write an argumentative essay on why linguistics is a science

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

1.1 Linguistics is Science

Check Yourself

Video script.

Linguistics is one of those subjects that not many people have heard of, so you might well be wondering exactly what it is.

The simplest definition of Linguistics is that it’s the science of language .

This is a simple definition but it contains some very important words. First, when we say that linguistics is a science, that doesn’t mean you need a lab coat and safety goggles to do linguistics.  Instead, what it means is that the way we ask questions to learn about language uses a scientific approach.

The scientific way of thinking about language involves making systematic, empirical observations .  There’s another important word:  empirical means that we observe data to find the evidence for our theories.

All scientists make empirical observations: botanists observe how plants grow and reproduce. Chemists observe how substances interact with other. Linguists observe how people use their language.

A crucial thing to keep in mind is that the observations we make about language use are NOT value judgments.  Lots of people in the world — like your high school English teacher, various newspaper columnists, maybe your grandparents, and maybe even some of your friends — make judgments about how people use language.  But linguists don’t.

A short-hand way of saying this is that linguists have a descriptive approach to language, not a prescriptive approach.

We describe what people do with their language, but we don’t prescribe how they should or shouldn’t do it.

This descriptive approach is consistent with a scientific way of thinking. Think about an entomologist who studies beetles.  Imagine that scientist observes that a species of beetle eats leaves.  She’s not going to judge that the beetles are eating wrong, and tell them that they’d be more successful in life if only they eat the same thing as ants.  No — she observes what the beetle eats and tries to figure out why:  she develops a theory of why the beetle eats this plant and not that one.

In the same way, linguists observe what people say and how they say it, and come up with theories of why people say certain things or make certain sounds but not others.

In our simple definition of linguistics, there’s another important word we need to focus on:  linguistics is the science of human language .

There are plenty of species that communicate with each other in an impressive variety of ways, but in linguistics, our job is to focus on the unique system that humans use.

It turns out that humans have some important differences to all other species that make our language unique.

First, what we call the articulatory system : our lungs, larynx & vocal folds, and the shape of our tongue, teeth, lips, nose, all enable us to produce speech.  No other species can do this in the way we can, not even our closest genetic relatives the chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.

Second, our auditory system is special:  our ears are sensitive to exactly the frequencies that are most common in human speech.  There are other species that have similar patterns of auditory sensitivity, but human newborns pay special attention to human speech, even more so than synthetic speech that is matched for acoustic characteristics.

And most important of all, our neural system is special: no other species has a brain as complex and densely connected as ours with so many connections dedicated to producing and understanding language.

Humans’ language ability is different from all other species’ communication systems, and linguistics is the science that studies this unique ability.

Essentials of Linguistics Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

2. The scientific method in morphosyntax

2.1 Linguistics as science

In Section 1.3 , we defined linguistics as the scientific study of language. In this section, we will learn why we consider linguistics to be a science.

Often, when people think of science, they think of the physical sciences, which is the study of the physical properties of our universe. Although some subfields of linguistics, such as phonetics, include the study of physical properties, linguistics generally belongs to the category of social sciences. In the social sciences , we study the properties of societies. We can also categorize linguistics as a cognitive science , which is the study of the mind. Linguistics is the branch of cognitive science that studies what language can tell us about how the human mind works.

The Scientific Method

All of the types of science — physical, social, and cognitive sciences — are united by their methodology, which is known as the Scientific Method . The Scientific Method consists of four parts:

• Observe data.
• Formulate a hypothesis .
• Test the hypothesis against more data.
• Revise the hypothesis.

The Scientific Method can be treated as a cycle. After you revise your hypothesis in Step 4, you continue to collect more data, and test and revise your hypothesis, getting more and more precise and accurate with each revision. The second time through the cycle, and every subsequent time, you observe the data you collected from testing your previous hypothesis to formulate a new, revised hypothesis.

An example of the Scientific Method in morphosyntax

Let’s look at an example as applied to morphosyntax.

Step 1: Observe data

The first step is to observe some data. We will start with the data in (1).

Sentence (1a) includes the pronoun we , which means something like ‘a group of people including the speaker.’ Sentence (1b) includes the pronoun us , which also means something like ‘a group of people including the speaker.’ So an observation we could make about this data is that we and us  are very similar in meaning.

Step 2: Formulate a hypothesis

The next step is to make a hypothesis. Since we observed that we and us are very similar, one possible hypothesis could be that they are perfect synonyms .

Hypothesis 1: We and us are perfect synonyms.

This hypothesis makes a prediction. If we and us are synonyms, then we might expect them to be interchangeable. That is, we might expect us to be able to switch one for the other without changing the meaning of the sentence.

Step 3: Test the hypothesis

So let’s test out the predictions of our hypothesis! We will take the examples from (1), but switch we for us and vice versa and see what happens.

When we switch  us and we , the result, shown in (2), doesn’t sound quite right, so we mark them with an asterisk symbol (*) to show that the sentences are not well-formed.

What have we figured out? Contrary to our first hypothesis, it doesn’t seem like we and us are exactly the same. They are different in some way, which is why switching one for the other in (2) results in ill-formed sentences.

Step 4: Revise the hypothesis

The difference between the sentences in (1) and those in (2) is not a difference in meaning, but a difference in grammaticality. Perhaps, then, the difference between we and us is not a difference in meaning, but a difference in grammatical function.

Hypothesis 2: We and us have the same meaning but different grammatical function.

This hypothesis also makes a prediction. According to this hypothesis, if we change the structure of the sentence but keep the same meaning, it might affect whether we need to use we or us.

Step 5: Test the revised hypothesis

One way to change the structure of these sentences is to put them in passive voice . If we take the sentences in (1) and change them to the passive voice, keeping the same pronoun, we get the sentences shown in (3). If, on the other hand, we make them passive but switch the pronouns, we get the sentences in (4).

This time, the predictions we made in Hypothesis 2 are consistent with our data! Sentences (1a) and (4a) mean the same thing but have different structure, but (1a) must have we and cannot have us , but sentence (4a) must have us and cannot have we . Likewise, sentences (1b) and (4b) also mean the same thing but have different structure, and also use different pronouns.

And so on…

Even though our Hypothesis 2 ended up passing our test, that doesn’t mean we’re done. There are two main ways we might continue to refine our hypothesis.

First, notice that our Hypothesis 2 is rather vague. We have proposed that there is a difference in structure, but what exactly is this difference? If we were to continue on with this example, we might try to figure out how to describe the structural difference between us and we .

Second, notice that we’ve only looked at eight sentences. You could even say we’ve only looked at two sentences and variations on those two sentences! That’s not very much data! Another way to continue revising and refining our hypothesis would be to test it against even more data, and different kinds of data, to see if our hypothesis continues to stand.

Check yourself!

The study of societies.

The study of the mind.

The method of inquiry used in science whereby researchers observe data, and then formulate, test, and revise hypotheses based on their observations.

A proposed analysis or explanation made based on the observation of data, to be tested over the course of scientific investigation.

A word that shares the same or similar meaning with another word in the same language.

A grammatical structure in which the subject of a clause is deleted or included in an optional 'by'-phrase, and the object of the clause is promoted to subject position.

The Linguistic Analysis of Word and Sentence Structures Copyright © by Julianne Doner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Beatriz (L), 7, from Rio de Janeiro speaks with an indigenous girl at the Kari-Oca village as part of the ‘Rio+20’ United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Photo by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters

Is linguistics a science?

Much of linguistic theory is so abstract and dependent on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to explain.

by Arika Okrent   + BIO

Science is a messy business, but just like everything with loose ends and ragged edges, we tend to understand it by resorting to ideal types. On the one hand, there’s the archetype of the scientific method: a means of accounting for observations, generating precise, testable predictions, and yielding new discoveries about the natural consequences of natural laws. On the other, there’s our ever-replenishing font of story archetypes: the accidental event that results in a sudden clarifying insight; the hero who pursues the truth in the face of resistance or even danger; the surprising fact that challenges the dominant theory and brings it toppling to the ground.

The interplay of these archetypes has produced a spirited, long-running controversy about the nature and origins of language. Recently, it’s been flung back into public awareness following the publication of Tom Wolfe’s book The Kingdom of Speech (2016).

In Wolfe’s breathless re-telling, the dominant scientific theory is Noam Chomsky’s concept of a ‘universal grammar’ – the idea that all languages share a deep underlying structure that’s almost certainly baked into our biology by evolution. The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). And the challenging fact is the discovery of an Amazonian language, Pirahã, that does not have recursion. The scientific debate plays out as a classic David-and-Goliath story, with Chomsky as a famous, ivory-tower intellectual whose grand armchair proclamations are challenged by a rugged, lowly field linguist and former Christian missionary named Daniel Everett.

Stories this ripe for dramatisation come along rarely in any branch of science, much less the relatively obscure field of theoretical linguistics. But the truth will always be more complicated than the idealisations we use to understand it. In this case, the details lend themselves so well to juicy, edifice-crumbling story arcs that a deeper, more consequential point tends to be overlooked. It concerns not Everett’s challenge to Chomsky’s theory, but Chomsky’s challenge to the scientific method itself.

This counter-attack takes the form of the Chomskyans’ response to Everett. They say that even if Pirahã has no recursion, it matters not one bit for the theory of universal grammar. The capacity is intrinsic, even if it’s not always exploited. As Chomsky and his colleagues put it in a co-authored paper , ‘our language faculty provides us with a toolkit for building languages, but not all languages use all the tools’. This looks suspiciously like defiance of a central feature of the scientific archetype, one first put forward by the philosopher Karl Popper: theories are not scientific unless they have the potential to be falsified. If you claim that recursion is the essential feature of language, and if the existence of a recursionless language does not debunk your claim, then what could possibly invalidate it?

In an interview with Edge.org in 2007, Everett said he emailed Chomsky: ‘What is a single prediction that universal grammar makes that I could falsify? How could I test it?’ According to Everett, Chomsky replied to say that universal grammar doesn’t make any predictions; it’s a field of study, like biology.

The nub of the disagreement here boils down to what exactly linguistics says about the world, and the appropriate archetypes we should apply to make it effective. So just what kinds of questions does linguistics want to answer? What counts as evidence? Is universal grammar in particular – and theoretical linguistics in general – a science at all?

P opper first proposed the criterion of falsifiability as a way of drawing a bright line between science and pseudoscience. If you go out looking for confirmation of a theory or hypothesis, he said, you are almost certain to discover it. For a pseudoscience such as astrology, the predictions are so vaguely stated that any apparent contradiction can be explained away. For Freudian psychology, there’s no type of human behaviour that could not be accounted for by unconscious drives .

By contrast, good theories or hypotheses are those that allow you to search for contrary evidence. Thus Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity made a very specific prediction about the effect of gravity on light, which could be subsequently tested during the solar eclipse of 1919. Unlike astrology or Freudianism, relativity could be contradicted. It was possible to conceive of an observation that would conflict with one’s expectations (although the eclipse ultimately vindicated Einstein). The capacity to be disproved is what makes general relativity scientific.

To what extent is linguistic theory scientific, in this Popperian sense? Well, the first thing to say is that linguistics is hard to write about precisely because it seems like it should be easy. When it comes to general relativity, we accept that there are principles at work that are complex and that we don’t observe directly. But it’s harder for us to accept that the same is true of language – we do observe it directly, every day. The elementary particles of language are out there for the taking: words, sounds, sentences.

