Z.

    communicating information is the purpose/function of language

    Confucius says: language just needs to convey meaning.
    (See link for about half a dozen other translations of the exact same five-character phrase.)

  177. This is the phrase in question: 辭達而已矣 . (The linked thread ends with exegesis of the moral philosopher Horton.)

  178. Bathrobe says

    A different view: Which human ancestor invented words?

    Difference from Chomsky: Words were invented first, then grammar. Chomsky believes everything was invented at once.

    Chomsky’s claims about Merge as being the simplest computational process appears to be based on the work of people like Turing. The problem is: do people’s brains actually function like that?

    I also found Chomsky’s idea that language is perfect in the mind; it’s when it needs to be transformed into linear order as speech that problems of performance enter the picture. I just don’t believe this. I don’t believe that we always think in some kind of pure, syntactically perfect language. There are times when it is hard to put things into words. This suggests to me that our minds do NOT generate syntactically perfect sentences. Rather, a lot of the time we have general intuitions and ideas that are NOT expressed through a perfect syntax.

  179. Well, i do not know what people mean by “function” and “communication” and “information” here:(

    What is the function of a man?

  180. Bathrobe says

    My apologies for the defective syntax; I was having trouble transferring my thoughts into linear order.

    The Gallilean challenge: “the distinctive human capacity to construct in our minds an infinite number of thoughts, expressed in language, and to use them to reveal our thoughts to others in ways that are appropriate to circumstances. And we can add, to bring them to our own consciousness and understanding.”

    “Human language and thought are for this reason based on a generative process, which is why the modern study of these topics, motivated by the Gallilean challenge, has been called the generative enterprise, an enterprise that began to take shape in the mid-20th century, aided by a new theoretical understanding of the nature of computational systems.”

  181. The referred Galileo’s words:

    SIMP. Aristotle acquired his great authority only because of the strength of his proofs and the profundity of his arguments. Yet one must understand him; and not merely understand him, but have such thorough familiarity with his books that the most complete idea of them may be formed, in such a manner that every saying of his is always before the mind. He did not write for the common people, nor was he obliged to thread his syllogisms together by the trivial ordinary method; rather, making use of the permuted method, he has sometimes put the proof of a proposition among texts that seem to deal with other things. Therefore one must have a grasp of the whole grand scheme, and be able to combine this passage with that, collecting together one text here and another very distant from it. There is no doubt that whoever has this skill will be able to draw from his books demonstrations of all that can be known; for every single thing is in them.

    SAGR. My dear Simplicio, since having things scattered all over the place does not disgust you, and since you believe by the collection and combination of the various pieces you can draw the juice out of them, then what you and the other brave philosophers will do with Aristotle’s texts, I shall do with the verses of Virgil and Ovid, making centos of them and explaining by means of these all the affairs of men and the secrets of nature. But why do I speak of Virgil, or any other poet” I have a little book, much briefer than Aristotle or Ovid, in which is contained the whole of science, and with very little study one may form from it the most complete ideas. It is the alphabet, and no doubt anyone who can properly Join and order this or that vowel and these or those consonants with one another can dig out of it the truest answers to every question, and draw from it instruction in all the arts and sciences. Just so does a painter, from the various simple colors placed separately upon his palette, by gathering a little of this with a bit of that and a trifle of the other, depict men, plants, buildings, birds, fishes, and in a word represent every visible object, without any eyes or feathers or scales or leaves or stones being on his palette. Indeed, it is necessary that none of the things imitated nor parts of them should actually be among the colors, if you want to be able to represent everything; if there were feathers, for instance, these would not do to depict anything but birds or feather dusters.

  182. For short, I will refer to it as the Galilean challenge. These great founders of modern science expressed their awe and wonder at the fact that language permits us to construct “from 25 or 30 sounds an infinite variety of expressions, which although not having any resemblance in themselves to that which passes through our minds, nevertheless do not fail to reveal all of the secrets of the mind, and to make intelligible to others who cannot penetrate into the mind all that we conceive and all of the diverse movements of our souls.” 1

    1 The quote is from Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonée (1660). Galileo’s earlier version, in his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) was similar, except for referring to the alphabet rather than the sounds of language.

    The original: C’est l’usage que nous en faisons pour signifier nos pensées,& cette invention merveilleuse de composer 25. ou 30. sons cette infinie varieté de mots, qui n’ayant rien de semblable en eux-mesmes, à ce qui se passe dans nostre esprit, ne laissent pas d’en découvrir aux autres tout le secret,& de faire entendre à ceux qui n’y peuvent pеnеtrer, tout ce que nous concevons, et tous les divers mouvements de nôtre ame.

  183. David Eddyshaw says

    awe and wonder at the fact that language permits us to construct “from 25 or 30 sounds an infinite variety of expressions”

    Surely this speculation is no more profound than being amazed that any of an infinity of positive integers can be uniquely expressed using only ten symbols (or, indeed, only two*)?

    *Indeed (in the spirit of Chomsky Himself, only one. Merge is All!)

  184. Bathrobe says

    One Merge to rule them all, One Merge to find them, One Merge to bring them all, and in the darkness Bind them

  185. I just realized that he is a relative of Bourbaki. I don’t even know how it did not occur to me before. But they are similar…

  186. In brief:
    Informality in teaching mathematics is valued here, because the memories of the time when Bourbaki affected education are too scary.


    I do not mean informality in human communication, in this sense Bourbaki is pefectly informal. One of my books has soem version of this portrait, the other has a naked woman on the frontispiece.

    A naked Greek woman, so the mores are observed.

  187. David Eddyshaw says

    In the context of beautiful but false reductionist systems, Merge reminds me of the role played by the (generalised) Sheffer stroke in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; a major difference, of course, being that Witters came to see that his beautiful reductionist system was, in point of fact, wrong, and subsequently said so. A lot. I am not holding my breath waiting for a similar revelation to appear to ANC and his bacchants*.

    * And maenads, of course. Never forget the maenads. I see that drasvi, for one, has not forgotten them.

  188. John Cowan says

    The Galilean challenge

    Vicisti, Galileae!

    Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
    We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

  189. What is clear is that any serious theory of phonology must rely heavily on well-formedness constraints; where by ‘serious’ we mean ‘committed to Universal Grammar’.

    Prince and Smolensky, Optimality Theory. Forgot about this. One of quotations in the collection of weird lines that make me feel weird things about… Do they mean Chomskian Universal Grammar? Then about Chomskyan Universal Grammar.

  190. You dare confuse Chomskyan Universal Grammar with Chomskian Universal Grammar? Off to the stocks with you!

  191. David Eddyshaw says

    I have misled you all. Forgive me …

    The Fundamental Attribution Error lizard to which I alluded is not, as I rashly asserted here

    https://languagehat.com/mabuchi-vs-kanji/#comment-1733074

    a Kusaasi lizard. He (or she) is a Dagaaba lizard, and the original Dagara proverb is

    Fʋ̀ʋ̀n wà ñɛ́ bàndá k-ʋ́ sɛ́ kùré, ʋ̀ bàngná á ʋ̀ zʋ̀ʋ̀r gáálʋ́ zíé.
    “Si jamais tu vois un margouillat qui porte un pantalon, il sait où ranger sa queue.”

    From Penou-Achille Somé, Proverbes Dagara.
    I feel better now.

  192. David Eddyshaw says

    (Fairly sure I have actually heard it in Kusaal, but I can’t trace it.)

  193. A bit old, but: The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. One of the authors is Nick Evans, an expert on Australian languages.

    It has a (hypothetical) example of nonconfigurationality represented as it would look in English: “That[object] this[subject] huge[object] caught woman[subject] butterfly[object]”, meaning “This woman caught that huge butterfly.” Regrettably Section 4 doesn’t deliver an explanation as promised, but it clears up my confusion as to how nonconfigurational languages might work.

    What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?” is also good.

  194. David Eddyshaw says

    Nick Evans is undoubtedly on the right side in this matter, and I very much agree with the general tenor of the paper.

    However, I think it tends rather to over-egg the pudding. I’m always struck (for example) by the way Dan Everett’s take on Pirahã gets coopted into this sort of thing; I think there is room for some scepticism about his work, a lot of which seems to depend on just taking his word for it, with little independent verification; and he clearly has a very distinct agenda of his own, which I find a bit unsettling when it comes to the search for how things really are. (There was a really quite persuasive counteranalysis of his data, and earlier data of his own which he has subsequently reinterpreted quite radically, in Language; the authors made some pretty good points …) And I believe the analysis of Arrernte syllable structure as V(C) is actually not uncontroversial, either. Moreover, what I’ve read on the Salishan noun/verb thing certainly suggests that it is difficult to maintain that there is no real difference at all between nouns and verbs; in fact, the single best grammar of a Salishan language that I’ve seen, Wayne Suttles’ Musqueam grammar, describes this as needlessly making the language appear more exotic than it really is, pointing to quite a number of pretty clear criteria for demarcation. (Admittedly, the actual Salishan languages themselves might differ in this respect.) Not all of these reanalyses are in the service of merely defending the Chomskyan One True Path, by any means. I don’t think it’s altogether a good thing to present these sorts of things as simply uncontroversial, even in polemic.

    I think there are sorta language universals, though not of the Chomskyan kind: “language” is a collection of Wittgensteinian “family resemblances” rather than a set with a coherent single definition, but some of these resemblances are very widespread and probably can tell us quite a bit about how human beings (and no animals) can do language; and it is not illegitimate in principle to argue that particular “exceptional” cases (like sign languages, for example) can be accommodated by special rules and treatments without completely undermining the case for “universals.”

    I don’t think anybody has ever had much trouble identifying that a particular human communication system is in fact a “language”, as opposed to something else entirely, once they started looking at it properly*; how could we be so confident of such judgments if “language” was a completely vague category lacking any common theme at all?

    * This qualification is admittedly doing a lot of work here, but I stand by it.

  195. I erred: he covers it in Section 5.

    His admission that sign languages are languages would seem to support UG.

  196. David Marjanović says

    It has a (hypothetical) example of nonconfigurationality represented as it would look in English: “That[object] this[subject] huge[object] caught woman[subject] butterfly[object]”, meaning “This woman caught that huge butterfly.”

    That is hardly any stranger than Latin poetry.

    There was a really quite persuasive counteranalysis of his data, and earlier data of his own which he has subsequently reinterpreted quite radically, in Language; the authors made some pretty good points …

    A few years ago I saw an independent investigation into whether Pirahã really lacks subordinate clauses. The result was inconclusive. I doubt I can find it again, though, and it’s not likely to be the latest word on the matter.

    And I believe the analysis of Arrernte syllable structure as V(C) is actually not uncontroversial, either.

    Kiparsky (2013) demolished it.

  197. David Marjanović says

    subordinate clauses

    No, recursion in general.

  198. David Eddyshaw says

    Your Kiparsky link doesn’t work for me, but this is an interesting paper on the topic.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317381484_Moraic_Onsets_in_Arrernte

  199. David Eddyshaw says

    Your Kiparsky link doesn’t work for me

    It does now. Thanks!

  200. David Eddyshaw says

    I’d missed the fact that Evans and Levinson claim that there is evidence from Northwest Caucasian that spoken languages need not have vowel phonemes at all. As Kiparsky rightly says, this is a complete misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of the actual linguistic work on those languages. Very naughty.

  201. That is hardly any stranger than Latin poetry.

    I was just about to say: “Illum haec egregium cepit mulier papilionem.” If it scanned (and it almost does), I’d expect to see it somewhere.

    When I was a second-semester Latin student and trying to read poetry without really understanding meter, I was like: “Why are you doing this to me?”

  202. marie-lucie says

    When, after 6 or 7 years of Latin, we read (or basically tried to decipher) poetry, the book gave a basic explanation of meter (iambs etc), but the teacher NEVER did. When I realized what meter was about, I thought that French students were disadvantaged – we should have been taught Latin by Italian profs.

  203. Russian allows something like this butterfly-clause.

    Compare t.A.T.u., once popular teenage group peforming lesbianism (I do not know what the actual sexualities of the singers are).

    One of possible readings of the name is:
    ta tu
    that-one.SUBJ-feminine that-one.OBJ-feminine

    Leaving what that one is doing to that two to vivid public imagination.

  204. Actually, when I was a child ananas “pineapple”, made me want to respond “and we her”. Because ananas sounds the same as ona nas “she us”.

  205. Ha! I like it.

  206. @marie-lucie: I had the same experience of learning about poetic meter from material in the textbook that the teacher didn’t cover. That was English poetry though, and you might think there would be no difficulty teaching meter to (largely) native speakers of (stress-timed) English. I never took the standard eighth- or tenth-grade English classes, but meter was definitely not covered in class in ninth grade, although I read about it in the textbook.* After reading that section, I was mortified that I had, up to that time, been writing poetry without explicit attention to accented and unaccented syllables, and I cringed at the low quality of some of my versifying. The topic was finally explicitly covered in class when I took (eleventh-grade-level) American Literature.

    * One thing I hated about textbooks aimed at precollegiate teaching was that there was often material that we were expected to learn that simply was not in the student edition of the text. It might appear only in activities described in the teacher’s edition, or on the supplementary worksheets, etc. that were part of the instructional package.

  207. David Eddyshaw says

    ta tu

    кто кого?

  208. Thank you.

  209. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s important to express one’s gratitude afterwards.

  210. David Marjanović says

    “Illum haec egregium cepit mulier papilionem.”

    I’m actually a bit stunned I can almost read this at normal speed. Must be because it’s a lot shorter than the average sentence in Latin poetry (or prose).

    That’s not what a really non-configurational language is like, though; this is.

    When, after 6 or 7 years of Latin, we read (or basically tried to decipher) poetry, the book gave a basic explanation of meter (iambs etc), but the teacher NEVER did. When I realized what meter was about, I thought that French students were disadvantaged – we should have been taught Latin by Italian profs.

    That would hardly have helped, because Italian lacks phonemic vowel length: Italian vowels are long in stressed open syllables, short everywhere else. That’s as misleading as German, where stressed syllables can’t be short either*.

    We were very briefly taught the meters of the Latin poetry we were to decipher, and we had slightly less briefly learnt a few meters for German poetry earlier, but it would have helped a lot if a teacher, or at least the textbook, had ever explicitly stated the unthinkable: that stressed open syllables can, and very often do, support short vowels in Classical Latin. The textbook we used in the first two of the six years, before all the literature & poetry, had all the macrons spelled out, but they were never actually mentioned, except to distinguish the nominative/vocative from the ablative in the singular of the a declension. Basically, we ignored them completely, and as far as I noticed that included the teacher.

    I only figured this out long after school.

    * … …well. First, short vowels in stressed open syllables survive in Switzerland; Zürich is locally [ˈt͡sʏrɪ]. Second, in most of the rest of the German-speaking area (both the dialects and the Standard accents used there), consonant length is lost, so of course there’s a large number of stressed open syllables with short vowels; but the formerly long consonants are still all spelled double, so that stressed open-looking syllables cannot contain short vowels. Third, in the southeast, vowel length is not phonemic in the dialects, and indeed the combination of that fact with the vowel length of Standard German has led to a few words with short vowels in stressed open syllables – but these are such rare exceptions** that we didn’t manage to imagine they could be much, much more common in another language that has phonetic vowel length.

    ** And they’re very similar to each other: /(CV)ˈ(C)aCaCa(C)/ – Kanada, Panama, Sahara***, Himalaya****, Ananas, and I think that’s the complete list.

    *** Increasingly pronounced with stress and length on the second syllable, which also gets rid of the additional anomaly of /h/ in an unstressed syllable.

    **** /hɪˈmalaja/ is actually my spelling-pronunciation. Other people have arrived at it, but most others put the stress on the ay which they interpret as ei (reportedly following a song that was popular a few decades ago); that’s even less close to the original but eliminates the length anomaly and the un-Germanic intervocalic /j/.

  211. Increasingly pronounced with stress and length on the second syllable
    That’s actually the only pronunciation the Duden has and the one I know as the prevailing one as long as I can remember; I always considered the other pronunciation (stressed short first syllable) an exoticising eccentricity.

  212. David Marjanović says

    de.Wiktionary doesn’t have it either; it has stress and length on the second or, as I’ve never heard, the first syllable.

    All three seem equally silly when compared to the original: صَحْراء‎ ṣaḥrāʾ – at least if that’s stressed on the last syllable, which I don’t know.

  213. David Eddyshaw says

    if that’s stressed on the last syllable

    Yes.

  214. January First-of-May says

    “Illum haec egregium cepit mulier papilionem.”

    Latin gets away with that kind of thing (and Russian absolutely could, it just doesn’t happen to normally do that) because of the sheer amount of case/number agreement on the words. I’m not sure to what extent the same thing happens (and/or doesn’t happen) with Australian languages. I’ve vaguely heard that it does happen in some New Guinean languages.

    Wasn’t it an Australian language that had tripartite agreement? It sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would help with it.

     
    writing poetry without explicit attention to accented and unaccented syllables

    Russian poetry is so much about meter that it’s hard for us to understand poetical forms that don’t depend on where the stressed syllables are… when I had to deal with Serbian decasyllables in a linguistics contest recently, I found myself automatically reading them out as if they were in trochaic pentameter.

    Of course, since Russian words are far longer than English ones, Russian poetry makes strong use of nominally-unstressed syllables in stressed positions. (There’s probably a term for this, but I can’t think of one offhand.)
    In particular, it’s fairly common to have a -dum-da-DUM-da- pattern, where every other “stressed” syllable is a lot more strongly stressed (and a lot more likely to have an actually-stressed syllable in the lyrics).

    The weird part of Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) meter is, as David Marjanović mentioned, making strong use of vowel length: in Russian, vowel length isn’t even slightly phonemic, with stressed syllables (and, IIRC, in a Moscow accent, pre-stress syllables) being long(er) and everything else short.
    (There are, of course, doubled vowels across syllable boundaries, but AFAIK there are no cases of phonemic long or short vowels within a syllable.)

    So it’s hard to understand that phonemic vowel length is a thing at all, though at least we get that one drilled into us in English classes; the idea of long vowels as something separate from stress (such as in Latin or e.g. Czech) is even harder to understand, and the idea that long vowels and stress both contribute to meter (in different ways) is almost unintelligible.

