Some observations on language and language learning: Reply to Macnamara, Arbib, and Moore and Furrow

Abstract

John Macnamara’s comments deal with issues that are important if somewhat obscure, and therefore merit more extensive and careful discussion than I can give here. I will follow his breakdown of the issues, considering first his comments on modularity, then on the principles-and-parameters conception of linguistic theory. Macnamara traces the modularity thesis to the so-called “autonomy of syntax” thesis. As he notes, my “statements of the autonomy thesis have been guarded.” One reason is that I do not know exactly what the thesis is supposed to be. The autonomy thesis has frequently been vigorously denied by critics who seem to have something in mind, but what it is, they have not clearly stated. In the work to which Macnamara refers (Chomsky, 1957), I considered various highly confident claims that syntax is necessarily based on semantics and argued that these specific claims were untenable. I have also pursued the point elsewhere (e.g. Chomsky, 1965, 1977), suggesting various forms that such a thesis might take and considering arguments offered to refute some (never clearly stated) “autonomy thesis” and in support of the position that “syntax is based on semantics”, arguments that generally seem to me without force. I have no doctrine on the matter: the problem is to find out the truth about what language is and how it is acquired. One reason why it is difficult to discuss the alleged thesis is that the term “semantics” is commonly used to refer to what I think should properly be called “syntax”, specifically, the syntax of mental representations. As Macnamara observes, “the key notion of semantics” is reference, a relation between elements of language and things in the world (or perhaps the world as it is conceived to be). Other key notions of semantics have to do with connection of meaning (analvticity, synonymy, etc.). But when terms such as “reference” are used internally to the study of mental representations and their syntax, as is often the case, then the claim that “syntax is based on semantics” becomes the empty assertion that “syntax is based on syntax improperly called ‘semantics’ “, and again it remains unclear what critics of the “‘autonomy thesis” take it to be asserting.