#chomsky
This is Chomsky’s formulation of the Strong Minimalist Thesis, i.e. the working hypothesis underlying the Minimalist Program.
Language = the narrow syntax, i.e. the computational system that builds structure using items from the lexicon. Structure is built using simple, yet powerful, operations.
The narrow syntax builds the structure and then the structure goes off to other systems with which the narrow syntax shares an interface. These other systems (of which Chomsky assumes there are two, one semantic, the other to do with production (speech or signs etc.)) are systems in their own right. This means they can only ‘see’ and deal with certain things. Therefore, the narrow syntax must produce something that an interface system can ‘read’. Since there are two interface systems, the narrow syntax must produce structures which are legible to both interface systems. The interface systems are different and so require different ‘legibility conditions’ to be met. The narrow syntax thus faces a problem of how to satisfy these conditions simultaneously. The hypothesis being followed in the Minimalist Program is that the narrow syntax that we have is an optimal solution to this problem – it meets the conditions of the interface systems in (one of) the best possible ways.
The Strong Minimalist Thesis is not a doctrine – it is a working hypothesis. It’s a bit like the assumption that natural phenomena can be modelled by mathematics – you assume an ideal, see how far the natural phenomenon matches the ideal, identify the areas where it does and does not, then return for more hypothesising. By using the Strong Minimalist Thesis as a working hypothesis linguists (of course this only applies to linguists who make the same assumptions as Chomsky) can try to establish:
(1) The ‘legibility conditions’ of the interface systems.
(2) The extent to which the narrow syntax does meet these conditions in some ‘optimal’ way.
(3) The extent to which the narrow syntax does NOT meet these conditions in some ‘optimal’ way.
(4) Reasons for why language may be optimal/sub-optimal.
Hopefully that has shed some light on what is at first glance…and second, third, fourth glances etc…a pretty obscure little sentence.
In the most recent versions of Chomskyan theory, Merge plays a central (if not the central) role. It is the only structure building operation available in the language faculty. This differs from earlier versions where Move was considered to be a separate structure building operation but Move has since been reconceived as a different type of Merge.
The Minimalist Program has reduced the architecture of the language faculty to the bare essentials (referred to as the ‘(virtually) conceptually necessary’ components). This means that there is a lexicon, a structure building computational system and (at least) two ‘interfaces’ with other cognitive systems (one semantic, the other phonological, broadly speaking). Items are selected from the lexicon and copied into the Numeration if they are to be used to construct a sentence. The Numeration is like a holding bay.
Merge, the structure building operation, takes two items and forms a set, i.e. X and Y merge to form {X,Y} (the theory also involves labelling the set but I’ll ignore that bit). Now, when I said above ‘a different type of Merge’ I did not mean that the operation itself varies, rather the difference between the types of Merge lies in where X and Y come from. There are three possibilities.
1) X and Y both come directly from the Numeration.
2) Either X or Y but not both comes directly from the Numeration.
3) Neither X nor Y come directly from the Numeration.
Option (1) is the type of Merge that gets structure building started. Without (1) there would be no structure.
Option (2) is the type of Merge called External Merge (EM) because one of the merging items is from the Numeration, i.e. comes from somewhere external to the structure that has already been built. Option (2) allows the structure built by option (1) to be extended by merging further items to already existing structure.
Option (3) is the type of Merge called Internal Merge (IM) and this is the current conception of movement. When an item moves, it is going from one place in the structure to another so the items that are merging both come from somewhere internal to the structure that has already been built.
Note that this assumes there is only one monolithic Numeration. If we wanted to merge two existing structures, we would have to add to the options above or modify our assumptions about the nature of the Numeration.
I haven’t written anything for a while since I’ve been so busy recently (been working a lot on the typology of relative clauses - perhaps I’ll post something about that soon). This evening I watched an interview (on YouTube) from the late 1970’s (1977, I think) with Chomsky. The interview is from a series called “Men of Ideas” produced by the BBC.
It’s a great interview - stimulating and perceptive questions and, of course, stimulating and perceptive answers! Many things caught my attention, one of which being that Chomsky spoke of two factors playing a role in language design, namely the biological endowment (i.e. Universal Grammar (UG) - the species- and domain-specific cognitive ‘organ’ dealing with language) and linguistic experience (i.e. the primary linguistic data from which we acquire our native language(s)). The idea was that all humans are born with a capacity for language, i.e. UG is innate in humans, provided by our genetic makeup. The data we encounter as children is so scant and degenerate (full of false starts, sentence fragments, etc.) that it would be virtually impossible to acquire a grammar in the short amount of time that it takes any normal child to do so the world over…unless we came pre-programmed for such a task. The idea was that UG was this pre-programming. UG was thought to be richly specified with linguistic principles (all genetically encoded) that would help children in the task of language acquisition by severely constraining the possible hypotheses that any child would postulate when acquiring a grammar to generate the data the child was exposed to. That was then.