Linguistics therefore requires you to look beyond what you think you know, and start looking instead at what you don’t know that you know. This implicit knowledge has been the object of study in linguistics since the 1950s. Back then, Chomsky revolutionised the field when he observed that grammar is a generative system. That is, a language is not a big set of all the words and sentences people say in that language; rather, it’s a mental system of rules for generating acceptable sentences. We have the ability to create sentences we’ve never heard that conform to norms we’ve never explicitly learned. From the limited, finite exposure we get while learning our native language, we somehow acquire an unlimited, infinitely productive system of rules.

Trying to pinpoint those rules depends on a rather counterintuitive practice: not collecting examples of what people actually say, but carefully crafting sentences that no one would ever say. For example, this sentence is clearly violating some principle:

(1) What did Mary believe the rumour that Bill was eating?

The task for the linguist is to formulate the principle that this phrase violates by comparing it with acceptable sentences. Is the problem that the sentence has no meaning? Well, that’s hard to sustain in light of the fact that this sentence does make sense:

(2) Mary believed the rumour that Bill was eating spaghetti.

If spaghetti was drowned out by a sudden noise when someone was saying example 2, there’s no obvious reason why we couldn’t respond by asking the question in example 1. Maybe the problem is that the what in example 1 refers to the object of eating, which would appear too far away at the other end of the sentence if it weren’t a question? No, because in this example, the distance between what and the object it traces is fine:

(3) What did Mary say that John thought Bill was eating _____?

All this suggests that the principle will refer not to something we can observe directly – the order of the words and the distance between them – but to some second-level of analysis we must infer, some grouping of the words into a hierarchical structure.

It’s unusual for a science to depend as heavily as linguistics does on intentional violations and bad examples

Determining the nature of those structures has been the project of linguistics for decades now. The linguist forms a hypothesis about the configuration of words (Mary [believed [the rumour [that Bill was eating spaghetti.]]]); formulates a rule referring to that structure, which is violated by the unacceptable sentence (you can’t move the object of a verb out to the what position if it has to cross over a noun-phrase level – ‘the rumour’ – to get there) and tests the hypotheses by coming up with more good and bad sentences.

This is an incredibly counterintuitive way to think about language, which after all is a thing we intuitively know how to use. But it’s still science, an effort to discover the nature of something by forming hypotheses and testing them against evidence. Sentence 3 is evidence that the hypothesis mentioned above it – about the distance of what from the place it traces to – is incorrect. It’s just that the evidence here is not language as spoken ‘out there’ in the world, but an idealised set of consciously contrived sentences.

Consciously contrived examples are nothing unusual in science. Frictionless planes, perfect spheres and ideal gases are tremendously useful abstractions from the messy reality of ‘stuff in the world’. However, it is unusual for a science to depend as heavily as linguistics does on intentional violations and bad examples – which, when it comes down to it, are only violations to the extent that our intuitive judgment says they are. From this perspective, the object of study in linguistics is not words, sentences or human communicative behaviour, the things we can see and hear – it’s an underlying system, an abstraction. The abstraction makes predictions, not necessarily about what people will say, but about what their intuitive judgments should be.

I n Chomsky’s formulation, we are not just after a set of abstract rules that account for the things we can see and hear, but one that explains why they are the way they are. In the late 1970s, Chomsky began to refer to this method of enquiry as the ‘Galilean style’ – a term coined by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and popularised by the American physicist Steven Weinberg. For Galileo to get at the mathematical truths, he had to have the vision to abstract away from real-world effects that interfered with the expected observations. The laws governing falling bodies, for example, had to be considered apart from air resistance or friction. Air resistance is a fact of the real world, but the scientific view of the motion of falling bodies is the ‘truth’. As Weinberg put it in a 1976 paper , these are ‘abstract mathematical models of the Universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations’.

Chomsky’s Galilean vision was that our intuitive judgments about language stem from an innate language faculty, a universal grammar underlying the human capacity for language. His project is to determine the essential nature of that universal grammar – not the nature of language, but the nature of the human capacity for language. The distinction is a subtle one. Many linguists use the same kind of evidence (native speakers’ intuitive acceptability judgments) and the same methods (hypothesising structures and constraints that account for them), but simply want to discover the rules of particular languages, or to examine how different languages handle comparable phenomena. There are also many linguists who look at language use in the real world, and want to answer questions such as: what are the social factors that lead to the use of one linguistic formulation over another? What do children’s errors reveal about their knowledge of language? What does context contribute to the interpretation of linguistic meaning? All of this can be done without making any commitment to whether or not the descriptions are part of an innate universal grammar.

However, for Chomskyans there is a standing commitment to this idea. Universal grammar is not a hypothesis to be tested, but a foundational assumption. Plenty of people take issue with that assumption, but all types of linguists generally agree that there are indeed constraints on what a human language can be, that languages don’t do absolutely anything. They differ on where those restrictions come from. The commonalities among languages might come from more general cognitive domains, such as memory and information-processing capabilities, or from the commonalities in human social or cultural capacities. Chomsky doesn’t think so. In The Architecture of Language (2000), he said: ‘There are properties of the language faculty, which are not found elsewhere, not only in the human mind, but in other biological organisms as far as we know.’ The essential part of the human capacity for language is specific to language and to humans.

So what is that essential part? The phrase ‘universal grammar’ gives the impression that it’s going to be a list of features common to all languages, statements such as ‘all languages have nouns’ or ‘all languages mark verbs for tense’. But there are very few features shared by all known languages, possibly none. The word ‘universal’ is misleading here too. It seems like it should mean ‘found in all languages’ but in this case it means something like ‘found in all humans’ (because otherwise they would not be able to learn language as they do.)

This all sounds maddeningly circular or at the very least extremely confusing. Grammar is a property of language, but universal grammar is a property of humans, and humans are able to learn the particular grammar of their language because they have the universal grammar of humans. Or something like that. So what are the relevant observations? What is the evidence?

You’d think that a simplifying turn would be easy to explain, but even linguists have trouble understanding it

Native-speaker intuitions about as wide a range of human languages as possible seems a good place to start. However, the more languages that the Chomskyan theory tried to incorporate into its abstract core, the messier things got. A vast body of theoretical work has been produced in the past few decades, involving structural descriptions and rules that account for the difference between good and bad sentences over many specific examples, in many different languages, through a common set of fundamental principles. But to achieve this feat, the theory grew ever more technically complex, with more and more levels and stipulations, and lots of exceptions that necessitated even more theoretical machinery to explain. The whole agenda was moving far away from the Galilean ideal of explanatory simplicity . Anyway, it was unlikely that so much specific complex machinery could possibly be instantiated in the human brain, and even more unlikely that it could have evolved.

In the 1990s, Chomsky introduced something he called the Minimalist programme. It is presented not as a theory of what universal grammar is, but as an outline of a productive way to think about things, one that prioritises simplicity, elegance, parsimony. He invoked another aspect of Galilean style, the idea that the scientist should be guided by the expectation that the deepest laws of nature will be the easiest and simplest ones. In a 1999 interview, Chomsky said that ‘it is the abstract systems you are constructing that are really the truth; the array of phenomena is some distortion of the truth because of too many factors, all sorts of things. And so, it often makes good sense to disregard phenomena and search for principles that really seem to give some deep insight into why some of them are that way, recognising that there are others that you can’t pay attention to.’ In other words, air resistance is real, but it’s just not relevant to the deeper truth about the motion of falling bodies.

You might think that a simplifying turn would be easy to explain to a lay audience, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Even linguists have trouble understanding it. Frankly I’m not sure I really understand it myself. The drive toward minimalism here is actually a drive toward abstraction. Not boiling down the facts to see what they all share in common, but abstracting away from observations until what we have is so remote that it defies appeals to concrete models, metaphors or even formal, mathematical-type statements.

We’re pretty far from the ideal archetypes of science now. What are we measuring? What are we even observing? What is the theory, what are its specific claims, and how are we testing them? Is this science? Or philosophy? And does it even matter?

W hat we have is a field with a big, exciting idea at its heart – that there is an innate universal feature of human language – but a major part of it is unfalsifiable and it’s so abstract and dependent on theoretical apparatus that it might be impossible to explain. Chomskyan linguistics has become like a theoretical physics version of linguistics, with universal grammar as the elusive, unifying theory of everything. Does that mean it’s not worth doing? Is there any value to working out an explanatory model for its own sake? To saying, let’s just see where this leads? The generative linguist Cedric Boeckx at the University of Barcelona stresses that minimalism is not a theory, but a programme – ‘and as such it is neither right nor wrong; it can only be fecund or sterile’, he wrote in ‘A Tale of Two Minimalisms’ (2010).

I must admit, there have been times when, upon going through some highly technical, abstract analysis of why some surface phenomena in two very different languages can be captured by a single structural principle, I get a fuzzy, shimmering glimpse in my peripheral vision of a deeper truth about language. Really, it’s not even a glimpse, but a ghost of a leading edge of something that might come into view but could just as easily not be there at all. I feel it, but I feel no impulse to pursue it. I can understand, though, why there are people who do feel that impulse.

I’ve also had the same feeling about analyses that make appeals to the idea of regularities arising from something other than a core, innate language capacity: from our affinity for patterns, our human social endowments, our historical accumulation of cultural habits. At this point, I’m no longer a practitioner of linguistics, but an observer and communicator about the discipline. I have the luxury of not having to argue for any particular point of view. To each her own facts to find interesting. To each his own impulse to follow.

Not embedding one phrase inside another was just one of the many ways that the Pirahã prioritised the here and now

Still, that’s a rather unsatisfying perch to land on. As narrative archetypes go, ‘Ah well, everybody’s got their own thing’ is not compelling at all. Shouldn’t there be something at stake in determining which way of looking at things is the right one? Isn’t the whole point to find the truth?

The Pirahã themselves would disagree. In their culture, as Everett describes it in his memoir of his time with them, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes (2008), ‘they have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality’. They live in the moment, according to what he terms the ‘immediacy of experience principle’. Ironically, in the 2005 article that began the whole Chomsky/Everett debate, Everett barely touched on the notion that the Pirahã’s lack of recursion might challenge the theory of universal grammar. Instead, his aim was to show that the Pirahã cultural commitment to immediate, concrete experience permeated the very structure of their language: not embedding one phrase inside another was just one of the many ways that the Pirahã prioritised the here and now. Other evidence he adduced for this priority included the simplicity of the kinship system, the lack of numbers, and the absence of fiction or creation myths.

The years-long immersion in Pirahã culture and the struggle to understand it had a profound personal effect on Everett. His encounter with their concept of truth made him rethink his belief in God and eventually become an atheist. His renunciation of universal grammar involved a similar disillusionment, since he had worked within the framework for the first 25 years of his career. Yet Everett’s study of the Pirahã falsifies neither Christianity nor universal grammar, since they are not designed for falsification in the first place. They are both a way to try to get a handle on reality. The first asks that you take a set of assumptions on faith because they are the truth. The second provides a set of assumptions for generating a line of enquiry that might at some point lead to the truth.