  215. Russian poetry is so much about meter that it’s hard for us to understand poetical forms that don’t depend on where the stressed syllables are

    Unless you go back far enough. Simeon Polotsky:

    Что наипаче от правды далеко бывает,
    гласу народа мудрый муж то причитает.

    Яко что-либо народ обыче хвалити,
    то конечно достойно есть хулимо быти.

    И что мыслить — суетно, а что поведает,
    то никоея правды в себе заключает.

    Antiokh Kantemir:

    Скучен вам, стихи мои, ящик, десять целых
    Где вы лет тоскуете в тени за ключами!
    Жадно воли просите, льстите себе сами,
    Что примет весело вас всяк, гостей веселых,
    И взлюбит, свою ища пользу и забаву,
    Что многу и вам и мне достанете славу.

  216. In Latin can a preposition and its object be separated? a preposition taking the accusative would lead the butterfly sentence off course quickly.

  217. David Eddyshaw says

    Ennius is supposed to have perpetrated saxo cere comminuit brum “he shattered his bra…in with a rock.”

    Ennius had (he said) three mother tongues, so we should either bow to his superior linguistic powers or cut him some slack. Whatever.

  218. David Marjanović says

    Amazingly, Latin prepositions always stay prepositions. As far as I’ve noticed they also can’t be separated from their objects, but the objects can be reshuffled around them, e.g. medias in res.

  219. David Eddyshaw says

    can a preposition and its object be separated

    Can’t think of an example offhand, but Horace has Lydia, dic, per omnes te deos oro, where he sticks the object of the verb in the middle of a quite separate prepositional phrase. “Lydia, say, by all the [you] gods I beg …”

    Latin prepositions always stay prepositions

    Pax vobiscum!

  220. David Marjanović says

    …other than that exception (-cum after personal pronouns).

    ingenti saxo cere- comminuit -brum is certainly unsurpassed, and I’m quite sure it must be unique.

  221. Proud to say I know nothing about poetic meter, except what I picked up from the singsong recitation of poetry. And sprung rhythm.

    Iambic pentameter? What’s that?

  222. I just read the actual blog entry to this thread and came across:

    The day will come when his legacy is compared to Skinner’s, and when historians of the social sciences will debate which one ultimately caused the most damage.

    Amazingly, I just read Chomsky’s review of Skinner yesterday, a review that basically sank behaviourism and spelt the death knell of old-style American structuralism. All the ideas that would later emerge in full force are there, if only in embryonic form. And the same thought struck me. Skinner was pretty bad, but little did the readers in that day know what this new upstart who was destroying the old order was going to unleash on the linguistic world.

    But I disagree with Pedantry on this:

    Of the principles he advanced in linguistics, nothing remains. Even among Chomsky’s advocates, universal grammar has been replaced by an amorphous “language instinct.” The separation of syntax from semantics is now viewed as a deeply foolish, if not outright contradictory position to hold. Phrase structure grammar is a meaningless formalism if you add headedness to it, and modern theories of grammar are almost without exception lexicalist theories. Virtually nothing remains of the competence/performance distinction.

    It’s not true. None of it. 18 years later, these things are still being taught and discussed: universal grammar (the “language instinct” is Pinker), a disembodied syntax as the heart of language, mapped onto semantic and phonological representations after syntax has done its work, those insane tree diagrams (PS + headedness), and competence now given pride of place over performance (sentences can be “grammatical” even if they are “unacceptable”, since it is only human limitations that prevent us from producing “grammatical sentences”). It’s all still there.

  223. David Eddyshaw says

    Teste* Gildersleeve and Lodge, quite a lot of Latin prepositions can follow pronouns, even in prose: ante, circa, contra, inter, penes, propter, sine, ultra; tenus and versus (as -“ward”) always follow their objects. The Poets, they say in loco, “have no scruples.” (So true …)

    Consulting my favourite Latin poet: Lucretius, III v310 ff has sed caput esse quasi … haec loca circum… “but a head it is like” … “these regions around …”

    Yoda could not have put it better.

    *Testibus, I suppose. At this rate I shall have to return the Rector’s Latin Prize (the only school prize I ever won … NOT bitter …)

  224. Что’ наипа’че от пра’вды дале’ко быва’ет, (dactyl)
    гла’су наро’да му’дрый муж то’ причита’ет. (dactyl, stress on “то” is a bit weird, but hey!)

    Я’ко что-ли’бо наро’д * обы’че хвали’ти, (one syllable short of dactyl, but it’s not bad if you make a long ceasura)
    то конечно достойно есть хулимо быти.

    И что мы’слить — суе’тно, а что’ поведа’ет, (anapest)
    то нико’ея пра’вды в себе’ заключа’ет. (anapest)

    Not Pushkin, but syllabo-metric enough

    Скучен вам, стихи мои,// ящик, десять целых
    Где вы лет тоскуете // в тени за ключами!
    Жадно воли просите,// льстите себе сами,
    Что примет весело вас// всяк, гостей веселых,
    И взлюбит, свою ища// пользу и забаву,
    Что многу и вам и мне// достанете славу.

    All are 2 half-line trochees

  225. can a preposition and its object be separated

    DE’s Horace example rang a bell and I eventually found Terence, Andria 538: per te deos oro et nostram amicitiam. There are probably other examples, but it’s not an easy thing to search for.

    ingenti saxo cere- comminuit -brum is certainly unsurpassed, and I’m quite sure it must be unique.

    Not quite: also attributed to Ennius is the even more spectacular Massili- portabant juvenes ad litora -tanas, where Massilitanas are supposed to have been bottles that were broken at the neck and thrown into the sea.

  226. January First-of-May says

    ящик, десять целых
    Где вы лет тоскуете

    A bit too much of a syntactic maze for modern Russian, as it happens; I’ve been able to parse it, but it took me a while. I wonder if it was inspired by Latin.

  227. Quoting myself:

    Both Skinner and Chomsky started with interesting and not useless ideas that offered new ways to look at cognition. When scientists saw those ideas, they recognized that they contained germs of usefulness; at the very least, they offered new lenses through which certain forms of learning could be studied, and those lenses seemed potentially useful in precisely the areas where the previous paradigms of understanding had been failures. However, both sets of ideas were quickly applied far beyond the regimes where they might be useful, and they both developed collections of rote followers who looked upon the respective theories’ tenets as fundamental principles, rather than phenomenalistic descriptions of observed behavior.

  228. Not quite: also attributed to Ennius is the even more spectacular Massili- portabant juvenes ad litora -tanas, where Massilitanas are supposed to have been bottles that were broken at the neck and thrown into the sea.

    There was a lecturer (mathematical logic) who kept interrupting himself. I remember when I (in awe) was describing it to others I insisted that he could do it in the middle of a word, to resume the interrupted flow some 10 seconds later and from the same place. Other digressions took much longer, but he always resumed.

    I think he could, but now I need to check (this sentence does not continue the previous sentence, but rather the one before it. This “could” refers to “he could do it in the middle of a word”. It was not intentional, but I will leave it as an illustration of what an innocent “interruption” – not word-medial and not in speech – may look like).

    When I transcribed a paragraph by him it looked fascinating: as if someone typed it, and then applied select-cut-move the cursor-paste operation at random several times. A real master.

  229. However, both sets of ideas were quickly applied far beyond the regimes where they might be useful

    Your use of the passive here is interesting.

    I’m not sure they are the same if converted to the active voice.

    My suspicion is that “linguists” developed Skinner’s ideas far beyond the regimes where they might be useful. Maybe Skinner was guilty, too.

    But in the case of Chomsky, whenever someone tried to apply his ideas beyond the regimes that Chomsky found acceptable, they were stopped in their tracks — in particular, the Generative Semanticists, who tried to extend Chomsky’s theories beyond syntax. The theory was then developed either by Chomsky himself, or someone collaborating with Chomsky, to sit strictly within Chomsky’s original ideas: syntax is central — even more so now that Chomsky has declared it the one thing that (genetically) separates man from the beasts — and the ultimate form of linguistic description must be “computational” in nature.

    In the early days of generative grammar many people found it a welcome liberation from the straitjacket of behaviourism and eagerly embraced its possibilities, but in their enthusiasm went off on tangents Chomsky never intended them to. Once Chomsky pulled his movement back to earth, his obsession with the form a grammar should take became apparent. Government and binding, principles and parameters, X-bar, and now Minimalism, these are all concerned with how syntax can be described through formalisms, with a deep conviction that these formalisms will lead us to Universal Grammar.

    In other words, I don’t think structuralism was a one-man show. Generativism pretty much is.

  230. Let me elaborate slightly on the above.

    American structuralism as a movement, never completely embodied in one person, was keen to avoid the analysis of Amerindian languages according to the unconscious norms of traditional grammar (Latin) and strove to bring “objectivity” to the task. “Distributionalism” is one product of that thinking. It’s still impressive to read how structuralism applied to English brought out differences in the distribution of words that were traditionally assigned to rough categories like “adverb” or “preposition”.

    Eventually structuralism got trapped in the pseudo-objectivity of behaviourism, but I don’t think it intrinsically had to be that way. European structuralism, for a start, does not appear to have fallen into that trap.

    Generativism was one man’s program from the start, and he kept it under his personal control for the next half century.

  231. It’s not just Chomsky. The idea of using the formalism of mathematical logic to describe language came before him, and that deplorable practice stayed on through the years, separate from capital-G Generativism. You still see that formalism in papers on semantics.

  232. There is a difference between “we also can look at it from this angle, and maybe it will be productive” and “there exists a right angle to look at it, we have found it”. Apply the model theory to semantics if you can. How I can be against that?

  233. “This blog is devoted to exploring and promoting the great diversity that exists in the study of language, in the past and today. ” – quoted by LH in his recent post.

    I am fascinated and even admire this diversity of schools and approaches in linguistics. A million of ponds and frogs sing differnetly.

    It would be terrible if everyone began to publish in English: at national level diversity is supported by existence of too many schools abroad. If “modern linguistics” is a million ponds, should I even start my petty fight with the department next door? Some do, but it is laughable.

  234. @ Y

    Didn’t Hjelmslev try to do the same within structuralism. Unfortunately I haven’t read his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, and I’m not sure I’d like it if I did.

  235. David Marjanović says

    (the only school prize I ever won … NOT bitter …)

    I never won any, because the whole concept of school prizes is unknown over here. 🙂

    …except that those who got straight As – never me – got a book or two from the headmaster, who was (rightly) so unpopular they felt more embarrassed than rewarded.

  236. I came to my school 2 years ago, when it was celebrating something and found students carrying plates with cakes, desperately trying to find someone hungry.

    I was hungry.

  237. @ Y

    You still see that formalism in papers on semantics.

    You are talking of formal semantics? That arose from attempts to represent ordinary (human) linguistic logic in strictly logical terms, if I remember rightly. Barbara Partee was big on that. It has also fed into the formalism of generative linguistics.

  238. She has several students in Moscow, inluding my old friend. They do not call their pond “serious” semantics or anything like that, so I am mostly happy.

    But, again, if it were the only semantics, that would be a total nightmare for most linguistics students.I mean: someone is studying Cambodian in Moscow. And I am glad that she is doing it. I do not come to her and do not tell: “It is a wrong language”. And she does try to make our elementary schools teach Cambodian. If we are freinds, I will even be curious about it.

  239. Formal semantics became one mainstream approach to semantics within linguistics by the 1980’s;
    (Partee)

    All right.
    Then maybe it is, again, advtange of my Moscow provincialism. Let’s call it perspective.
    Chomsky is a linguist. DE is another.

  240. John Cowan says

    But Chomsky, poor old fellow, is not now and never has been a herpetologist.

  241. Or an eye doctor.

  242. jack morava says

    I’m convinced that that Calc II – the part about evaluating integrals by substitution – must have been a traumatic and transformative experience for ANC; I’d bet that, wherever he encountered the subject in his youth, he nearly flunked. That material seems to me a perfect model for the ideas underlying early transformational grammar; its methods are easy for machines to learn, and Mathematica, for example, is much better at it than most humans.

    IIRC Chomsky was for some time funded at MIT by the department of electrical engineering, and I suspect that part of his linguistic impact came from finding new financial resources for the field, by promising to teach machines to talk. There is something Swiftian in his lust for reductionism, in his distaste for the human.

  243. E, M, E, M, let’s call the whole thing off!

  244. Bathrobe, I’m not sure about the details of these papers, because I glance at them and turn away in disgust. Ditto for anything supposedly being about human language and mentioning Regular/Context-Free/Whatever grammars. I’d just as soon (i.e. not at all) read about Freudian analysis of literature, or about creation science.

  245. There is in my opinion no important theoretical difference between natural languages and the artificial languages of logicians; indeed, I consider it possible to comprehend the syntax and semantics of both kinds of language within a single natural and mathematically precise theory. On this point I differ from a number of philosophers, but agree, I believe, with Chomsky and his associates. (“Universal Grammar” 1970)

    В случае лингвистики, однако, был и другой стимул помимо машинного перевода. Этот стимул состоял в иррациональной потребности отыскать в языке строгие законы, строгостью своею напоминающие математику. Об­ращаясь к химической аналогии, нарисуем такую, не претендующую на ре­альность, картину. Одни пытаются получить философский камень с целью превратить свинец в золото (разумеется, отнюдь не только с целью разбога­теть, само слово «философский» свидетельствует о бескорыстии поисков). Другие пытаются увидеть в строении и чередовании химических веществ отражение законов астрологии. Впрочем, и те, и другие, в полном согласии «сидят в дыму лабораторий над разложением веществ».

  246. @ Y

    My feelings are the same. But I feel impotent admitting I don’t know enough about what they are talking about to refute their arguments or methods. Unfortunately you would have to spend a lifetime mastering their models to refute them. A lifetime better spent on other things. I admire Geoff Pullum for trying.

    I reread the Tom Wolfe article on Chomsky (https://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/the-origins-of-speech/), the subject of a LH post in July 2016. I love Wolfe’s lines near the end:

    in thirty years, Chomsky had advanced from “specific neural structures, though their nature is not well understood” to “some rather obscure system of thought that we know is there but we don’t know much about.”

    Since he is unrefutable*, your lifetime would be spent in vain.

    * Has a different meaning from “irrefutable”.

    @ David Eddyshaw

    You wrote:

    I think there is room for some scepticism about his work, a lot of which seems to depend on just taking his word for it, with little independent verification; and he clearly has a very distinct agenda of his own, which I find a bit unsettling when it comes to the search for how things really are. (There was a really quite persuasive counteranalysis of his data, and earlier data of his own which he has subsequently reinterpreted quite radically, in Language; the authors made some pretty good points …)

    I’m interested in learning more about Everett. Do you have any sources that could get me up to speed on how his data have been analysed differently, and also his “agenda”? It seems that after a lot of chiselling from linguists all around, it was Everett who actually threatened to blow Chomsky out of the water. Tom Wolfe’s article nicely captures the way that Chomsky managed to pooh-pooh him out of existence. But fireworks aside, there is, of course, room for scepticism about Everett and I’d like a quick “in” (rather than relying on what Google serves to dish up) from a person who actually knows linguistics (i.e., not Tom Wolfe) but is not a rabid Chomskyite.

  247. David Eddyshaw says

    @drasvi:

    So much the worse for your opinion, Montague …

    Montague’s horrific death rather distracts (rightly enough) from the fact that he seems to have been a really unpleasant person. (Though nasty people can have valid opinions, too. LIfe is so complicated …)

    @bathrobe:

    As I say, I got this from Language; it was a reply to Everett’s paper therein, and provoked a further reply from him.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41152486_Piraha_Exceptionality_A_Reassessment

    I stopped subscribing to Language a while back as it seems to consist these days largely of Chomskyite stuff of minimal interest to unbelievers, but I remember being fairly impressed with this article at the time.
    I reserve the right to recant when I’ve reread it.

  248. I appeared here because someone sent me a link to a popular article in Russian about Pirahã and I watched boring talks on youtube where Russian linguists were cautiously discussing him, and I decided to learn more about Everett – but that thing about “recursion” was irritating and I read a thread here.
    I guess
    https://languagehat.com/everett-v-chomsky/

    I of course knew the site, but for some reason that time I wanted to comment on something

  249. The boring talks in Russian. Just for reference. A round table in the Institute of Linguistics. The publisher of the Russian translation of Everett’s book organized it together with the Institute. As I said, it is mostly boring, and in Russian – but some speakers are familiar to some here from their works. Not too different from any conference, but in an actual meeting you take a bottle and go to the beach and sing (someone’s drunk head on your not too sober shoulder):
    черный во-орон
    чёрный во-орон.
    Что ты вьёшься надо мной?

  250. ты добы-ычи не добьё-ошься…

  251. Ya want Chomsky? Here’s Chomsky. It’s a look back at his career, from a year ago.

    By then, progress in simplifying the theoretical apparatus (UG, in current terminology) had reached the point where genuine explanations could be offered for crucial properties of language within the “Minimalist Program” (MP) [refs.] How far this program can reach, we do not of course know, but the prospects seem to me far brighter than could have been imagined a few years ago.

    On the next page he name-drops Galileo. All is well.

  252. David Eddyshaw says

    Ya want Chomsky?

    Na, thanks. Had some already.

  253. David Eddyshaw says

    Chomsky’s current position seems to be that language is (fundamentally) the way it is because of basic constraints that you can deduce from first principles by just thinking about it hard enough. (This is essentially the ancient Greek method of doing science, before people thought up all that stuff about experiments and data.)

    He feels that the great advantage of this over lesser methods of enquiry is that it explains everything (as opposed to merely showing how things are.) This is (apparently) what Galileo achieved in his day – a Forerunner!

  254. There is in my opinion no important theoretical difference between natural languages and the artificial languages of logicians; … the syntax and semantics of both kinds of language . … [I] agree, I believe, with Chomsky and his associates. (“Universal Grammar” 1970)

    Montague’s “UG” bears no relation to Chomsky’s; and Chomsky vintage 1970 is very different to Chomsky vintage his UG era.

