Noam Chomsky: "After 60+ Years of Generative Grammar: A Personal Perspective"

okay well I'm Robert realistic program person University and there's my pleasure to welcome you to this talk later we shall see Noam Chomsky began work on the generative grammar as a senior at the University Pennsylvania senior thesis and he 1914 on and has continued since then with hard to describe the output which most of us to shame well Bob asked me to say a few words about where I think the field has gone and roughly 60-plus years as you made clear it's obviously a personal perspective other people see it very differently maybe rightly since he mentioned 1949 and since I'm supposed to start from the beginning if you don't mind a personal anecdote one of the things got me interested in the field actually around 1946 was the realization that the Bible is mistranslated the Bible begins in the beginning God created that's mistranslation that's a mistranslation based on a grammatical error by the Masoretic scholars who put the vowels in around the 8th century any of you know Hebrew you can oughta be able to figure out pretty quickly what the error is it's been mistranslated for a thousand years and I figured at the time if the first couple of words of the Bible can be wrong in the authoritative text and wrong in the translation and then we noted it for a thousand years it's got to be something interesting to learn in fact the more you look the more you find that everything is misunderstood and when you think about a little more that's not terribly surprising that's the way the history of science has worked so he'd take a look at say the Galilean revolutions around 1600 afterwards what it was mainly a watch to a large extent based on was the discovery that everything everyone believed was wrong about very simple things so for millennia there was an answer to a very simple question if I this cup of boiling water let's say and I let go of it couple full and the steam will rise and there was a classical answer to that from Brazilian science they're seeking their natural place and for thousands of years that was considered a fine answer except gallo and a couple of others decided to be puzzled about it and as soon as they were they saw at once it's not an answer and as soon as you looked a little further you found that all your intuitions about falling bodies are totally wrong and they're modern science starts and my feeling is we've been in a kind of pre Galilean stage and we've just got to learn and by now everybody's work from the field knows they don't have to learn you just have to be puzzled by the very simplest phenomena in fact opener look at a corpus or open a book and pick out the first sentence and it's puzzling why should it be that way not some other way and just about everything you look at is just as in the physical world and my own aha or lameness was when I realized that the word in the beginning were mistranslated and a mistranslation that actually was based on a grammatical error they went back a thousand years and it's transparent you know as soon as you look at it if you know anything about Hebrew grammar he's impossible it's grammatically impossible that's also clear what it was supposed to be remember they put in vowels consonants were there and they put the vowels in wrong but so that's in the beginning well things kind of began to get crystallis other things to say about by the early 50s the things were kind of beginning to fall into place there was an orthodoxy strict orthodoxy I was at Harvard you know kind of main intellectual center in these areas the dual orthodoxy one was structural linguistics and the other was Oh psychology and the two meshed though they didn't say so there were about three people who didn't believe the orthodoxy this grad student where things usually come from I was one Mars Hallie Walton friend and colleague was another and the third was Eric Lynn over who went on to found biology of language and we talked to each other and started reading things and doing various things and gradually some ideas began to crystallize which only became clearer considerably later so this will be anachronistic but that's the way things usually are as you know yeah so I think you understand something in 20 years later you see you really did understand it but you didn't know you understood it so the some of these assumptions that began to take shape seem to me as if they ought to be truisms in fact they are truisms but they're highly contested in fact vigorously denied right to the present so maybe it's worth mentioning them one thing that should is and should be regarded as a truism is that language is spoken by people doesn't sound very remarkable so it's something that individuals do and they don't do it because of something in their feet you know they do it because it's something good mostly in their brains so language capacity must be a biological property that's mostly in the some part of the brain we know though some things about where and how but she's got to be there which means that the core problem of language should be viewed from the point of view what years later came to be called bio linguistics the study of a internal individual biological property which manifests itself in action like others it's a motor organization or vision or anything else it should be just normal science study of some biological capacity and I think that's true of all cognitive capacities but that's another story which I won't go into also highly contested a second assumption which is again should be obvious it gradually became clear isn't actually an insight that goes back to Descartes she keeps the first two formulated with any clarity and that is the ordinary use of language and let me stress use is has a kind of creative capacity normal ordinary use of language so it's constantly innovative its unbounded it's appropriate to circumstances typically but not caused by circumstances or he's going to elicit it by them it's a critical difference which wasn't understood then and isn't understood now and as actually the basis for most of Cartesian science what's called philosophy well it's kind of interesting that you don't find this in the long history of the subject in fact the only person I've been able to find maybe some scholars here can fill in details is Galileo who had a kind of a weak version of it but he was talking about the alphabet which is a reflection of this capacity not the capacity that one was pointed out to me by Erwin Panov Skee who you may know Greek scholar but if there's anything else I haven't founded I was perfectly obvious from a moment's thought that that's what language use is but not there if you get the modern period virtually nothing in fact if you which is an interesting question itself how can these obvious things not only not be seen but be vigorously and often passion Danai you know up to the present well that's the second the actually about fifty when I got interested in the history started looking at it considerably you know I did find some later things which brought it up there was afraid I find home bolts I've quoted a number of times that has been very seriously misunderstood maybe I my fault but by now it's widely used language involves infinite use of finite means that's what he said exactly what he meant if you read it but whatever it was he was talking about in use okay he was talking about infinite use of finite means now we know nothing about the infinite use I mean essentially just that there we've learned a lot about the means in fact most of the work in the last 60 odd years is about the means that enter into the infinite use which leaves us a long distance away from the classical and very intriguing problems about what is it about human it may be complete it may be totally human as Descartes thought we don't know that that's wrong but whatever it is it's an elementary fact about humans manifests itself in other ways kind of the core of human nature we don't understand it don't know how to study it but you can get a in some areas and languages one of them one of the very few you can learn a lot about the means that are put to use different question but an interesting one well that's the conclusion from that I think in retrospect should have been obvious all thousand years ago certainly should have been obvious in 1950 is that you should study language from what's later been called the bio linguistic perspective and with a focus on what's now called I at least what I call language which is just grant grammar and one of the earlier uses of the term grammar ambiguous terms so this was technical proposal the ambiguity so some system that's internal individual and thanks to English spelling is viewed intentionally with an S so you're interested in the actual procedure not the kind of irrelevant what the output of the procedure is some ancillary phenomenon that corpus or something like that it's dated not what you're looking at so that's a language earlier years grammar the same concept nothing you do except a term and so I like which means some kind of generous procedure any system of means that infinite unbounded has got to have we now understand has to have some generative procedure that recursive procedure that characterizes it and that's what you're interested in the actual procedure not its output I fee some years later this was discussed in a kind of an interesting way but a somewhat our THOG '''l which is also another stood by dave maher window pretty will I was actually using grammatical models and he as you should know develop the and approach the cognitive science generally which separated the computational level which is kind like a characterization of the problem the algorithmic level where you have a procedure that deals with the problem and if I can't what he called it a material level where you look at how it's all working out in the brain it's it's the analogy was supposed to be something like confidence and performance but it's not quite the same because he was studying and this is quite important he was studying input processes vision and for input processes yes there's an algorithm so you can study the problem say three-dimensional vision you know how the object recognition you can state with the problem is computational level you can look at the algorithm by which it's carried out which is quite surprising when you look at it as very odd properties so nobody ever knew until recently and you can look at the mechanisms but for a competent system a generative system like language there's no algorithm and nothing is being done you know it's just a characterization of an infinite set finite characterization of an infinite set but there's no algorithm so you can't carry over the more model for this actually this is kind of similar to Jerry Fodor's work on modularity which you may know he's his modules are input systems but the kind of modules that are studied in should be studied in my view in cognitive science theories are central systems different Randy gallo cells work is like this that's what I always meant by it so is this and that's what Jerry says can't exist can't be a modular sensible central system but it has to there has to be internal modules that do particular things and they are not input or output systems so you have to be really careful about applying these notions sounds similar but not quite well it's I mean the sort of core question you have to answer once you adopt this kind of framework I'm the L most elementary question is what's a language it's again interesting to see how this question is ignored in the literature of a thousand years it's instructive to take a look I said take the modern period you know so sir Bloomfield Klein philosopher did most of the work on it the only proposals about what language is make absolutely no sense at all as soon as you look at them in fact coin gives contradictory answers almost the same page neither of which makes any sense one of his answers