Biographical Sketch

As the synoptic introduction makes clear, Noam Chomsky is a unique intellectual figure who has had a huge impact on several fields. He was almost single-handedly responsible for initiating the cognitive revolution in linguistics, and, with others such as George Miller, Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, for the ensuing replacement of behaviorism by cognitive science in psychology generally, to say nothing of being a leading critic of American foreign policy since the American war in Vietnam

Chomsky's "Galilean" Explanatory Style

Chomsky pursues a methodology in linguistics that abstracts from substantial amounts of data about actual language use in a way that has met considerable resistance from many other linguists. He thinks of this method as like that employed by Galileo and later physicists who proposed laws of motion in considerable abstraction from many of the motions we observe in daily life, focusing, for example, not on leaves in the wind, but on frictionless environments that virtually never occur on earth. Thus, Chomsky’s theoretical proposals are supported not by studies of the corpora of actual language use, but often by the intuitions of native speakers; and the relevant intuitions are not about what they think is often or is likely to be said, but rather about what “can’t” be said (so called “negative data”), and about what types of interpretation a sentence can or cannot have. But doesn't this fly in the face of good, commonsensical scientific methodology? Aren’t theories confirmed by greater data, and refuted by data that seem to conflict with them? With regard to this issue, Chomsky (1980) writes: Substantial coverage of data is not a particularly significant result, it can be attained in many ways, and the result is not very informative as to the correctness of the principles employed. It will be more significant if we show that certain far-reaching principles interact to provide an explanation for crucial facts – the crucial nature of these facts deriving from their relation to proposed explanatory theories. (Chomsky 1980, 2) We’ll argue below that Chomsky’s observation here in fact accords with good explanatory practice elsewhere in science, but it does conflict with a traditional methodology in linguistics. In the spirit of the positivism/empiricism of the 1930s, the ‘structuralist’ linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933, 20) insisted that “the only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations”, and linguists for the next several decades tried to specify ‘discovery procedures’, or rules for using a collection of phonetically characterized utterances to induce phonemic, morphemic and – it was hoped – finally syntactic analyses of the target language (see Sampson, 1980, 76ff). Such discovery procedures have fallen by the wayside, but many contemporary linguists would still agree with Bloomfield that linguistics seeks generalizations that both emerge from, and provide good coverage of, the data of language use

Synoptic introduction

Noam Chomsky is justly famous for his revolutionary contributions to linguistics, psychology and philosophy. He is presently in his 92nd year, and we thought it high time to provide an overview of the major achievements of his now more than sixty-year-old research program and its prospects for the future. This is particularly pressing in the light of persistent rumors, encouraged by a number of authors1, that his program has proven bankrupt, “completely wrong” and has been replaced by various sorts of proposals in general statistical learning and “functionalist/constructionist” linguistic theories (which we return to below)