    When Montague talks of “syntax and semantics” he’s meaning ‘logical syntax’ in a model-theoretic framework. The syntax is functions and predicates applying to individuals, and bindings/quantification of variables ranging over individuals. Montague’s remark may well have in mind the treatment of passive transformation [**] in ‘Syntactic Structures’, where Chomsky notes a passive sentence doesn’t have the same truth conditions vs its untransformed active form, because of the scoping of quantifiers and determiners. For a logician this is in the realm of bleedin’ obvious.

    Unfortunately you would have to spend a lifetime mastering their models to refute them. A lifetime better spent on other things.

    And fair enough too. Just don’t suppose that two models called “Universal Grammar” are in any way comparable.

    Re Everett’s models, AFAICT he now claims his earlier analysis of Piranha was utterly dominated by Chomskyan prejudice (of whichever model C was espousing at the time), to the extent it blinded him to the actual evidence. Then E repudiates the Nevins and Pesetsky “Reassessment” on the grounds it relies on invalid observations — that is, those made by E’s earlier self.

    It seems to me the only way to resolve that dispute would be to send a fresh/unprejudiced researcher to ‘spend a lifetime’ observing the language from scratch. Good luck with that.

    [**] Transformations, ah happy times when I thought I understood what C was trying to do.

  255. the prospects seem to me far brighter than could have been imagined a few years ago.

    There’s light at the end of the tunnel!

  256. Nah, he means that there is no the end to this tunnel at all.

  257. The few texts by Chomsky that I have read were not repulsive. He, for one thing, did not call anything “to Chomsky-adjoin” (I made a typo, “Chomsky-adjoint”, and apart of Il s’agit d’une règle qui déplace un constituant dans S et le Chomsky-adjoint à S, de sorte que ce constituant gouverne,… I see تشومسكي – إلحاق ).

  258. There are texts by Stalin that are not repulsive. Don’t be fooled!

  259. David Marjanović says

    Language belongs neither to the base nor to the superstructure.

  260. David Eddyshaw says

    Yon, ber, sal, rosh … kat …

  261. David Eddyshaw says

    He, for one thing, did not call anything “to Chomsky-adjoin”

    Well, he’d probably have said “me-adjoin” …

  262. Like Feynman, who would always refer to ‘me-diagrams’…

    Actually, I forget what Feynman would say. Not Feynman diagrams, anyway.

  263. Stu Clayton says

    @Brett: is this so ?

    # While Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for their contributions to developing an improved theory of quantum electrodynamics, it was Dyson who derived the rules and provided instructions about how the Feynman diagrams should be drawn and how they should be translated into their associated mathematical expressions. Moreover, he trained his peers to use the diagrams during the late 1940s and 1950s, turning the Institute into a hotbed of activity in this area. According to David Kaiser of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics, “Feynman diagrams spread throughout the U.S. by means of a postdoc cascade emanating from the Institute for Advanced Study.” # Feynman Diagrams and the Evolution of Particle Physics

  264. David L (not Brett) says

    It’s true that Dyson was responsible for showing how the work of Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman was all mathematically consistent; it may even have been him who started calling them Feynman diagrams.

    But I recall reading somewhere that Feynman would refer to them in lectures as ‘interaction diagrams’ or something of the sort.

  265. Stu Clayton says

    # Murray Gell-Mann always referred to Feynman diagrams as Stueckelberg diagrams, after a Swiss physicist, Ernst Stueckelberg, who devised a similar notation many years earlier. Stueckelberg was motivated by the need for a manifestly covariant formalism for quantum field theory, but did not provide as automated a way to handle symmetry factors and loops, although he was first to find the correct physical interpretation in terms of forward and backward in time particle paths, all without the path-integral.[5]

    Historically, as a book-keeping device of covariant perturbation theory, the graphs were called Feynman–Dyson diagrams or Dyson graphs,[6] because the path integral was unfamiliar when they were introduced, and Freeman Dyson’s derivation from old-fashioned perturbation theory was easier to follow for physicists trained in earlier methods.[a] Feynman had to lobby hard for the diagrams, which confused the establishment physicists trained in equations and graphs.[7] #

  266. Murray Gell-Mann always referred to Feynman diagrams as Stueckelberg diagrams

    mainly because Gell-Mann was a dick, especially with respect to anything involving Feynman

  267. Stu Clayton says

    It’s always nice to hear about bitchiness in the long tails. On average, one knows only mean people in the middle. I think blame should be distributed as evenly as possible.

  268. Diagrammatic representations of infinite series in physics were older than Feynman’s work. The earliest example was the cluster expansion, used in statistical mechanics to write represent interaction effects on the equation of state as a sum of two-body clusters, plus three-body clusters, etc. In a dilute enough fluid, it is obvious that the higher terms contribute less and less. So there was already a paradigmatic example of a diagrammatic expansion, and the most important theorem about summing Feynman diagrams goes by the name of the “linked cluster theorem,” since it was first proved for the cluster expansion.

    With the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED*), Schwinger derived the whole system as a quantum version of the way one might derive the field theory of waves on a string. This consists of writing down a theory with an infinite number of degrees of freedom and then treating each one of those like an abstract quantum system, per Heisenberg. In fact, Dirac had already done this in 1928; it was a fairly obvious thing to do. The problem was that the expansion immediately led to integrals that diverged. Schwinger reorganized the calculation, so that those infinite integrals could be nicely factored out (and dealt with). However, the resulting analytic expressions were extremely complicated, hard to obtain, and hard to work with.

    Feynman’s method was not based on deriving things from an underlying expression for the energy of the theory. He made informed guesses about what effect, say, the interaction of an electron with a photon at one spacetime point would have on the electromagnetic field at another point. This was based on what was known about how free (noninteracting) fields propagated. Feynman built his diagrams by envisioning essentially free quanta propagating according to their free field equations, but occasionally interacting with other fields at discrete points. What he found was that, if he formed a quantum mechanical superposition, finding an outgoing state by summing over all possible interaction topologies and integrating each interaction point over all spacetime, he got tractable expressions, which duplicated Schwinger’s in the simplest cases.

    The huge superposition Feynman used included summing over a fermion propagating from a spacetime location A to another location B and an antifermion propagating from B to A. Which one is a physical process depends on whether A or B comes first in time. Feynman found that when A and B were integrated over, it was easier to find the amplitude for both intermediate processes together than either one individually (the way Schwinger had done it). One specific thing that distinguishes a “Feynman” diagram from other interaction diagrams is that there is no time ordering if the internal vertices of the graph; all possible time orders get summed up in the end. Feynman really envisioned his approach as being based on integration over each vertex of the graph that he drew to represent the calculation, and his early diagrams are often marked up with little x’s, showing all the points that need to be integrated over.

    Dyson subsequently showed several things. One was that the whole formalism Feynman had laid out could be derived from the same starting point that Schwinger had used. Thus, the two were equivalent, not merely in the simplest cases, but always. As a consequence of Dyson’s derivation, it also became clear how to extend Feynman’s method to much more general theories than quantum electrodynamics. The Feynman rules for other quantum field theories became easy to derive from their Lagrangian densities. Moreover, Dyson and others showed that Feynman’s calculations could be further simplified by doing virtually everything with the Fourier transforms of the fields. The integrals over all interaction points were exchanged for integrals over virtual four-momenta, with the number of required integrations being the power of ħ in a final expression. In particular, getting a classical limit required no integration at all.

    How fundamentally important Dyson’s work was has been a subject of disagreement. Some people think he deserved a Nobel prize more than Tomonaga. However, I have also heard the opinion, “People don’t win Nobel prizes for rederiving Wick’s theorem.” It is certainly the case that both Feynman and Dyson were influential in spreading the use of Feynman diagrams in their final form. However, Schwinger refused to teach the diagrams. Although he recognized their usefulness for bookkeeping of quantum corrections, he thought they encouraged a misleading way of thinking about quantum field theories.

    * A fortuitous acronym, which certainly helped that name for the quantized theory of the Maxwell field catch on.

  269. January First-of-May says

    Like Feynman, who would always refer to ‘me-diagrams’…

    “Dr. von Neumann, ich möchte gern wissen, was ist dann eigentlich ein Hilbertscher Raum?”

  270. jack morava says

    A shout-out for

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick%27s_theorem

    which should be better-known. Its use by Kontsevich and, later, Mirzakhani, is arguably the basis for two Fields Medals in mathematics. Not to mention Wick’s rotation (which interchanges time and space… well, sort of…).

  271. One of the remarkable things about Feynman diagrams is that they do all the combinatorics almost automatically. Rather than counting the contractions that arise from Wick’s theorem, you just need to find the symmetry factor of each diagram. Including all the various topologies of Feynman graphs is otherwise all you need, to generate an infinite perturbation series, for which at each order it would otherwise be necessary to disentangle all the terms via Wick’s theorem.

  272. David Marjanović says

    Bad omens for generative syntax – and I can’t gloat. Indeed, the author seems naïve in implying that the problems he mentions are limited to the humanities.

  273. David Eddyshaw says

    Indeed. It’s no comfort that they’re throwing out the bathwater, when that is merely a consequence of their determination to throw out the baby.

  274. I tried to read this. I tried to read some of his other posts, and after this one I gave up. That he has to try so hard to figure out the philosophical underpinnings of what he’s doing convinces me, more than ever before, that formal syntax of that ilk will never be of any use to anyone. I don’t understand how a human mind can be engaged to do this.

  275. David Eddyshaw says

    He shows some insight, at least, in being uneasy about the philosophical basis of his endeavour.

    Esa Itkonen is very good on just what has gone amiss at this foundational level with the Chomsky thing.
    (As a mere dabbler in these waters, I am grateful to fellow-Hatters for putting me on to this.)

  276. John Cowan says

    Bad omens for generative syntax

    I tried to read this, but was completely derailed by this:

    if a scholar of [Omer Preminger’s] prominence and ability can’t negotiate something as reasonable as a spousal hire, what hope does anyone else have in having a life and an academic career too.

    I am shocked (and somewhat surprised that I am shocked) by the kind of entitlement that this reveals. Clicking through to Preminger’s own post, I find this complaint:

    The University of Maryland, it turns out, is unwilling to dedicate the necessary resources to spousal hires (which are, it should be noted, an equity issue par excellence).

    Why the devil should they? It would never occur to me (and I am twice as senior in my profession as Preminger is) that I might say to a prospective employer, “I am quite willing to work for you, but I must insist that you hire my wife too.” Granted, I can’t quite imagine a corporation that has need for both a computer programmer and a secondary-school / adult literacy teacher, but it’s the inconceivability (and incomprehensibility) of the thing that blows me away. My wife and I managed to have parallel careers in the same city (admittedly a cosmopolitan one) for a good many years before she retired (on disability) without any such concessions to our conjugality.

  277. David Eddyshaw says

    Good point. It would never have crossed my mind that any prospective employer would have any kind of duty to provide a job for my wife.

    (Though, fortunately for the sanity of us both, she was very welcome for her French-teaching abilities when we lived in Ghana; I think the school may well have missed her more than the hospital missed me when we left.)

    On the other hand, I have been paid a lot more than a university lecturer pretty much from the outset, and had a permanent job once I became a consultant (and you have to really work at it to get yourself sacked as a UK hospital consultant.) I can’t begrudge increasingly poorly-treated academics whatever perks they are still able to screw out of the neoliberal zombies now entrusted with running our universities by our anti-human governments.

  278. Well, spousal hire aka the two-body problem is a perennial issue in academia and though the sense of entitlement is not warming any hearts, it is so well known that usually there is no point in going into details when outsiders are not listening. Basically, in most (all?) academic fields a reasonably qualified person cannot be expected to be hired in a place of her choosing and has to go wherever the job offer is. So if an unfortunate couple includes two academics with tenure-track aspirations, it becomes rather difficult. Academic inbreeding sucks!

  279. David Eddyshaw says

    There is a limited sort of provision for this in medical training in the UK; if you’re a higher-level trainee already, you can apply to transfer to a training scheme nearer your spouse, and in fact have the right to preempt any other candidate applying for the post at your preferred destination (a preemption which actually happened to a well-qualified female acquaintance who would otherwise pretty certainly have been a shoo-in; where there are winners, there are also losers …)

    Medical trainees in general are much better looked after nowadays than when I was one. Not a bad thing at all …
    They miss out on a lot of the freedom and flexibility we had, though. There’s a lot more soul-destroying ticking of boxes …

  280. John Cowan says

    I can’t begrudge increasingly poorly-treated academics whatever perks they are still able to screw out of the neoliberal zombies now entrusted with running our universities by our anti-human governments.

    Nor do I, now that the shock has worn off.

    Basically, in most (all?) academic fields a reasonably qualified person cannot be expected to be hired in a place of her choosing and has to go wherever the job offer is. So if an unfortunate couple includes two academics with tenure-track aspirations, it becomes rather difficult. Academic inbreeding sucks!

    My parents were both academics, and while my mother stayed home for my first decade, after that they spent a year in different cities (Ithaca and Newark, N.J., 220 miles / 355 km apart) before my mother was able to get a position in New York City. She spent every weekend driving (with me being nauseated in the back seat) from Ithaca to Newark and back. Still, that was then, this is now, alas.

  281. “there are no theoretical syntax conferences“?!

    But he does have a point; a lot of the field does seem to have simply lost interest in Minimalism-internal theoretical questions. That doesn’t strike me as a problem at all – why should I burden myself with a theory that, as he notes, apparently predicts that adjuncts shouldn’t exist? – but for a student pursuing that path it surely is.

  282. This, from the same blog, seems impossible to read as anything but a rejection of science tout court in favour of pure mathematics (the only thing that deductive reasoning can actually get you minus observation and induction.) I’d like to assume he’s using some broader unorthodox definition of “deductive reasoning”, but his claim that “deduction generates true statements from true statements” seems to rule that out. Surely he doesn’t suppose that the law of gravity was discovered by deductive reasoning in that sense? The dichotomy is false to begin with; the core of theory-making is neither deduction nor induction, but imagination. Induction is for feeding the imagination, and deduction is for working out the consequences afterwards.

    “A science advances, in my estimation, when one of two things happen: either an additional general truth is derived, or two general truths are subsumed under a single general truth. Theoretical sciences traffic in general statements, and they do so using deductive reasoning. Since deduction generates true statements from true statements, then it stands to reason that theoretical sciences are capable, in principle, of advancing. Descriptive sciences, on the other hand, traffic in particular truths (i.e., facts) and does so by a combination of observation and induction. Since observation only yields facts and induction cannot reliably derive general truths from facts, descriptive sciences cannot advance.”

  283. why should I burden myself with a theory that, as he notes, apparently predicts that adjuncts shouldn’t exist?

    That’s pretty much it. Twenty years of ever-more elaborate framework-making elegantly demostrated that birds can fly and mammals can not. The surprising discovery of chickens and bats opens exciting opportunities for massaging the data into fitting the existing framework.

    But what do I know? I’m just a butterfly collector.

  284. David Marjanović says

    What is an adjunct?

    It’s no comfort that they’re throwing out the bathwater, when that is merely a consequence of their determination to throw out the baby.

    Well said.

    different cities (Ithaca and Newark, N.J., 220 miles / 355 km apart)

    And they were lucky. They could easily have ended up on different continents in fields more like mine.

    a rejection of science tout court

    To me it reads instead as total ignorance of science theory, funnily enough. First, there simply is no such thing as “a descriptive science”! Here’s the classic Darwin quote from 1861:

    About 30 years ago there was much talk that Geologists ought only to observe & not theorise; & I well remember some one saying, that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit & count the pebbles & describe their colours. How odd it is that every one should not see that all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service.—

    Second, that whole talk about truth is just wrong. Science is the quest for all falsehood, in the vague hope that in some sort of end only reality might be left standing – and then the relationship between reality and truth is still a philosophical matter.

  285. David Eddyshaw says

    What is an adjunct?

    Something you can omit while still leaving the sentence/phrase/whatever as completely grammatical and well-formed.

    “I’m going to work.”
    “I’m going to work today.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_(grammar)

    Like a lot of things in grammar, the longer you think about it, the more you start going “But …”
    (which is how progress is made.)

    Descriptive sciences, on the other hand, traffic in particular truths (i.e., facts) and does so by a combination of observation and induction. Since observation only yields facts and induction cannot reliably derive general truths from facts, descriptive sciences cannot advance

    Utter nonsense; anybody who can say this and believe it disqualifies himself from having any view on the philosophy of science worth paying the least attention to.

    I suspect this gibberish is a confused version of the classic Chomskyite characterisation of real linguistics as “butterfly collecting”; he’s so far down the rabbit hole he doesn’t realise this is just a yah-boo insult, but thinks it’s actually what descriptive linguists do.

  286. John Cowan says

    Something you can omit while still leaving the sentence/phrase/whatever as completely grammatical and well-formed.

    Up to a point, Minister.

    Te amo.
    Te ego amo.

  287. (sorry if I already posted it)
    There is a stereotype in hard sciences: if the universe can be compared to an axiomatic system, then maybe there exists an unique “initial” set of axioms, a neat set of laws from which everything can be derived, and reconstructing it is the coolest thing one can ever do. Or if it can’t, if, for example, it is possible to go down infinitely, then at least the universe is directed: there is up (consequences) and there is down (reasons) and the farther down you went, the more fundamental, the deeper you and your ideas are. Or simply speaking, discovering the electron is a greater achievemnt than learning to fly.

    Objections:
    1) there is another stereotype in hard sceinces. “physicsts are smarter and doing something more fundamental than others, while mathematicians are smarter and doing somthing more fundamental/cool than physicists”. Great, but what mathematicians do is exactly exploring the consequences:) That is, they do not usually go down. Up, to the left, spin around.

    2) there are such things as thermodynamics. It can be seen as a consequence from more fundametal laws, yet it is pretty (in the statistical formulation, at least, as opposed to the school subject), yet it is mighty.
    And the point above about an “unique” initial set is hardly true.

    3) already known laws produce a very rich world (one that we see around…) of funny effects, often fantastic, often unpredicted, often unexplained. From superconductivity to human beings.
    And a lot of stuff that has not been discovered yet.

  288. It was about someone’s rant about linguists (folks like Chomsky) and languists (folks more interesting in the diversity of existing languages than in the fundamental laws).