is essentially taken from Bloomfield who the finds of the great it is both language language is the totality of expressions that are used in a piece in a speech community that's completely meaningless I won't talk about it think about it one of coins proposals about the same the other one contradicts it if you look back at so sir there's essentially nothing I mean it's a social contract of some kind well okay but it doesn't say anything about languages what language has to be the core question is at least a generative process at least that another were denying language which is just the generative process and then come questions about what it is well there plenty of other questions to ask about language significant ones acquisition use if you could possibly study at which you can't in any serious way neural representation history diachronic linguistics evolution of language which are incredibly confused with historical linguistics and modern work in a astonishing fashion sometime of them but those are all questions you can investigate but for any of them you can proceed only as far as you have some characterization of what languages like you can't study acquisition of language unless you know what languages they don't know everything of course you know like you can study evolution of the eye without knowing everything about the eye but it's certainly not enough just to know that eyes are used to watch television I mean no biologist would study the evolution of the eye on that basis please take a look at the work on what's called evolution of language it's exactly what it is language is used for communication sometimes and a million other things so therefore we'll study that and of course get zero results as you would if you studied evolution of the eye knowing nothing except that's used to watch television these oughta be elementary observations that's kind of embarrassing to talk about them except that they're rampant in current work in the field and we should ask why for a lot of you that's the field you're getting into well there's another truism or ought to be and that is that there's some genetic component in humans that makes it possible for us to do what we're doing but makes it impossible for you know we're called our nearest relatives know 10 million years apart say chimpanzees they have about the same auditory system that humans have that's been recently discovered in fact they even pick out the same phonetic features that are used in distinctive features and language however if you say have a chimpanzee and you're you know baby sister or maybe if you're old enough whose are stuck from birth in front of a massive noise the infant human infant immediately picks out of the norm is something that's language relevant which is kind of miraculous nobody knows how that's done but they do it instantly reflexively some of what we now know is even prenatally on the other hand for another animal with the same laudatory systems there's noise and it's that goes the other way to other organisms will pick out relevant material from the noise general noise environmental noise and humans won't see anything unless they kind of study from the outside of scientists well from that alone that follows this gotta be a genetic component and if you go on to the next step you know a couple months later it just becomes more obvious they're doing very specific things that consistently no very uniform ways of course it's driven by data but so does everything on the other hand it's going on a path which is not determined by data you can see that from the elementary fact that no other organism doesn't plus that there's no way of doing it from just from data if you look at it and and they get to the capacity that we're using very early in fact the better experimental work gets the younger and younger the apart the capacity is noted in fact there's even some work which is suggestive some of you guys know about it that by around two years old the child probably knows the whole language can't manifest it but that's pretty good evidence that can be elicited that's the most interesting cases are the Helen Keller type case she was 20 months old when she lost language capacity the use of lease but she recovered it on the basis of almost no data you know just touch in fact she learned her she invented the technique that's now used to teach a diff line but it's called the dome over you sort of put your hand on someone's face you get in from the vocal cord from the chief on the basis of that she got fantastic linguistic capacity which is almost impossible unless you knew everything adding to this is something about which there aren't enough cases to draw a confident conclusion but they seem systematic if the loss was before about 18 months there's never been a case of recovery so it looks as if there's something going on right around then which is basically giving like the language you know then you've sort of had details or you can refine it or something like that well whatever this is and it seems to be independent of other cognitive capacities it's quite good evidence now for radical dissociations with other capacities well these are kind of some of these you know even if this detail isn't right you know the general picture is and it seems it's the more and more evidence that it just has to be an internally directed process from the most obvious much more complex arguments than what I've given so there's got to be a genetic component there's a technical name for the generative component it's called ug okay universal grammar that's taking over a traditional phrase for a new context the existence of ug is hotly denied hot lead to die overwhelmingly huge literature seems ridiculous so what the literature is saying everything's a miracle it's exactly what it's name because there's no alternative there's no coherent alternative now there are proposals so there are proposals about shared and pension ality you know culture these are interesting proposals I mean they give hand-waving a bad name actually if you look at them there's just nothing there and there can't possibly be anything there if only because of dissociated associations or because of timing like a two-year-old and knowing about the culture you know unshared intention like what distich is don't have it they speak fine and it goes I don't know and furthermore there's nothing that comes out of the euro you know but it's very widely held you can read about it from you know technical articles in the cognitive science journals to Times Literary Supplement and all across the board except that it's totally vacuous and can't make any sense just we have to think about it you see it can't make any sense well there are more specific proposals which are of some interest because you can investigate them at least so one proposal it's just monstrous memory like you memorize everything well again it's infinite so you're not gonna be able to memorize everything furthermore even if you take normal usage which actually was studied by george miller who was here late george miller 60 years ago he looked at the sentences of 8th grade reading level Reader's Digest and calculated how much you have to memorize if you could understand those sins it turns out more than the number of particles in the universe no if you reduce it by replacing the words by categories which is not a trivial matter it's basically the same the numbers are so big doesn't make any difference if you put in phrases which is often done you've given the game away because the phrases has to be recursively generated so you're done you know well that's the memorization story there are interesting there's an industry of statistical models which are quite interesting to look at there's a kind of hysteria about the importance of Statistics and you know sophisticated Bayesian etc is a couple of phrases you have to use when you write about this and it's not zero oh and if you look back say to the beginning early 50s there was a an argument yeah I wrote about it back in the mid fifties that you should be able to detect words from phrases from continued not fraser from continued texts to isolate them just by looking at transition probabilities that's mentioned in logical structure of linguistic theory actually meant as a footnote because it looked obvious doesn't see me any other evidence well if that were true you get to do something with mystical models whether this has anything to do with language acquisition there's a totally different story I mean kids don't learn words by picking them out of continuous discourse you know they know a lot before they're looking at the discourse anyhow no point pursuing it turns out to be wrong Charles showed that years ago you can get something but only if you add ug principles and their subsequent work by Humbert others we chose you got to know quite a lot even to do this that's one of the very few examples there's another interesting one interesting ones in Charles's work again one thing that he showed is there's been a lot of study in recent years of connectionist work and others I'm trying to account for the learning of irregular verbs that's kind of a peripheral problem it was never studying very much but it recently it has been none of it works except for Charles as a proposal which gives a very interesting answer to the question of how irregular verbs are learned by intermingling probabilistic arguments with UG principles and as far as I know everything in this field you couldn't correct me if I'm wrong if it gets anywhere works that way or else it deals with different problems like processing or communication and so on everyone always agrees your statistical models are significant there but again you can read very the planet literature a lot of it very triumphalist and the technical journals listing all kind of great results that have been achieved everyone you look at when you look at it and take it apart it achieved up to nothing except a total irremediable failure but it just goes on and on this is a kind of unstoppable and so taking over a lot of cognitive science well actually the only again they only work that I know of engineers wrong is kind of around the margins as far as the nature of the system is concerned it's the only question we're asking and and it's acquisition and maybe it's used and involves an intermingling of ug principles with probabilistic arguments Charles's book is about how these interact so I think the conclusion is about the same after it should be the same adopt the bio linguistic perspective study the core topic is I language generous procedure and you got to try to figure out what ug is what is the genetic basis and so there's a lot of literature of pointing out sort of the saint's gosh after 50 years these guys have been studying the ug and they still don't know what it is it must be something wrong try studying the genetic basis for having blue eyes you know let alone any complex trait I mean it's known to what be look at the favored advanced text and biology evolutionary biology they point out the quote it's fiendishly difficult to find the genetic basis for almost anything and it's not that anyone denies that it exists but organisms are complex creatures you know to try to pull out the properties that are genetic and separate them from lots of interacting fact is no small trick even when you have a hundreds of millions of dollars from the NSF for experimentation and so on and so forth and to do it for a trait as complex as language a cognitive trait that is beyond fiendishly difficult so if there are any results at all and I think there are it's amazing it's an amazing achievement and the fact that you haven't answered the question is about on the par with a common complaint that after all these years no one's written a complete grammar of any language I mean it's not even worth talking about you don't even know exactly what you're supposed to describe so what's in it and what isn't in it and so on