It was with great pleasure that I read Ray Jackendoff’s discussion note ‘What is the human language faculty? Two views’, published in Language 87.3.586–624 (September 2011). Since it was not presented as an ordinary article but as a ‘discussion note’, it seemed appropriate to ask the editors of Language to print a short reaction, meant to make a positive contribution to the discussion

Seuren, P.

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A reaction to Jackendoff’s discussion note

174DISCUSSION NOTESA reaction to Jackendoff’s discussion notePIETERA. M. SEURENMax Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsIt was with great pleasure that I read Ray Jackendoff’s discussion note ‘What is thehuman language faculty? Two views’, published in Language 87.3.586–624 (Septem-ber 2011). Since it was not presented as an ordinary article but as a ‘discussion note’, itseemed appropriate to ask the editors of Language to print a short reaction, meant tomake a positive contribution to the discussion.I do not go into all of the details of Jackendoff’s analyses and arguments, with manyof which I am happy to agree, but there is one basic aspect that I feel calls for comment,mainly for the sake of clarity. Jackendoff, correctly in my view, argues against Chom-skyan minimalism, and especially against Merge as a basic operation in that theory. Yetsomething odd appears to have occurred in Jackendoff’s treatment of the issue. Onp. 599 he correctly points out that in orthodox Chomskyanism a generative grammarwas never explicitly presented as a realist production model. Remembering the olddays, he writes: ‘When I was a graduate student in the 1960s, we were always taughtthat this has nothing to do with processing’—using the word processing but meaningproduction processing, as the text makes clear. Rather, the word was, a generativegrammar should be looked upon as an ‘abstract’ characterization of speakers’ compe-tence, much in the way mathematicians characterize mathematical notions. Jackendoffdraws a parallel (p. 599) with the inductive definition of rational numbers, based onPeano’s axioms, as known in mathematics. Just as numbers are enumerated by an in-ductive system starting from a base, sentences are ‘inductively’ (we normally say ‘algo-rithmically’) enumerated by a grammatical rule system starting from an initial symbol.Here lies the origin of generative grammar, not in the empirical study of how humansproduce and interpret utterances. Linguistic reality was thus relegated to mathematicalreality, not to psychological, physiological, and social reality, which is where it belongs.In fact, it would be absurd to claim realism for the various Chomskyan grammar mod-els we have seen over the years, including minimalism.And Jackendoff rightly poses thequestion of the actual reality, if any, behind these models. Put bluntly, we want to knowwhat the physiological correlates are of what we know as linguistic competence so thatwe may gain some understanding of how competence drives performance. There hasbeen a great deal of beating about the bush with regard to this question, but Jackendofftakes the bull by the horns and asks (p. 599): ‘What does this inductive definition have todo with how the brain actually PROCESSES language?’ (emphasis mine).Unfortunately, as Jackendoff will no doubt agree, it is proving very hard to make thebrain yield its secrets. Linguists and psychologists, moreover, are on the whole notbrain specialists, nor do brain specialists tend to have much linguistic or psychologicalknowledge, leaving aside a few precious exceptions. But even these have great diffi-culty tracing possible correlates between conscious actions and impressions on the onehand and brain processes on the other, let alone between psychologically or linguisti-cally defined rule systems and brain structures. At the present stage, any quest for phys-iological correlates of language production and comprehension processes is bound to beseriously hamstrung, despite the sophisticated scanning machines now at our disposal.As a result, linguists and, to a certain extent, psychologists seek refuge in what I havecalled (Seuren 2009:9) NONHARDWARE REALISM—that is, analyses and descriptions interms that look as if they stand a better chance of being physiologically implementedthan those formulated in terms taken from mathematical proof-theory. Clearly, there areno hard and fast standards for degrees of physiological implementability, but one can, tobegin with, try to formulate overarching ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES of the system en-visaged in terms that conform to what is known from direct intuitive observation andexperience or as a result of brain research. The extent to which enlightening, explana-tory generalizations are found and formulated in terms of a given architecture will thenbe a sensible measure of the possible reality value of one’s enterprise. In this context,Jackendoff proceeds to developing thoughts about a possible REALIST model of compe-tence, still, however, considering the chance that Chomskyan Merge might play a rolethere—despite the fact that the very architecture of Chomskyan grammar models per seprecludes any realist implementation, whether as a production or as a reception system.Utterances are not produced by pushing a start button, waiting for a semantically arbi-trary result, and then sending the product to a semantic and a phonological department,jointly yielding a <meaning,form> pair. Nor is there any analogous reversal of such asystem to describe utterance comprehension. The very architecture of such a system isunfit for any realistic interpretation. It is, therefore, not clear why Jackendoff still con-siders Merge worth discussing in realist terms.Apart from this, however, when Jackendoff develops his own ideas of what a morerealist theory of competence might look like, it quickly transpires (p. 600) that what hehas in mind when speaking about ‘competence’ in realist terms is a