I’m not sure whether you can call yourself a Christian if you reject the foundational tenets of Christianity – but you can certainly reject the assumptions of universal grammar and still call yourself a linguist. In fact, a drive to debunk Chomsky’s assumptions has led to a flourishing of empirical work in the field. Even as a foil, villain or edifice to be crumbled, the theory of universal grammar offers a framework for discovery, a place to aim the magnifying glass, chisel or wrecking ball, as the case may be. Archetypes of all kinds can simplify and exaggerate, and universal grammar is no different. But whether as a structured mythology or a catalyst for conflict, it nonetheless helps us to reach a deeper understanding of the world.

Thinkers and theories

Philosophy is an art

For Margaret Macdonald, philosophical theories are akin to stories, meant to enlarge certain aspects of human life

Neuroscience

How to make a map of smell

We can split light by a prism, sounds by tones, but surely the world of odour is too complex and personal? Strangely, no

Jason Castro

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

The therapist who hated me

Going to a child psychoanalyst four times a week for three years was bad enough. Reading what she wrote about me was worse

Michael Bacon

Consciousness and altered states

A reader’s guide to microdosing

How to use small doses of psychedelics to lift your mood, enhance your focus, and fire your creativity

Tunde Aideyan

The scourge of lookism

It is time to take seriously the painful consequences of appearance discrimination in the workplace

Andrew Mason

Our tools shape our selves

For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience

Bryan Norton

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

0.1: Linguistics is a science

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 111787

Linguistics is Science, from Catherine Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics .

Video Script:

Linguistics is one of those subjects that not many people have heard of, so you might well be wondering exactly what it is.

The simplest definition of Linguistics is that it’s the science of language .

This is a simple definition but it contains some very important words. First, when we say that linguistics is a science, that doesn’t mean you need a lab coat and safety goggles to do linguistics. Instead, what it means is that the way we ask questions to learn about language uses a scientific approach.

The scientific way of thinking about language involves making systematic, empirical observations . There’s another important word: empirical means that we observe data to find the evidence for our theories.

All scientists make empirical observations: botanists observe how plants grow and reproduce. Chemists observe how substances interact with other. Linguists observe how people use their language.

A crucial thing to keep in mind is that the observations we make about language use are NOT value judgments. Lots of people in the world — like your high school English teacher, various newspaper columnists, maybe your grandparents, and maybe even some of your friends — make judgments about how people use language. But linguists don’t.

A short-hand way of saying this is that linguists have a descriptive approach to language, not a prescriptive approach.

We describe what people do with their language, but we don’t prescribe how they should or shouldn’t do it.

This descriptive approach is consistent with a scientific way of thinking. Think about an entomologist who studies beetles. Imagine that scientist observes that a species of beetle eats leaves. She’s not going to judge that the beetles are eating wrong, and tell them that they’d be more successful in life if only they eat the same thing as ants. No — she observes what the beetle eats and tries to figure out why: she develops a theory of why the beetle eats this plant and not that one.

In the same way, linguists observe what people say and how they say it, and come up with theories of why people say certain things or make certain sounds but not others.

In our simple definition of linguistics, there’s another important word we need to focus on: linguistics is the science of human language .

There are plenty of species that communicate with each other in an impressive variety of ways, but in linguistics, our job is to focus on the unique system that humans use.

It turns out that humans have some important differences to all other species that make our language unique.

First, what we call the articulatory system : our lungs, larynx & vocal folds, and the shape of our tongue, teeth, lips, nose, all enable us to produce speech. No other species can do this in the way we can, not even our closest genetic relatives the chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans.

Second, our auditory system is special: our ears are sensitive to exactly the frequencies that are most common in human speech. There are other species that have similar patterns of auditory sensitivity, but human newborns pay special attention to human speech, even more so than synthetic speech that is matched for acoustic characteristics.

And most important of all, our neural system is special: no other species has a brain as complex and densely connected as ours with so many connections dedicated to producing and understanding language.

Humans’ language ability is different from all other species’ communication systems, and linguistics is the science that studies this unique ability.

Check Yourself

Exercise \(\pageindex{1}\).

What does it mean to say that Linguistics is a science?

• The field consists of a set of true facts that can be proven objectively.
• The field uses the scientific method to determine objective rankings of language quality.
• The field uses empirical observations to develop theories of language behaviour.

"The field uses empirical observations to develop theories of language behaviour."

The reason: Linguistics is a social science, based in empirical observations.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{2}\)

Each of the following sentences represents something someone might say about language. Which of them illustrates a descriptive view of language?

• The use of quotative like in sentences such as, “She was like, I can’t believe you did that!” began to enter Canadian English with the generation of speakers born in 1971.
• The song “I can’t get no satisfaction” should really mean that “I can get some satisfaction” because two negatives always make a positive.
• In a phrase like, “the people who the bride invited to the wedding,” it’s proper to use whom rather than who .

"The use of quotative like in sentences such as, “She was like, I can’t believe you did that!” began to enter Canadian English with the generation of speakers born in 1971."

The reason: It's an objective description of language without associating a 'prescribed' value of what is 'right' or 'proper'.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{3}\)

Which of the following kinds of data would a linguist be likely to observe?

• Which method is most effective to help a child stop stuttering.
• Whether Korean includes tones that change the meaning of words.
• How many undergraduates can correctly use the words affect and effect in their essays.
• If second-language speakers can pronounce English words correctly.

"Whether Korean includes tones that change the meaning of words."

The reason: This is an empirical observation of what happens in a language. The others are all subjective or prescriptive in some way.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Philosophy of Linguistics

Philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science as applied to linguistics. This differentiates it sharply from the philosophy of language, traditionally concerned with matters of meaning and reference.

As with the philosophy of other special sciences, there are general topics relating to matters like methodology and explanation (e.g., the status of statistical explanations in psychology and sociology, or the physics-chemistry relation in philosophy of chemistry), and more specific philosophical issues that come up in the special science at issue (simultaneity for philosophy of physics; individuation of species and ecosystems for the philosophy of biology). General topics of the first type in the philosophy of linguistics include:

• What the subject matter is,
• What the theoretical goals are,
• What form theories should take, and
• What counts as data.

Specific topics include issues in language learnability, language change, the competence-performance distinction, and the expressive power of linguistic theories.

There are also topics that fall on the borderline between philosophy of language and philosophy of linguistics: of “linguistic relativity” (see the supplement on the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism ), language vs. idiolect , speech acts (including the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts), the language of thought, implicature, and the semantics of mental states (see the entries on analysis , semantic compositionality , mental representation , pragmatics , and defaults in semantics and pragmatics ). In these cases it is often the kind of answer given and not the inherent nature of the topic itself that determines the classification. Topics that we consider to be more in the philosophy of language than the philosophy of linguistics include intensional contexts, direct reference, and empty names (see the entries on propositional attitude reports , intensional logic , rigid designators , reference , and descriptions ).

This entry does not aim to provide a general introduction to linguistics for philosophers; readers seeking that should consult a suitable textbook such as Akmajian et al. (2010) or Napoli (1996). For a general history of Western linguistic thought, including recent theoretical linguistics, see Seuren (1998). Newmeyer (1986) is useful additional reading for post-1950 American linguistics. Tomalin (2006) traces the philosophical, scientific, and linguistic antecedents of Chomsky’s magnum opus (1955/1956; published 1975), and Scholz and Pullum (2007) provide a critical review. Articles that have focused on the philosophical implications of generative linguistics include Ludlow (2011) and Rey (2020). For recent articles on the philosophy of linguistics more generally, Itkonen (2013) discusses various aspects of the field from its early Greek beginnings, Pullum (2019) details debates that have engaged philosophers from 1945 to 2015, and Nefdt (2019a) discusses connections with contemporary issues in the philosophy of science.

1.1 The Externalists

1.2 the emergentists, 1.3 the essentialists, 1.4 comparing the three approaches, 2.1 competence and performance, 2.2 ‘i-language’ and ‘e-language’, 2.3 the faculty of language in narrow and broad senses, 2.4 linguistic ontology, 2.5 components of linguistic theories, 3.1 acrimony over linguistic intuitions, 3.2 grammaticality and acceptability judgments, 3.3 assessing degrees of acceptability, 3.4 informal and experimental elicitation, 3.5 what informal methods actually are, 3.6 corpus data, 4.1 linguistic nativism, 4.2 language learnability, 5.1 phylogenetic emergence, 5.2 historical evolution, other internet resources, related entries.

• Supplement on Whorfianism

1. Three Approaches to Linguistic Theorizing: Externalism, Emergentism, and Essentialism

The issues we discuss have been debated with vigor and sometimes venom. Some of the people involved have had famous exchanges in the linguistics journals, in the popular press, and in public forums. To understand the sharp disagreements between advocates of the approaches it may be useful to have a sketch of the dramatis personae before us, even if it is undeniably an oversimplification.

We see three tendencies or foci, divided by what they take to be the subject matter, the approach they advocate for studying it, and what they count as an explanation. We characterize them roughly in Table 1.

Table 1. Three Approaches to the Study of Language

A broad and varied range of distinct research projects can be pursued within any of these approaches; one advocate may be more motivated by some parts of the overall project than others are. So the tendencies should not be taken as sharply honed, well-developed research programs or theories. Rather, they provide background biases for the development of specific research programs—biases which sometimes develop into ideological stances or polemical programs or lead to the branching off of new specialisms with separate journals. In the judgment of Phillips (2010), “Dialog between adherents of different approaches is alarmingly rare.”

The names we have given these approaches are just mnemonic tags, not descriptions. The Externalists, for example, might well have been called ‘structural descriptivists’ instead, since they tend to be especially concerned to develop models that can be used to predict the structure of natural language expressions. The Externalists have long been referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’ (and sometimes Externalists apply that term to themselves), though this is misleading (see Scholz and Pullum 2006: 60–63): the ‘empiricist’ tag comes with an accusation of denying the role of learning biases in language acquisition (see Matthews 1984, Laurence and Margolis 2001), but that is no part of the Externalists’ creed (see e.g. Elman 1993, Lappin and Shieber 2007).

Emergentists are also sometimes referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’, but they either use the Emergentist label for themselves (Bates et al. 1998, O’Grady 2008, MacWhinney 2005) or call themselves ‘usage-based’ linguists (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Tomasello 2003) or ‘construction grammarians’ (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001). Newmeyer (1991), like Tomasello, refers to the Essentialists as ‘formalists’, because of their tendency to employ abstractions, and to use tools from mathematics and logic.

Despite these terminological inconsistencies, we can look at what typical members of each approach would say about their vision of linguistic science, and what they say about the alternatives. Many of the central differences between these approaches depend on what proponents consider to be the main project of linguistic theorizing, and what they count as a satisfying explanation.

Many researchers—perhaps most—mix elements from each of the three approaches. For example, if Emergentists are to explain the syntactic structure of expressions by appeal to facts about the nature of the use of symbols in human communication, then they will presuppose a great deal of Externalist work in describing linguistic patterns, and those Externalists who work on computational parsing systems frequently use (at least as a starting point) rule systems and ‘structural’ patterns worked out by Essentialists. Certainly, there are no logical impediments for a researcher with one tendency from simultaneously pursuing another; these approaches are only general centers of emphasis.