and so forth these are impossible goals and never approached in the Sun never formulated in the sciences because they're so crazy but it's somehow applied to this one field which is supposed to be different from anything in the sciences well the idea that you can have infinite output from a finite mechanism that does go back to classical antiquity so Euclidean geometry says Moore's laws like that but it's worth remembering that Euclidean geometry wasn't formalized until about a century ago it was largely intuitive and in fact the general concepts missed by Hilbert the general concepts of what it means for a finite object to have an infinite yield that wasn't really clarified till the 1930s and 40s but now it's understood and by now everybody knows that you all go a laptop computer it's a stored-program computer the storage program if it's the right program generates an infinite output of course it can only go up to a certain point unless you add memory but and that's often confused in the literature when you add map say arithmetic you can have a program for multiplication and it'll stop up to some big number but the point is if you add memory it'll go on without changing the program that's the crucial part the fact that and the brain has got to be the same than language has got to be the same this crucial fact going on without changing the program again is greatly misunderstood in the even the technical literature of computational cognitive science that's why most of the connectionist molds no make any sense if you add the next step you've got to change the whole program you know so it's doing nothing you know it's just showing that some finite output can be handled with what amounts to a list yes sure but no interest well these are things that ought to be understood one I mentioned that I language should be studied in the context of generative processes recursive processes it's part of recursive function theory Turing machine theory very narrow part of it the the concept of recursion is hopelessly misunderstood and the technical linguistic literature for one thing there's a debate about even whether it has to be infinite not but not the infinite you can ever accurse the function with no output at all in fact there's some of the most interesting ones but it doesn't have to be infinite so in fact in the case of human language apparently it's always an infinite recursion is constantly confused with embedding or even self embedding which are special cases but only special cases and the okay we can go on if you don't mind being blind there actually I just came back from Gaza where this happens every hour okay the jet the generator okay [Music] there is another thing that's if you look at it actual language output it seems to her strange caps in it actually is a classic study of this which is very important that it isn't rid enough ritual cane not an article by you when your callings can hail about 35 years ago on cultural gaps it's very much worth reading particularly because of a lot of complete nonsense that's flooding the field now about languages that allegedly don't have this or that in fact every case that's mentioned in the recent literature is discussed by can much more seriously because serious linguist and gives good arguments showing how these apparent gaps are simply restrict this narrow restrictions on ug principles that the people all know then use plenty of evidence from the Australian languages of the languages so that one's quite worthy also some very interesting comments about the universal nature of relative clauses and then embedded relative clauses which are quite interesting worth thinking about anyhow that's these are things that will be known - so whatever in I language is it's something that gives an finite object give us in the brain gives an infinite array of hierarchically structured expressions each of which gets an interpretation at at least maybe at least maybe the most to other cognitive systems that one it can be somehow so it doesn't have to be in fact most of our language isn't externalized but it can be externalized at the sensorimotor system we now know that that's modality independent pretty much usually speech but could be sign or touch or something else it seems to be independent of modality it also appears to vary a lot and probably does it vary a lot which is an interesting fact one of the many things that indicates I think that the externalization to the sensory motor system is probably some ancillary secondary fact about language kind of tacked on to it Knott central more central appears to be the fact that it's it interacts with what are roughly called thought systems technical term is conceptual intentional systems intangibility not that the technical term adds anything particularly fancy so it's got to be an externalization at that system whatever it is and they're very fundamental questions about which part of that mapping of the internal computation is part of the external system and which is part of the internal system and that goes right to the heart of a lot of questions like say an afro where is it yeah and we usually assume it's internal to eye language but that's only because we have some ideas that I deal with and so you can kind of you know a lot of interesting work on how it works but you know it's got to be plenty of computation and that outer system too so who knows where the boundary is and get here at the quite interesting questions about thought in language which I won't talk about those are important topics it's often argued that if the the Akane computational system that has roughly these properties is going to have embedded in it somewhere an operation that takes things that have already been generated and makes a bigger thing it may not be put that way like it may be a friggin ancestor or it could be as just of axioms or whatever but somewhere embedded in it is that operation there's no way to get around that and notice that that's operations a lot of people mean and others call merge so there's got to be some operation merge that has that property will merge automatically gives hierarchic structures automatically it's putting things together so you get a structure yeah add something else get a bigger structure so it is Purdue it has the right properties it's producing hierarchic infinite number of hierarchic structures which then have to get interpreted by processes that are there's a lot of study of them at the towards the sensorimotor saw and some towards the conceptual intentional so I've got a lot of it has the problem that I mentioned which isn't investigative where is it is it inside the I language or outside the I language not easy to answer because we have no we have independent evidence about the sensorimotor system like you can hear it but almost nothing about the other systems you're kind of wandering around a confused field there with quite interesting questions I won't go into them the it's often argued that there are simpler things the merge the usual proposal is concatenation concatenation is a more complex notion it presupposes birds and furthermore it presupposes ordering it looks as if it's not hierarchical but that's only because has an extra operation associativity which knocks out the hierarchy so it's more complex there is a version or word Hornstein's which I've Strax away from ordering but still has has to have the structure the operation and strikes out structured a lot of the study of formal linguistics about all of it in fact deals with weak generative capacity now the weak generous capacities a of first director grammars that's considered to be simpler than the study of I language it's much more complex because weak generous capacities a derivative notion you have to derive it from the I language by knocking out the structure you take a look at a phrase structure grammar doesn't give you it doesn't weakly generate it strongly generates structures you can wipe out the structure and look at what's left which is already problematic because it's more complex and it's doubly problematic because you don't know what's supposed to be isn't every linguist notice that if you open a technical article and say linguistic inquiry then I get expressions with stars and question marks and star question mark and all sorts of other things and these are very interesting a lot of the most important work has to do with these distinctions so why is there a distinction between say sub jason c and e CP violations that's interesting but it's all at the level of technically what wouldn't be generated by it weak generous capacity and this is not a new observation it's discussed at length in the nineteen fifties of chapters logical structure of linguistic theory devoted to it the answer the question but talks about some of the problems so the study of weak generosity is first of all derivative more complex based on arbitrary stipulations it's not clear that has anything to do with language I mean you know I worked on it I thought it was fun but it's a small branch of formal method of formal logic or mathematics some vague relations to language but not much it's worth thinking through as well the goings back to what I still haven't started and what happened for the last 60 years but the early proposals back in the 50s I'm an assumed is realized that everything you look at is completely problematic from the first phrase of the Bible to the next sentence you look at the proposals started coming along as to how to deal with it well the early proposals actually and the fifties were extremely complex I won't review them but if you look at the same my proposals others they send a lot of complex mechanisms which seem necessary there is to be any other way just to describe the data in different languages and I think the history of the field at least that the theoretical level since then has been an effort to try to simplify it to remove the stipulations the complexity the mechanisms and see if you can get the principles from which a lot of these things follow there should be nothing problematic about this that's what's called science science is the search for simple mechanisms that account for complex phenomena anything else is you know flower collecting so which is fine and I think along with that but it's not science so there's nothing problematic about it I won't run through the steps which you're all familiar mostly or at least they're familiar with that's been a kind of steady progress in that in recent years work in this direction has been given another name which was a mistake I think my mistake it's been called the minimalist program and that lid anything you say about language there's one thing you can be certain of it's not realistic and norm confusion and misunderstanding that's a kind of a theorem you don't know what for Lots room but it's a fact you know and the minimalist Bergeron totally misunderstood it's constantly described as a theory and then there's arguments that the theory is falsified by this it's not a theory it's just science it's trying to find the best explanation for complex phenomena eliminating stipulations where you can eliminate in complex mechanisms showing how they can be derived by deeper principles and in fact just deepening explanation that's what enquiries about you know the minimalist program is that just a seamless continuation of efforts that went on from the first notice that we don't understand anything well it did the program did suggest suggest some new research programs which you know the research programs writer is it's not true or false no either it's useful or it isn't useful I think this one has been useful the research program that it suggests is to start by assuming that the language is essentially perfect that it precisely in the most optimal fashion satisfies the interface conditions there's a few who of course it of mine since about 1980 we'll remember that every course started by saying ok let's assume this and then started looking