  289. The point is: it is perfectly romantic to study solid state physics, butterflies, songs and your spouse’s navel if it is what you want to study. Or no less romantic than pure math.

  290. Lars Mathiesen says

    I would argue that when mathematicians find ways of expressing two or more, let’s call them insights, in the same formalism, they have actually gone one layer deeper. That’s really what’s so cool about category theory, it’s a bit like going from umpty-fourteen mesons and baryons to three kinds of quarks.

  291. I just remembered that there was (or maybe still is) a similar argument here, inspired by this : https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf

  292. There must be a journal of Snobbery, inter-disciplinary.

  293. David Eddyshaw says

    inter-disciplinary

    Trouble is, it would only publish Pure Maths articles, to avoid bringing the tone down.

  294. David Eddyshaw says

    Up to a point, Minister

    Well, that’s exactly why I said that the idea makes you go “But …”

    In Kusaal, you can pretty much always omit the direct object of a verb without being ungrammatical; however, if you do that with some verbs, it implies anaphora, and with other verbs, it doesn’t.

    M kʋya. “‘I’ve killed [him/her; I just mentioned them.]”
    M nuya. “I’ve drunk [something; doesn’t matter what, don’t bother your head about it.]”

    So if you say

    M nu daam la. “I’ve drunk the beer.”

    is the beer an adjunct? Seems to be …
    Trouble is, you can make it into the subject if you want:

    Daam la nuya.
    “The beer has got drunk.”

    which doesn’t seem very adjunct-y.
    Movement and position verbs often take place names as “objects” (or something), but you can always omit them without any implication of anaphora:

    M kɛnnɛ Bɔk. “I’m going to Bawku.”
    M kɛnnɛ. “I’m walking.”

    M bɛ Bɔk. “I’m in Bawku.”
    M bɛ. “I exist.”

    Seems to me that whether you call Bɔk an “adjunct” or not doesn’t really signify anything much at all … either way you just need to describe the phenomena.

  295. John Cowan says

    The Book of Snobs, by William Makepeace Thackeray, aka “the celebrated Thacker”:

    No unusual incidents marked Thackeray’s lectures in St. Louis and Cincinnati, though he was fond of relating an anecdote which had Barnum’s Hotel in the former city as its setting. Dining there one day, he overheard one Irish waiter say to another:

    ‘Do you know who that is?’
    ‘No’, was the answer.
    ‘That’, said the first, ‘is the celebrated Thacker!’
    ‘What’s he done?’
    ‘D—d if I know!’

  296. Link omit.

  297. jack morava says

    What Lars M just said.

    It’s a memorable fancy that knowledge is infinite-dimensional and stratified by codimension or depth, with some matters deeper than others. Shallow understanding starts on the surface in codimension zero; a little learning is a dangerous thing…

  298. “Up and down” in the stereotype are not the same as “superficial and profound”. The stereotype exactly implies a tree-like structure. There exists human brain and its faculty of language, it generates observable languages. Let us reverse-engineer it. There exist laws of nature (dynamics) and they generate the universe.

    This idea of generation is central to the stereotype, and the direction of “down” is known before you moved to there. There are many contributions in physics that do not look like this. A new mathematical apparatus in physics is not the same. Conservation laws are not. Thermodynamics is not. I am not saying that there is nothing in physics which happens to be both beuatiful and powerful. I am saying that not all of this fits the tree.

  299. jack morava says

    I was trying to say that there is often reason to think in terms of codimension rather than probability: in geometry any subspace of positive codimension has measure, and hence probability, zero. Bayesians like probability but it misses deeper phenomena constrained for some reason to have positive codimension, cf perhaps

    https://improbable.com/2016/12/17/a-chicken-is-a-dirac-limit-of-a-tyrannosaur/

  300. John Cowan says

    Oops, it’s https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2686; fix it up, if you wouldn’t mind awfully (heh).

  301. Done!

  302. The sequel to Bad omens…: The Grantification of Everything.

    Contra my prediction, the main issue homed on here seems to be more about a rise of projects “whose central premise can be debunked in a short blog post”. Sounds rather glib to me, especially when said blog post turns out to be rife with rather dubious assertions like “don’t forget: ‘complex expression’ means ‘assembled by syntax.'”. No, as one learns by entertaining even five seconds’ worth of consideration of construction grammar, “complex expressions” can be very easily learned by rote and devoid of any (internal) syntactic structure.

    Obviously there are real issues with grantification (starting with e.g. requirements to wax bullshit about why your work is relevant to some political goal du jour, or the fact that the quality of one’s science communication is not perfectly correlated with the quality of one’s research). Requiring people to make their research framework intelligible, even to people who do not already share all of one’s unexamined assumptions, regardless seems to be mostly a good thing to me. And maybe there even still is “a race to be bottom as far as theoretical depth is concerned”! — but I don’t think that case is made just by pointing out a single example.

    For that matter I could consider even a sense in which “a race to be bottom on theoretical depth” is a good outcome: if theoreticists have become split in camps that don’t agree even on basic premises, that should be an issue to duke out first of all before building too much more theory of any flavor, since everyone in such a situation would seem to agree that all but at most one camp has something seriously wrong in their foundations.

  303. David Eddyshaw says

    The fact that the glib do better than they deserve to is neither news not a problem confined to academia.

    Requiring people to make their research framework intelligible, even to people who do not already share all of one’s unexamined assumptions, regardless seems to be mostly a good thing to me

    Absolutely. And I think it is not unreasonable for those on the receiving end of the explanations to wonder whether, if the researcher can’t manage to express their theoretical presuppositions coherently and intelligibly, there might actually be a problem with the presuppositions. (On a more pedestrian level: haven’t we all imagined that we understood something, until we tried to explain it to someone who didn’t already know all about it? *)

    * At this point, you can of course pull the Chomsky Manoeuvre, which consists of making your explainee feel so stupid for not understanding your explanations that they pretend that they do understand them; and if you outrank them, they will hopefully come to actually believe that they understand them.

  304. “complex expressions” can be very easily learned by rote and devoid of any (internal) syntactic structure.

    Actually, even from a construction grammar perspective that doesn’t seem right. For one thing, words are constructions too; for another, idioms clearly manifest some properties of regular constructions. “Faint heart never won fair lady” has to be memorised, and equally clearly has to have internal structure; the former does not entail the absence of the latter. That realization has been one of the more encouraging points of convergence between some very different approaches in linguistics in recent decades, after a long period of thinking of the lexicon as a mere collection of exceptions.

  305. Idioms surely almost always manifest properties of regular constructions because they etymologically derive from them. This does mean that they might, for some or even many speakers, continue to have internal structure. But I don’t think this means that they have to for everyone. To be sure I am taking the possibly hardline stance here that only mental representation counts as “internal structure”, and that different instances of the same sentence-as-string-with-meaning could therefore have different structures. (Indeed never mind just idioms, it should be theoretically possible that any sentence, no matter how regular, could for some speaker have a representation just as a structureless string.)

  306. Idioms surely almost always manifest properties of regular constructions because they etymologically derive from them.

    Many idioms preserve archaic/no longer productive constructions — I wouldn’t call those ‘regular’. So it might well be that speakers are regurgitating them by rote (those of Shakespearian or KJV origin, for example) — except of course for those who hang out here, for whom Elizabethan English is still ‘regular’.

    “many a mickle makes a muckle” seems to be widely mis-parsed — nothing ‘regular’ about it in most peoples’ speech.

    Indeed ‘many a X makes a Y’ I wouldn’t call ‘regular’ at all.

  307. If it has no internal structure for a given speaker, than for that speaker it’s not a sentence any more at all. An English monolingual who says “inshallah” probably isn’t giving it any internal syntactic structure, but by the same token isn’t treating it as a phrase either, just as an single-word adverb. Whereas if you can actually parse it into words, you can’t really avoid giving it some syntactic structure, historically correct or not.

  308. David Marjanović says

    One of the first things people learn when they’re taught German is wie geht es dir “how are you”.

    They’re given the spelling, so they can see the words. But the grammar and what’s left of the meaning of the words have to wait for later-if-ever. There’s a dummy subject in there, an empathic dative, an uncommon meaning of what normally means “walk”… and I don’t have most of those things in mind as a native speaker either.

  309. Lars Mathiesen says

    I’m told that as a toddler, I asked for a bedtime story with the words Skal mor læse for dig, Lars? = ‘Should Mom read to you, Lars?’ Clearly, for me that was a string learned by rote while for my mom it was a regular construction.

    But perhaps we aren’t talking about language acquisition.

    (Also, what makes people think that using nouns to refer to themselves when talking to little kids helps anything? Cf. ‘she’ is the cat where it’s some sort of taboo).

  310. If it has no internal structure for a given speaker, than for that speaker it’s not a sentence any more at all.

    If we use this as a definition of “a sentence”, then sure. But if so, this just means that cannot claim that some “complex expression” has to be a sentence (or a part of one) just because it could be one. Or maybe it might not be even “a complex expression” according to some technical definition despite appearences, whatever.

    Regardless of what definitions we build around it, the point is that the notions of “is mentally represented by a certain structure” and “could be mentally represented by a certain structure” are, at least sometimes, not equivalent by logical necessity. Empirical psycholinguistic study cannot be done away with pure theoretical inference. And then, in particular, the idea that (what appears to be?) a sentence can be picked for production based on semantic considerations first of all, w/o a speaker consulting their syntax module, is not self-evidently wrong.

    An interesting associated question might be if it makes a difference for anything when people know that something is not pure keysmash, but without knowing themselves in what way exactly. I know close to nothing about Arabic myself but I could still easily figure out (have figured out already decades ago) that Inshallah is probably i(-)n(-)sh-allah with between two and four morphs. But this seems to be best treated as extralinguistic / folk-etymological knowledge, not as a case proof that morphosyntactic structure can be probabilistic.

  311. @Lars, I think it is common for children to use “X” to refer to an event where “X” is uttered and I understand it as a quotemarked X. Somewhat similarly (in a childish manner) a friend of mine can object to an X that in any way imply an intent: “not X”.

    @David, reminded me about the word that Russians learn from “the Encyclopaedia of Russian Life” Eugene Onegin.

    Васисдас.

    But the grammar and what’s left of the meaning of the words have to wait for later-if-ever.
    What, they don’t practice interlinear anymore? O tempora!

  312. Lars Mathiesen says

    I’m sure it’s common, but this whole thread hinges on whether humans ever (with communicative intent) utter quotemarked strings that could be sentences, alone or as part of a larger construction.

    Wantest thou to argue that children be not actual humans until until some 12 or 16 winters pass? I shall gainsay thee not.

  313. January First-of-May says

    An interesting associated question might be if it makes a difference for anything when people know that something is not pure keysmash, but without knowing themselves in what way exactly.

    My impression is that it’s extremely common for someone to pick up apparent morphemes in a word, and/or apparent words in a longer expression, even if that someone doesn’t actually understand how the word/expression is actually divided into morphemes/words, and/or whether those apparent morphemes/words make any sense in the context of the apparent meaning of the word/expression.
    (On a larger scale, this is exactly how reanalysis happens; on a smaller scale, a variant of this is commonly referred to as an “eggcorn”.)

    Come to think of it, the existence of libfixes also implies that most speakers do appear to believe that any particular sufficiently long word probably divides into morphemes in some way, even if they might be unaware of the actual relevant division (if any).

     
    EDIT:

    I’m sure it’s common, but this whole thread hinges on whether humans ever (with communicative intent) utter quotemarked strings that could be sentences, alone or as part of a larger construction.

    Idioms are, of course, one example of such, and those are commonly in an obsolete dialect; but another example is (what is usually known as) references. It’s hard to dispute that “These are not the droids you’re looking for” is a sentence in modern English, yet in practice it usually functions as a single idiomatic unit.

  314. @Lars, what I mean is that I think you were well aware of the literal meaning.

    Quoting a phrase or using it as a label makes its structure unimportant in some ways (e.g. substituting X in “не X” with a random line may result in something funny), but not others (this something is still funny).

  315. That’s actually a really interesting topic that I’m guessing hasn’t been researched as much as it deserves. “God rest ye merry gentlemen” springs to mind — very few current English speakers can explain how it works (they automatically take “merry gentlemen” as a unit).

  316. Just got to this in Salvatore Scibona’s New Yorker essay on Halldór Laxness:

    It’s impossible to separate any Laxness novel from the legacy of the Icelandic sagas, the great savage stories written in prose on calfskin during the early twelve-hundreds, before many modern languages had any literature at all. We know the authors of almost none of the sagas. Among the devices that distinguish them is a point of view that seems to come from the shared knowledge of humanity as applied to particular farmers on particular fjords. Laxness is an heir to the form and its tropes, which he can deploy for laughs or for pity. Of Salka and Sigurlína’s first arrival in the village, he writes, “The snow blew straight into their faces, as it always does with such people.” Of the moment Salka discovers that her mother has spent all of Salka’s money, he writes, “Few sights are as peculiar as that of a little girl in a ragged man’s jacket, with a string around her waist, crying on a set of steps in a little village by the sea as dusk is beginning to fall.” Who’s saying this? None of the characters. But it isn’t Laxness himself, either. Reading him reminds you that the narrator of any novel is as much an invention as the characters are. But a funny kind of invention. Far from being a part of the writer’s mind, it partakes of a genius, when things are going right, that the writer himself doesn’t possess.

    Once that invented narrator starts to speak on the page, whatever point a writer may have hoped to dramatize can feel hopelessly sophomoric. Laxness seems to have made this same discovery multiple times. His opinions were less interesting, and paradoxically less true, than the fictitious products of his imagination.

    (I still haven’t read Independent People, which got Laxness his Nobel and which I’ve owned for decades.)

  317. David Marjanović says

    Skal mor læse for dig, Lars?

    I was going to comment that similar stories abound, e.g. I reportedly took the 2sg pronoun as my personal pronoun and referred to myself in the second person.

    But no. What this truly proves is that nobody understands spoken Danish.

    “God rest ye merry gentlemen” springs to mind — very few current English speakers can explain how it works (they automatically take “merry gentlemen” as a unit).

    Commas are important people!

    “The snow blew straight into their faces, as it always does with such people.”

    Yup, Nobel prize deserved.

  318. Lars Mathiesen: Skal mor læse for dig, Lars?

    That is uncommonly adorable.

    Separately, another kind of not exactly compositional fixed phrase occurred to me. Sometimes an aphorism is so well known that only part of it needs to be stated aloud to convey its meaning. In fact, there are examples where only part of the phrase is known to many people. For example, plenty of people will remark, “If wishes were horses,” even though that is not a complete grammatical thought, and, on their own, the words are only vaguely suggestive of the implicit meaning. I am the only person I know of who regularly follows up with the second clause: “[then] beggars would ride.” In fact, many people who know the meaning of, “If wishes were horses,” turn out to be completely unfamiliar with the second part. I suspect that the version I use is not universal even among people who continue the expression to make a complete sentence; there are probably multiple versions of the rarely heard second half.

    Coming back around to where I started, I think this is interesting because, “If wishes were horses,” is clearly a grammatical utterance, although it is not a complete thought. The phrasing is suggestive of some kind of pessimistic analogy, but one has to learn the meaning independently from the phrasing, since the words alone do not convey everything. There is a complete-sentence/complete-thought version, whose meaning is (comparatively) transparent, but most people don’t actually know it.

  319. Similarly, there’s a Russian saying “Знал бы прикуп, жил бы в Сочи” [If I knew the widow (face-down card), I’d be living in Sochi], which can have the ending omitted (from a novel: “Знал бы прикуп, жил бы сама знаешь где” [If I knew the widow, I’d be living you-know-where] or can be played with (as in Pelevin’s «Читал бы сутры, знал бы прикуп» [If I’d read the sutra, I’d know the widow]).

  320. Skal mor læse for dig, Lars?

    僕 JLPT 4
    Kana Reading
    ぼく
    Romaji
    boku
    Word Senses

    Parts of speech
    pronoun, nouns which may take the genitive case particle `no’
    Meaning
    1. I; me
    2. you (used addressing young children)
    3. manservant

    https://nihongomaster.com/japanese/dictionary/word/50196/boku

  321. My paternal grandma, who lived with her middle daughter (the Indologist), called me a hypocoristic of my name and ended up being called Grandma the Hypocoristic by me.

  322. wie geht es dir “how are you”

    I raise you kuidas käsi käib ‘how hand goes?’

  323. @Brett, I don’t think in this case people learn the meaning independently from the phrasing. The meaning is metaphorical, but obvious both times.

  324. John Cowan says

    There are something like 25 ghits for “All trademarks are the property of their respective owners”, but does anyone want to claim that this is non-compositional? (In a pragmatic sense it is, because its pragmatic meaning is “I acknowledge that my use of these trademarks does not imply a connection with their owners”. But syntactically?) I think there is a distinction between idioms and boilerplate.

  325. @David Marjanović: In the first week of German I, we learned, Wie geht’s?. I don’t remember if Mr. Chapmann pointed out that “geht’s” was a contraction immediately, but to English speakers the German question was easy to understand, since the word-for-for translation, How goes it? is everyday idiomatic English.

  326. Words “mental representation” bother me.

    Mental means, in our minds. What is “mind”? We don’t know a shit about it. From introspection we can claim that “when we hear XXX we feel and think this” and whatever J Pystynen called “an empirical study” you can learn some more things (like: when people hear X they do Y).
    But we assume that neither approaches a predictive model of a mind and what it is capable of.

    I am also not sure if such a thing as a “syntax module” exist.

  327. David Eddyshaw says

    What is “mind”? We don’t know a shit about it

    I don’t understand my own physical body either (I can speak with professional authority on this point.) I do not regard this uncomfortable fact as a basis for avoiding all doctors as charlatans.

    I too doubt the existence of syntax “modules”, insofar as I can attach any coherent meaning to the idea at all. But real psychologists (about whose work Chomsky is incurious) have their own good reasons for doubting the existence of such fanciful things too. On an academic level (quite apart from the level of personal experience and interaction) we actually know a lot about minds. That’s what psychologists study.

