Ouch
In Language Log: Criticizing Pinker the right way, Mark Liberman takes me to school over my post on “The Language Instinct”
I’ve not only made an error, but I’ve compounded it by joking about preposition placement. I could comfort myself with the fact that at least he agrees with my overall evaluation, but that would be too easy. At the risk of irritating Liberman1, whose blog is one those that inspired me to start this one, I’m going to redouble my error in spades. Not because I’m stubborn—well, not just because I’m stubborn—but because I’m confused. One of us must have misunderstood something, and it’s probably me.
I admit that I can’t do elementary syntactic analysis in a coherent way, and it’s a lack (along with my inability to read IPA) that I feel keenly. And I really don’t want to be unfair to Pinker, particularly because my basic gripe with The Language Instinct is this nagging sense that Pinker is not fairly presenting the state of play in linguistics. But…
In the passage that Liberman dissects, I’m not arguing against Pinker’s theory. Level-ordering may be right for all I know. Liberman helpfully points to a paper arguing against it, Haskell, T.R., MacDonald, M.C., & Seidenberg, M.S. “Language learning and innateness: Some implications of compounds research” . Cognitive Psychology, 47, 119-163. (2003) , so you can read it and decide.
My complaint is really a different one, and I should probably have chosen an example from a different section to make that more clear. It’s that Pinker states something categorically that doesn’t seem to be true prima facie. Even if there is an interpretation that makes it true, even trivially true, to anyone skilled in the art (e.g. better at syntactic analysis or familiar with Haj Ross’s “syntactic islands”), as long as it seems odd or wrong to the naive reader then I think my complaint that it’s hard to tell whether Pinker is oversimplifying for pedagogical purposes is still fair.
Specifically, the passage I quoted was this (I’ve included one more sentence, the first one, since it really points up the problem):
The concept of a word that I have used so far in this chapter is a linguistic object that, even if built out of parts by the rules of morphology, behaves as the indivisible, smallest unit with respect to the rules of syntax–a “syntactic atom,” in atom’s original sense of something that cannot be split. The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the sentence This monster eats mice and move the phrase corresponding to mice to the front, yielding What did this monster eat? But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rule cannot look “inside” the word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word mice-eater in the sentence This monster is a mice-eater and move the morpheme corresponding to mice to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible: What is this monster an -eater?
Now, the immediate reaction that I had was that noun-noun compounds of the form X-Yer can be looked inside of and fiddled with according to a rule (and once having done so, you can apply the question rule). In fact it seems that there’s a reversible rule for combining and splitting: a snee-snicker is a snicker of snee, a wugger of ugs is an ug-wugger. Time-waster, soul-stealer, death-defier, clothes-drier. Liberman seem to think that I’ve missed the crucial fact that this makes the noun-noun compound into a noun connected to a prepositional noun-phrase. I understand what he’s saying, but does that make it not a syntactic rule as linguists understand syntax? Is the issue that this isn’t a good argument against level ordering (fair enough, it isn’t intended to be any sort of argument against level ordering), or am I wrong and misleading in counting this sort of transformation as a rule that looks inside the compound? ‘Cause if it’s not, I really could use some guidance on what constitutes a rule.
I’m not sure I understand exactly why Liberman thinks that I’m being unfair to Pinker. When Pinker says that “monster-eater” cannot be split he doesn’t seem to literally mean that it cannot be split, or when he says a syntactic rule cannot look inside the parts of a compound and fiddle with those parts Pinker doesn’t mean no syntactic rule and no kind of fiddling. If ug-wugger -> wugger of ugs isn’t looking inside the compound and fiddling with it syntactically then Pinker must mean something different by either rules of syntax or fiddling than I would have supposed. This is entirely possible, but is exactly the kind of thing that leaves me scratching my head as I read. (Contrast monster-eater compounds with ones like show-down or cock-up, which appear to be genuinely unsplittable without losing the sense, even if you freely add prepositions. I believe that there are compound nouns that behave as indivisible smallest units with respect to the rules of syntax; I just have trouble seeing why monster-eater is such a compound.) Maybe the unfairness is that a linguist would never have supposed Pinker to be saying what I suppose he’s saying, and I ought to be more charitable and read atomic as atomic only with respect to the aspect of syntax relevant to the case for level ordering, implicitly understanding that it’s not quite the same sense of atomic as when describing the unsplittability of locomotive or adverbially. IOW, maybe all Pinker meant by this whole discussion of indivisibility is sticky enough to generally be treated as a unit.
If I’ve gone on at length about this, it’s because I genuinely don’t want to go about criticizing anyone “the wrong way”, and I do want to be fair, but I don’t know whether I understand Liberman’s criticism well enough to avoid it in the future.
1. Is it just me, or does referring to people by last name sound almost unbearably formal in a blog post?