at the facts and everything fell apart so you get anywhere but the around the 90s the program started to make more sense and my guess is it's going to turn out to be the right program it's hard to show but I think that's kind of a long-run goal that people might keep in mind and I think there's reasons but that what that means is try to formulate what's sometimes called a strong minimalist thesis not these strong minimalist thesis we don't know enough to do that but one that looks plausible the one that says here would be a perfect solution to the external conditions on I language a couple of ideas about what that should be and then arrays two kinds of questions one of the kinds of questions is descriptive when you apply when you take a look at the data of wide variety of languages from this starting point you find a lot that doesn't work so the first most automatically so the first descriptive problem is see if you can show that what doesn't seem to work is based on miss analysis of the data or miss formulation of the principles and if you can do that okay you've advanced the program and I think there's been a lot of work going in that direction that we're near the end but quite a lot the other question you can ask is kind of more abstract and that is assuming that something like your strong Millis thesis is correct what does that tell you about the nature of language the architecture of language or maybe as cognition generally and actually I think it tells it quite a lot which more than generally appreciated oh the well as I said every let's just proceed some that this is the right way to approach the I mentioned that any strong minimalist thesis in fact any approach to language is going to have to assume emerge like operation so the question is what it is well of course if you just proceeding in the normal manner of science that is following the minimalist program so what is at least you'll start by assuming that the operations as simple as possible okay it goes wrong you've complicated as simple as possible means that when you merge say two things x and y and neither of them will change so you're minimizing I'm the overriding principle that one ought to try to keep - is a sort of minimal computation try to show that the system is has as bad as it was at least the least messy it has to be so minimal computation I don't think that's a Eugene principle I think it's I sometimes call the third factor principle it's an overriding principle that works for the sciences altogether mr. maybe it's a law of nature or something or a law of human cognition whatever you think it is but it it determines what counts as rational inquiry so look for minimal communication computation that means you're not going to that the merge merge XY is not going to change either X or Y that's called the no tampering condition but it's just minimal computation which it has interesting consequences very interesting consequences the other condition at automate is that its unordered that's simpler than being ordered so the least computation will take X and y and not change them and leave them on ordered which means it just forms the set X Y that's what it amounts to that would be the perfect answer here we get into a real morass because where does ordering come from and it's all over the place and complicated issues related to it well one thing that shouldn't strike you right away is that ordering is required and other arrangements in fact are required at the sensorimotor system like we can't talk on ordered set you know hierarchically structured on order sets something's going on at least in the externalization that's imposing order and in fact other arrangements like in sign was more than order and even speech not prosody and so on but at least order so maybe it's a reflex of linearization of the externalization one possibility if that's true it shouldn't just by the general architecture of the system it shouldn't enter into narrow syntax and semantic interpretation you know the mapping to the CIA interface and I think there's a fair amount of evidence that that may be true of these interpretations typically seem to involve hierarchy not order they work the same with different orders and that suggests that collection of observation suggests that maybe ordering is just that an artifact non-linguistic artifact connected with the fact that the system has to get the sensorimotor system well if you take a look at the evolutionary for as I mentioned the study of evolution of language is such a member ass that I didn't want to get into it it's I have never seen so much confusion on any topic literally actually begins from the name of the topic one of the problems with the study of this a huge library growing library on evolution of language and one pretty obvious problem with it is the topic doesn't exist languages don't evolve evolution is something that happens to organisms the languages don't have genes you know they don't evolve languages change but that's not evolution and if you look at the literature it's actually studying change that's not in setting change of language it's studying change of communication practices and it's not even studying that because so hogwash it's just concocting stories you know maybe it happened this way maybe that way well there is a field of historical linguistics serious field but you can't get away with it in that field by saying maybe this happened or maybe that happened you know and but that's almost the whole field of what's called evolution of language however there are a few things to say about it very few I actually know of only two two things that can be said about one is that there's been it's a it's of course evolution of the language capacity it's an evolution of humans language users and one thing we can be quite confident about is that nothing has happened for at least fifty thousand years whatever the date is from when humans began leaving Africa small number of humans started cursing out of East Africa roughly 50 maybe 75 thousand years ago something is archaeological evidence about this and since that time nothing's happened and you can be pretty sure that just from the fact that infants today are equally capable of acquiring any language without any difficulty so they've all got the same language capacity I mean there's there are individual differences but I don't think there any group differences no no not everything's been studied of course but the evidence on this is pretty overwhelming so there's strong evidence that either nothing or nothing of any significance has happened for maybe fifty seventy five thousand years the second piece of evidence which is less certain but reasonable at least is it if you go back another say fifty or seventy-five thousand years there's no evidence archaeological calling for logical evidence there was anything like language okay you don't get the artifacts complex symbolic representations it all seems to come along pretty suddenly sometimes well the Great Leap Forward by paleoanthropologists roughly in that window well that's an extremely narrow window from Ellucian arey point of view it's a flick of the eye so what appears to have happened is that something changed suddenly which yielded this capacity and notice that there were no selectional effects at that time the things that change are happened to an individual like a group doesn't undergo rewiring the brain or genetic alteration or something an individual does and that individual is under no selectional pressures zero I mean the capacity could proliferate through a small breeding group which is what our ancestors were and maybe after a while you know a lot of people have it and at that point it would make some sense to figure out a way to make it public it's all going on in the head that's externalization externalization is a tough problem it's a tough cognitive problem you have to match whatever is in the brain which got there somehow probably like you know some small rewiring you've got to match that with a sensory motor system which had been around for hundreds of thousands of years I went for that there's good fossil evidence so there's a sensor and maybe as far back as chimpanzees no.12 many years ago about 6 million years ago but the you've got to match these two different systems which have nothing to do with each other and that's a pretty complex process which can be done in a lot of different ways a lot of ways of mapping something that sort of satisfies the strong minimalist thesis to a system that has definitely nothing to do with it and in fact it we just know you know the overwhelming complexity of what we observe in language overwhelmingly the complexities in the externalization of course you know maybe we just don't know other things about what's internal but the vast complexity looks like it's in the externalization also diversity I mean that's where languages seem very diverse on the surface but the more you look you find them less diverse at the computational level the I language level which makes it and they're also very easily subject to change at the externalization level and it is happening every generation you know teenage jargons or norman invasion changes the externalization of massively and it's the whole history of language not evolution but change so it looks as though just from data like these that the externalization problem aspect of language is some ancillary phenomenon it's kind of tacked on after something developed which had no selectional pressures so therefore it would have been optimal it would have been something like a snowflake yeah it just happens by laws of nature well that's the strong minimalist thesis that there ought to be a snowflake in there which is mapped on to the sensory motor system by a lot of different complex ways which can be rediscovered and changed and be modified and so on but it may not even be part of I languish in that kind of a narrow sense maybe it is maybe it isn't there's questions about it but anyhow it's kind of ancillary not much more interestingly there's a linguistic internal linguistic evidence that leads to the same conclusion and that's much more interesting because these are all speculations based on the two or three facts we know about language evolution the internal evidence is much more significant and that comes right away as soon as you look at the most elementary combinatorial operation merge so go back to merge it's kind of no hypothesis is it doesn't change the things that are merged and it doesn't impose order okay just take the first of those doesn't change the things that's merge well just by the logic of the situation nothing else if you look at merge of XY it has two possibilities exactly two that one of them's called external merge the others called internal merge and by just logic not in the debate those two are available and they have a definite output external merge is essentially what puts things together and leaves them as a unit so you take whatever underlies you know the man and whatever underlies is tall and put them together you get something that underlies the man is tall okay external and internal merge which is the only other possibility takes some unit let's say you know read the book and take something that's inside that unit and merges it to it so the book read the book or what the man saw was you know okay that's internal merge now notice that that has two properties for one thing it yields the displacement displacement so ubiquitous property of language you see it all over the place the other is it yields the copy theory they both remain okay that's the null hypothesis there's a lot of confused literature about the copy theory assuming it involves other operations you know copy murders and so on no nothing it's just the most elementary case of merge if it doesn't occur in some language you got to explain why so you need some stipulation to block it okay because it's just free now that's important for a number of reasons for one