here - Linguistic Society of America

Plenary AddressGrand Ballroom Salons G-KFriday, 4 January, 12:45 1:45 PMЧто дѣлать? What is to be done?David PesetskyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyWhat syntactician has not fantasized about a world in which the discoveries of our field are regularly reported in newspapers,magazines, and major scientific journals, like other sciences? In this alternative universe, the educated public would have spentthe last few decades learning about the most remarkable general discoveries of our field, such as:1. the hierarchical organization of sentences, including movement (as variously analyzed);2. the locality conditions that restrict relations among units of hierarchical structure;3. general laws that correlate syntactic structure with meaning (including anaphora).Non-specialist readers in this fantasy-world would cherish regular updates about how diverse phenomena of the world's languagesare illuminated by these discoveries, supporting Chomsky's conjecture that a common core of hidden principles underlies alllanguages, simultaneously restricting linguistic diversity and helping to solve the logical problem of language acquisition.From our own group at MIT, for example, one might have read in Science or Nature how Legate (2001, 2002) showed that thehierarchical organization of Warlpiri's clausal left-periphery is the same as Italian (Rizzi 1997) or Tlingit (Cable 2007, 2010) despite its notoriously free word order; or we might have learned about the odd pattern of number mismatches in LebaneseArabic discovered by Ouwayda (2012), which obeys the same hierarchical logic as gender mismatches in Russian (Pesetsky2011). Major newspapers might have reported Halpert's (2011) discovery of nominal case in Zulu (a language thought to lacksuch a thing), obeying locality principles familiar from rich case systems like Icelandic; or they might have reported Richards andVan Urk's (2012) discovery that Dinka is a verb-second language like German (Bach 1962), Kashmiri (Bhatt 1995) and Vata(Koopman 1984), where wh-movement interacts with verb-position as in Yiddish (Diesing 1990) and strands plural markers likeWest Ulster English (McCloskey 2000). A magazine like New Scientist might have called attention to Hartman's (2012)surprising discovery (backed by a Mechanical Turk experiment) that English dative nominals block raising and passive just liketheir counterparts in other languages; and might have reminded readers about Anagnostopoulou's (2003) discovery thatcomparable effects are obviated by clitic doubling in Greek exactly where an English anaphora puzzle ("backwards binding")leads one to expect such a result.But as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. After decades of neglect, major scientific journals and even the popularpress have suddenly taken an interest in syntax, but in a strange and unexpected fashion: a stream of articles in journals such asNature (Dunn et al. 2011), Proceedings of the Royal Society (Frank et al. 2012), and Brain and Behavioral Sciences (Evans &Levinson 2010), with attendant press coverage all denying one or more of the discoveries in 1-3 (among others). Thisspotlight on syntax could be a positive and exciting moment for the field, except that not one of these articles has taken up thechallenge posed by any of the data or argumentation that support these results.So what is to be done? Most constructively, this criticism in the public spotlight should spur more energetic attention to unsolvedproblems. With the syntax of tough-constructions as an example, I will suggest that the very findings cited above may help solvethat notorious puzzle. At the same time, research-as-usual is clearly an insufficient response. Can we turn adversity intoopportunity, re-directing public interest to the actual research? In the spirit of the many answers that have been offered to thefamous and relevant Russian meme Что длать? ('What is to be done?'; Chernyshevsky 1863), I will offer some suggestions.David Pesetsky is Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, and head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He received his B.A. fromYale in 1977, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1983. He previously taught at USC and at UMass Amherst, and has been afaculty member at several LSA Institutes. Pesetsky's research focuses on syntax and the implications of syntactic theory forrelated areas of linguistics. Several of his papers concern the structure of Russian, an language of special interest. Most recently,he has been working with Jonah Katz on the syntax of music and its relation to language. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and hasserved as a panelist and advisory committee member for the National Science Foundation. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow ofthe LSA.82