Nowadays, Chomsky speaks not of two factors, but of three factors of language design. UG and the primary linguistic data are the first and second factors respectively. The third factor is made up of general principles of data analysis and efficient computation. The idea is that children can bring these domain-general (i.e. not exclusively related to language) tools to language acquisition. The third factor allows the first factor, i.e. UG, to be made much smaller. In other words, UG is no longer thought to be as richly specified as it once was. In fact, the aim is to make UG as small as possible. This is desirable for a number of reasons, but a particularly pertinent reason concerns the evolution of language, i.e. the evolution of the capacity for language in humans. As an 'organ’ of the mind, UG is a biological entity, and as such it must have evolved (though not necessarily through direct selection, as Chomsky points out in the interview!). Given that chimpanzees do not have UG, UG must have evolved some time in the last 5-7 million years or so. It is therefore unlikely that something as rich and complex as UG as it was originally conceived could have evolved in such an evolutionarily short space of time. The third factors, however, need not be specific to language, nor do they need to be specific to humans. Therefore, it is conceptually desirable if we can explain the design of language in terms of third factors. This is, in fact, viewed as the only source of principled explanation in Chomskyan syntax nowadays.
Importantly, although UG is far smaller than it was and may only consist of very few things (a recursive structure building operation at the very least), it is nevertheless still thought to exist. The UG hypothesis in its modern incarnation is thus still very different from approaches which deny the existence of UG altogether.
Anyway, if you’re interested, I suggest reading Chomsky’s (2005) paper:
Chomsky, N. (2005). Three Factors in Language Design. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 1, 1-22.
看到中天等電視台拚命拿 Chomsky 反壟斷的事情做文章，頓時覺得憤怒，覺得庭安學姊被如此圍勦污衊，Chomsky 如此隨便輕忽（好，這是因人發／廢言：但是一來之前跟學姊工作下來，學姊做事謹慎，海報上的內容不會不講，畢竟都要人背書了，這算是合理的義務，若 Chomsky 不解或是遺忘，想必是當初根本不經心），還有對澳門學者的奴性大感不屑：反中跟反中国因素是同一檔事嗎？
對於相關討論說「反壟斷不只是看中国因素，也要考慮到媒體環境健全等」等議論，我多少覺得空泛不切實：媒體生態的討論不深入，同時又有架空認識台灣社經狀況，把事情放在真空上討論的弊病。情感認同中國我覺得沒什麼好說的，但是看見並承認中国因素的干預才是誠實──喜不喜歡中国因素是一回事，但是人家拿出來批，就別急著把人跟反中換上等號，這樣多蠢。提出中国因素那麼可恥嗎？美帝說出來都不政治不正確了。承認吧，中国因素作為中國帝國（啊？怎麼？中国不是帝國嗎？）
然後我也多少不屑王顥中（這我早知道）跟某些朋友「之前看到 Chomsky 不敢轉，現在看到澳門學者的聲明毫不猶豫地轉了」的行徑。前者的弊病多矣不多說，後者不也是一種造作的「審慎」姿態：真的希望了解脈絡請把庭安的聲明一起轉；承認吧，這種說詞多少反應了你面對相關議題的偏好（或偏見啦，我不反對把這兩者在某些時候視為同義詞），不管這個偏好的來由是習慣對中国／國的情感認同或是被養壞，碰到中国因素習慣性的閃避。
我當然不同意把中国因素是什麼萬能解，國族問題是一切問題的根源。但是理解歷史和社會問題，早就已經不是古典馬克思那種鄙視民族／國族主義可以處理的。不管是新馬，或是中国，都對此做出反省，後者非常明確地擁抱、創造、加強國族共同體這種東西啊。如果可以批判福佬沙文，批判中国因素有何不可？如果可以批判美帝，批判中帝有何不可？對他人批判，也要用同樣的標準回來審視自己（情感上）不願審視，但是也符合同樣標準（帝國、國族 whatever）的東西啊，這才是一致和誠實。這算是我對某些朋友、某些（例如說澳門）論者跟某些學者的回敬。
An excerpt of a speech given by Noam Chomsky in June of 1998, in Canada, on the subject on the world economy.
The USA created the background out of which ISIS grew and developed.
“Are you a colorless green idea? Because I want to sleep furiously with you.”— pickup lines with Noam Chomsky (via hippotatomi)