Conversational implicature

Conversational implicatures (i) are implied by the speaker in making an utterance; (ii) are part of the content of the utterance, but (iii) do not contribute to direct (or explicit) utterance content; and (iv) are not encoded by the linguistic meaning of what has been uttered. In (1), Amelia asserts that she is on a diet, and implicates something different: that she is not having cake. (1) Benjamin:Are you having some of this chocolate cake?Amelia:I’m on a diet. Conversational implicatures are a subset of the implications of an utterance: namely those that are part of utterance content. Within the class of conversational implicatures, there are distinctions between particularized and generalized implicatures; implicated premises and implicated conclusions; and weak and strong implicatures. An obvious question is how implicatures are possible: how can a speaker intentionally imply something that is not part of the linguistic meaning of the phrase she utters, and how can her addressee recover that utterance content? Working out what has been implicated is not a matter of deduction, but of inference to the best explanation. What is to be explained is why the speaker has uttered the words that she did, in the way and in the circumstances that she did. Grice proposed that rational talk exchanges are cooperative and are therefore governed by a Cooperative Principle (CP) and conversational maxims: hearers can reasonably assume that rational speakers will attempt to cooperate and that rational cooperative speakers will try to make their contribution truthful, informative, relevant and clear, inter alia, and these expectations therefore guide the interpretation of utterances. On his view, since addressees can infer implicatures, speakers can take advantage of their ability, conveying implicatures by exploiting the maxims. Grice’s theory aimed to show how implicatures could in principle arise. In contrast, work in linguistic pragmatics has attempted to model their actual derivation. Given the need for a cognitively tractable decision procedure, both the neo-Gricean school and work on communication in relevance theory propose a system with fewer principles than Grice’s. Neo-Gricean work attempts to reduce Grice’s array of maxims to just two (Horn) or three (Levinson), while Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory rejects maxims and the CP and proposes that pragmatic inference hinges on a single communicative principle of relevance. Conversational implicatures typically have a number of interesting properties, including calculability, cancelability, nondetachability, and indeterminacy. These properties can be used to investigate whether a putative implicature is correctly identified as such, although none of them provides a fail-safe test. A further test, embedding, has also been prominent in work on implicatures. A number of phenomena that Grice treated as implicatures would now be treated by many as pragmatic enrichment contributing to the proposition expressed. But Grice’s postulation of implicatures was a crucial advance, both for its theoretical unification of apparently diverse types of utterance content and for the attention it drew to pragmatic inference and the division of labor between linguistic semantics and pragmatics in theorizing about verbal communication

Metarepresentation

Humans and other thinking beings can represent the world. My cat knows which cupboard her food is in: she has a mental representation of that state of affairs. Given that I believe that she knows where her food is, I have a mental representation of her mental representation. I also know where it is, and I know that I know that: I have a mental representation of my own mental representation about the food’s location. What is more, using language I can describe all of these facts about representations. The capacity to think and talk about representations, that is, to represent representations or metarepresent, is a species characteristic of human beings. All developmentally normal human beings, across all cultures, metarepresent, and with considerable facility; and metarepresentation is a central property of both human language use and human thought. [...] The original research has been published in Routledges' Handbook of Pragmatics. The publication can be found at this URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Pragmatics/Barron-Gu-Steen/p/book/978041553141

Pragmatics and Rationality

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The many errors of Vyvyan Evans' the Language Myth

Vyvyan Evans’ The Language Myth argues that Chomsky’s program of Universal Grammar (UG) is “completely wrong,” and it has attracted much recent discussion, some of it laudatory. We set out what we take to be its many serious errors, including: (i) a misunderstanding of the empirical character of the evidence that Chomsky and other generativists have adduced for UG, in English as well as in many other languages, coupled with a mistaken claim that the theory is unfalsifiable; (ii) a confusion of superficial typological universals, or features present at the surface of all of the world’s languages, with UG features that are apparent only under analysis; and (iii) a failure to appreciate the significance of Fine Thoughts (the things one cannot say in natural languages, even though it would be clear what they would mean) as critical evidence of UG, and of the difficulties presented by them for the kinds of “language-as-use” and related empiricist theories that he favors. Indeed, Evans also (iv) fails to address the issues of competence and constraints that are raised by Fine Thoughts and that are a central concern of UG; and (v) conflates UG with a computational theory of mind, a Fodorean conception of modules and a Pinkerean interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Literal and metaphorical meaning: in search of a lost distinction

The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known and embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, figurative uses deviate from literal ones. But recent work on lexical modulation and polysemy shows that meaning deviation is ubiquitous, even in cases of literal use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative distinction has no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus on metaphor and argue that here the literal–figurative distinction has theoretical importance. The distinction between literal and metaphorical needs to be captured by our account of communication because literal uses transmit information in a way that metaphorical ones do not. We argue that there is a way to explain the literal/metaphorical distinction that preserves the core of the folk-linguistic idea and gives the distinction theoretical relevance. We propose that literal uses of a word are made with the intention to conform to an established practice of use, while metaphorical uses do not so conform, but depend on this pre-existing practice. Our account can deal with data that are problematic for other theories. A further advantage is that it extends naturally to other non-literal uses of words, including metonymy