Syntactic Structures

xvi Introduction by David W. Lightfoot Introduction by David W. Lightfoot xvii
cedure: children may seek certain elements of grammatical structure,
cues. These cues would be prescribed at the level of UG in a kind of
menu from which children select. Some cues represent parameters of
variation (i. e. occurring in some grammars but not others) and all
cues would be found in the mental representations which result from
parsing phrases and sentences that children are exposed to (Dresher
1999, Fodor 1998, Lightfoot 1999). Some of those phrases and sentences
would "express" cues, requiring the cued structure for understanding.
Under this view, children acquire a mature grammar by accumulating
cued structures and children (and linguists) have a kind of discovery
procedure.
Nearly fifty years ago Chomsky argued for explicit rigor, for various
levels of representation provided by a theory of grammar, and for
seeking a precise evaluation metric to compare grammars. After almost
fifty years of enrichment, we can revisit this matter and many
others in the light of subsequent work developing theories of grammar
and spelling out the details of Universal Grammar, seen now as defining
the language faculty. The ongoing investigation of this part of
human cognition has been immensely productive; we have witnessed
the "considerable sophistication" that Lees predicted. We have learned
a vast amount about many languages and we have learned different
kinds of things: generativists adopting the biological, cognitive perspective
have focused on where generalizations break down, because
that reveals poverty-of-stimulus problems which illustrate information
conveyed by the linguistic genotype, UG (see The Linguistic Review
19.1, 2002, for extensive discussion of the role of poverty-of-stimulus
arguments). The avalanche has also given rise to new kinds of studies
of language acquisition by young children, new experimental techniques,
explorations of language use in various domains, new computer
models, new approaches to language history, all shaped by the
core notion of a language organ. It has also spawned new approaches
to old philosophical questions, notions of meaning and reference, and
Chomsky has taken the lead in this area (for example, Chomsky 2000).
The cognitive analysis of language was re-energized by this remarkable
snowball and it will continue for much longer, because much remains
to be done now that the perspective has been widened.
Georgetown, July 2002 DAVID W. LIGHTFOOT
Notes
* I am grateful to colleagues who have commented on an earlier draft of this introduction:
Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, Norbert Hornstein, and Neil Smith. They are all
old enough to remember 1957, appearances to the contrary.
I Bear in mind that these were notes for undergraduate classes. Students were not familiar
with Markov processes and needed to be introduced to string generating mechanisms.
This material does not feature in LSLT, presumably because it was remote
from empirical issues. The idea was to show that much richer systems were inadequate
for natural language and that the goal should be the strong generation of structures,
there being no grammatical-ungrammatical distinction, as elaborated in LSLT (Chapter
5).
2 Linguists who restrict themselves to mathematical descriptions might be said, generously,
to be following the example of Syntactic structures, hoping that their analyses
will be as automatically translatable into psychological claims as the ideas of 1957.
However, they deprive themselves of the wealth of empirical demands and guidance
which come specifically from the psychological dimension, matters of learnability, etc.
It is worth noting in the shade of a footnote that linguists pursuing the cognitive
perspective postulate genetic information needed to solve acquisition problems. By
discovering more and more about the genetic information required, we hope one day
to learn something about the appropriate form of that information, a different and
more ambitious matter. Hypotheses abound but nobody is under any illusion that
current ideas come anywhere near what will be needed to unify our hypotheses with
what is known about genetic structure (if that is ever possible). It may meanwhile be
correct to say that certain information is required, but that just means that at this
stage of understanding we are doing Mendelian genetics.
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