If one assumes, with the Externalists, that the main goal of a linguistic theory is to develop accurate models of the structural properties of the speech sounds, words, phrases, and other linguistic items, then the clearly privileged information will include corpora (written and oral)—bodies of attested and recorded language use (suitably idealized). The goal is to describe how this public record exhibits certain (perhaps non-phenomenal) patterns that are projectable.

American structural linguistics of the 1920s to 1950s championed the development of techniques for using corpora as a basis for developing structural descriptions of natural languages, although such work was really not practically possible until the wide-spread availability of cheap, powerful, and fast computers. André Martinet (1960: 1) notes that one of the basic assumptions of structuralist approaches to linguistics is that “nothing may be called ‘linguistic’ that is not manifest or manifested one way or another between the mouth of the speaker and the ears of the listener”. He is, however, quick to point out that “this assumption does not entail that linguists should restrict their field of research to the audible part of the communication process—speech can only be interpreted as such, and not as so much noise, because it stands for something else that is not speech.”

American structuralists—Leonard Bloomfield in particular—were attacked, sometimes legitimately and sometimes illegitimately, by certain factions in the Essentialist tradition. For example, it was perhaps justifiable to criticize Bloomfield for adopting a nominalist ontology as popularized by the logical empiricists. But he was later attacked by Essentialists for holding anti-mentalist views about linguistics, when it is arguable that his actual view was that the science of linguistics should not commit itself to any particular psychological theory. (He had earlier been an enthusiast for the mentalist and introspectionist psychology of Wilhelm Wundt; see Bloomfield 1914.)

Externalism continues to thrive within computational linguistics, where the American structuralist vison of studying language through automatic analysis of corpora has enjoyed a recrudescence, and very large, computationally searchable corpora are being used to test hypotheses about the structure of languages (see Sampson 2001, chapter 1, for discussion).

Emergentists aim to explain the capacity for language in terms of non-linguistic human capacities: thinking, communicating, and interacting. Edward Sapir expressed a characteristic Emergentist theme when he wrote:

Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be understood as such… It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. (Sapir 1929: 214)

The “pretty patterns” derided here are characteristic of structuralist analyses. Sociolinguistics, which is much closer in spirit to Sapir’s project, studies the influence of social and linguistic structure on each other. One particularly influential study, Labov (1966), examines the influence of social class on language variation. Other sociolinguists examine the relation between status within a group on linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989). This interest in variation within languages is characteristic of Emergentist approaches to the study of language.

Another kind of Emergentist, like Tomasello (2003), will stress the role of theory of mind and the capacity to use symbols to change conspecifics’ mental states as uniquely human preadaptations for language acquisition, use, and invention. MacWhinney (2005) aims to explain linguistic phenomena (such as phrase structure and constraints on long distance dependencies) in terms of the way conversation facilitates accurate information-tracking and perspective-switching.

Functionalist research programs generally fall within the broad tendency to approach the study of language as an Emergentist. According to one proponent:

The functionalist view of language [is] as a system of communicative social interaction… Syntax is not radically arbitrary, in this view, but rather is relatively motivated by semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive concerns. (Van Valin 1991, quoted in Newmeyer 1991: 4; emphasis in original)

And according to Russ Tomlin, a linguist who takes a functionalist approach:

Syntax is not autonomous from semantics or pragmatics…the rejection of autonomy derives from the observation that the use of particular grammatical forms is strongly linked, even deterministically linked, to the presence of particular semantic or pragmatic functions in discourse. (Tomlin 1990, quoted by Newmeyer (1991): 4)

The idea that linguistic form is autonomous, and more specifically that syntactic form (rather than, say, phonological form) is autonomous, is a characteristic theme of the Essentialists. And the claims of Van Valin and Tomlin to the effect that syntax is not independent of semantics and pragmatics might tempt some to think that Emergentism and Essentialism are logically incompatible. But this would be a mistake, since there are a large number of nonequivalent autonomy of form theses.

Even in the context of trying to explain what the autonomy thesis is, Newmeyer (1991: 3) talks about five formulations of the thesis, each of which can be found in some Essentialists’ writings, without (apparently) realizing that they are non-equivalent. One is the relatively strong claim that the central properties of linguistic form must not be defined with essential reference to “concepts outside the system”, which suggests that no primitives in linguistics could be defined in psychological or biological terms. Another takes autonomy of form to be a normative claim: that linguistic concepts ought not to be defined or characterized in terms of non-linguistic concepts. The third and fourth versions are ontological: one denies that central linguistic concepts should be ontologically reduced to non-linguistic ones, and the other denies that they can be. And in the fifth version the autonomy of syntax is taken to deny that syntactic patterning can be explained in terms of meaning or discourse functions.

For each of these versions of autonomy, there are Essentialists who agree with it. Probably the paradigmatic Essentialist agrees with them all. But Emergentists need not disagree with them all. Paradigmatic functionalists like Tomlin, Van Valin and MacWhinney could in principle hold that the explanation of syntactic form, for example, will ultimately be in terms of discourse functions and semantics, but still accept that syntactic categories cannot be reduced to non-linguistic ones.

If Leonard Bloomfield is the intellectual ancestor of Externalism, and Sapir the father of Emergentism, then Noam Chomsky is the intellectual ancestor of Essentialism. The researcher with predominantly Essentialist inclinations aims to identify the intrinsic properties of language that make it what it is. For a huge majority of practitioners of this approach—researchers in the tradition of generative grammar associated with Chomsky—this means postulating universals of human linguistic structure, unlearned but tacitly known, that permit and assist children to acquire human languages. This generative Essentialism has a preference for finding surprising characteristics of languages that cannot be inferred from the data of usage, and are not predictable from human cognition or the requirements of communication.

Rather than being impressed with language variation, as are Emergentists and many Externalists, the generative Essentialists are extremely impressed with the idea that very young children of almost any intelligence level, and just about any social upbringing, acquire language to the same high degree of mastery. From this it is inferred that there must be unlearned features shared by all languages that somehow assist in language acquisition.

A large number of contemporary Essentialists who follow Chomsky’s teaching on this matter claim that semantics and pragmatics are not a central part of the study of language. In Chomsky’s view, “it is possible that natural language has only syntax and pragmatics” (Chomsky 1995: 26); that is, only “internalist computations and performance systems that access them”; semantic theories are merely “part of an interface level” or “a form of syntax” (Chomsky 1992: 223).

Thus, while Bloomfield understood it to be a sensible practical decision to assign semantics to some field other than linguistics because of the underdeveloped state of semantic research, Chomsky appears to think that semantics as standardly understood is not part of the essence of the language faculty at all. (In broad outline, this exclusion of semantics from linguistics comports with Sapir’s view that form is linguistic but content is cultural.)

Although Chomsky is an Essentialist in his approach to the study of language, excluding semantics as a central part of linguistic theory clearly does not follow from linguistic Essentialism (Katz 1980 provides a detailed discussion of Chomsky’s views on semantics). Today there are many Essentialists who do hold that semantics is a component of a full linguistic theory.

For example, many linguists today are interested in the syntax-semantics interface—the relationship between the surface syntactic structure of sentences and their semantic interpretation. This area of interest is generally quite alien to philosophers who are primarily concerned with semantics only, and it falls outside of Chomsky’s syntactocentric purview as well. Linguists who work in the kind of semantics initiated by Montague (1974) certainly focus on the essential features of language (most of their findings appear to be of universal import rather than limited to the semantic rules of specific languages). Useful works to consult to get a sense of the modern style of investigation of the syntax-semantics interface would include Partee (1975), Jacobson (1996), Szabolcsi (1997), Chierchia (1998), Steedman (2000).

The discussion so far has been at a rather high level of abstraction. It may be useful to contrast the three tendencies by looking at how they each would analyze a particular linguistic phenomenon. We have selected the syntax of double-object clauses like Hand the guard your pass (also called ditransitive clauses), in which the verb is immediately followed by a sequence of two noun phrases, the first typically denoting a recipient and the second something transferred. For many such clauses there is an alternative way of expressing roughly the same thing: for Hand the guard your pass there is the alternative Hand your pass to the guard , in which the verb is followed by a single object noun phrase and the recipient is expressed after that by a preposition phrase with to . We will call these recipient-PP clauses.

1.4.1 A typical Essentialist analysis

Larson (1988) offers a generative Essentialist approach to the syntax of double-object clauses. In order to provide even a rough outline of his proposals, it will be very useful to be able to use tree diagrams of syntactic structure. A tree is a mathematical object consisting of a set of points called nodes between which certain relations hold. The nodes correspond to syntactic units; left-right order on the page corresponds to temporal order of utterance between them; and upward connecting lines represent the relation ‘is an immediate subpart of’. Nodes are labeled to show categories of phrases and words, such as noun phrase (NP); preposition phrase (PP); and verb phrase (VP). When the internal structure of some subpart of a tree is basically unimportant to the topic under discussion, it is customary to mask that part with an empty triangle. Consider a simple example: an active transitive clause like (Ai) and its passive equivalent (Aii).

A tree structure for (Ai) is shown in (T1).

In analyses of the sort Larson exemplifies, the structure of an expression is given by a derivation , which consists of a sequence of successively modified trees. Larson calls the earliest ones underlying structures. The last (and least abstract) in the derivation is the surface structure, which captures properties relevant to the way the expression is written and pronounced. The underlying structures are posited in order to better identify syntactic generalizations. They are related to surface structures by a series of operations called transformations (which generative Essentialists typically regard as mentally real operations of the human language faculty).

One of the fundamental operations that a transformation can effect is movement , which involves shifting a part of the syntactic structure of a tree to another location within it. For example, it is often claimed that passive clauses have very much the same kinds of underlying structures as the synonymous active clauses, and thus a passive clause like (Aii) would have an underlying structure much like (T1). A movement transformation would shift the guard toward the end of the clause (and add by ), and another would shift my pass into the position before the verb. In other words, passive clauses look much more like their active counterparts in underlying structure.

In a similar way, Larson proposes that a double-object clause like (B.ii) has the same underlying structure as (B.i).

Moreover, he proposes that the transformational operation of deriving the surface structure of (B.ii) from the underlying structure of (B.i) is essentially the same as the one that derives the surface structure of (A.ii) from the underlying structure of (A.i).

Larson adopts many assumptions from Chomsky (1981) and subsequent work. One is that all NPs have to be assigned Case in the course of a derivation. (Case is an abstract syntactic property, only indirectly related to the morphological case forms displayed by nominative, accusative, and genitive pronouns. Objective Case is assumed to be assigned to any NP in direct object position, e.g., my pass in (T1), and Nominative Case is assigned to an NP in the subject position of a tensed clause, e.g., the guard in (T1).)

He also makes two specific assumptions about the derivation of passive clauses. First, Case assignment to the position immediately after the verb is “suppressed”, which entails that the NP there will not get Case unless it moves to some other position. (The subject position is the obvious one, because there it will receive Nominative Case.) Second, there is an unusual assignment of semantic role to NPs: instead of the subject NP being identified as the agent of the action the clause describes, that role is assigned to an adjunct at the end of the VP (the by -phrase in (A.ii); an adjunct is a constituent with an optional modifying role in its clause rather than a grammatically obligatory one like subject or object).