thing in physics you know the lyritrol know about this those are you work on it that the copy theory has extremely important consequences at the CI level not acceptable intentional level it yields most of the basic reconstruction effects automatically now that's quite significant these are very complex somatic effects about them they're very complex somatic judgments and it's extremely mysterious where they come from a child has no evidence for them zero but everyone knows them and they know them in a very specific way so it's gotta follow that they just come from some elementary mechanisms is there any how and yields these results no it doesn't yield all of them and that suggests a research topic show that it yields all of them because it ought to and if it seems that it's not yielding all there's something we don't understand about reconstruction processes and you should important topic of inquiry is fill in the gap I'll show that in fact if we understood everything yeah it would you all was enough to make that plausible and it's conceptually natural because it ought to you know the second fact fact about it sorry the second important fact about it is that it yields it produces the major complications in parsing communication those of you who've worked on parsing programs are aware that the toughest problem is what are called filler gap problems okay so you hear our sentence with a wh phrase at the beginning you got to figure out where it comes from well why does that happen well let's go back to the principle of minimal computation as least computation as possible what that's going to do is give you the copy theory internally that's going to wipe out all copies except at least one because every one that they have to have at least one or you know anything's happened but it has to wipe out all the others because that each other copy and there can be many copies you know it's not as simple as what did John see you look at more complicated sentences copies all over the place yeah it has to one of those copies is complicated to compute and to articulate and they can be of arbitrary complexity remember each of these phrases can be of arbitrary complexity so if you pronounced all the copies it would overcome almost all of the filler gap problems but it's a lot of expensive computation so what you have is a conflict between computational efficiency and communicative efficiency it's one of many such conflicts and in every case I know correct me if I'm wrong computational efficiency wins hands down there's never even any competition everything works by computational efficiency doesn't give a damn what the effects are for communicative efficiency and that shows up all over the place I mean take just ambiguous structurally ambiguous sentences you know flying flames can be dangerous they come about if the rules just apply with nobody fiddling with them but they cause communicative problems or what are they called garden path sentences another example probably islands I mean islands are basically things that you can think that you can't say you know you have to find some paraphrase and to the extent it's an interesting topic trying to understand them but to the extent that they're understood which is limited they seem to follow by making optimal rules and there's another gap try to show that it's always the case it's always the cases it should be then there'll be another case at that point well another example which is interesting because of its history and its consequences and because it's been very intensively studied is a structure dependent that was noticed as a puzzle back in the 50s it was never regarded as a puzzle in the preceding several thousand years of intensive language study but if you take a sentence like instinctively eagles that fly swim very simple sentence instinctively goes with swim it doesn't go with fly okay no one ever makes a mistake about that the children never make mistakes about it there's no a lot of the discussion of this has been confused by the fact that the examples that are looked at involvement displacement it Sorella and so people have all kind of complicated theories about displacement but it doesn't matter you have exactly the same phenomena with no displacement and it's furthermore every construction that's the fact of it is that there's a simple computation linear computation as simple as possible which would get instinctively to link up with fly instinctively equals the fly swims the closest just count okay so it's the closest you easiest computation you can get never used the the actual computation is much more complex it involves structure it involves minimal structural distance which are much harder computation then it's done in these constructions I think it's done in every construction in every language that has any of these properties there's got to be some reason for it and a very simple reason would be that there's no linear order that at the point where all this stuff is being computed internally there's no linear order so therefore you have to use the next most complicated minimal distance measure structural distance now that would yield a whole massive results and all kind of languages and no exception none but of course it requires assuming that the merge operation is unordered that is that we have something like a strong minimalist thesis now this one is kind of interesting because just modern history there's a small industry in computational cognitive sciences even gotten into the linguistic literature whole issues of linguistic journals devoted to pointless proposals about this is you guys know trying to show that you can get it somehow some other way you know statistical analysis a couple of examples in The Wall Street Journal I mean they're all kind of crazy proposals are given they are interesting because they can be investigated they're clear enough to be investigated so you can easily demonstrate that everyone is not only a failure but an remediable failure no way to get out of it you know and yet they keep coming because it's just not permitted that there be a linguistic principle of ug in fact that would account for a huge complex massive phenomena the kind of interesting pathology in the field try to explain it with a very interesting principle simple one its rooted and as a conceptually natural base and it does suggest that order is just the reflex of the sensory motor system well prima facie that doesn't look possible it conflicts with a lot of important linguistic work prima facie so what we want to ask is does it really conflict I think the most striking conflict the conflict perhaps is with the work on what's called cartography no Cinque Ricci others so say take a Cinque so when he calls Universal base hypothesis no move tense verb object that kind of thing and plus a lot of refinement you know extensive refinement of these categories with dozens of postulated functional categories in his system which are ordered in a particular way well this seems to inflict Lou because that all enters into semantic interpretation however these studies which are extremely interesting and the empirical work is very impressive I think but it just can't be right you know that there's no way in which it anyone could possibly learn that functional structure was inconceivable there's no evidence for it you know and so it could develop through an evolutionary process it's pretty hard to imagine how I mean why should evolution ever give this crazy thing why not reordering them somehow so the natural assumption and I think Jane Clayton kind of agrees with this we talked about it a lot is that luigi Ricci also that there ought to be some semantics or pragmatic reasons why they come out this way and not some other way and there's some work couple of dissertations some other work trying to work it out well is a good reason to expect that that's where it's going to go if we learn enough so another gap to look at but if it does then this work well you know I'm not questioning its significance it's very significant that probably won't have to do with language I language if you can reduce some observed phenomenon to a pragmatic consideration let's say like it wouldn't be useful to do it the other way it's this an extraneous source you know outside the I language system and of course there's plenty of interaction of all kinds of things so I think that's a direction to look important direction to look anyhow what all of this seems to me to suggest is that we abandon a contemporary dogma and I stress contemporary very modern dogma that the core of language is communication now that's the last 50 years if you go back before that the traditional view was that language is an expression of thought and that goes all the way back now you get it in linguists like William Dwight Whitney the card Galileo hours though everybody language is supposed to be an expression of thought today it is literally a dogma that it has to be based on communication like in the philosophical literature there are articles by good people was saying it can't you can't understand how I can even question this since it's kind of it's like that nose on your face it's got to be true well this strong evidence that isn't true of the kind that I mentioned but that doesn't matter it's got to be true of why well interesting question but my my suspicion is that it's consequence of the behavioral science dogmas of 50 years ago which cover the whole field you know the whole range of fields linguistics psychology philosophy and so on had to believe in them and if you believe that then it's natural to think that the communication would somehow be the core of language I suspect it's also based on total misunderstanding of evolutionary biology which is very common among the people of talk about it not not evolutionary biologists but anyone who alludes to it that's the belief that there is a phrase in Darwin it's there which crucially there are you know right in front which says evolution has to be the result of small changes you know welcome ulation of a lot of small changes that gives you different organisms his book of course is called Origin of Species but if notice there's nothing about species in it because there's even today it's extremely unclear how species develop but the evidence right now it's quite well known that no one's questioning Darwin's insights yeah of course natural selection is significant but it's very well known that that's just not true there's case after case of dramatic change probably involving species appearance which is sudden from an evolutionary point of view so for example classic example is just not certain but it's widely assumed by evolutionary biologists as the change from invertebrates to primitive vertebrates chordates seems to have come from a tiny change which all of a sudden changed the whole body plan and everything else and there's plenty of other cases so there's no reason to believe it no it's not an accord with evolutionary biology it's a doctrine you learn it and eighth grade and so on but you know put it out of your head if you believe it then it makes sense to trace language back to in occasion because you get communication you know a back to bacteria so every organism has some way of communicating interacting with the environment or each other and you can make up a story which is or a thousand stories they're all as each is as good as the other about how maybe small changes in communicative practice led the language you can't make up any story about how I language developed by small changes because that's a sudden change it's a new principle new phenomenon had to be a kind of rewiring in the brain may be a small genetic change though he knows enough to say but it's very hard to even imagine a plausible alternative but apart from general plausibility there is there's very strong evidence most of it internal linguistic evidence so therefore nobody looks at it because one of the principles of cognitive science these days