    It is conceivable that as a heuristic technique it might be useful to be agnostic about “mind” and confine oneself strictly to the study of observable behaviour, discounting not only one’s own introspections but what other people tell you about their own introspections. But frankly, Skinner-style Behaviourism seems to have long since run into the sand as a productive idea. Chomsky’s claim that He Himself dealt it its death-blow is (like his philosophical claims in general) nonsense.

  328. No, I do not avoid linguists🙂 But the words “mental representation” bother me.

    P.S. and no, I think the object of study of linguistics is mostly known to us exactly from introspection.
    Like, meanings of all words (because what is “meaning”?):-) Yes, it makes linguistics somewhat less “scientific”, but… it exists, it is fun, and it can only be studied this way.

  329. P.P.S. yes, we know a lot about minds in the sense we can write a lot about minds (more than one book). But we can’t model mind.

    Words “mental representation” sound as if such a thing exists, we know what it is and can discuss it. Is so all right, tell me what is the mental representation of a word “table” in your or my or anyone’s mind.

    Or well, what is “computer representation” of a program? If by this phrase we mean thoughts and feelings accessible to introspection, then maybe a word “feelings” better reflects our state of knowlege.

  330. A freind of mine considered allergen immunoterapy. I read about it. Popular accounts: “it works because T cells blah-blah-blah”.
    Professional journals: “some doctor invented it and it seems to work, but no one knows why. Perhaps the effect is related somehow to another curious observation: for during the therapy T cells blah-blah-blah”

  331. John Cowan says

    How goes it? is everyday idiomatic English.

    Wikt thinks it’s a calque from German. English is full of these phrase level calques: It goes without saying < Ça va sans dire.

  332. También, as well.

  333. PlasticPaddy says

    @jc
    I am not sure how Wikt squares the “German calque” idea with occurrences in Shakespeare, e.g.
    How much unlike art thou Mark Antony!
    Yet, coming from him, that great medicine hath
    With his tinct gilded thee.
    How goes it with my brave Mark Antony?

    Antony and Cleopatra, I.5
    Actually the “with” makes a calque from Dutch more likely here.

  334. @John Cowan: A calque is certainly plausible, but I’d like to know more of the history, since there does seem to be another possibility. English obviously has strong restrictions on how questions are normally formed.* In question starting with a verb, the verb has to be a modal or a form of be. Things are a bit freer when a wh-question starts with the wh-word, but there are still restrictions. If the wh-word plays the role of the grammatical subject, then it can be used directly with any main verb:

    Who made this mess?
    What happened here?

    However, when the wh-word is grammatically an object or adverbial, a auxiliary-class verb is required in the main clause:

    What was that about? [The main verb is was, which is allowed since forms of be can function as linking verbs.]

    Whom did he ask for?
    *Whom asked he for?

    Where could it happen?
    *Where happened it?

    How does your burrito taste?
    *How tastes it?

    Since how is pretty much unavoidably appears grammatically as a adverbial adjunct, questions starting with how typically require an auxiliary verb.

    However, since go can function as a linking verb in English and (many? all?) other Germanic languages, that may be enough to license a question like, How goes it?—without having to calque them it another language like German, with far fewer restrictions of which verbs can be used without auxiliaries in questions. It is probably relevant that, How goes it? while an idiom, is not the only question of this form that is found in standard English. In fact, the form How goes [object]? can be quite productive:

    How goes your project?
    How goes the computer upgrade?
    How goes the rat race?

    * Of course there are exceptions. It is common to omit the subject of a question, so that it starts with an unrestricted verb. However, it seems like examples such as, Going well? can be interpreted as clipped versions of questions that do possess explicit subjects, e.g.

    Going well? from Is it going well?
    Feel up to coming along? from Do you feel up to coming along?
    Tasted good? from It tasted good?

    That last example obviously demonstrates another exception to the “rules” for forming questions in English. Almost any sequence of words that looks superficially like a declaration may be converted into a question via intonation.

  335. Stu Clayton says

    Skinner-style Behaviourism seems to have long since run into the sand as a productive idea.

    I use it productively to understand other people. I observe and listen to them and act, or not, in light of all that I have observed and heard so far. I don’t impute “motives” as causes, for example. If anything, “motives” are shorthand for the preliminary results of my observations.

    What someone says about themselves is just another brick in the wall, not introspective access granted to me.

    That is a behavioristic account of my behavior. Who will gainsay it ? And if they did, what are they going to do about it ? I would monitor the situation closely.

  336. David Eddyshaw says

    Ah, but that is merely you introspecting about what you do. Such evidence is of course inadmissible. Observation of your actual behaviour may well tell a different story (and is, in any case, the only True Path.)

  337. Stu Clayton says

    Of course. That’s why I said I would be monitoring those observing and commenting on my actual behavior [which includes my comments].

    You can’t be too careful. Those who jump to conclusions are easy to fob off [“introspection” my foot, for all you know I was talking about someone else, using “I” as a decoy]. It’s those who take their time that you gotta keep an eye on – mutually.

    The dog Sparky has been observing me for the last several hours, as I rattle away on my keyboard. What difference would it make to speculate about why he does that ? We both know that I will finally give in and go out for a walk with him.

    Dogs are the cream cheese on the matzo of life.

  338. Anyway, though as well and también sure look like calques, I don’t see how and where such calquing would have occurred. También is first recorded from about 1200, and the likes of it are restricted to Iberian plus Occitan (per Corominas). As well is witnessed in English beginning in the 1380s (per the OED).

  339. i can’t really picture a path for a german calque*, but/and i’m wondering whether “how goes it?” could be adaptated from “how’s it going?” – the opposite could be true, of course! (or the latter could be a bowdlerization of “how’s it hanging?”).

    to my ear, the other “how goes X” phrases Brett cited all feel like descendents of the little family of literary stock phrases from military narratives in that form: “how goes the battle” and the like.

    .
    * i don’t think the hanover or saxe-coburg & gotha dynasties have had the influence on british english that the normans did, though i suppose a case could be made for a route through one of the waves of german emigration to north america.

  340. David Marjanović says

    How goes it? is everyday idiomatic English.

    Shakespeare isn’t generally idiomatic modern English… I’ll go out on a limb and claim how’s it going is idiomatic over most of modern English, but how goes it is widely not even considered grammatical – some modern usages are probably ironic.

  341. Trond Engen says

    Brett; How goes it? is everyday idiomatic English.

    John C.: Wikt thinks it’s a calque from German.

    PlasticPaddy: I am not sure how Wikt squares the “German calque” idea with occurrences in Shakespeare, e.g.

    […]
    How goes it with my brave Mark Antony?
    […]

    Actually the “with” makes a calque from Dutch more likely here.

    Norw. Bm. Hvordan går det (med han/deg)? “How goes it (with him/you)?”

    Eastern Colloquial: Åssengåre(me.n/-meræ)? (or more likely; Åssengåremena/-meræa? with emphatic -a)

    A calque from somewhere Continental must be pretty old to be so thoroughly incorporated in the colloquial agglutination.

  342. @David Marjanović: That limb will not support your weight.

    I will say again: How goes it? is everyday idiomatic English. I assume, based on their lack of objection above, that the other native speakers who have commented on the phrase agree with me?

    I have no doubt that, How’s it going? is more common and more demotic in register. However, both questions are unremarkable to (American) English speakers. I got “How goes it” (like that—no punctuation) in a text earlier this week, and it was a simple inquiry about the progress of a task, with no apparent allusion or irony.

  343. I will say again: How goes it? is everyday idiomatic English. I assume, based on their lack of objection above, that the other native speakers who have commented on the phrase agree with me?

    Yes, but with the important proviso that it’s educated/elite idiomatic English. It’s not on the same usage level as “How’s it going?”

  344. Stu Clayton says

    based on their lack of objection above

    I hasten to object before closing time. I’ve always felt that “how goes it” sounds vaguely Yiddish, or Germanish as in something from the Katzenjammer Kids vel sim. Like “I know from nothing”, “How should I know already” and many another phrase.

    no apparent allusion or irony

    When people pick up unusual expressions, the reason is sometimes mere amusement – then they become usual, or are dropped, or laid up in the cedar chest because you never know. Allusion and irony come in different shapes and sizes, and are subject to both emergence and detergence, just as are the things they subject*.

    I remember “off the wall” getting out of hand in 90s America – then it vanished. I expect to experience the demise of FTW, IMHO, IIRC etc before mine.

    *This sentence parodies certain features of Blumenberg’s prose. I’m reading Ein mögliches Selbstverständnis at the mo.

  345. “Almost any sequence of words that looks superficially like a declaration may be converted into a question via intonation.”

    @Brett, I wonder if prescriptivism contributed in restrictiveness of English. It could:

    The obvious problem of questions marked with intonation is that in writing you don’t have it. There is the question mark, but in Russian some questions don’t look good in writing when marked with this mark only. Perhaps because the intonation marks a word:
    you yesterday ؟went to school? yes, went
    ؟you yesterday went to school? yes, me
    you ؟yesterday went to school? yes, yesterday

  346. David Marjanović says

    I expect to experience the demise of FTW, IMHO, IIRC etc before mine.

    IMHO has been around for decades, and it has spread – I’ve seen it in Russian as имхо a few times…

  347. Yes, it firmly established itself in Russian slang already in 90s.

  348. Stu Clayton says

    IMHO has been around for decades, and it has spread

    That’s also true of me, yet the end is nigh.

    Hochachtungsvoll, “yours of the 16th inst.” and “far out!” were around for a few decades, then they weren’t any more.

  349. David Eddyshaw says

    If I sprinkle hochachtungsvoll liberally into my German conversation, will I sound charmingly retro?

    (Distinguished salutations are better, of course. The French do these things so well.)

  350. Stu Clayton says

    Sprinkle, but sprinkle with care. You don’t want to create the impression of an old duffer with a tic. Moderation is the soul of charm. And try not to giggle.

    What was the sense of distingué in that locution ? What does it have to do with the meanings of today’s verb ?

  351. I have often wondered that.

  352. Stu Clayton says

    Maybe it meant something like “best” as in “best regards”. The best has the distinction of being the pineapple of the good.

    There’s that anecdote by Charlie Mordecai, supposedly quoting Mallarmé describing a certain older woman of superior bearing: si extraordinairement distinguée, que quand je lui dis bonjour je me fais l’impression de lui avoir dit merde .

  353. Trond Engen says

    Extraordinary?

  354. But why would you say “please agree to the expression of my extraordinary sentiments”?

  355. Trond Engen says

    Several rounds of polite hyperbole and circumlocution? Salutations distinguées is just making more fuzz about them than what’s common. You can do that for a while, but when everybody expects — and gets — extraordinary fuzz, you offer extraordinary sentiments. And when expressing sentiments is too much, you start asking for permission.

  356. by me, “how goes it?” definitely doesn’t carry the whiff of “educated/elite”. but that may be generational or social-context-based.

    i’d be a bit more open to the suggestion of yiddish influence (along the lines of the classic calques that stu brought in) if it weren’t for the citation von und zu avon. old bill’s english isn’t a contemporary vernacular, but he’s a great sign of how long phrases that are part of current idiomatic usage have been established in the language (including the cases where he’s the earliest source and the only reason they’ve stayed established). but to my ear, it doesn’t have much of a yiddish ring, and (bearing in mind i’m not a cradle-tongue or daily speaker) “vi geyt es” sounds like half a clause.

    a quick google for “װי גײט עס” finds:
    (1) untrustworthy pop phrasebooks;
    (2) recent hasidic usage that could be calqued from english (at least some of it looking like advertising bot copypasta);
    (3) a 1930 novel translated from german, mislabeled as Tess of the d’Urbervilles;
    and not much else.

    and almost everything in (2), plus the appearance in (3), has some kind of grammatically meaningful specifier immediately following – “epes”, “dort”, “arop”, “im”, “dir”, etc. (which makes me feel better about my ear, but may or may not tell us anything much)

  357. David Eddyshaw says

    “How goes it?” does not strike me as at all American, which would bear out rozele’s impression that it’s not a Yiddishism.

    (On the other hand, impressions of that kind often turn out to be demonstrably false.)

    It does strike me as not-lower-class. I’ve always taken it as a (pseudo?) archaism. The Wodehouse register.

  358. It does strike me as not-lower-class. I’ve always taken it as a (pseudo?) archaism. The Wodehouse register.

    There you go.

  359. i don’t really hear it that way, but /shrug/. that could argue for some calquing from “ça va?” in the mix, though.

  360. PlasticPaddy says

    Re earlier usage:
    I seo hu hit geþ.
    Floris and Blauncheflur, 1300/1250
    this is the version without with or indirect object
    It fareth so with me.
    Chaucer, CT, MerchantsTale Prologue
    Version with faren instead of gon

    I believe all of these go back further, i.e. “how goes/fares it [with] dative pronoun” but do not have a reference.

  361. John Cowan says

    Combustion is just as easy to understand either way.

    Only if you are willing to accept that while all other substances are pushed down by gravity, phlogiston is pushed up by levity.

    do hit us to witanne

    Which shows that AcI in English is not altogether a calque, but I continue to think that it is heavily reinforced by the Latin construction. By the same token, how goes it? was compositional in EModE, but I think it remained intact because it was reinforced by one or more other Germanic language.

    God rest ye merry gentlemen

    I am not sure quite what is going on here. The original was Sit you merry, gentlemen and then God rest you merry, gentlemen. But the use of ye is what WP calls a pseudo-archaism, and every time my mind’s ear hears it, I wince. The only way to make that work would be as God rest, ye merry gentlemen, where the second half is a vocative … which is absurd. Intransitive subjunctive rest? Bah.

  362. You’re absolutely right, of course, and I don’t know why I wrote “ye” except that the pseudo-archaism is stuck firmly in my head.

  363. January First-of-May says

    Only if you are willing to accept that while all other substances are pushed down by gravity, phlogiston is pushed up by levity.

    As I’ve already said the last time it came up, phlogiston fits perfectly into the model of gravity if we just assume it has negative mass.

  364. David Marjanović says

    If I sprinkle hochachtungsvoll liberally into my German conversation, will I sound charmingly retro?

    Impossible; it was only used on top of the signature in letters. Using it there will make you look charmingly old-fashioned, though; it was still used 30 years ago.

    (Distinguished salutations are better, of course. The French do these things so well.)

    In the last 20 years they all seem to have stopped and switched to Cordialement.

    Extraordinary?

    Simply “distinguished” as in “a distinguished gentleman”: an unusually good one. Like… “my most exquisite sentiments”.

    I’ve always taken it as a (pseudo?) archaism.

    Same for what say you.

    do hit us to witanne

    Which shows that AcI in English is not altogether a calque, but I continue to think that it is heavily reinforced by the Latin construction.

    Yes. This reinforcement didn’t happen in German, where the AcI is limited to a very small number of verbs.

    Tu es uns zu wissen “let us know”, “inform us formally” was idiomatic German 400 years ago.

    As I’ve already said the last time it came up, phlogiston fits perfectly into the model of gravity if we just assume it has negative mass.

    That fails as soon as you can weigh gases.

  365. Lars Mathiesen says

    I’m not sure that a negative weight gas and a vacuum will fit in the same model. How will you prove that a vacuum isn’t “just” a mixture of phlogiston and air with zero density?

  366. @Lars Mathiesen: Besides negative mass, phlogiston would need to carry negative momentum. Otherwise you could distinguish a gas-phlogiston mixture by its pressure. Oxygen was discovered and the phlogiston theory debunked in the 1770s, by which point the basics of the necessary kinetic theory of gasses had been published, but it wasn’t widely accepted. (Lavoisier still listed heat as an element in his chemistry book.)

  367. I’m with David M. How goes it? has always sounded strange and quotative to this native speaker. The output of someone aiming for an amusing spin on How’s it going? but missing the mark. If it were idiomatic, When goes it? ought to work too, but it doesn’t.

  368. Lars Mathiesen says

    @Brett, yeah, trying to imagine a collision between molecules of phlogiston and oxygen did make my head spin, but I was not aware that people were thinking in those terms so early.

  369. PlasticPaddy says

    How seems to be used in common expressions with archaic or anomalous forms:
    how come
    how do (you do)/howdy
    knowhow
    somehow
    anyhow
    So “how goes it” seems to be accepted by some L1 speakers as one of this family, and by others as a learned or deliberately archaic phrase.
    I don’t have an explanation why there are not similar expressions for when, maybe when is too concrete. English does not even have *somewhen or *anywhen, which are realised in e.g., German.

  370. John Cowan says

    Displaced, I suppose, by some time, any tme.

  371. Of the six major wh-words, where and how seem to form the most compounds (and probably other idiomatic constructions). Consider that we have

    somewhere
    anywhere
    nowhere

    somehow
    anyhow
    nohow
    [usually considered nonstandard, but prevalent in several varieties of native English (although not mine)].

    The other wh-words are in a number of different situations. Sometimes there are alternative constructions For example, instead of the corresponding constructions with who, we use one.

    someone
    anyone
    no one

    For what, there is only one of the compounds in use

    somewhat

    *anywhat
    *nowhat.

    Those last two, as well as the nonexistent,

    *somewhy
    *anywhy
    *nowhy

    *somewhen
    *anywhen
    *nowhen

    seem to require separate locutions, such as “in no place,” “for some reason,” any time.” (However, it does seem to me that the –when compounds are less bad than the others. I can imagine nowhen, for example, being used jocularly, but not nowhy.)

  372. it seems to me that there are systematic substitutions all through, with only “-how” and “-where” retaining the question-word forms in compounds:

    “-one” for “-who”;
    “-thing” for “-what” (with “somewhat”/”summat” only holding its meaning in some dialects);
    “-time” for “-when” (with “never” blocking the consistency-predicted *notime);
    and, interestingly, “-how” pulling in the semantic field of “-why”.

    and while the “-when” compounds ring better in my ear too, i think that’s because both Brett and i are sf readers, and those forms have been used enough in the genre to make them a bit familiar (just as reading miéville has made “ab-” a more familiar and more generative prefix in my mind and ideolect).

  373. @rozele: You’re right about –thing taking over for –what. And I was also thinking about how Leiber’s “Nehwon” was almost “nowhere” backwards, although that was apparently inspired by Butler’s Erewhon.