Larson proposes that both of these points about passive clauses have analogs in the structure of double-object VPs. First, Case assignment to the position immediately after the verb is suppressed; and since Larson takes the preposition to to be the marker of Case, this means in effect that to disappears. This entails that the NP after to will not get Case unless it moves to some other position. Second, there is an unusual assignment of semantic role to NPs: instead of the direct object NP being identified as the entity affected by the action the clause describes, that role is assigned to an adjunct at the end of the VP.

Larson makes some innovative assumptions about VPs. First, he proposes that in the underlying structure of a double-object clause the direct object precedes the verb , the tree diagram being (T2).

This does not match the surface order of words ( showed my pass to the guard ), but it is not intended to: it is an underlying structure. A transformation will move the verb to the left of my pass to produce the surface order seen in (B.i).

Second, he assumes that there are two nodes labeled VP in a double-object clause, and two more labeled V′, though there is only one word of the verb (V) category. (Only the smaller VP and V′ are shown in the partial structure (T2).)

What is important here is that (T2) is the basis for the double-object surface structure as well. To produce that, the preposition to is erased and an additional NP position (for my pass ) is attached to the V′, thus:

The additional NP is assigned the affected-entity semantic role. The other NP ( the guard ) does not yet have Case; but Larson assumes that it moves into the NP position before the verb. The result is shown in (T4), where ‘ e ’ marks the empty string left where some words have been moved away:

Larson assumes that in this position the guard can receive Case. What remains is for the verb to move into a higher V position further to its left, to obtain the surface order:

The complete sequence of transformations is taken to give a deep theoretical explanation of many properties of (B.i) and (B.ii), including such things as what could be substituted for the two NPs, and the fact there is at least rough truth-conditional equivalence between the two clauses.

The reader with no previous experience of generative linguistics will have many questions about the foregoing sketch (e.g., whether it is really necessary to have the guard after showed in (T3), then the opposite order in (T4), and finally the same order again in (T5)). We cannot hope to answer such questions here; Larson’s paper is extremely rich in further assumptions, links to the previous literature, and additional classes of data that he aims to explain. But the foregoing should suffice to convey some of the flavor of the analysis.

The key point to note is that Essentialists seek underlying symmetries and parallels whose operation is not manifest in the data of language use. For Essentialists, there is positive explanatory virtue in hypothesizing abstract structures that are very far from being inferrable from performance; and the posited operations on those structures are justified in terms of elegance and formal parallelism with other analyses, not through observation of language use in communicative situations.

1.4.2 A typical Emergentist analysis

Many Emergentists are favorably disposed toward the kind of construction grammar expounded in Goldberg (1995). We will use her work as an exemplar of the Emergentist approach. The first thing to note is that Goldberg does not take double-object clauses like (B.ii) to be derived alternants of recipient-PP structures like (B.i), the way Larson does. So she is not looking for a regular syntactic operation that can relate their derivations; indeed, she does not posit derivations at all. She is interested in explaining correlations between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of clauses; for example, she asks this question:

How are the semantics of independent constructions related such that the classes of verbs associated with one overlap with the classes of verbs associated with another? (Goldberg 1995: 89)

Thus she aims to explain why some verbs occur in both the double-object and recipient-PP kinds of expression and some do not.

The fundamental notion in Goldberg’s linguistic theory is that of a construction . A construction can be defined very roughly as a way of structurally composing words or phrases—a sort of template—for expressing a certain class of meanings. Like Emergentists in general, Goldberg regards linguistic theory as continuous with a certain part of general cognitive psychological theory; linguistics emerges from this more general theory, and linguistic matters are rarely fully separate from cognitive matters. So a construction for Goldberg has a mental reality: it corresponds to a generalized concept or scenario expressible in a language, annotated with a guide to the linguistic structure of the expression.

Many words will be trivial examples of constructions: a single concept paired with a way of pronouncing and some details about grammatical restrictions (category, inflectional class, etc.); but constructions can be much more abstract and internally complex. The double-object construction, which Goldberg calls the Ditransitive Construction, is a moderately abstract and complex one; she diagrams it thus (p. 50):

This expresses a set of constraints on how to use English to communicate the idea of a particular kind of scenario. The scenario involves a ternary relation CAUSE-RECEIVE holding between an agent ( agt ), a recipient ( rec ), and a patient ( pat ). PRED is a variable that is filled by the meaning of a particular verb when it is employed in this construction.

The solid vertical lines downward from agt and pat indicate that for any verb integrated into this construction it is required that its subject NP should express the agent participant, and the direct object (OBJ 2 ) should express the patient participant. The dashed vertical line downward from rec signals that the first object (OBJ) may express the recipient but it does not have to—the necessity of there being a recipient is a property of the construction itself, and not every verb demands that it be made explicit who the recipient is. But if there are two objects, the first is obligatorily associated with the recipient role: We sent the builder a carpenter can only express a claim about the sending of a carpenter over to the builder, never the sending of the builder over to where a carpenter is.

When a particular verb is used in this construction, it may have obligatory accompanying NPs denoting what Goldberg calls “profiled participants” so that the match between the participant roles ( agt , rec , pat ) is one-to-one, as with the verb hand . When this verb is used, the agent (‘hander’), recipient (‘handee’), and item transferred (‘handed’) must all be made explicit. Goldberg gives the following diagram of the “composite structure” that results when hand is used in the construction:

Because of this requirement of explicit presence, Hand him your pass is grammatical, but * Hand him is not, and neither is * Hand your pass . The verb send , on the other hand, illustrates the optional syntactic expression of the recipient role: we can say Send a text message , which is understood to involve some recipient but does not make the recipient explicit.

The R notation relates to the fact that particular verbs may express either an instance of causing someone to receive something, as with hand , or a means of causing someone to receive something, as with kick : what Joe kicked Bill the ball means is that Joe caused Bill to receive the ball by means of a kicking action.

Goldberg’s discussion covers many subtle ways in which the scenario communicated affects whether the use of a construction is grammatical and appropriate. For example, there is something odd about ? Joe kicked Bill the ball he was trying to kick to Sam : the Ditransitive Construction seems best suited to cases of volitional transfer (rather than transfer as an unexpected side effect of a blunder). However, an exception is provided by a class of cases in which the transfer is not of a physical object but is only metaphorical: That guy gives me the creeps does not imply any volitional transfer of a physical object.

Metaphorical cases are distinguished from physical transfers in other ways as well. Goldberg notes sentences like The music lent the event a festive air , where the music is subject of the verb lend despite the fact that music cannot literally lend anything to anyone.

Goldberg discusses many topics such as metaphorical extension, shading, metonymy, cutting, role merging, and also presents various general principles linking meanings and constructions. One of these principles, the No Synonymy Principle, says that no two syntactically distinct constructions can be both semantically and pragmatically synonymous. It might seem that if any two sentences are synonymous, pairs like this are:

Yet the two constructions cannot be fully synonymous, both semantically and pragmatically, if the No Synonymy Principle is correct. And to support the principle, Goldberg notes purported contrasts such as this:

There is a causation-as-transfer metaphor here, and it seems to be compatible with the double object construction but not with the recipient-PP. So (in Goldberg’s view) the two are not fully synonymous.

It is no part of our aim here to provide a full account of the content of Goldberg’s discussion of double-object clauses. But what we want to highlight is that the focus is not on finding abstract elements or operations of a purely syntactic nature that are candidates for being essential properties of language per se. The focus for Emergentists is nearly always on the ways in which meaning is conveyed, the scenarios that particular constructions are used to communicate, and the aspects of language that connect up with psychological topics like cognition, perception, and conceptualization.

1.4.3 A typical Externalist analysis

One kind of work that is representative of the Externalist tendency is nicely illustrated by Bresnan et al. (2007) and Bresnan and Ford (2010). Bresnan and her colleagues defend the use of corpora—bodies of attested written and spoken texts. One of their findings is that a number of types of expressions that linguists have often taken to be ungrammatical do in fact turn up in actual use. Essentialists and Emergentists alike have often, purely on the basis of intuition, asserted that sentences like John gave Mary a kiss are grammatical but sentences like John gave a kiss to Mary are no, as we see above with Goldberg’s (D)(ii). Bresnan and her colleagues find numerous occurrences of the latter sort on the World Wide Web, and conclude that they are not ungrammatical or even unacceptable, but merely dispreferred.

Bresnan and colleagues used a three-million-word collection of recorded and transcribed spontaneous telephone conversations known as the Switchboard corpus to study the double-object and recipient-PP constructions. They first annotated the utterances with indications of a number of factors that they thought might influence the choice between the double-object and recipient-PP constructions:

• Discourse accessibility of NPs: does a particular NP refer to something already mentioned, or to something new to the discourse?
• Relative lengths of NPs: what is the difference in number of words between the recipient NP and the transferred-item NP?
• Definiteness: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs definite like the bishop or indefinite like some members
• Animacy: do the recipient and transferred-item NPs denote animate beings or inanimate things?
• Pronominality: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs pronouns?
• Number: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs singular or plural?
• person: are the recipient and transferred-item NPs first-person or second-person pronouns, or third person?

They also coded the verb meanings by assigning them to half a dozen semantic categories:

• Abstract senses ( give it some thought );
• Transfer of possession ( give him an armband );
• Future transfer of possession ( I owe you a dollar );
• Prevention of possession ( They denied me my rights );
• Communication verb sense ( tell me your name ).

They then constructed a statistical model of the corpus: a mathematical formula expressing, for each combination of the factors listed above, the ratio of the probabilities of the double object and the recipient-PP. (To be precise, they used the natural logarithm of the ratio of p to 1 − p , where p is the probability of a double-object or recipient-PP in the corpus being of the double-object form.) They then used logistic regression to predict the probability of fit to the data.

To determine how well the model generalized to unseen data, they divided the data randomly 100 times into a training set and a testing set, fit the model parameters on each training set, and scored its predictions on the unseen testing set. The average percent of correct predictions on unseen data was 92%. All components of the model except number of the recipient NP made a statistically significant difference—almost all at the 0.001 level.

What this means is that knowing only the presence or absence of the sort of factors listed above they were reliably able to predict whether double-object or recipient-PP structures would be used in a given context, with a 92% score accuracy rate.

The implication is that the two kinds of structure are not interchangeable: they are reliably differentiated by the presence of other factors in the texts in which they occur.

They then took the model they had generated for the telephone speech data and applied it to a corpus of written material: the Wall Street Journal corpus (WSJ), a collection of 1987–9 newspaper copy, only roughly edited. The main relevant difference with written language is that the language producer has more opportunity to reflect thoughtfully on how they are going to phrase things. It was reasonable to think that a model based on speech data might not transfer well. But instead the model had 93.5% accuracy. The authors conclude is that “the model for spoken English transfers beautifully to written”. The main difference between the corpora was found to be a slightly higher probability of the recipient-PP structure in written English.

In a very thorough subsequent study, Bresnan and Ford (2010) show that the results also correlate with native speakers’ metalinguistic judgments of naturalness for sentence structures, and with lexical decision latencies (speed of deciding whether the words in a text were genuine English words or not), and with a sentence completion task (choosing the most natural of a list of possible completions of a partial sentence). The results of these experiments confirmed that their model predicted participants’ performance.

Among the things to note about this work is that it was all done on directly recorded performance data: transcripts of people speaking to each other spontaneously on the phone in the case of the Switchboard corpus, stories as written by newspaper journalists in the case of WSJ, measured responses of volunteer subjects in a laboratory in the case of the psycholinguistic experiments of Bresnan and Ford (2010). The focus is on identifying the factors in linguistic performance that permit accurate prediction of future performance, and the methods of investigation have a replicability and checkability that is familiar in the natural sciences.

