Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics (TWPL), Volume 32
© 2010 B. Elan Dresher
Only connect
B. Elan Dresher University of Toronto
Originally published in Glot International 5,4, pages 134–136, April 2001.
It is now a widely held view that the progress of science is not a linear progression towards truth, but is rather a succession of paradigms or research traditions whose relation to what preceded them can be difficult to characterize. Similarly, we are used to hearing that there are no data without a theory, or that a field is characterized more by the questions that one asks than by any particular subject matter. These ideas used to be novel, but by now they are quite familiar, especially to theoretical linguists who have an affinity for the ‘Galilean style’ of inquiry.
As long as one sticks to one’s usual circle of friends and colleagues, it is possible to think that maybe this picture is exaggerated, and that knowledge accumulates in an orderly manner after all.
But step outside your habitual environment and try to make connections between research paradigms that have not had much contact with each other, and you realize how much we rely on our theories to make sense of what is going on.
Some years ago I attended a workshop on prosody that brought together phoneticians and phonologists of various backgrounds. Prosody has seldom been treated as a unified field like syntax, phonology, and semantics. Rather, selected prosodic phenomena have been studied as part of one or another of these areas. I came to the workshop from the phonology side, in particular, from the generative phonology side. The main questions asked in this tradition are: What are the domains of phonological rules above the word? How are these domains related to syntax? The main evidence that a prosodic phrase exists, in this research paradigm, is that it serves as the domain for, or blocks, a phonological rule. Examples of this type of work can be found in the articles collected in Inkelas &
Zec (1990).
Phoneticians have been interested in other aspects of prosody, asking questions like: What are the phonetic correlates of perceived phrases? How are pitches distributed in a phrase, and how should intonational melodies be represented? Ladd (1996) is a good review of various approaches.
Of course, the ideal theory of prosody should be able to account for all aspects of prosody. It should at least be able to show how the phonetic and phonological aspects fit together. Hence, the workshop.
The talks by the phonologists were pretty straightforward, I thought, but the talks by the phoneticians were more difficult for me. Though they appeared to be about matters I was interested in—phonetic correlates of prosodic phrases—there was always some basic point that I didn’t get, though I was unable to identify what the problem was. I wished I could pick up a pair of earphones that would provide a simultaneous translation into my own paradigm.
I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, judging by some of the questions that followed the talks. Here is one exchange I remember. The speaker is a phonetician, the questioner a phonologist:
Q: In your talk you gave various examples of phonological phrases. I would like to know how you derived these phrases.
A: I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘derived’. Do you mean how did we record the samples?
Q: No, I meant how do you account for these phrases? Does every phonological phrase correspond to some edge of a particular syntactic boundary?
A: Maybe I don’t know what you’re getting at. We know what a phrase is from the pitch contours—when you see this contour, that’s a phrase. There’s no need to bring in syntax.
B.ELAN DRESHER
2
Q: Let me try again. I see that many of these phrases are syntactic noun phrases. Would you then say that every noun phrase is a phonological phrase?
A: I don’t think I want to say that. Do you want to say that?
Q: I don’t, but I’m just trying to get you to say what you think the correct generalization is about the relation of syntax to the phrases you talked about.
A: Well, that’s not really the question we were trying to answer in this study. I think we will have to leave that to others.
To be fair, I am giving only my side of this exchange. I understood what the questioner was after and couldn’t see why the speaker didn’t get it. But the reverse must have been the case for the phoneticians. It must have seemed to them that the phonologists were asking irrelevant questions, entirely missing the main point of the talks. Since simultaneous translation was not available, I cannot report on how the dialogue sounded to the speaker. But from his expression during the question period, I imagine that he heard it as something like this:
Q: In your talk you gave various examples of phonological phrases. I would like to know how you found the auras of these phrases.
A: I’m not quite sure what you mean by ‘found the auras’. Do you mean how did we record the samples?
Q: No, I meant how do you account for their auras? Does every phonological phrase have the same colour aura?
A: Maybe I don’t know what you’re getting at. We know what a phrase is from the pitch contours—when you see this contour, that’s a phrase. There’s no need to bring in auras.
Q: Let me try again. I see that many of these phrases are syntactic noun phrases. Would you then say that every noun phrase has the same aura?
A: I don’t think I want to say that. Do you want to say that?
Q: I don’t, but I’m just trying to get you to say what you think the correct generalization is about the auras of the phrases you talked about.
A: Well, that’s not really the question we were trying to answer in this study. I think we will have to leave that to others.
It is of course worth the effort to try to understand unfamiliar research traditions, because it is precisely in situations like these that one can find unexpected convergences. One can show, for example, that the complex system of ‘accents’ in the Hebrew Bible appears to have a prosodic basis (Dresher 1994). However, in the representations indicated by the accents, phrases are organized in complicated ways that require nested structures. Unfortunately, almost all work in my ‘home’
research paradigm assumed that prosodic structure is relatively flat, with no nesting of phrases.
Eventually, I did find contemporary theories of prosodic structure that have striking parallels with the Biblical Hebrew accentual structures in the work of Philippe Martin (Rossi et al. 1981; Martin 1987) and François Grosjean (Gee & Grosjean 1983), neither of them phonologists. Another example of an unexpected synthesis of results drawn from widely different sources is the recent article by Mark Steedman (2000), which brings together the phonetics of intonation, the semantics of information structure, and Categorial Grammar syntax in a novel way.