  374. John Cowan says

    Somewhere here on the Hat I posted Pullum’s table of which of these pronouns can be used in which constructions in English, but I can’t find it.

  375. David Marjanović says

    Interview about the ongoing debate about the generic masculine and what, if anything, to do about it in German. Chomsky is never mentioned, and yet:

    In der Linguistik kam es ab den Neunziger-, spätestens den Nullerjahren zu einer großen empirischen Wende. Zuvor wurde viel Introspektion betrieben. In früheren Arbeiten hat man sich selbst befragt, das eigene Sprachgefühl absolut gesetzt, und das passiert noch häufig. Man nennt das auch „arm-chair-linguistics“, Linguistik vom Sessel aus. Das geht heute nicht mehr, die Ansprüche haben sich geändert.

    “In linguistics there was a great empirical turn from the 90s on, or the 00s at the latest. Before, there was a lot of introspection going on. In earlier studies you interrogated yourself, set your own Sprachgefühl as absolute, and that still happens frequently. That’s also called ‘armchair linguistics’. That’s no longer possible, the demands have changed.”

    The next paragraph gives examples: blinded empirical psycholinguistic studies, empirical acceptability studies and corpus linguistics.

  376. A “specialist in Azeri poetry” and a Turkologist in the list may not be accidental…

  377. Lars Mathiesen says

    Today’s German reading comprehension exercise, nice. Very sensible opinions, that scientist! The thing about boys’ and girls’ names for animals in children’s books correlating with grammatical gender to 90%, that’s pretty much a cincher against the position that nobody thinks that way.

    (Standard Danish conflated m and f to c in the 15th, so I have no armchair feeling to go on here. My ex-wife might have, being born in rural Funen where her generation still have the three genders, but I’m not going to ask her. And I think the number of children’s books written in conservative Funen dialect is too small for statistics. German will have to do).

  378. John Cowan says

    Merge reminds me of the role played by the (generalised) Sheffer stroke in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

    Well, there’s a fundamental difference, which is that you can actually build arbitrary digital circuits out of NAND-gates, whereas you cannot build anything out of Chomsky-gates.

  379. Stu Clayton says

    whereas you cannot build anything out of Chomsky-gates.

    But derivations are a kind of gate. Gates can be crashed.

  380. David Eddyshaw says

    you cannot build anything out of Chomsky-gates

    Not at all!

    You can build anything out of Chomsky-gates, both possible things and impossible things, such is their awesome power!

  381. Here is a compellingly argued piece by Chomsky. The conclusion seems to be you can’t construct a theory of mind or language just from neuroscience.

    Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding

    I’ve almost been converted to his camp.

  382. David Marjanović says

    The conclusion seems to be you can’t construct a theory of mind or language just from neuroscience.

    I can’t find that conclusion in there at all.

    I mean, Chomsky refuses to clearly state any conclusion in there, which strikes me as passive-aggressive rather than scientific or philosophical; but the closest I can see is an implication that we shouldn’t worry too much if our current findings about mind contradict our current findings about neuroscience because the latter might be wrong. That’s pretty much a non-statement; nobody has claimed that neuroscience has thoroughly understood its subject matter.

    I also find a few gaps in the presentation of the history of philosphy of science that makes up most of the essay. Quantum physics has indeed explained both “spooky action at a distance”* and chemistry, but the developments that led to this were not attempts to understand either of these and were not informed by them. Any revisions that end up explaining mind or language are not particularly likely to come from attempts to integrate mind or language directly into neuroscience.

    Finally, I’m a bit shocked Chomsky believes the grave accent is an opening single quotation mark.

    * The trick is that space isn’t as simple as Newton believed. It’s a function of entanglement, rather.

  383. I can’t find that conclusion in there at all.

    You are right, of course. But the implication is that research into the physical structure (mechanics) of the brain can’t trump Chomsky’s own abstruse theories as to how language works. In other words, even though Chomsky’s ideas about Merge, Move α, traces, etc. etc. can’t be proved, they can’t be disproved through any appeal to the structure of the brain, neurons, etc. They are out there beyond the reach of directly observable material phenomena.

    I am perhaps extrapolating too much from this, but Chomsky’s belief in Merge as the bedrock of human linguistic ability — even if its existence can’t be seen in the human brain and its genetic basis is not immediately apparent — is not accessible to plodding human beings, just as erstwhile believers in a simple mechanical explanation for all phenomena were unable to transcend their conventional views. Like Newton, Chomsky has proposed a new theory that overturns all the old preconceptions.

    Yes, overly simplified, for sure, but I see this as being behind Chomsky’s arrogance in dismissing alternative views. Counterarguments presented by his opponents are trivial; they are trapped in old philosophies and just don’t get it.

  384. Quantum physics has indeed explained …“spooky action at a distance”

    Well, it depends what you mean by ‘explain.’ Quantum mechanics can certainly account quantitatively for what happens, but it requires non-locality in physics, which is both non-Newtonian and Extremely Strange. As Feynman said, no one knows how quantum mechanics works, it just does.

    Perhaps Chomsky understands non-locality but I don’t know that he’s ever expounded on it.

  385. Stu Clayton says

    nobody has claimed that neuroscience has thoroughly understood its subject matter.

    Not that explicitly, no. But every time you turn around, someone is claiming that enormous progress has been made on this or that. Since progress can be estimated only with respect to a known goal, the message is always the same: scientists are that close to having everything figured out !

    Thorough understanding is just around the corner, folks ! Step up, only a quarter a throw !

  386. David Eddyshaw says

    Perhaps Chomsky understands non-locality

    I get a strong impression that Chomsky subscribes to the Benjamin Jowett principle: “What I don’t know ain’t knowledge.”

    (Among the many differences are that Jowett neither said nor believed this, and also knew a lot more than Chomsky.)

  387. Stu Clayton says

    “What I don’t know ain’t knowledge.”

    I knew of Jowett only as a Greek geek, not as Miss Attribute the quip queen. Other sayings/writings (mis)attributed to him (but from where exactly?):

    Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.

    Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door.

    Give the clergy your sympathy; don’t give them anything else.

  388. David Marjanović says

    But the implication is that research into the physical structure (mechanics) of the brain can’t trump Chomsky’s own abstruse theories as to how language works.

    I was wondering about this, but didn’t want to accuse Chomsky of gross dishonesty over such a nebulous text…

    progress can be estimated only with respect to a known goal

    Measured perhaps, but estimated?

  389. Stu Clayton says

    Measured perhaps, but estimated?

    When I am swimming across a river to reach a hut on the other side, I can only estimate my progress, not measure it. The hut is the known goal, and it’s in sight, but it may turn out to take longer to reach it than it appears to me now. The tide is rising and the current is getting stronger, but I didn’t know that at first.

    A measurement is not assumed to change that much, estimates are born to change.

    At any rate, “thorough understanding” is a pretty vague goal. And we all know that surprises often lie in wait.

    What the world needs is a thorough understanding of what thorough understanding is. Hut, or whut ? I’m not holding my breath for that one.

  390. Quantum physics has indeed explained both “spooky action at a distance” …*

    * The trick is that space isn’t as simple as Newton believed. It’s a function of entanglement, rather.

    I find contradictory claims on this point. Sabine Hossenfelder says ‘Einstein did not use the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to refer to entanglement.’ — and somewhere she has a Youtube posting with fuller detail.

    There’s also Youtube videos claiming Quantum physics has explained <something> and mentioning “spooky action at a distance” in the same breath. Those seem to be mathematicians, not Quantum physicists. Of course I now can’t find that video. Spooky action at Youtube?

  391. Chomsky refuses to clearly state any conclusion in there, …

    Indeed. He is though remarkably forthright (for him these days) in condemning:

    This new dualism seems to me truly pernicious, unlike Cartesian dualism, which was respectable science. The new methodological dualism, in contrast, seems to me to have nothing to recommend it.

    But, but! He’s now abrogated ‘dualism’ to mean utterly different things, having in common only that each is talking about two of <something>.

    If there’s anything tending towards a conclusion, it’s

    Far from bewailing the existence of mysteries-for-humans, we should be extremely grateful for it.

    Which seems to be justifying licence for him to continue dabbling in ‘Mysterianism’ affording no-one any ability to call him out.

  392. Neuroscience, no. However, there are wonderful things happening in psycholinguistics nowadays, which would absolutely have to be considered for a viable theory of syntax. Understanding sentence processing and parsing is as essential to syntax as understanding speech perception is to phonetics, but it’s something which generative syntax, by definition, is not interested in.

  393. David Eddyshaw says

    It seems to have become apparent quite early on that actual experimental psycholinguistic work shows conclusively that people don’t either process or produce language in a way at all consistent with generative syntax representing anything real happening in the brains of speakers or hearers. The orthodox Chomskyite response to this seems to boil down to “So what?”

  394. Which seems to be justifying licence for him to continue dabbling in ‘Mysterianism’ affording no-one any ability to call him out.

    Exactly my point.

    Chomsky seems to see himself as a disciple of Descartes, claiming scientific respectability for his attempts to get close to the linguistic “ghost in the machine”. As AntC points out, this paper seems to be all about giving himself the leeway to continue advancing crackpot claims.

    At this late stage (2014) Chomsky was still invoking Descartes, despite the fact that his attempt to define “Cartesian linguistics” decades earlier had been soundly ridiculed and trashed. Just ignore the naysayers and continue advancing your debunked claims. Someone who didn’t know your history would assume you are both right and profound.

  395. Here’s the mathematicians, “spooky action” first mentioned at 2:55.

    Here’s Hossenfelder saying Aspect, Clauser, Zeilinger merit the Nobel — but before it was awarded. “Spooky action” not mentioned. Here’s Hossenfelder ‘What did Einstein mean by “Spooky Action at a Distance”?’, nearly a year ago. Mentioning the two phrases at about 0:30 in order to explain it’s everybody else, _not_ Einstein, that have entangled them.

  396. David Marjanović says

    Sabine Hossenfelder says ‘Einstein did not use the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to refer to entanglement.’

    Of course; he thought both were separately absurd. But thanks for all the links, I’ll follow them. 🙂

  397. The Jowett quote comes, IIRC, from a contemporary Oxford student revue in which a student done up as Jowett recited:

    “I’m Doctor Benjamin Jowett!
    I’m the Master of Balliol College!
    If anything’s knowledge, I know it,
    And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge!”

    My long-forgotten source noted that this establishes the correct pronunciation of “Jowett.”

  398. Einstein was just wrong about this stuff. There’s a good chance that he never used the phrase “spooky action at a distance,” since he did very little scientific discussion in English, but Rosen (his most famous assistant-cum-translator) may well have originated the phrase. Moreover, both of them clearly believed in the notion and rejected what quantum mechanics predicted about how measurements of entangled pairs of particles would work. And the question of entanglement is absolutely not separable from the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox; the paradox does not exist without entanglement, and without the apparent paradox (or other similar counterintuitive results), entanglement would be a lot less interesting. Anybody who claims otherwise is trying to separate “entanglement” (as a well-verified quantum-mechanical phenomenon) from the context of Einstein’s objections, motivated by a preference not to state that Einstein was just dead wrong—even though he was.

    You can read the famous paper online. It is not long, nor does it required knowledge of anything beyond undergraduate physics, and it is in fact careful about stating the assumptions that it makes—although it is also, in my view, rather disingenuous in how it characterizes those assumptions, which most disinterested observers could see were almost certainly wrong at the time it was published. It is peculiar that Einstein, although he demonstrated some famously counterintuitive stuff early in his career, could not, when he was much older, give up on his human intuition about how the laws of physics “ought” to work.

    Finally, I should mention that Sabine Hossenfelder has basically ruined her reputation among physicists by repeatedly beclowning* herself on the Internet. I don’t begrudge her the chance to make a living after washing out as an academic; there is nothing wrong with making and monetizing educational videos on YouTube as a career. However, she spends a lot of time talking about her and her friends’ own pet ideas, without usually giving any indications that those ideas are far outside the mainstream (and in some cases demonstrably wrong). When it comes to pretty basic stuff, like the nature of entanglement and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, her descriptions can generally be trusted, although even then she tends to inject her own quasi-crackpot ideas into how she contextualizes the issues involved.

    * To my ear, the verb beclown can only be used with a reflexive object. It is usually used derisively to describe how public figures, often politicians, have made fools of themselves, as in: “Musk has beclowned himself with the way he handled the Twitter deal, and Tesla’s stock price has dropped accordingly.” Although the term is apparently particularly popular at the right-wing site Instapundit, it is in widespread use on the Internet from people all across the political spectrum.

    However, until a couple weeks ago, I don’t think I had encountered a description of somebody “beclowning” somebody else. It came across as totally wrong. However, the verb is not new; the OED has a 1609 attestation:

    VVhen first I saw thee, surely I was mad,
    For choyce of fourteene propper men I had;
    Yea, euen as handsome creatures to mine eye,
    As ere were girt in Girdles, (t’is no lye)
    And yet I left them all, to marry thee.
    VVhat greater crosse then this, could light on mee,
    To haue a Fellow grumbling at me still,
    And all I haue, comes from him ‘gainst his will:
    O wretch, O Lob, who would be thus beclown’d?
    I deserue better for two hundred pound.

    The OED places beclown under its sense 5 of the prefix be-:

    Forming trans. verbs on adjectives and substantives, taken as complements of the predicate, meaning To make: as befoul v., to make foul, originally to surround or affect with foulness; bedim v., to make dim; befool v., to make a fool of; besot v., to turn into a sot. In modern use, nearly all tinged with ridicule or contempt; cf. to beknight with to knight.

    However, it is not clear whether the old use had really survived, or whether the modern use of beclown is a fresh coinage; the OED notes that be– is still productive, at least in some of its major senses. Moreover, it is plausible that beclown may have a long history or referring primarily to something people do to themselves; the above quote from Samuel Rowlands is not clear about who the agent of the beclowing act actually is—the wife who is speaking herself, her husband, or her father (responsible for the two-hundred-pound diary, which is discussed further on subsequent lines).

  399. he [Einstein] never used the phrase “spooky action at a distance,”

    He wrote it in a letter, in German. See Hossenfelder’s video [link above] where she shows the text of the letter. “spukhafte Fernwirkungen” about 1:40. It doesn’t appear in the EPR paper.

    Rosen … may well have originated the phrase.

    “may well have” is pretty much a shibboleth for ‘I’m claiming without evidence’. It would be so easy to chase up the reference Hossenfelder SHOWS ON SCREEN.

    Anybody who claims …

    I was careful not to add claims; only report (my understanding of) claims others have made. Since I can’t put together a consistent picture from the different claims different people are making, I linked to those sources. I see no evidence you’ve watched them.

    Hossenfelder at no point says Einstein/EPR was correct on entanglement. She does say the “spooky action” quote has been taken out of context and is not referring to entanglement. (The different-coloured socks inside envelopes is entanglement; not spooky.)

    I find none of your asseverations helpful — on account of the lack of references.

    her own quasi-crackpot ideas … Would you like to provide some/any evidence that you haven’t just provided a different set of crackpot ideas? I only linked to the narrow topics around “spooky action”/Bell’s Theorem/last years Nobel-earning paper. Your character-assassination of H, whilst at the same time conceding her descriptions can generally be trusted really is doing your credibility no good.

  400. his [Einstein’s] human intuition about how the laws of physics “ought” to work.

    I think not Einstein’s only, but all of Newton’s mechanics, for example: all effects proceed from a cause; that cause is in principle observable, if only we can design sufficiently sensitive machinery and contrive an experiment. (Gravitational lensing as an example of counterintuitive stuff is explainable in this way.)

    Bell’s theorem — so far as I understand it (not much) — is claiming that with entanglement there is no cause that is observable; the effect is all we’re going to get; furthermore observing the effect ipso facto annihilates it (the particle), so we can’t double-check.

    Thanks, but I’m not going to bet my pension fund on quantum cryptography if that’s the sort of woo you want me to believe [per Warren Buffet’s investment advice].

  401. It would be so easy to chase up the reference

    Citing who the letter was to, and the exact date. (The definition given there seems to be falling into the same error of ripping-out-of-context H is pointing out.)

    _If_ I’m following: quantum entanglement is _not_ particles interacting “over a distance” — “instantaneously” or otherwise. They got entangled at their common origin. Observing one at some later time/place merely reveals what was the nature of that initial entanglement; from which we can predict the nature of the other whenever and wherever we choose to look or not look.

  402. “may well have” is pretty much a shibboleth for ‘I’m claiming without evidence’. […] I see no evidence you’ve watched them. […] I find none of your asseverations helpful — on account of the lack of references. […] Would you like to provide some/any evidence that you haven’t just provided a different set of crackpot ideas? […] Your character-assassination of H, whilst at the same time conceding her descriptions can generally be trusted really is doing your credibility no good.

    Your consistent personal attacks on other commenters is doing your own credibility no good. Please try to find other ways of disagreeing.

  403. David Eddyshaw says

    I can’t say that I’ve ever had any conceptual difficulty with abandoning the principle of locality. It’s not as if spooky action at a distance is any more implausible in itself than Newtonian gravity, which we’ve all grown up so familiar with that we don’t notice just how weird it is, and think of as perfectly intuitive. (Unlike all that beautiful-but-strange Riemannian geometry of Einstein’s.)

  404. Newton himself found the ‘action-at-a-distance’ property of Newtonian gravity implausible. It was the subject of his famous assertion hypotheses non fingo. But his theory worked and he couldn’t see any alternative, which was fair enough since the alternative was more than two centuries in the future.

    I remember learning early on in my physics education that action at a distance was a conceptual problem than ran against the grain of ‘common sense’ physical reasoning. Non-locality remains a big problem — the biggest obstacle, to my mind, in efforts to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, and one that superstrings etc don’t seem to address, although perhaps Brett can provide some enlightenment on that point.

  405. a shibboleth for ‘I’m claiming without evidence’.

    In addition to what Hat said, that’s not what “shibboleth” means.

  406. it’s a lovecraftian critter – the big amoeba-ish one with all the eyes, from antarctica!

  407. David Eddyshaw says

    Shall I compare thee to a crawling horror?
    Thou art more rugose and batrachian …

  408. Batrachian was not yet in use in Shakespeare’s time, but why am I nitpicking? It’s a lovely verse.

  409. Stu Clayton says

    … her father (responsible for the two-hundred-pound diary

    A very busy man, apparently.