However, we should make it clear that the work is not some kind of close-to-the-ground collecting and classifying of instances. The models that Bresnan and her colleagues develop are sophisticated mathematical abstractions, very far removed from the records of utterance tokens. They claim that these models “allow linguistic theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and allied fields of cognitive science” (Bresnan et al. 2007: 69).

1.4.4 Conclusion

It is important to see that the contrast we have drawn here is not just between three pieces of work that chose to look at different aspects of the phenomena associated with double-object sentences. It is true that Larson focuses more on details of tree structure, Goldberg more on subtle differences in meaning, and Bresnan et al. on frequencies of occurrence. But that is not what we are pointing to. What we want to stress is that we are illustrating three different broad approaches to language that regard different facts as likely to be relevant, and make different assumptions about what needs to be accounted for, and what might count as an explanation.

Larson looks at contrasts between different kinds of clause with different meanings and see evidence of abstract operations affecting subtle details of tree structure, and parallelism between derivational operations formerly thought distinct.

Goldberg looks at the same facts and sees evidence not for anything to do with derivations but for the reality of specific constructions—roughly, packets of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information tied together by constraints.

Bresnan and her colleagues see evidence that readily observable facts about speaker behavior and frequency of word sequences correlate closely with certain lexical, syntactic, and semantic properties of words.

Nothing precludes defenders of any of the three approaches from paying attention to any of the phenomena that the other approaches attend to. There is ample opportunity for linguists to mix aspects of the three approaches in particular projects. But in broad outline there are three different tendencies exhibited here, with stereotypical views and assumptions roughly as we laid them out in Table 1.

2. The Subject Matter of Linguistic Theories

The complex and multi-faceted character of linguistic phenomena means that the discipline of linguistics has a whole complex of distinguishable subject matters associated with different research questions. Among the possible topics for investigation are these:

• the capacity of humans to acquire, use, and invent languages;
• the abstract structural patterns (phonetic, morphological, syntactic, or semantic) found in a particular language under some idealization;
• systematic structural manifestations of the use of some particular language;
• the changes in a language or among languages across time;
• the psychological functioning of individuals who have successfully acquired particular languages;
• the psychological processes underlying speech or linguistically mediated thinking in humans;
• the evolutionary origin of (i), and/or (ii).

There is no reason for all of the discipline of linguistics to converge on a single subject matter, or to think that the entire field of linguistics cannot have a diverse range of subject matters. To give a few examples:

• The influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) distinguished between langue , a socially shared set of abstract conventions (compare with (ii)) and parole , the particular choices made by a speaker deploying a language (compare (iii)).
• The anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (1921, 1929) thought that human beings have a seemingly species-universal capacity to acquire and use languages (compare (i)), but his own interest was limited to the systematic structural features of particular languages (compare (ii)) and the psychological reality of linguistic units such as the phoneme (an aspect of (vi)), and the psychological effects of language and thought (an aspect of (v)).
• Bloomfield (1933) showed a strong interest in historical linguistic change (compare (iv)), distinguishing that sharply (much as Saussure did) from synchronic description of language structure ((ii) again) and language use (compare (iii)), arguing that the study of (iv) presupposed (vi).
• Bloomfield famously eschewed all dualistic mentalistic approaches to the study of language, but since he rejected them on materialist ontological grounds, his rejection of mentalism was not clearly a rejection of (vi) or (vii): his attempt to cast linguistics in terms of stimulus-response psychology indicates that he was sympathetic to the Weissian psychology of his time and accepted that linguistics might have psychological subject matter.
• Zellig Harris, on the other hand, showed little interest in the psychology of language, concentrating on mathematical techniques for tackling (ii).

Most saliently of all, Harris’s student Chomsky reacted strongly against indifference toward the mind, and insisted that the principal subject matter of linguistics was, and had to be, a narrow psychological version of (i), and an individual, non-social, and internalized conception of (ii).

In the course of advancing his view, Chomsky introduced a number of novel pairs of terms into the linguistics literature: competence vs. performance (Chomsky 1965); ‘I-language’ vs. ‘E-language’ (Chomsky 1986); the faculty of language in the narrow sense vs. the and faculty of language in the broad sense (the ‘FLN’ and ‘FLB’ of Hauser et al. 2002). Because Chomsky’s terminological innovations have been adopted so widely in linguistics, the focus of sections 2.1–2.3 will be to examine the use of these expressions as they were introduced into the linguistics literature and consider their relation to (i)–(vii).

Essentialists invariably distinguish between what Chomsky (1965) called competence and performance . Competence is what knowing a language confers: a tacit grasp of the structural properties of all the sentences of a language. Performance involves actual real-time use, and may diverge radically from the underlying competence, for at least two reasons: (a) an attempt to produce an utterance may be perturbed by non-linguistic factors like being distracted or interrupted, changing plans or losing attention, being drunk or having a brain injury; or (b) certain capacity limits of the mechanisms of perception or production may be overstepped.

Emergentists tend to feel that the competence/performance distinction sidelines language use too much. Bybee and McClelland put it this way:

One common view is that language has an essential and unique inner structure that conforms to a universal ideal, and what people say is a potentially imperfect reflection of this inner essence, muddied by performance factors. According to an opposing view…language use has a major impact on language structure. The experience that users have with language shapes cognitive representations, which are built up through the application of general principles of human cognition to linguistic input. The structure that appears to underlie language use reflects the operation of these principles as they shape how individual speakers and hearers represent form and meaning and adapt these forms and meanings as they speak. (Bybee and McClelland 2005: 382)

And Externalists are often concerned to describe and explain not only language structure, but also the workings of processing mechanisms and the etiology of performance errors.

However, every linguist accepts that some idealization away from the speech phenomena is necessary. Emergentists and Externalists are almost always happy to idealize away from sporadic speech errors. What they are not so keen to do is to idealize away from limitations on linguistic processing and the short-term memory on which it relies. Acceptance of a thoroughgoing competence/performance distinction thus tends to be a hallmark of Essentialist approaches, which take the nature of language to be entirely independent of other human cognitive processes (though of course capable of connecting to them).

The Essentialists’ practice of idealizing away from even psycholinguistically relevant factors like limits on memory and processing plays a significant role in various important debates within linguistics. Perhaps the most salient and famous is the issue of whether English is a finite-state language.

The claim that English is not accepted by any finite-state automaton can only be supported by showing that every grammar for English has center- embedding to an unbounded depth (see Levelt 2008: 20–23 for an exposition and proof of the relevant theorem, originally from Chomsky 1959). But even depth-3 center-embedding of clauses (a clause interrupting a clause that itself interrupts a clause) is in practice extraordinarily hard to process. Hardly anyone can readily understand even semantically plausible sentences like Vehicles that engineers who car companies trust build crash every day . And such sentences virtually never occur, even in writing. Karlsson (2007) undertakes an extensive examination of available textual material, and concludes that depth-3 center-embeddings are vanishingly rare, and no genuine depth-4 center-embedding has ever occurred at all in naturally composed text. He proposes that there is no reason to regard center-embedding as grammatical beyond depth 3 (and for spoken language, depth 2). Karlsson is proposing a grammar that stays close to what performance data can confirm; the standard Essentialist view is that we should project massively from what is observed, and say that depth- n center-embedding is fully grammatical for all n .

Chomsky (1986) introduced into the linguistics literature two technical notions of a language: ‘E-Language’ and ‘I-Language’. He deprecates the former as either undeserving of study or as a fictional entity, and promotes the latter as the only scientifically respectable object of study for a serious linguistics.

2.2.1 ‘E-language’

Chomsky’s notion ‘E-language’ is supposed to suggest by its initial ‘E’ both ‘extensional’ (concerned with which sentences happen to satisfy a definition of a language rather than with what the definition says) and ‘external’ (external to the mind, that is, non-mental). The dismissal of E-language as an object of study is aimed at critics of Essentialism—many but not all of those critics falling within our categories of Externalists and Emergentists.

Extensional . First, there is an attempt to impugn the extensional notion of a language that is found in two radically different strands of Externalist work. Some Externalist investigations are grounded in the details of attested utterances (as collected in corpora), external to human minds. Others, with mathematical or computational interests, sometimes idealize languages as extensionally definable objects (typically infinite sets of strings) with a certain structure, independently of whatever device might be employed to characterize them. A set of strings of words either is or is not regular (finite-state), either is or is not recursive (decidable), etc., independently of forms of grammar statement. Chomsky (1986) basically dismissed both corpus-based work and mathematical linguistics simply on the grounds that they employ an extensional conception of language that is, a conception that removes the object of study from having an essential connection with the mental.

External . Second, a distinct meaning based on ‘external’ was folded into the neologism ‘E-language’ to suggest criticism of any view that conceives of a natural language as a public, intersubjectively accessible system used by a community of people (often millions of them spread across different countries). Here, the objection is that languages as thus conceived have no clear criteria of individuation in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On this conception, the subject matter of interest is a historico-geographical entity that changes as it is transmitted over generations, or over mountain ranges. Famously, for example, there is a gradual valley-to-valley change in the language spoken between southeastern France and northwestern Italy such that each valley’s speakers can understand the next. But the far northwesterners clearly speak French and the far southeasterners clearly speak Italian. It is the politically defined geographical border, not the intrinsic properties of the dialects, that would encourage viewing this continuum as two different languages.

Perhaps the most famous quotation by any linguist is standardly attributed to Max Weinreich (1945): ‘A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot’ (‘A language is a dialect with an army and navy’; he actually credits the remark to an unnamed student). The implication is that E-languages are defined in terms of non-linguistic, non-essential properties. Essentialists object that a scientific linguistics cannot tolerate individuating French and Italian in a way that is subject to historical contingencies of wars and treaties (after all, the borders could have coincided with a different hill or valley had some battle had a different outcome).

Considerations of intelligibility fare no better. Mutual intelligibility between languages is not a transitive relation, and sometimes the intelligibility relation is not even symmetric (smaller, more isolated, or less prestigious groups often understand the dialects of larger, more central, or higher-prestige groups when the converse does not hold). So these sociological facts cannot individuate languages either.

Chomsky therefore concludes that languages cannot be defined or individuated extensionally or mind-externally, and hence the only scientifically interesting conception of a ‘language’ is the ‘I-language’ view (see for example Chomsky 1986: 25; 1992; 1995 and elsewhere). Chomsky says of E-languages that “all scientific approaches have simply abandoned these elements of what is called ‘language’ in common usage” (Chomsky 1988, 37); and “we can define E-language in one way or another or not at all, since the concept appears to play no role in the theory of language” (Chomsky 1986: 26; in saying that it appears to play no role in the theory of language, here he means that it plays no role in the theory he favours).

This conclusion may be bewildering to non-linguists as well as non-Essentialists. It is at odds with what a broad range of philosophers have tacitly assumed or explicitly claimed about language or languages: ‘[A language] is a practice in which people engage…it is constituted by rules which it is part of social custom to follow’ (Dummett 1986: 473–473); ‘Language is a set of rules existing at the level of common knowledge’ and these rules are ‘norms which govern intentional social behavior’ (Itkonen 1978: 122), and so on. Generally speaking, those philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein also take the view that a language is a social-historical entity. But the opposite view has become a part of the conceptual underpinning of linguistics for many Essentialists.