is you're not supposed to know anything it's kind of crucial not to know anything literally like my own University if a student in the cognitive science department has a thesis on or an article on language which involves knowing something about language it's almost automatically thrown out and that covers a lot of the field and I think there's an origin for that too it comes back to the early days of artificial intelligence it's deeply rooted in the computational cognitive sciences you're not supposed to understand anything because the principle is if you have huge massive data and you throw a big computer at it and you have a lot of Statistics something's supposed to come out well chances of that happening or approximately zero and if you look at sixty years of it I think the results conformed the expectations but if you adopt that way of looking at things and if you're kind of you've got in the back ear of mine the whole behavioral science framework it sort of these conclusions come out pretty naturally but I think they were it's very it's kind of important that people in the field you know this field our field of leaks what I take to be my field it's not going to survive unless the surrounding intellectual environment can see why there's a point in carrying it out and to a very large extent that's not the case and it's diminishing which is a problem for those of you who are not my age should I think about not a problem for me I won't be around well there are a lot of stuff and when I get into but when I stop them leave it actually you should have been interrupting all along since we took the light then yeah I can go on sort of indefinitely [Applause] which you have to say that I think it is when you're interpreting that's a very straightforward interpretation what did John see what you can write it out in classical logic I don't say that's the way it's done but it's easy for which X X a thing John saw the thing X that's what you want to interpret know that but that's a way of an ode to see them as far as the brain is concerning it may just look at what did you see what okay we can write out what it's doing in a way intelligible to us because we studied elementary logic in which we express it as for which thing X John saw the thing X but there's no reason to believe that's what's going on in here it may be just looking at what John saw a wad interpret that way you know these are all notice there's a lot of ways of saying it but they're all saying the same thing this thing we've get this thing what John so what and we're asking what's a natural way of putting it in terms that we understand no I don't say that these are just arbitrary choices like the different choices say Danny foxes and someone else sometimes have empirical differences but not often if you look they're usually enter translatable so you can do with if there are different is fine then you look at them and that gives you more insight into exactly how it's being interpreted but notice that what we're looking at we're looking at the rules that are called formal semantics okay these are generally understood to be operations that take the narrow syntactic objects like what did you see what and turn it into something interpretable @ci okay but then we're back to the question I asked before let's say there are differences among the different approaches I don't think it's all that obvious but let's say there are then then there's a right answer at or on the answer okay there's a right mechanism and a wrong one where is that mechanism is it in the I language or is it in the thought system well we don't know but okay so there's some mechanism the interesting to find it and then we'd have to explain it no we're not a Tribune to get just say we don't know I mean it doesn't you know there's no more complexity assuming it tributing the one than the other I mean first thing you have to show is that there are empirically significant differences between different ways of interpreting what the narrows index gives you it's not a simple task as you know but suppose you can if you can then you have an argument for one mechanism over another mechanism next question where's that mechanism in the whole architecture of cognition third question why is it there well maybe the reason why it's there is some third factor of principle that we don't know but since these since we don't have a theory of computation that holds for thought systems or semantic interpretation you can't talk about the third factor principles this is very much like narrow syntax in the 1950s you postulate whatever mechanism you need you know T markers or whatever it may be to give you some phenomenon and that just can't be right for the same reason it wasn't right and narrow syntax so you have to ask okay why is it this way not some other way in other words you have to pursue the minimal program you have to and that I'm not criticizing it but it hasn't even been undertaken in these domains with the all the work you know maybe rightly it's devoted to how to get mechanisms which will give you the descriptively accurate results okay and that's fine I'm not I don't mean to be critical like I wasn't critical of the work in the 50s of NARAS index but it's just the beginning yeah you got to go on and answer all these other questions it's kind of like cartography I think extremely interesting work raises all kind of questions okay go on to pursue the question and I think these are the questions that arise in this case but for all the formal semantics notice that formal semantics is not semantics it's miss named its syntax formal semantics is symbol manipulation and by definition that syntax the classical notions of you know syntax semantics pragmatics are for simple manipulation of syntax and then our question where it's going on and semantics has to do with relations to some outside world okay and it's very possible in fact my view correct probably that language just doesn't have a semantics and when we talk about the outside world but that's referring we're talking about those are actions from the fact that we refer to things which you certainly do it doesn't mean that there's a reference relation in language and I think there's strong evidence that there isn't there is an animal communication as far as we know so it looks as though in animal communication one of the many respects in which animal communication systems look totally different from human language in almost every respect but one of them is that you're Andy gal Estelle's worked on this among others that it seems to be the case in animal communication systems that every symbol has a one-to-one relation to some externally identifiable physical phenomenon so you know the leaves flutter in the vervet monkey eliminates you listen it's what we call a warning call or some hormonal change and elicits what we call I'm hungry you know and that looks first of all it looks reflexive like they got to do it and it also seems to have a denotational property you know there's a mind independent characterization of some event in the world that's one to one related to the internal symbol a human words are not like oh there's a notational dogma that claims that were just announced resort of things you know first two events and so on since you look at the words they don't do that at all I mean any word that's ever been looked at doesn't work like that it's perfectly true that we refer to things but not that way it looks like part of the theory of action and if that's correct language anymore half a semantics it'll have an internal syntax and a pragmatic I'm not saying you can prove this but it's my view is that's what the evidence points to but the in the work that you're talking about which is quite fascinating ya know integration is syntactic work by definition that's true and certainly of all of model theoretic semantics if model theoretic semantics for those of you work on it postulates individuals and studies arrangements of the individuals no predicate so were the individuals and so on but the individuals are mental object they're not things in the world there are anything you postulate to make the mechanisms work and you somehow have to relate all this stuff to the world well at that point you're getting into semantics but nobody looks at this and in fact if you do look at it I don't think any way to do it it's not that the models are wrong it's just that to find a way of showing how they enter into the acts of referring is going to be a tricky thing it's not just you see a cow and yes a cow no doesn't work at all well you can snake same are again a generative process can be studied at any of his three levels actually only well let's take an input outputs of general process are different but pick what he's talking about say vision so you can study vision which was his topic at all three levels you can say at the computational level the problem of is is take a real case you have three dots on a hysto scopic image and you have a series of these three dots okay that's the external part the internal part is you see a rigid object in motion a pretty crazy thing but it's true it's called the rigidity principle so the computational problem is it's just what I said you get a series of three dots on the Kiska scope you see a rigid object in motion that's the computational part then comes the algorithmic part figure out the right mechanism the right procedure that'll map one into the other okay then and you gotta get the right one because good the other the next step would be what's going on in the visual cortex that implements this algorithm so you got all three when you look at a generative process you only have two there's an internal process maybe the kind I described maybe something else which is yielding these structures it's not forming them I mean that's kind of like its thing to say if you're studying mathematics you think of a function I mean the way you kind of intuitively think about it is the function is taking this and it's yielding that but a function is just a relation it's not doing anything you know this thing here is a relation you know that's a kind of intuitive way of thinking about it but or take a proof you study and the same logic and you learn what a proof is you take the axioms apply the rules of inference and ultimately you get the theorem that's nothing to do with proofs that defines geometrical profe is a geometrical object it's a certain geometrical object and the axiom system determines the infinite set of those geometrical objects but proving a theorem is nothing that I'm the way you prove a theorem is you got something you think may be true you know try to figure out a little mo maybe it follows from this and so you can establish the lemma and then do some other crazy thing well you know get a flash of insight whatever maybe that's proving a theorem but a proof itself though it's described as if it's an action isn't that just as a function isn't an action or a rule of multiplication is not an action it's just saying here's the triples such that X equals y times e you know just listing them and that's what generative processes so there aren't any algorithms there's there's a computational account you can say here's what's doing somewhere which we don't know there's some mechanisms that are going on but there's no middle level that's why the applications of Dave Mars very interesting and valuable approach just don't work for generous processes like give you a personal anecdote if you don't mind but I got my degree PhD which was a total fraud incidentally I hadn't done any work or anything else happened but I had no professional qualifications and that's why I went to MIT cuz they're here they didn't care because they were getting a ton of Pentagon money for them to do research or do whatever you like but that's how a lot of us becomes like I was talk to the director of the lab and listen it was interested as a scientist you know told him was working on it sounded kind