Another type of disconnect between researchers apparently working on the same topic can be illustrated first by an episode in the history of music. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a battle raged in France over the relative merits of French and Italian music. Musicians and journalists all took sides, championing one style or the other, or else arguing for some sort of reconciliation of the two approaches. It is interesting, however, that these passionate debates went on only in France! In Italy, French music made no impact at all. Italian composers simply continued developing their own traditions, producing great quantities of music and exporting musicians to all parts of Europe.
ONLY CONNECT
3
I thought of the music wars as I leafed through some recent issues of the Journal of Child Language. A great battle is raging in the pages of JCL about the role of innateness versus
‘emergence’ in language learning. Every volume, almost every issue, contains major review articles of books that raise fundamental questions about the nature of language acquisition, with various luminaries in the field weighing in from all directions with commentaries and rebuttals. In terms introduced by Sabbagh & Gelman (2000), the question is to what extent learners make use of
‘buzzsaws’ (domain-general cognitive processes) as opposed to ‘blueprints’ (representations or rules that specify when and how buzzsaws might be used). Buzzsaws or blueprints? Sparks fly as the discussants consider all aspects of this question. Rispoli (1999: 224–225) worries that Rethinking Innateness, while offering ‘tantalizing glimpses of what could be’, also ‘has the potential for increasing the already substantial divisiveness that mars the field.’ Like Sabbagh & Gelman’s, his review article attracted an avalanche of commentaries of every stripe.
Meanwhile, over at Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, no buzzsaws disturb the tranquil air. Researchers serenely go about the work of trying to understand language acquisition in terms of the generative paradigm. In Norwegian child language Hestvik &
Philip (1999/2000: 221) find ‘strong psycholinguistic evidence in support of the binding theory of Reinhart & Reuland (1993) augmented by Hestvik’s (1992) proposal regarding the LF movement of Norwegian pronouns.’ Guasti & Chierchia (1999/2000: 129) argue that Italian-speaking children
‘provide evidence in favor of a biologically determined mechanism subsuming both standard Principle C effects and cases of “reconstruction”.’
This is not to say that everyone agrees on everything. Stromswold & Zimmermann (1999/
2000) argue against Deprez & Pierce’s (1993) claim that negation data show that German-speaking children go through a stage during which subject NPs may optionally stay VP-internal. But disagreements are on relatively narrow grounds. With respect to more basic matters, the contributors to LA are in harmony. The dominant notes are struck by Avrutin & Wexler (1999/2000: 100), who find that Russian-speaking children have knowledge of ‘subtle linguistic principles...These principles are highly abstract in nature and not immediately noticeable in the input. Thus,...[they] may be part of the Universal Grammar.’
Now, it’s not as if the issues being debated in JCL have all been settled. Who knows, maybe caretaker speech is a crucial prerequisite for language acquisition; maybe grammars in all their subtlety do emerge from basic learning strategies the way the shape of a soap bubble emerges from basic physical laws. Just because I don’t get these arguments doesn’t mean they might not be true. So it’s good that there is a journal that is exploring these questions at a high level. And maybe we Galilean generativists ought to get out more, have more contact with researchers pursuing different frameworks. JCL provides an excellent forum for such exchanges.
On the other hand, I never get tired of the work presented in LA: this stuff is music to my ears.
Some might say that the focus of LA is narrow, but to that I say, Evviva l’Italia!
References
Avrutin, Sergey and Kenneth Wexler. 1999/2000. Children’s knowledge of subjunctive clauses: obviation, binding, and reference. Language Acquisition 8: 69–102.
Deprez, Viviane and Amy Pierce. 1993. Negation and functional projections in early grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 25–67.
Dresher, Bezalel Elan. 1994. The prosodic basis of the Tiberian Hebrew system of accents. Language 70: 1–52.
Gee, James Paul and François Grosjean. 1983. Performance structures: a psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal.
Cognitive Psychology 15: 411–458.
Guasti, Maria Teresa and Gennaro Chierchia. 1999/2000. Backward versus forward anaphora: reconstruction in child grammar. Language Acquisition 8: 129–170.
B.ELAN DRESHER
4
Hestvik, Arild. 1992. LF movement of pronouns and antisubject orientation. Linguistic Inquiry 23: 557–594.
Hestvik, Arild and William Philip. 1999/2000. Binding and coreference in Norwegian child language. Language Acquisition 8: 171–235.
Inkelas, Sharon and Draga Zec (eds.). 1990. The Phonology-Syntax Connection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ladd, D. Robert. 1996. Intonational Phonology (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 79). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Philippe. 1987. Prosodic and rhythmic structures in French. Linguistics 25: 925–949.
Reinhart, Tanya and Eric Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 657–720.
Rispoli, Matthew. 1999. Rethinking Innateness. Review essay on: Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff- Smith, A., Parisi, D. and Plunkett, K. Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective On Development.
With discussion. Journal of Child Language 26: 217–260.
Rossi, Mario, Albert Di Cristo, Daniel Hirst, Philippe Martin and Yukihiro Nishinuma (eds.). 1981. L'intonation, de l'acoustique à la sémantique (Études linguistiques 25). Paris: Klincksieck.
Sabbagh, Mark A. and Susan A. Gelman. 2000. Buzzsaws and blueprints: what children need (or don’t need) to learn language. Review essay on: B. MacWhinney (ed.), The Emergence of Language. With discussion.
Journal of Child Language 27: 715–766.
Steedman, Mark. 2000. Information structure and the syntax-phonology interface. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 649–689.
Stromswold, Karin and Kai Zimmermann. 1999/2000. Acquisition of nein And nicht and the VP-internal subject stage in German. Language Acquisition 8: 101–127.