Failing to have precise individuation conditions is surely not a sufficient reason to deny that an entity can be studied scientifically. ‘Language’ as a count noun in the extensional and socio-historical sense is vague, but this need not be any greater obstacle to theorizing about them than is the vagueness of other terms for historical entities without clear individuation conditions, like ‘species’ and ‘individual organism’ in biology.

At least some Emergentist linguists, and perhaps some Externalists, would be content to say that languages are collections of social conventions, publicly shared, and some philosophers would agree (see Millikan 2003, for example, and Chomsky 2003 for a reply). Lewis (1969) explicitly defends the view that language can be understood in terms of public communications, functioning to solve coordination problems within a group (although he acknowledges that the coordination could be between different temporal stages of one individual, so language use by an isolated person is also intelligible; see the appendix “Lewis’s Theory of Languages as Conventions” in the entry on idiolects , for further discussion of Lewis). What Chomsky calls E-languages, then, would be perfectly amenable to linguistic or philosophical study. Santana (2016) makes a similar argument in terms of scientific idealization. He argues that since all sciences idealize their targets, Chomsky needs to do more to show why idealizations concerning E-languages are illicit (see also Stainton 2014).

2.2.2 ‘I-language’

Chomsky (1986) introduced the neologism ‘I-language’ in part to disambiguate the word ‘grammar’. In earlier generative Essentialist literature, ‘grammar’ was (deliberately) ambiguous between (i) the linguist’s generative theory and (ii) what a speaker knows when they know a language. ‘I-language’ can be regarded as a replacement for Bever’s term ‘psychogrammar’ (see also George 1989): it denotes a mental or psychological entity (not a grammarian’s description of a language as externally manifested).

I-language is first discussed under the sub-heading of ‘internalized language’ to denote linguistic knowledge. Later discussion in Chomsky 1986 and 1995 makes it clear that the ‘I’ of ‘I-language’ is supposed to suggest at least three English words: ‘individual’, ‘internal’, and ‘intensional’. And Chomsky emphasizes that the neologism also implies a kind of realism about speakers’ knowledge of language.

Individual . A language is claimed to be strictly a property of individual human beings—not groups. The contrast is between the idiolect of a single individual, and a dialect or language of a geographical, social, historical, or political group. I-languages are properties of the minds of individuals who know them.

Internal . As generative Essentialists see it, your I-language is a state of your mind/brain. Meaning is internal—indeed, on Chomsky’s conception, an I-language

is a strictly internalist, individualist approach to language, analogous in this respect to studies of the visual system. If the cognitive system of Jones’s language faculty is in state L, we will say that Jones has the I-language L. (Chomsky 1995: 13)

And he clarifies the sense in which an I-language is internal by appealing to an analogy with the way the study of vision is internal:

The same considerations apply to the study of visual perception along lines pioneered by David Marr, which has been much discussed in this connection. This work is mostly concerned with operations carried out by the retina; loosely put, the mapping of retinal images to the visual cortex. Marr’s famous three levels of analysis—computational, algorithmic, and implementation—have to do with ways of construing such mappings. Again, the theory applies to a brain in a vat exactly as it does to a person seeing an object in motion. (Chomsky 1995: 52)

Thus, while the speaker’s I-language may be involved in performing operations over representations of distal stimuli—representations of other speaker’s utterances—I-languages can and should be studied in isolation from their external environments.

Although Chomsky sometimes refers to this narrow individuation of I-languages as ‘individual’, he clearly claims that I-languages are individuated in isolation from both speech communities and other aspects of the broadly conceived natural environment:

Suppose Jones is a member of some ordinary community, and J is indistinguishable from him except that his total experience derives from some virtual reality design; or let J be Jones’s Twin in a Twin-Earth scenario. They have had indistinguishable experiences and will behave the same way (in so far as behavior is predictable at all); they have the same internal states. Suppose that J replaces Jones in the community, unknown to anyone except the observing scientist. Unaware of any change, everyone will act as before, treating J as Jones; J too will continue as before. The scientist seeking the best theory of all of this will construct a narrow individualist account of Jones, J, and others in the community. The account omits nothing… (Chomsky 1995: 53–54)

This passage can also be seen as suggesting a radically intensionalist conception of language.

Intensional . The way in which I-languages are ‘intensional’ for Chomsky needs a little explication. The concept of intension is familiar in logic and semantics, where ‘intensional’ contrasts with ‘extensional’. The extension of a predicate like blue is simply the set of all blue objects; the intension is the function that picks out in a given world the blue objects contained therein. In a similar way, the extension of a set can be distinguished from an intensional description of the set in terms of a function: the set of integer squares is {1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, …}, and the intension could be given in terms of the one-place function f such that f ( n ) = n × n . One difference between the two accounts of squaring is that the intensional one could be applied to a different domain (any domain on which the ‘×’ operation is defined: on the rationals rather than the integers, for example, the extension of the identically defined function is a different and larger set containing infinitely many fractions).

In an analogous way, a language can be identified with the set of all and only its expressions (regardless of what sort of object an expression is: a word sequence, a tree structure, a complete derivation, or whatever), which is the extensional view; but it can also be identified intensionally by means of a recipe or formal specification of some kind—what linguists call a grammar. Ludlow (2011) considers the first I (individual) to be the weakest link and thus the most expendable. He argues in its stead for a concept of a “Ψ-language” which allows for the possibility of the I-language relating to external objects either constitutively or otherwise.

In natural language semantics, an intensional context is one where substitution of co-extensional terms fails to preserve truth value ( Scott is Scott is true, and Scott is the author of Waverley is true, but the truth of George knows that Scott is Scott doesn’t guarantee the truth of George knows that Scott is the author of Waverly , so knows that establishes an intensional context).

Chomsky claims that the truth of an I-language attribution is not preserved by substituting terms that have the same extension. That is, even when two human beings do not differ at all on what expressions are grammatical, it may be false to say that they have the same I-language. Where H is a human being and L is a language (in the informal sense) and R is the relation of knowing (or having, or using) that holds between a human being and a language, Chomsky holds, in effect, that R establishes an intensional context in statements of the theory:

[F]or H to know L is for H to have a certain I-language. The statements of the grammar are statements of the theory of mind about the I-language, hence structures of the brain formulated at a certain level of abstraction from mechanisms. These structures are specific things in the world, with their properties… The I-language L may be the one used by a speaker but not the I-language L′ even if the two generate the same class of expressions (or other formal objects) … L′ may not even be a possible human I-language, one attainable by the language faculty. (Chomsky 1986: 23)

The idea is that two individuals can know (or have, or use) different I-languages that generate exactly the same strings of words, and even give them exactly the same structures. This situation forms the basis of Quine’s (1972) infamous critique of the psychological reality of generative grammars (see Johnson 2015 for a solution in terms of invariance of ‘behaviorally equivalent grammar formalisms, to use Quine’s terminology, see also Nefdt 2021 for a similar resolution in terms of structural realism in the philosophy of science).

The generative Essentialist conception of an I-language is antithetical to Emergentist research programs. If the fundamental explanandum of scientific linguistics is how actual linguistic communication takes place, one must start by looking at both internal (psychological) and external (public) practices and conventions in virtue of which it occurs, and consider the effect of historical and geographic contingencies on the relevant underlying processes. That would not rule out ‘I-language’ as part of the explanans; but some Emergentists seem to be fictionalists about I-languages, in an analogous sense to the way that Chomsky is a fictionalist about E-languages. Emergentists do not see a child as learning a generative grammar, but as learning how to use a symbolic system for propositional communication. On this view grammars are mere artifacts that are developed by linguists to codify aspects of the relevant systems, and positing an I-language amounts to projecting the linguist’s codification illegitimately onto human minds (see, for example, Tomasello 2003).

The I-language concept brushes aside certain phenomena of interest to the Externalists, who hold that the forms of actually attested expressions (sentences, phrases, syllables, and systems of such units) are of interest for linguistics. For example, computational linguistics (work on speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language interfaces to databases) must rely on a conception of language as public and extensional; so must any work on the utterances of young children, or the effects of word frequency on vowel reduction, or misunderstandings caused by road sign wordings. At the very least, it might be said on behalf of this strain of Externalism (along the lines of Soames 1984) that linguistics will need careful work on languages as intersubjectively accessible systems before hypotheses about the I-language that purportedly produces them can be investigated.

It is a highly biased claim that the E-language concept “appears to play no role in the theory of language” (Chomsky 1986: 26). Indeed, the terminological contrast seems to have been invented not to clarify a distinction between concepts but to nudge linguistic research in a particular direction.

In Hauser et al. (2002) (henceforth HCF) a further pair of contrasting terms is introduced. They draw a distinction quite separate from the competence/performance and ‘I-language’/‘E-language’ distinctions: the “language faculty in the narrow sense” (FLN) is distinguished from the “language faculty in the broad sense” (FLB). According to HCF, FLB “excludes other organism-internal systems that are necessary but not sufficient for language (e.g., memory, respiration, digestion, circulation, etc.)” but includes whatever is involved in language, and FLN is some limited part of FLB (p. 1571) This is all fairly vague, but it is clear that FLN and FLB are both internal rather than external, and individual rather than social.

The FLN/FLB distinction apparently aims to address the uniqueness of one component of the human capacity for language rather than (say) the content of human grammars. HCF say (p. 1573) that “Only FLN is uniquely human”; they “hypothesize that most, if not all, of FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals”; and they say:

[T]he computations underlying FLN may be quite limited. In fact, we propose in this hypothesis that FLN comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces. (ibid.)

The components of FLB that HCF hypothesize are not part of FLN are the “sensory-motor” and “conceptual-intentional” systems. The study of the conceptual-intentional system includes investigations of things like the theory of mind; referential vocal signals; whether imitation is goal directed; and the field of pragmatics. The study of the sensory motor system, by contrast, includes “vocal tract length and formant dispersion in birds and primates”; learning of songs by songbirds; analyses of vocal dialects in whales and spontaneous imitation of artificially created sounds in dolphins; “primate vocal production, including the role of mandibular oscillations”; and “[c]ross-modal perception and sign language in humans versus unimodal communication in animals”.

It is presented as an empirical hypothesis that a core property of the FLN is “recursion”:

All approaches agree that a core property of FLN is recursion, attributed to narrow syntax…FLN takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions. This capacity of FLN yields discrete infinity (a property that also characterizes the natural numbers). (HCF, p. 1571)

HCF leave open exactly what the FLN includes in addition to recursion. It is not ruled out that the FLN incorporates substantive universals as well as the formal property of “recursion”. But whatever “recursion” is in this context, it is apparently not domain-specific in the sense of earlier discussions by generative Essentialists, because it is not unique to human natural language or defined over specifically linguistic inputs and outputs: it is the basis for humans’ grasp of the formal and arguably non-natural language of arithmetic (counting, and the successor function), and perhaps also navigation and social relations. It might be more appropriate to say that HCF identify recursion as a cognitive universal, not a linguistic one. And in that case it is difficult to see how the so-called ‘language faculty’ deserves that name: it is more like a faculty for cognition and communication.