of interesting so he asked me if I wanted to work on a machine translation project that they had and I said that's a stupid project I'm not gonna work on it but if you want to hire me under the project that's fine and then I'll do the work that I'm talking about and he thought that was pretty good answers but I suggest that as a pro but work in this case the reason I was a stupid project is linguistics is nowhere near enough to give a principal to answer to hey you might do something like that so if you want to get it done do it by brute force you know take Canada well what they actually do by now after having given up in linguistics properly they take the Canadian hands are you know parliamentary records they're in French and English parallel so do a ton of totally boring and irrelevant statistical analysis and you can kind of get an approximation to which french phrases and which English phrases more or less together that's how the translation the Google translation programs work just match up a lot of garbage and do some techniques that don't give any insight and it'll it's like building a bigger bulldozer no there's nothing wrong with big bulldozers but you know study physics that way so sure it's fine that a lot of things you can do that way in fact I want anything in areas that you don't understand or it done that way I mean almost all of engineering was done that way up until a generation ago like when I got to MIT main engineering school in the world there were very good maths and physics departments but they were service departments they were just teaching engineers tricks and if you wanted to build something you would go to MIT you learn how to construct an electric circuit or build a bridge or something okay go to MIT it's mostly brute force and you know at lore things that people have learned by practice the physics and math kind of help out to sort of formulate thing within ten years it it totally changed by the 1960s when you guys were there or later it was a science university anyone who no matter what engineering profession you're interested in you study the same basic science and then maybe some applications to different areas and the reasons are simple for the first time science really had a lot to tell engineering the furthermore technology started changing very fast there was any point learning how to design an electric circuit if ten years later it's all gonna be done in a computer you know and the same with every other field so that's it's very recent notice it's very recent that science had much to tell engineering it's same with medicine I'm until frankly the last generation in fact is a famous line in the history of medicine but I think I forget what year maybe in 1920 was a critical year in the history of Medicine because it's the first time when if there was a confrontation between a patient and a doctor the patient might improve from it and the reason primarily was chemistry and engineering so if you get drugs that really cure things and you know people didn't fix your broken bones and stuff like that but almost all medicine is still just lore now good doctors or nurses and others kind of know from experience intuition know where it's coming from that this is a way to deal with this problem sometimes right sometimes wrong but science is finally contributing something and you know linguistics is nowhere near physics and biology we don't understand the most elementary thing and machine translation is much more complex than curing pneumonia or something so there's a huge gap and in that gap these statistical models are fine they're brute-force methods don't yield any insight or understanding except than the way that Charles does it integrated with UG principles which gives you something you know and I think that makes sense there shouldn't be any conflict about it I bet a lot of people are pretty hysterical about it I know if you read Peter Norfolk's diatribe the guy who runs Google and crazy guy and he gave a lot of examples which are right those are examples of brute force in areas where you don't understand anything and so yeah you go by I'm not I don't well you know a lot more about an idea but see I'm interested seeing what you think but my feeling is that decimals alone have a record of zero success is that an exaggeration at least I don't know the case and nor do I expect them to why should they they've got to be based on something you know you know if you're doing Bayesian models you start with priors where'd they come from you know if you look at the literature on it's a famous very well-known study by a colleague of mine Joshua the Penan bound came out in science on how to grow a mind or something you know that paper he starts by postulating the priors and the priors are a kind of a network of concepts which answers all possible questions before you start except that the concepts are all wrong and then he does a lot of complex statistical analysis and ends up saying well there isn't much to say I'm gonna say about this that's considered a major contribution if that's if you think that's a caricature read the paper but a lot of stuff in the field is like that and it's what you expect I mean if you say you wouldn't study physics by taking a ton of videotapes of what's happening outside the window and doing complex statistical analysis of it I mean you might get a pretty good prediction about what's likely to be outside the window tomorrow if I way better than the physics department can give you but it's not physical I think one of the best ways of predicting the weather and Boston I learned years ago is to read the Cleveland newspapers we usually get their weather the next thing okay that kind of works probably as good as meteor rocks that's different we don't know whether there's ordering and thought because the only introspection we have is into internal externalize language so if you just introspect you can't go a minute without talking to yourself but you talk to yourself in externalized language what's going on inside well that's not accessible to consciousness but if you introspect about the process there hasn't been much work about that so let's talk my own personal introspection my impression is that when I try to say something even to myself that something is there first I mean I know what I mean and I try to say it it doesn't come out right and you try something else maybe that gets closer and sometimes you find you just can't express it you know you can't find a way to express it that captures what you're thinking that kind of experience and there's a lot actually there's some experimental work that's like it really bears on it that seems to indicate that probably everything of any significance is going on beyond consciousness the experimental work has to do with choice the lipid experiment which I think have been badly misinterpreted but there are some experiments that show that if I intend to pick up a cup say milliseconds before I intend there's something going on in the you know motor organization system okay that's argued to show you don't have free will doesn't show anything it just shows that it's all the decisions are all going on unconsciously and by the time they read consciousness which sometimes happens sometimes doesn't it's kind of peripheral phenomenon it's all done and that's probably true of everything now studying unconscious thought is no trivial matter I mean it's it's not impossible so for example there have been studies of there have been studies of somebody will know the details of people who are just thinking just thinking about things to say it turns out you can detect the very slight lip movements and things like that now I've asked some people who worked on sign and they're some people are looking at it to see if when people are thinking and first of all nobody knows how people are thinking inside and it just hasn't been investigated like take a a native speaker of sign language I mean or they're obviously thinking all the time just like we are are they thinking in sign well if they are what what's it like and can you detect a hand movements minimal and movements well you know you could pursue enquiries like this would give you something but they're not going to go very far because what's going on beyond the level of consciousness is probably almost everything significant that consciousness is some kind of peripheral thing which picks up somewhat what's going on in our head it's not a small problem you know but we shouldn't pretend it's not there because we don't understand anything we don't know we don't know we don't know that we're thinking in language which comes to consciousness first of all at least me when I introspect into my use of language it isn't sentences it's scattered phrases no bits and pieces of phrases I mean I can restate them as a sentence but when I really think about it I'm getting you know a word here other word there somehow it's all the listening something that's really back there somewhere and you put it together try it sometimes it's kind of interesting to introspect into what you're doing when you're just talking to yourself we're not talking to ourselves and something is right there again something to speak and it gives the impression at least to me is if something going on in there that bits and pieces come out occasionally and we kind of construct them and try to put them in a intelligible form and when you speak or when you're right that's another step that's trying to do it but this just guesses nobody's really studied yeah I'll give you some names if you want Michael Tomasello look what he says it's shared intentionality he doesn't say anything about principles of computation shared intentionality is totally irrelevant totally because people without what no that's different that's use of language but you can have an autistic child and in fact know some who have no idea what anybody else wants and can't deal with anyone else but his language is perfect and in fact if you look at the just the acquisition rate the acquisition of language is very early acquisition of what's called theory of mind or something shared intentionality that's considerably later yeah and any kind of experimentation that's done I mean it's you know three or four year olds that are picking up the ability to do this theory of mind experiments but there's much more serious problem even if we believe it exists suppose it's based on shared intentionality as he claims how do you go from shared intentionality to structure dependence or anything yeah but categorization is a different thing that's a thought process that's not language I mean if it shows up read the people who write about it like Susan Curtis has expensive work on any kind of dissociation you can think of about that she no she storm at normal languages well and in fact the they're people with normal language use who have all kind of other in capacities and conversely yeah so there are cases where it's not true there are cases where it is true that's the case where it is true that are interesting I mean I just gave you one autistic kids whose language is perfect and have no sense of shared intentionality and you know some of them have say fantastic arithmetic ability and the language yeah okay that's yeah it goes almost any way you look and this plenty of studies of no cause autistic as you know I'm sure you know it's not a category it's some kind of spectrum that's not understood so that's what we call autism there's all kind of different things but there are children who are diagnosed as autistic whatever that means in fact they know some who have the language capacity is essentially perfect you can't maybe with some complicated experiments you can show something they don't know and they have no conception of how to deal with anyone else they can't get along with anyone you know okay and it works the other way there are people who kids who get along fine with everyone who don't speak and there's every other