cerebro-cognitivesystem in virtue of which HEARERS COMPREHEND and INTERPRET utterances produced byspeakers. From now on, the term processing is taken in the sense in which it is com-monly used in computational linguistics—that is, comprehension or interpretation. Thesense of ‘production processing’ no longer plays a role. Jackendoff thus, suddenly andwithout warning, switches over to what appears to be an exclusively INTERPRETATIVEprocessing view of competence. The mechanism involved is a PARSER, taking utterancesto the cognitive content intended and expressed by the speaker, not a sentence or utter-ance PRODUCER. As an illustration, let me quote from the fourth and fifth paragraphs onp. 600. Pleading in favor of a constraint-based, rather than a derivational, formalism,Jackendoff writes:[U]nlike a derivational formalism, a constraint-based formalism lends itself to a direct relation to theo-ries of processing. The current consensus on sentence processing is that it is deeply ‘incremental’ or ‘op-portunistic’: the processor uses whatever information is available at the moment, whether fromphonology, syntax, semantics, or discourse or visual context, to build hypotheses about what is to comein the sentence and the sentence’s likely interpretation … The competence theory then is a theory ofwhat structures are possible in principle, and the performance theory is a theory of how those structuresare built in real time, using the rules directly. Such an approach has been central to LFG parsers sinceFord et al. 1982 …I can only read this as saying, or at least implying, that what constitutes competenceis adequate parsing ability on the part of the hearer, and I do feel that I must take issuewith such a view. It seems to me that a strong argument, regardless of any specific the-ory or of any technical details, can be put up in favor of the view that linguistic compe-tence is per se defined by a SPEAKER’S ability to PRODUCE utterances reflecting thespeaker’s semantic intentions in a form that satisfies the linguistic norms valid in anygiven society or social group for given interactional situations. The main reason for say-ing so is that hearers can, and often have no choice but to, make sense of garbled utter-ances either produced by a noncompetent speaker or damaged in the process ofDISCUSSION NOTES 175176 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 88, NUMBER 1 (2012)transmission to the hearer’s ears or the reader’s eyes—provided these are in good order.I have, in the past, sometimes used the example of a nonnative speaker saying Me nowater in. Me no can swim. Not only any competent speaker but also most noncompetentspeakers of English will be able to make sense of such an utterance—that is, reduce itthrough some, probably ad hoc, parsing system to the speaker’s intended meaning.Clearly, a speaker making such an utterance cannot be taken to be competent in English.But how about the hearer’s competence? It would seem to me that a listener who ade-quately makes sense of such an utterance cannot be declared competent in Englishmerely for that reason. The real test for competence in a language is to see whether aspeaker (writer) is capable of putting intended meanings into linguistic form in a waythat conforms to the language norms considered valid within any coherent group ofspeakers. The judges need not necessarily be fully competent speakers themselves, asone often recognizes perfect competence without being able to equal the same degree ofperfection or genuineness—just like a music critic may well judge quality withoutbeing able to reach the same degree of mastery in his or her own performance. In lan-guage teaching, comprehension tests are useful, as they will help to achieve proper fullcompetence, but they fail as competence tests in the sense in which the term is used intheoretical linguistics—that is, genuine, fully integrated mastery at all levels of a lan-guage or language variety, resulting from a language acquisition process guided by thelanguage faculty.This seems to me to be a basic point, in that theories aiming at a formal reconstruc-tion of the semantic parsing processes gone through by comprehending listeners (read-ers) may in themselves be of great use in increasing our understanding of thephenomenon ‘human language’, but they fail, as a matter of principle, as theories ofwhat has become known as linguistic competence. I have no doubt that UNIFICATION, forexample, plays a central role in the listeners’ parsing process, but I have difficulty ac-cepting that any unification-based theory of linguistic structure will be up to the task ofdefining competence. If correct, this point will affect the status not only of a fair num-ber of theories or approaches, especially those developed in the cognitivist school oflinguistic thought, but also of Jackendoff’s own design for a parallel architecture of lin-guistic competence.It seems worthwhile to raise this issue, since it is usually glossed over in the literaturewith little or no comment. Jackendoff’s discussion note shares this feature with most ofthe cognitivist literature but also, for example, with the widely quoted, decidedlynoncognitivist 2002 article by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch in Science. An explicit dis-cussion of this question will hopefully lead to greater clarity in this respect.REFERENCESFORD, MARILYN; JOAN BRESNAN; and RONALD M. KAPLAN. 1982. A competence-based the-ory of syntactic closure. The mental representation of grammatical relations, ed. byJoan Bresnan, 727–96. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.HAUSER, MARC D.; NOAM CHOMSKY; and W. TECUMSEH FITCH. 2002. The faculty of lan-guage: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298.1569–79.SEUREN, PIETER A. M. 2009. Language in cognition (= Language from within, vol. 1). Ox-ford: Oxford University Press.[pieter.seuren@mpi.nl] [Received 3 December 2011;accepted 15 December 2011]

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