  410. David Marjanović says

    Me:

    The trick is that space isn’t as simple as Newton believed. It’s a function of entanglement, rather.

    AntC, March 12:

    I find contradictory claims on this point. Sabine Hossenfelder says ‘Einstein did not use the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to refer to entanglement.’ — and somewhere she has a Youtube posting with fuller detail.

    That tweet reads in its entirety: “Einstein did not use the phrase “spooky action at a distance” to refer to entanglement. @csferrie” It’s a response to a Scientific American article which says “entanglement isn’t all that spooky after all”.

    On that topic, Hossenfelder’s next tweet is more important: “Have you noticed that no one ever quotes a source for this alleged statement of Einstein? It’s because there isn’t one. Einstein used the phrase “spukhafte Fernwirkung” (spooky action at a distance) to refer to the collapse of the wave-function, not to entanglement.”

    Sorry for the confusion, though! I didn’t mean to imply that “spooky action at a distance” was entanglement. I was being very vague because I’m operating at the very fringe of my understanding and my memory here. What I’m vaguely remembering is the idea that distance, space itself, is a function of entanglement: the more the ways that two particles are entangled with each other, the closer they are. Naturally I don’t remember my source, and the weather these days makes me too tired to look for it.

    (…BTW, the replies to her tweets… *facepalm* “Once you realize our consciousness is surfing the 2D holographic surface of a black hole, with space time blowing out of the black hole, causing universal expansion, changing the hologram (which is where our consciousness gets its information) then the path of oscillation off the hologram is dark matter energy. It’s grand unification and the theory of everything.” *backing away slowly*)

    Anyway, here’s another fun video about entanglement & stuff: “The 2022 Physics Nobel Prize Explained In Under 10 Minutes“. And now I’m going to watch the talk Zeilinger gave afterwards at the U of Vienna (almost an hour and 20 minutes).

    …edit: of course not, the first 13:44 is speeches by other people.

  411. David Marjanović says

    I recommend the talk if you understand enough German (with plenty of English words and phrases). The concept of space as entanglement is not in there, though; only the idea of equating information and reality.

    Bizarrely, there is no questions session afterwards. What is wrong with my alma mater!?!

  412. Stu Clayton says

    What I’m vaguely remembering is the idea that distance, space itself, is a function of entanglement: the more the ways that two particles are entangled with each other, the closer they are.

    Hmpf. I thought that Zeilinger’s people entangled two <whatevers> on opposite sides of a river through Vienna. The point being, as I sorta recall, that entanglement does not require proximity. Oh well, more research is needed, at least on my part.

    I recommend the talk if you understand enough German.

    Heard from Cologne, Zeilinger’s Austrian accent is as thick as Liptauer. Not for the faint of heart. I have a CD of him speaking on various topics. By accident I almost spread it on Vesperbrot one evening.

    You not only need to understand enough German, you need beer and Rettich as well.

    Edit: … the closer they might as well be, because the distance between them doesn’t make any différance ?? I begin to devine what the guy meant by “changing the hologram (which is where our consciousness gets its information)”. Conceptual free-for-all !

  413. Stu Clayton says

    divine

  414. David Marjanović says

    I thought that Zeilinger’s people entangled two <whatevers> on opposite sides of a river through Vienna. The point being, as I sorta recall, that entanglement does not require proximity.

    Yes; that was over 20 years ago.

    Zeilinger’s Austrian accent is as thick as Liptauer

    He routinely code-switches into dialect for side remarks and short informal explanations. His accent is Viennese at least on average.

  415. @ktschwartz that’s not what “shibboleth” means.

    Not as used in Judges 12:5-6. But I think you’ll find it’s meaning has morphed (see UrbanDictionary, for example), and fair cop I was using it in a too-trendy buzzword sense for sth like ‘tell-tale phrase’.

    wiktionary allows ” catchphrase associated with a particular group,”. I associate ‘may well have’ with certain news sites [you know who I mean] using the phrase for a ‘plausible deniability’ defence under 1st Amendment rights.

    @DM I was being very vague because I’m operating at the very fringe of my understanding

    Indeed. I’m operating well beyond the fringe of my understanding. Precision and evidence is what I would appreciate. The EPR paper is 1935; “spukhafte Fernwirkungen” is 1947. EPR wasn’t experimentally (or even theoretically) disproved until after Einstein’s death. So the q of what that latter phrase exactly referred to didn’t come up in Einstein’s lifetime.

    We should remember Quantum Mechanics is inconsistent with General Relativity. So ex falso quodlibet. Perhaps future science will find a better way to account for the phenomena than a wave function that has to collapse to be able to measure anything. “It’s very provoking.” [Humpty-Dumpty].

  416. @Brett There’s a good chance that he [Einstein] never used the phrase “spooky action at a distance,” since he did very little scientific discussion in English,

    Nobody’s claiming Einstein used the phrase in English: he wrote spukhafte Fernwirkungen in a 1947 letter. It doesn’t appear in the EPR paper [1935].

    Einstein had used [what’s translated as] ‘action at a distance’ in 1927 [Solvay conference], but with adjective [that’s translated as] ‘peculiar’. This was not talking about entanglement, but the diffraction through a pinhole of a single electron in a beam.

    Rosen didn’t start collaborating with Einstein until 1932. Maybe the “spooky” word arrived in later discussions between E with R, but the objection to action-at-a-distance was:

    * Clearly originally Einstein’s in the first place.
    * Clearly originally not about entanglement.

    Furthermore as Hossenfelder goes on to discuss in that video, quantum entanglement does not entail action-at-a-distance in that sense: the particles are entangled at origin.

    Now if you think Hossenfelder has misunderstood who said what when, or what they meant by it, please find citations to support a different interpretation. If there is something “demonstrably wrong” please demonstrate its wrongness.

    “Spooky” is the word that gets that phrase oft-repeated in popular science news. But the meat of the topic is in ‘action-at-a-distance’. And in this particular debate, it seems to me Hossenfelder is arguing against over-popular dumbing-down of science. Nearly all [**] other presentations that I could find and understand continue the confusion; at best they merely quote the phrase from 1947. None are as diligent as H is being.

    [**] There’s one or two that pull their punches with phrasing like ‘popularly called “spooky action at a distance”‘.

    It’s well beyond the fringes of my understanding for a theory to talk about a ‘wave function’ that puts the electron everywhere and nowhere until somebody measures it. So the tree that falls in the forest makes no noise unless there’s somebody to hear it? Entirely reasonable to describe that as ‘peculiar’/’spooky’.

    how the laws of physics “ought” to work.

    It might be that wave functions (and their collapse) and entanglement currently has the better predictive power than competing theories that our monkey brains have come up with so far. Doing no more than fitting equations to observations lacks what Philosophers of Science call ‘explanatory power’/causal relations.

  417. There are plenty of physicists who don’t object to the characterization of spatiotemporal behavior of wave function collapse as “spooky” or “peculiar.” Those who argue that quantum mechanics is not actually spooky are typically using the “spooky” terminology as a stand-in for the more general suite of beliefs espoused by Albert Einstein and his ilk. In the original EPR paper and elsewhere, they argued that the Born formulation of quantum mechanics was not just spooky but almost certainly wrong. They admitted that they did not know how to fix the theory, but they averred that a fundamental fix was necessary. However, their arguments for that necessity were wrong, and in the view of many other scientists at the time, rather obviously wrong.

    In fact, people generally focus too much, I think, on the “spooky” part of “spooky action at a distance.” This English wording (and I was just guessing that the translation might have been Rosen’s; Rosen certainly took to using that phrase later on, so it doesn’t matter much who actually originated it) makes a difference though, because “action at a distance” was already being used in a different context, in the slightly different sense mentioned by David L. In Newtonian gravity, two masses exert forces on one-another even when they are far apart: thus, action at a distance.

    Einstein’s research was closely related to this old Newtonian concept. In fact, Einstein’s work managed to completely do away with the notion of action at a distance in classical (meaning not quantum mechanical) physics. So it was natural for him to be concerned about its apparent reappearance in quantum mechanical measurement operations. Einstein essentially finished the field theoretical description of classical electrodynamics (via special relativity), and he produced the complete field theory of gravitation (general relativity). The field theory framework eliminates direct interactions between charges or masses at different points in space. Instead, these sources interact with a field, which mediates the forces indirectly. In this form, all the underlying interactions are microlocal, meaning fields and sources affect each other only when they are at the same spacetime point. This then automatically ensures that there can be no signaling that travels faster than the signal speed for wavelike excitations in the force-carrying field (thus, the speed of light). The fields are needed in relativity for this reason, the necessity of finite signal speeds, and they also solve other apparent difficulties that seem to crop up with relativity. Newton’s Third Law is not just wrong in a relativistic theory; its formulation is ill-defined, since it specifies that two forces at different locations must be equal and opposite at the same instant in time. However, simultaneity of spatially separated events is not something that different observers will agree upon; this is actually the very first thing Einstein showed in his first relativity paper. So Newton’s formulation makes no sense in relativity. What does make sense, however, is conservation of momentum; the Third Law of Motion is actually a consequence, in a particular limiting regime, of the more fundamental statement of momentum conservation. In a field theory, of the type required by relativity, the fields, not just the source particles, carry momentum (and energy and angular momentum), and with the field momentum taken into account, total momentum is conserved.

    What Einstein most objected to was the apparently instantaneous nature of wave function collapse during measurement. That can manifest in multiple ways, but entanglement is what makes the phenomenon seem particularly jarring. In quantum mechanics, with two entangled particles, no matter how far they are apart, it seems like you can do something to one particle that instantly changes something at the location of the other. You can do a measurement on particle A, and after you do that, you can know for sure what another experimenter will get from measuring particle B, wherever B is in the universe. However, had A not been measured, the measurement of B could have had a different result. So it certainly seems like the measurement of A has “done something” to particle B, from an arbitrary distance. That seems to be what Einstein really objected to, since it was in tension with the philosophy of relativistic field theory that had been his greatest accomplishment. It is critically important, however, that quantum mechanical measurements still cannot be used to send instantaneous signals. Because of the randomness of quantum measurements, no observation of A or B on its own can reveal whether the other particle has been measured. Only by combining the results from measurements of both can the consequences pf the prior entanglement be discerned.

  418. What Einstein most objected to was the apparently instantaneous nature of wave function collapse during measurement.

    Thanks Brett, since this is LanguageHat not QuantumMechanicsHat, I can’t help feel that word ‘collapse’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting (dropping?) here. Presumably the original term was in German (Heisenberg?) Is ‘collapse’ a reasonable translation? [wp uses “wave function reduction”]

    Heisenberg did not try to specify exactly what the collapse of the wavefunction meant. However, he emphasized that it should not be understood as a physical process.[11] Niels Bohr also repeatedly cautioned that we must give up a “pictorial representation”, and perhaps also interpreted collapse as a formal, not physical, process.
    [wp]

    The trouble is, to the great unwashed (like me) ‘collapse’ does sound physical. Like something is happening to the particle (to both the single electron observed in the pinhole experiment; and to the ‘other’ with entangled particles). Would ‘resolution’ or ‘instantiation’ better fit the bill?

    Does this analogy apply? To measure a voltage, we can’t avoid drawing a little current. In theory that depletes the total charge in (say) a voltaic cell. But the effect is negligible. And we don’t describe electric circuits in terms of paths of individual electrons. Whereas to measure a particle, we can’t avoid (some analogue of) drawing a little current. Tiny as is that draw, it can’t help but deplete the particle to nothingness.

    Measuring the weight of an object (in presence of one of those at-a-distance gravitational fields — say Earth) does deflect the scale so depletes the system’s potential energy/contributes to entropy a little. Again the effect is negligible; it doesn’t alter the mass of either the object or of the Earth.

    What happens during measurement of a particle is the observer’s prior description of the state can no longer hold; _the observer_ must instantiate their description/resolve to a new wave function to reflect changed knowledge and the fact of having destroyed the particle.

    BTW I see on that wki page ‘consciousness causes collapse’ [von Neumann-Wigner] as one possible interpretation. So without the observer in the forest, the tree won’t even fall?

    All interpretations of quantum mechanics are empirically indistinguishable, as they all predict the same outcomes to quantum mechanical experiments.

    This seems closer to metaphysics than mature science. (Since we’re camped on a a thread observing Chomsky’s ‘Mysterianism’.) Even if different interpretations made different observable predictions, those predictions would be probabilistic. How could they be used to falsify one vs another? Oh, interpretation X has just had a bad run of luck — over the past 10,000 trials at the LHC.

  419. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    For pinhole diffraction, I think the counter-intuitive thing is that the electrons are clearly able to affect silver halide particles in the photographic emulsion all over a large pattern, as seen when sending a lot of them through, but each of the electrons only affects one silver particle, as seen when sending only one. So how do the silver particles know which of them gets to interact with the electron? Are they talking to each other?

  420. What happens during measurement of a particle is the observer’s prior description of the state can no longer hold; _the observer_ must instantiate their description/resolve to a new wave function to reflect changed knowledge and the fact of having destroyed the particle.

    Although typical particle measurements do destroy the measured object, it is not necessarily so. For example you can have two entangled particles and apply the destructive measurement on just one of them – the second particle will still exist, yet still undergo the collapse.

    That said, as there is no mathematical inconsistency involved, the only* problem with quantum mechanics is that it does not conform to our intuitions. The desire for interpretation is possibly nothing more than our unwillingness to fully accept that certain intuitions we hold about the world are only macroscopic approximation and don’t apply universally. There is certain elegance in the positivist approach here. In the end there is a theory that is consistent and describes observations well, and that’s all what really matters. We may write long essays discussing the nature of the quantum collapse trying it to make more palatable, but there may actually be no satisfactory way to explain the weirdness, just to accept it.

    If we know all the laws governing the wave function collapse, we know what it is. There is likely nothing left to explain.

    *) There are still issues when trying to intergrating QM with general relativity, but this is not why people think QM is weird and it is entirely possible that a fully consistent and tested quantum gravity theory developed in the future will not resolve the weirdness of quantum collapse at all.

  421. So how do the silver particles know which of them gets to interact with the electron?

    In the Youtube I linked to of Mathematicians talking about the Nobel prize, I noted some equivocation about ‘local hidden variables’ which Bell’s theorem ruled out; but leaving the door ajar for ‘global hidden variables’.

    Perhaps sending through “a lot of” particles globally entangles them, so each goes to a fresh place. Or … the electrons, being charged particles, repel each other. Or …

    Are they talking to each other?

    Yes, that.

  422. David Eddyshaw says

    Paul Dirac (no less) in the introduction to his Quantum Mechanics (1958), maintains that aspects, at least, of quantum-mechanical counterintuitivity, and in particular, indeterminacy, are actually inevitable consequences of any adequate fundamental theory:

    It is usually assumed that, by being careful, we may cut down the disturbance accompanying our observation to any desired extent. The concepts of big and small are then purely relative and refer to the gentleness of our means of observation as well as to the object being described. In order to give an absolute meaning to size, such as is required for any theory of the ultimate structure of matter, we have to assume that there is a limit to the fineness of our powers of observation and the smallness of the accompanying disturbance – a limit which is inherent in the nature of things and can never be surpassed by improved technique or increased skill on the part of the observer. If the object under observation is such that the unavoidable limiting disturbance is negligible, then the object is big in the absolute sense and we may apply classical mechanics to it. If, on the other hand, the limiting disturbance is not negligible, then the object is small in the absolute sense and we require a new theory for dealing with it.

    A consequence of the preceding discussion is that we must revise our ideas of causality. Causality applies to a system which is left undisturbed. If a system is small, we cannot observe it without producing a serious disturbance, and hence we cannot expect to find any causal connection between the results of our observations. Causality will still be assumed to apply to undisturbed systems and the equations which will be set up to describe an undisturbed system will be differential equations expressing a causal connection between conditions at one time and conditions at another time. These equations will be in close correspondence with the equations of classical mechanics, but they will be connected only indirectly with the results of observations. There is an unavoidable indeterminacy in the calculation of observable results, the theory enabling us to calculate in general only the probability of obtaining a particular result when we make an observation.

  423. Stu Clayton says

    So how do the silver particles know which of them gets to interact with the electron? Are they talking to each other?

    Suppose silver particles, what we see and deal with, are merely different skin areas of Silverness. Like the tips of fingers on a mostly invisible Hand of Silver probing our spacetime (here apparently Shiva).

    They don’t need to talk with each other, they are One. Or at least their rear ends are fused together, as on a hand. “Entanglement” is a weak notion for identity of discernibles (principium identitatis discernibilium, to take Leibniz’ maxim a step further).

    Thank you for your attention.

  424. David Marjanović says

    It’s well beyond the fringes of my understanding for a theory to talk about a ‘wave function’ that puts the electron everywhere and nowhere until somebody measures it. So the tree that falls in the forest makes no noise unless there’s somebody to hear it?

    In his talk, Zeilinger told the anecdote of Einstein posing that question to Bohr, and Bohr replying “prove the opposite”.

    (It seems that every interaction with any other particle counts as a “measurement” or “observation” for these purposes; no need for consciousness, whatever that is. So, if there’s a forest, of course there’s noise. But if the “tree” is a single particle in a dark empty box…)

    Presumably the original term was in German (Heisenberg?) Is ‘collapse’ a reasonable translation?

    FWIW, the German term is Kollaps der Wellenfunktion, and the Danish Wikipedia article is titled Bølgefunktionens kollaps.

    Would ‘resolution’ or ‘instantiation’ better fit the bill?

    Nobody knows! 🙂

    Would ‘resolution’ or ‘instantiation’ better fit the bill?

    All interpretations of quantum mechanics are empirically indistinguishable, as they all predict the same outcomes to quantum mechanical experiments.

    This seems closer to metaphysics than mature science.

    That’s the very point of the Copenhagen Interpretation, the reason for its success, and the reason why it leaves everyone so unhappy.

    “Shut up and calculate.” Don’t try to imagine how it works, you can’t come up with testable hypotheses anyway. We know the math works extremely well, so stick to that, it says. It’s the deliberate lack of an interpretation.