kind of dissociation you like well I think the literature's pretty strong okay whatever you think but even if there weren't dissociation suppose there were none still the proposals of the safe Tomasello is making are completely vacuous because there is no way to get from shared intentionality or culture whatever that is to anything simple that you think of say you know structure dependence to take the simplest thing in fact if you look at the work he has zero his account is somehow we know subject-predicate because of this and that and the other thing so therefore we use structure dependent rules which is knowing to do with the question I mean you can have a lot of the cognitive computational cognitive science work makes exactly the same mistake they say look we have a way of getting hierarchy that shows he is structure dependence doesn't show a thing you could have hierarchy in fact you must have hierarchy still leaves the option of two methods of relating say instinctively to a verb in the case that I mentioned one is linear order that's available the other is minimal structural distance the fact they have hierarchy didn't tell you what you get you haven't linear order to so once you use it outlet of this work it's just totally irrelevant it doesn't think through the most elementary questions like both of those options are there with the F hierarchy or not and say Tomas oh it was right and his kind of speculation that somehow you know subjecting somebody in a predicate or I grant him that tells you nothing about why you don't use the linear order nothing doesn't even raise the question and the same is true in every other property of language find one that isn't what not for things like this is that's an other in communication you sometimes do like there's a you know uwh movement let's say it's to the left not to the right okay that's linear order so you look for reasons they're probably pragmatic reasons Ricci has a lot of evidence about how Lydia order shows up okay look at it but the idea that but it just doesn't bear on any of these topics it doesn't it bears on the various what I mean language use is a very complicated thing has all kind of things interacting you can find some which involve you know emphasis focus the some cases of say affronting of negation which change things a furthermore incidentally on this case there happens to be direct and pretty interesting neuro physiological evidence that you don't look that you can't use a linear order and the court cases the work that came out of the Milan group you know that well the very interesting studies that came out of a it's been replicated a lot by now but in about ten years ago a a research group in Milan Andre Amoros the linguist involved and they did some very straightforward experimental work they took speakers of I think German and gave them two kinds of nonsense language the one kind was modeled on some language they didn't know but accorded with UG the other involved extremely simple prints computational principles that aren't known in language like for example negating a sentence by putting the negative particle in the third word physician well the they were just studying neural correlates it turns out that when they give them the ug conforming nonsense you get the normal activation in the language areas when you give them the trivial computation put the negation in the third word say you get its puzzle you know people can solve it with different areas of brain are working in fact it's very diffuse all over the brain it's puzzle solving and there's some experimental work that tricky that conforms to this you know Smith and simply's work with their Chris they're sort of language genius this is a guy who has essentially no very low cognitive capacities you know they have to help him go upstairs there's because you know where to go and the house where he lives almost nothing but he learns language very quickly actually turns out he learns phonology and morphology very quickly and lexicon he learns those aspects of language he doesn't it looks as if he's learning syntax and semantics but you look closely probably not it's just there you know but he acquires languages very fast they tried to teach him and a group of normals a different languages some of them were some language in neither of them knew okay Chris acquired what looks like confidence very quickly he doesn't know time memorizes dictionary things like that the normals not a problem you know sometimes they finally solved the puzzle then they gave them he gave them they gave them nonsense languages which did same as moral did and did not violate ug the ones that did violate ug the normals treated it like some language they never heard of they finally got it as a puzzle that Chris could do nothing it's just because it can't solve puzzles okay there's that kind of evidence but I think the evidence is very strong and quite apart from the evidence the evidence really doesn't matter because there is no way to go from the kind of things that say Tomasello looks at to anything about language it's just hand waving you say okay you do it by induction and analogy or you know something else that's nothing that's what I meant by saying this desk is hand waving a bad name I think it really does is try to work it out that's pretty strong No well first of all I would like to qualify that because of what I said later I think it should satisfy the CI level optimally because the sensorimotor system seems ancillary not it has to satisfy that - probably optimally but it's going to be quite complicated so the question is fair question what is optimally mean well you know we don't have a perfect theory of computational complexity computational complexity is used in biology and in fact for physics all the time without a perfect theory of it but some ideas about it and the way you refine these ideas is by seeing what works and asking what does that tell you about computational complexity so and some of the ideas are quite simple for example less is better than more okay less computation is better than more computation ok that's alone is sufficient for everything I said or minimal search is better than deep search because it requires more complexity they're not what I call the no tampering condition you know you don't mess with the things you're merging is more efficient than changing them that's any theories computations when I have that property or eliminate copies on the way to externalization it gives you a massive restriction of computation or to take another case that I didn't mention it's kind of laying that was internal here but if you look at work on displacement over the years it's been assumed by me too that displacement is somehow a complex property as distinct from what I call the internal merge is something complicated somehow I have to explain away it's a kind of an imperfection of language and external merge you know just putting through things together is straightforward but actually it's the opposite it turns out if you think about it external merge requires a lot more computation than internal merge technically external merge requires searching the entire space of accessible object you know the whole lexicon the whole workspace and big search program and then you can put together C and John you know internal merge is much simpler you're looking at one object you're picking what's technically a term of it that's a well-defined notion and you merging that to the whole object that's straightforward but there's a lot of literature arguing good linguists that copies should be that internal merge should be replaced by external merge so take what did you see what okay the argument is waste you just generate you see what and then you take what which you've generated outside and yet externally merge them it's a very bad idea for a lot of reasons for one thing it requires for one thing it requires a stipulation you have to block internal birds which is free that's like blocking any other thing that comes free second is it involves a huge amount of computation every thing that's displaced has to be independently generated and it can be of arbitrary complexity and it can be present Anouar arbitrarily many times in the construction and you got to do all that computation instead of doing a very elementary computation take a term of an object and merger now any theory of computation is going to at least meet that condition and I think you generalize this isn't something true in other parts of biology so for example if you look at say you know Christian hacks work on optimizing neural networks he done an interesting work showing that take very simple organisms like in a nematode it's a couple hundred neurons and you look at the white with where the wiring diagrams known you know you know everything about how they're connected you know nothing about what the damn thing is doing but that's another problem but he's shown I think pretty convincingly that you can predict the wiring diagram by a principle of computation which essentially is the same principle that's used in building transistors a minimized wire length because if you minimize total wire length you get the nemeth though he argues that may extend to the fact that vertebrates have the brain at one end not in the middle you know things like that well that's good work but why that principle of computation you can think of others well that's the way science works you know you try to find sensible principles that makes sense see if they work you can ask well are there other principles that don't work what's the difference between them can I refine the theory such a good question but I think it's a research question and for our purposes at least at this primitive stage of languages study just obvious properties of complexity work like less is better than more the same thing two words for something were searching for we're searching for the general principle of biology and maybe Avnet of the natural world that tries to make things simple and you know that goes back to the origin that's all of science so it takes a Galileo I mean his you know the principle that he proposed for the sciences and that everybody follows fins is we have to believe that nature is simple maybe because God made it that way nature is simple and it's the task of the scientists to prove it if you can't prove it you're wrong and all of the sciences are based on this you know you throw that out you're just collecting data in fact you nine to collect me data because even to collect data requires prior assumptions about what is data so so it's just it's just it's asking a good question but it's a general question about the nature of human inquiry and it does show up in cases like this and sometimes you know sometimes you might find real examples like say with journey AK is there another mode of computation with structure dependence is there another mode and if you can find alternative proposals about optimization good then you search you try to distinguish them on some other grounds but it's a research question you can't answer at a priori you can start with reasonable a priori assumptions which get you pretty far but you have to be willing to question them later on because they could be wrong but that's just inquiry you can't get around those problems [Applause]

Channel: Noam Chomsky

Views: 61,433

Rating: 4.9039302 out of 5

Keywords: chomsky, linguistics, grammar, lecture, language

Id: Rgd8BnZ2-iw

Length: 122min 28sec (7348 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/ThomasVeil]

Fantastic, thanks. The part about algorithms and proofs is a real gem - haven't seen him talk about that before.

[u/tarragonmagenta]

Chomsky. Oh, lovable Chomsky. "I can talk pretty much indefinitely," goes on to insists he should not have a PhD, and when confronted by someone able to challenge the domain of discourse he generates on the same level in the same room, he slow talks his way out like A universally respected grandpa.