    Even if different interpretations made different observable predictions, those predictions would be probabilistic. How could they be used to falsify one vs another? Oh, interpretation X has just had a bad run of luck — over the past 10,000 trials at the LHC.

    Well, then it’s 10,000 times less likely than interpretation Y which has held up over all 10,000 trials, isn’t it. Probability in physics, probability in science theory. 😐 Popperian falsification is just a special case of parsimony.

    (…of course not 10,000 times, but I’m too tired to do any actual stochastics tonight.)

  425. John Cowan says

    There are something like 25 ghits for “All trademarks are the property of their respective owners”

    That should read “Gghits”, i.e. giga-Google-hits. When I tried it just now it was only 18 Gghits, but in any case there are a lot of instances. For what it’s worth, typical trademark-usage guidelines documents claim that this universal boilerplate is insufficient: they want you to say things like “ArchiMate, DirecNet, Making Standards Work, Open O logo, Open O and Check Certification logo, Platform 3.0, The Open Group, TOGAF, UNIX, UNIXWARE, and The Open Brand X logo are registered trademarks and Boundaryless Information Flow, Build with Integrity, Buy with Confidence, Commercial Aviation Reference Architecture, Dependability Through Assuredness, Digital Practitioner Body of Knowledge, DPBoK, EMMM, FACE, the FACE logo, FHIM Profile Builder, the FHIM logo, FPB, Future Airborne Capability Environment, IT4IT, the IT4IT logo, O-AA, O-DEF, O-HERA, O-PAS, Open Agile Architecture, Open FAIR, Open Footprint, Open Process Automation, Open Subsurface Data Universe, Open Trusted Technology Provider, OSDU, Sensor Integration Simplified, SOSA, and the SOSA logo are trademarks of The Open Group.”

    The Miranda programming language (an ancestor of Haskell) had a trademarked name that papers mentioning it were supposed to acknowledge with a footnote like the above (but shorter, of course). Were it not for this trademark, Haskell probably would not exist, and the leading statically typed FP language would simply be Miranda itself. Eventually, functional programming people took to festooning every appearance of the name “Miranda” (the surname of an FP theorist) in their papers with a footnote denying that it was in this particular use a trademark until this nonsense died out, and so did Miranda.

    In any case, I don’t think The Open Group® has any luck these days convincing people to always write “the UNIX® operating system” instead of “Unix”, despite the claim that trademarks are lost if not aggressively policed: the point here, apart from the capitalization and registration mark, is that we, the members of the Anglosphere, are not allowed to use trademarks as nouns, only as (attributive) adjectives. Pfui.

  426. The Miranda programming language (an ancestor of Haskell) had a trademarked name that papers mentioning it were supposed to acknowledge with a footnote

    Yeah there seemed to be some sort of in-joke going on with Haskell papers mentioning Miranda — indeed the wikip entry still mentions the trademark. I found it weird when I first encountered it. Most academic languages are open-source/in fact they’re desperate for wider mention. (What language ‘owners’ can do is control the compilers and toolsets; a language is of no use without those.)

    Were it not for this trademark, Haskell probably would not exist,

    Hmm? There were several very similar research languages around in late 1980’s. I think it was more that Turner was trying to ‘fix’ a standard whereas academics wanted to tinker [**] with it — as they do.

    [**] Or graft on excrescences, depending on your point of view.

  427. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    respective owners — of course they have to say that’s not enough, and it’s probably useful in a US court of law for The Open Group to be able to prove they said it wasn’t enough in a place where authors should be able to see it. (Having paid for a banner advert on Stack Overflow might be more convincing than just their own webpage, since close to 98.43 per cent of IT professionals don’t have even the faintest about who owns which trademark this week, but at least seven people would actually look at that banner).

    But do ten million instances of UNIX® as a noun, with or without that generic notice, materially weaken The Open Group’s claim to the trademark in case there’s a counterclaim to the effect that Unix is now a common noun? Say if somebody makes a Linux distro called “Unix v2” and The Open Group wants to sue them. Or is it enough that they’ve told people to stop? (Omitting the ® is another matter).

    (Do they also write to journals and demand that they edit back issues to change trademark ownership notices when the ownership changes?)

    I do remember Miranda®, but it turns out that ® is silent in Danish so I never knew it was trademarked. I don’t think the actual binary of the interpreter had ® in its name, we were still in the ASCII age. Or rather the IEC-646 variant code DK age.

  428. David Marjanović says

    but it turns out that ® is silent in Danish so I never knew it was trademarked.

    Thread won.

  429. J.W. Brewer says

    “Renowned academic Noam Chomsky” can still get himself in the headlines at age 94. Although not for anything having (at least obviously) to do with the Minimalist Program. https://www.insider.com/noam-chomsky-mit-wsj-wall-street-journal-jeffrey-epstein-2023-4

  430. David Eddyshaw says

    I actually have a sneaking admiration for Chomsky’s, er – robust, responses to these questions. Though they also, of course, demonstrate his apparently constitutional inability to admit even a suspicion of error on his own part about anything whatsoever (the very thing that makes him one of the greatest pseudoscientists of our time.)

  431. Stu Clayton says

    When one is not renowned, as is the case with yours truly, it’s actually easy to give robust reponses to impertinent questions. Hardly a day passes without both. One becomes infamous as a result, but still way down in the top 100 of reknown.

    Like Lord ?, I should have liked to sit in the window of my club, watching it rain on the damn people.

  432. Can you even imagine spending an evening with Jeffrey Epstein, Noam Chomsky, and Woody Allen? What a bunch of colossally arrogant assholes (and a Murderers: Row of shondas).

  433. David Eddyshaw says

    The idea does not appeal. I think I would have to amuse myself primarily by telling Allen that I thought Sleeper was his masterpiece. If that got dull, I would explain naive set theory to Chomsky, and ask Epstein what the Beatles were really like behind the scenes in the old days.

  434. Bathrobe says

    Are you sure you don’t have your Epsteins mixed up?

  435. David Eddyshaw says

    Quite sure, yes.

  436. John Cowan says

    Perhaps he was thinking of the Epstein who is to be waxed by Roth.

  437. I think what DE plans is rather like deliberately telling Rick Springfield that “Born in the U.S.A.” is your favourite album.

  438. David Eddyshaw says

    Quite so.

  439. I have, many times, been told that I’m Woody Allen-ish. The people who did this were invariably confused when I took that as an insult.

    EDIT: The typical discourse is

    them : “you look kind of look like Woody Allen and you have the same sense of humour” — hitting on me or something.

    me : “Woody Allen is a horrible human being”

    them : not sure how to react, but if they like him I don’t want to communicate with them.

  440. David Eddyshaw says

    Latest Grauniad/Observer:

    The latest boldface names to emerge from a series of Wall Street Journal reports include the director of CIA, Williams Burns, and Kathryn Ruemmler, White House counsel under Barack Obama, alongside lesser figures including the leftwing professor and activist Noam Chomsky,

    Ooh, burn

  441. David Marjanović says

    Auatsch.

  442. David Marjanović says

    Back in 2019:

    Also

    https://qntm.org/ra

    “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!”

    2022:

    (Distinguished salutations are better, of course. The French do these things so well.)

    In the last 20 years they all seem to have stopped and switched to Cordialement.

    The French perhaps, but not the Swiss! Here’s an example from an automatic reply from Geneva from two days ago: “Nous vous prions d’agréer, Madame, Monsieur, nos salutations les meilleures.”

    How goes it? has always sounded strange and quotative to this native speaker. The output of someone aiming for an amusing spin on How’s it going? but missing the mark. If it were idiomatic, When goes it? ought to work too, but it doesn’t.

    Tellingly, it’s idiomatic German in the meaning “when is it possible”, “when can you/we/someone do that”.

  443. John Cowan says

    you will then no doubt agree

    I do agree, but only (and this is crucial) if it helps the analysis. “The law does not say that there are to be no cakes and ale [Shakespearean reference], but there are to be no cakes and ale except such as are required for the benefit of the company.”

    it has fallen almost completely out of fashion for objects to talk about themselves

    Except in Smalltalk documentation, where it is de rigueur. For example, the description of the Collection class from Gnu Smalltalk is as follows: “I am an abstract class. My instances are collections of objects. My subclasses may place some restrictions or add some definitions to how the objects are stored or organized; I say nothing about this. I merely provide some object creation and access routines for general collections of objects.”

    Bell’s theorem — so far as I understand it (not much) — is claiming that with entanglement there is no cause that is observable;

    I do not need Bell’s theorem (which does not mean that I reject it) to tell me that cause is a philosophically unrespectable notion. Quantum mechanics xor non-locality xor non-causality? Marg bar causality, and I’ll keep locality.

    Bizarrely, there is no questions session afterwards.

    Either the audience was stunned into silence, or the presenters wished to give the impression that it was, or (perhaps most likely) just plain bad speech-planning. My personal tendency is the reverse: given a half an hour to talk, I will talk for fifteen minutes (with plenty of encouragement from me for questions and hecklings from the floor) and then stop, hoping there will be more questions.

    Madame, Monsieur,

    What’s with that? Were there two of you, one female?

  444. David Marjanović says

    As I said, it’s an automatic reply, triggered by the sending of an e-mail.

  445. Chomsky 2011: (What a wanker the man is!)

    The traditional conception of language is that it is, in Aristotle’s phrase, sound with meaning. The sound-meaning correlation is, furthermore, unbounded, an elementary fact that came to be understood as of great significance in the 17th century scientific revolution. In contemporary terms, the internal language (I-language) of an individual consists, at the very least, of a generative process that yields an infinite array of structured expressions, each interpreted at two interfaces, the sensory-motor interface (sound, sign, or some other sensory modality) for externalization and the conceptual-intentional interface for thought and planning of action. The (=my) earliest efforts to address this problem, in the 1950s, postulated rich descriptive apparatus—in different terms, rich (What does “rich” even mean in this context?) assumptions about the genetic component of the language faculty, what has been called “universal grammar” (UG). That seemed necessary to provide for a modicum of descriptive adequacy. Also, many puzzles were discovered that had passed unnoticed, and in some cases still pose serious problems. A primary goal of linguistic theory since has been to try to reduce UG assumptions to a minimum, both for standard reasons of seeking deeper explanations, and also in the hope that a serious approach to language evolution, that is, evolution of UG, might someday be possible. There have been two approaches to this problem: one seeks to reduce or totally eliminate UG by reliance on other cognitive processes; the second has approached the same goal by invoking more general principles that may well fall within extra-biological natural law, particularly considerations of minimal computation, particularly natural for a computational system like language. The former approach is now prevalent if not dominant in cognitive science and was largely taken for granted 50 years ago at the origins of inquiry into generative grammar. It has achieved almost no results, though a weaker variant—the study of interactions between UG principles and statistical-based learning-theoretical approaches—has some achievements to its credit. The latter approach in contrast has made quite considerable progress. In recent years, the approach has come to be called “the minimalist program,” but it is simply a continuation of what has been undertaken from the earliest years, and while considered controversial, it seems to me no more than normal scientific rationality. One conclusion that appears to emerge with considerable force is that Aristotle’s maxim should be inverted: language is meaning with sound, a rather different matter. The core of language appears to be a system of thought, with externalization a secondary process (including communication, a special case of externalization). If so, much of the speculation about the nature and origins of language is on the wrong track. The conclusion seems to accord well with the little that is understood about evolution of language, and with the highly productive studies of language acquisition of recent years.

  446. m’learned colleague is by far too understated with the insults.

  447. David Eddyshaw says

    The only interesting question with Chomsky these days is how much of his shtick is deliberate falsification of the record, and how much he really believes his own automythology. He is getting on a bit ..

    When I say “interesting”, I mean, like watching paint dry.

  448. “The English Ideas Project” has at some stage written this about Linguistics and Chomsky. No attempt is made to refute Chomsky with linguistic arguments. Chomsky is simply dismissed in a delightfully direct and refreshing way:

    “In the 20th Century, though, linguistics took a wrong turn, down a dead end, and this was down to one man – Noam Chomsky…. He has had a huge, yet malign, impact on linguistics.”

    “Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar work eventually devolved down to the Minimalist Program, which can be summed up, apparently, as ‘move alpha’. This seems to mean that you can move what you want to where you want”

    “The Chomskian research program was built on unfounded assertions and has produced nothing of note. It has been a 50 + year dead end of linguistic inquiry. Millions of wasted hours, invective and bile, and wasted careers.”

    Take that, Noam.

  449. I like it!

  450. David Eddyshaw says

    I think (as I have said before) that it is not in fact accurate to say that the Chomsky cult has produced nothing at all of value. It did encourage real linguists to study syntax more intensively, which had been a comparatively neglected part of grammatical study previously.
    (Even leading to some actual substantive results within the then-current Chomskyite paradigm, like Ross’s syntactic islands.)

    However, St Paul warns us to be careful with such reasoning:

    And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.

  451. Yes, that argument reminds me of the plea that Stalin did, after all, industrialize Russia. So he did, so he did…

  452. Or the mass murderers FDR and Churchill, who saved about 4 million European Jews (so they did, so they did), more or less unintentionally. In the process they produced (I don’t say “caused”!) about 11 megadeaths on the Axis side and 51 megadeaths on the Allied side. From these 62 megadeaths we should deduct about 15 Jewish megadeaths that would have happened if they had not rolled over. So about 47 net megadeaths. Bah. Hitler and Stalin were pikers.

  453. jack morava says

    Over at the Sapir-Whorf thread I dropped a link to a paper from Chomsky’s school which may set a number of folks’ hair on fire, but which I would argue is a serious paper on topics of considerable UNinterest to most Hatters. I bring this up because I do think the paper will be important to a large school of comp/cognitive sci people who had no choice but to try to work with the language/culture Chomsky and others had created.

    [These are not the droids you are looking for…]

  454. Another Chomsky story. I recently read an interview with the expat Israeli writer and linguist Maya Arad*. The interviwer notes that she is keen to describe food in detail in her novels. Arad says (my translation), “… In food there is something so sensual and palpable, and you can understand a person by it. Food that isn’t good really bums me out. When I was a linguist at MIT, if you came to a meeting with Chomsky at lunchtime, he would take some frozen bagel he’d brought from home, he’d put it on the radiator to thaw, put in it some kind of processed cheese, and finish off with some kind of industrialized pastry [I think she’s talking about a Twinkie or such.] It would make me simply ill.”

    * Maya Arad was a linguistics professor at Stanford, practicing the regrettable generative tradition; her dissertation, published as Roots and Patterns, is about whether roots exist as a universal category, based on evidence from Israeli Hebrew. She quit to dedicatte herself to writing, in Hebrew. Her novels which I’ve read tend toward what I’d call psychological novels; good, intelligent ones, but it’s not a genre I’m mad about. I do love her two works in verse, of Hattic interest. Her first novel, Makom Akher Ve’ir Zara ‘A Different Place, a Strange Town’ (2003) is a reworking of Onegin (by way of Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate), set in ’90s Tel Aviv. Her 2005 play Tsadik Ne’ezav ‘The Righteous Forsaken’, likewise a reworking of Griboyedov’s Го́ре от ума́, set at an Independence Day celebration in a kibbutz in 1998 (Arad lived for several years in Moscow, and in the postscript to the book she describes seeing Griboyedov’s play staged by theater companies big and small.) Both books are wonderful.

  455. Correction: Roots and Patterns is not Arad’s dissertation.

  456. JC, it was peacenik Chamberlain who declared a war on Germany, while Molotov wisely advised (31 October 1939) “Today, as far as the European great powers are concerned, Germany is in the position of a state which is striving for the earliest termination of war and for peace, while Britain and France, which but yesterday were declaiming against aggression, are in favour of continuing the war and are opposed to the conclusion of peace.” Njet, Molotoff.

  457. And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.

    which is strikingly the opposite of the “descend to ascend” school of jewish thinking, in its sabbatean and frankist extensions of the lurianic tradition. and to some extent, of the whole mortification school of christian mysticism – to at least gesture towards both sides of the partition line poor saul never could quite get out of his mind’s eye.

  458. David Eddyshaw says

    While Paul certainly had his limitations, in context he’s actually defending himself and his doctrines against accusations of antinomianism

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomianism

    Christian mainstream beliefs are easily so misrepresented, both by hostile polemicists and by homegrown heretics. Calvinists are prone to this (the bad guy in John Buchan’s best novel, Witch Wood, is one such. Buchan could do subtle when he wanted to.)

    The fun kind of Gnosticism seems to have been like this. (The material world is just Bad, so you may as well do whatever you like. The unfun kind reasons that the material world is evil, so you have to abstain from all earthly pleasures. It doubtless says something about humanity that only the unfun kind has survived to the present day … if the medicine tastes nice, it can’t be working …)

  459. which is strikingly the opposite of the “descend to ascend” school of jewish thinking, in its sabbatean and frankist extensions of the lurianic tradition.

    And let’s not forget the antinomian Sufis, e.g., the Qalandarīyah:

    The adherents of the order were notorious for their contempt for the norms of Muslim society, their use of drugs, and their coarse behaviour. They shaved their heads, faces, and eyebrows, dressed only in blankets or in hip-length hairshirts, led a wandering, nomadic life, and regarded all acts as lawful.

  460. John Cowan says

    Njet, Molotoff

    Now updated to Njet, Vladimir”. From the comments:

    Finnish General Adolf Ehrnrooth was visiting England in the 1970’s. English general asked him how many Soviet troops were stationed in Finland.
    – A few hundred thousand, Ehrnrooth replied.
    – Where are they stationed?
    – Two metres deep under ground all along our Eastern border.

  461. David Marjanović says

    Amazingly, the video is age-restricted, in other words you have to log in to watch it.

  462. Not me; it loaded right away.

  463. David Marjanović says

    Then you are logged in.

    Happens. I recently found I’d been logged in at my Google account for weeks.

  464. Giacomo Ponzetto says

    Those willing to log in can try and figure out which images in that video offend YouTube Community Guidelines … The song doesn’t and can be found in many other YouTube videos such as this one.

  465. David Marjanović says

    That must be why I remember the song… here’s a version with Crimea.

Speak Your Mind

*