This abandonment of linguistic domain-specificity contrasts very sharply with the picture that was such a prominent characteristic of the earlier work on linguistic nativism, popularized in different ways by Fodor (1983), Barkow et al. (1992), and Pinker (1994). And yet the HCF discussion of FLN seems to incline to the view that human language capacities have a unique human (though not uniquely linguistic) essence.

The FLN/FLB distinction provides earlier generative Essentialism with an answer (at least in part) to the question of what the singularity of the human language faculty consists in, and it does so in a way that subsumes many of the empirical discoveries of paleoanthropology, primatology, and ethnography that have been part of highly influential in Emergentist approaches as well as neo-Darwinian Essentialist approaches. A neo-Darwinian Essentialist like Pinker will accept that the language faculty involves recursion, but also will also hold (with Emergentists) that human language capacities originated, via natural selection, for the purpose of linguistic communication.

Thus, over the years, those Essentialists who follow Chomsky closely have changed the term they use for their core subject matter from ‘linguistic competence’ to ‘I-language’ to ‘FLN’, and the concepts expressed by these terms are all slightly different. In particular, what they are counterposed to differs in each case.

The challenge for the generative Essentialist adopting the FLN/FLB distinction as characterized by HCF is to identify empirical data that can support the hypothesis that the FLN “yields discrete infinity”. That will mean answering the question: discrete infinity of what? HCF write that FLN “takes a finite set of elements and yields a potentially infinite array of discrete expressions” (p. 1571), which makes it clear that there must be a recursive procedure in the mathematical sense, perhaps putting atomic elements such as words together to make internally complex elements like sentences (“array” should probably be understood as a misnomer for ‘set’). But then they say, somewhat mystifyingly:

Each of these discrete expressions is then passed to the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems, which process and elaborate this information in the use of language. Each expression is, in this sense, a pairing of sound and meaning. (HCF, p. 1571)

But the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems are concrete parts of the organism: muscles and nerves and articulatory organs and perceptual channels and neuronal activity. How can each one of a “potentially infinite array” be “passed to” such concrete systems without it taking a potentially infinite amount of time? HCF may mean that for any one of the expressions that FLN defines as well-formed (by generating it) there is a possibility of its being used as the basis for a pairing of sound and meaning. This would be closer to the classical generative Essentialist view that the grammar generates an infinite set of structural descriptions; but it is not what HCF say.

At root, HCF is a polemical work intended to identify the view it promotes as valuable and all other approaches to linguistics as otiose.

In the varieties of modern linguistics that concern us here, the term “language” is used quite differently to refer to an internal component of the mind/brain (sometimes called internal language or I-language).… However, this biologically and individually grounded usage still leaves much open to interpretation (and misunderstanding). For example, a neuroscientist might ask: What components of the human nervous system are recruited in the use of language in its broadest sense? Because any aspect of cognition appears to be, at least in principle, accessible to language, the broadest answer to this question is, probably, “most of it.” Even aspects of emotion or cognition not readily verbalized may be influenced by linguistically based thought processes. Thus, this conception is too broad to be of much use. (HCF, p. 1570)

It is hard to see this as anything other than a claim that approaches to linguistics focusing on anything that could fall under the label ‘E-language’ are to be dismissed as useless.

Some Externalists and Emergentists actually reject the idea that the human capacity for language yields “a potentially infinite array of expressions”. It is often pointed out by empirically inclined computational linguists that in practice there will only ever be a finite number of sentences to be dealt with (though the people saying this may underestimate the sheer vastness of the finite set involved). And naturally, for those who do not believe there are generative grammars in speakers’ heads at all, it holds a fortiori that speakers do not have grammars in their heads generating infinite languages (see Nefdt 2019c for a scientific modeling perspective on the infinity postulate). Externalists and Emergentists tend to hold that the “discrete infinity” that HCF posits is more plausibly a property of the generative Essentialists’ model of linguistic competence, I-language, or FLN, than a part of the human mind/brain. This does not mean that non-Essentialists deny that actual language use is creative, or (of course) that they think there is a longest sentence of English. But they may reject the link between linguistic productivity or creativity and the mathematical notion of recursion (see Pullum and Scholz 2010).

HCF’s remarks about how FLN “yields” or “generates” a specific “array” assume that languages are clearly and sharply individuated by their generators. They appear to be committed to the view that there is a fact of the matter about exactly which generator is in a given speaker’s head. Emergentists tend not to individuate languages in this way, and may reject generative grammars entirely as inappropriately or unacceptably ‘formalist’. They are content with the notion that the common-sense concept of a language is vague, and it is not the job of linguistic theory to explain what a language is, any more than it is the job of physicists to explain what material is, or of biologists to explain what life is. Emergentists, in particular, are interested not so much in identifying generators, or individuating languages, but in exploring the component capacities that facilitate linguistic communication, and finding out how they interact.

Similarly, Externalists are interested in the linguistic structure of expressions, but have little use for the idea of a discrete infinity of them, a view that is not, and cannot be empirically supported, unless one thinks of simplicity and elegance of theory as empirical matters. They focus on the outward manifestations of language, not on a set of expressions regarded as a whole language—at least not in any way that would give a language a definite cardinality. Zellig Harris, an archetypal Externalist, is explicit that the reason for not regarding the set of utterances as finite concerns the elegance of the resulting grammar: “If we were to insist on a finite language, we would have to include in our grammar several highly arbitrary and numerical conditions” (Harris 1957: 208). Infinitude, on his view is an unimportant side consequence of setting up a sentence-generating grammar in an uncluttered and maximally elegant way, not a discovered property of languages (see Pullum and Scholz 2010 for further discussion).

Not all Essentialists agree that linguistics studies aspects of what is in the mind or aspects of what is human. There are some who do not see language as either mental or human, and certainly do not regard linguists as working on a problem within cognitive psychology or neurophysiology. The debate on the ontology of language has seen three major options emerging in the literature. Besides the mentalism of Chomskyan linguistics, Katz (1981), Katz and Postal (1991) and Postal (2003) proffered a platonistic alternative and finally nominalism was proposed by Devitt (2006).

However, the Katzian trichotomy is no longer a useful characterisation of the state-of-the-art in linguistic ontology. For one thing, Katzian-style linguistic Platonism has very few if any extant adherents. One reason for this situation is that linguistic platonists attempt to restage the debate on the foundations and metaphysics of natural language within the philosophy of mathematics (see Katz 1996). But even if this move was legitimate, it would only have opened up a range of possibilities including nominalism (Field 1980; Azzouni 2004), structuralism (Hellman 1989; Shapiro 2007; Nefdt 2016), and forms of mentalism in the guise of intuitionism. For instance, while Richard Montague is often attributed with the view that linguistics can be viewed as a branch of mathematics, it is unclear whether or not he endorsed a platonistic ontology. Devitt (2006: 26) describes the possibility of a ‘methodological platonism’ in the following manner:

It is often convenient to talk of objects posited by these theories as if they were types not tokens, as if they were Platonic objects, but this need be nothing more than a manner of speaking: when the chips are down the objects are part of the spatiotemporal physical world.

Devitt’s nominalism or ‘linguistic conception’ was not around at the time of the original Katzian tripartite analysis. He argues that linguistics is an empirical science which studies languages as they are spoken by linguistic communities and viewing sentences as ‘idealised tokens’. Devitt’s ‘linguistic view’ (as opposed to the ’psychological view’ or Chomskyan mentalism) claims that grammars map onto behavioural output of language production, of which speakers are generally ignorant.

Katz took nominalism to have been refuted by Chomsky in his critiques of American structuralists in the 1960s. But, in Katz’s opinion, Chomsky had failed to notice that conceptualism was infected with many of the same faults as nominalism, because it too localized language spatiotemporally (in contingently existing, finite, human brains). Since contemporary Minimalist theories share in the earlier ontological commitment, Katz’ argument would presumably extent to them. Through an argument by elimination, Katz concluded that only platonism remained, and must be the correct view to adopt. But this is a false trichotomy and besides predating Devitt’s more philosophically grounded nominalism, it also fails to take linguistic pluralism into account.

Recent adherents of pluralism are Stainton (2014) and Santana (2016). Santana (2016) argues in favour of a pluralistic ontology for natural language based on all of the major foundational approaches, including sociolinguistic ontology. His approach is thoroughly naturalistic in asking the ontological question through the lens of “what sort of roles the concept of language plays in linguistic theory and practice” (Santana, 2016: 501).

The first thing Santana does is to separate the discussion into two related questions, one scientific and the other metascientific or ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ in his terms. He claims that “[l]anguage, the scientific concept, is thus descriptively whatever it is that linguists take as their primary object of study, and normatively whatever it is they should be studying” (Santana, 2016: 501). Eventually he advocates a union of various ontologies based on the ineliminable status of each perspective (in that way the oppose of Katz’ eliminative strategy).

Stainton (2014) similarly proposes a pluralistic ontology but with a more intersectional approach. His additional argument relates to how all of the views are indeed compatible. This argument is a response to an immediate objection along the lines of Postal (2003, 2009) as to the incompatibility of the various ontologies associated with mentalism, Platonism, physicalism and public language views. Stainton begins the pluralist apology in this way.

There is an obvious rebuttal on behalf of pluralism, namely that “the linguistic” is a complex phenomenon with parts that belong to distinct ontological categories. This shouldn’t surprise, since even “the mathematical” is like this: Two wholly physical dogs plus two other wholly physical dogs yields four dogs; there certainly is the mental operation of multiplying 26 by 84, the mental state of thinking about the square root of 7, and so on. (2014: 5)

His main argument against incompatibility, and in favour of intersection, is that the former rests on an equivocation of the terms ‘mental’, ‘abstract’ and even ‘physical’. Once the equivocation is cleared up, it is argued, hybrid ontological objects are licensed. The argument goes that appreciating the nuanced physical and mental and what he calls ‘abstractish’ nature of natural language will dissolve worries about ontological inconsistency and open the door for intersection. Consider some other members of this category of objects.

Indeed, our world is replete with such hybrid objects: psychocultural kinds (e.g. dining room tables, footwear, bonfires, people, sport fishing [...]; intellectual artifacts (college diplomas, drivers’ licenses, the Canadian dollar [...]; and institutions (MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Disneyworld [...] (Stainton, 2014: 6).

Despite the decline in interest in the ontology of language itself, philosophers have recently embraced a subset of this debate in the philosophy of linguistic objects with a special focus on words. There is a recent debate in philosophy on the philosophy of what Rey (2006, 2020) calls ‘Standard Linguistic Entities’ (SLEs) or tokens of word, sentence, morpheme, and phonemes types. Rey then defines a position called ’physical tokenism’ or PT as the assumption that SLEs can be identified with physical (acoustic) spatio-temporal phenomena. He doesn’t think that SLEs share the same kind of existence as his trusty Honda. In fact he thinks that they are ‘intentional inexistents’ (borrowed from Brentano, see the SEP entry on ‘Brentano’s Theory of Judgement, see also the section entitled ‘Intentional Inexistence’ in the entry on Intentionality ) or purely intentional uses of the term ‘represents’ which denote fictions of a particular sort. Linguistic theory according to him is only committed to the intentional contents of things like nouns, verbs, verb phrases etc. where “an (intentional) content is whatever we understand x to be when we use the idiom ‘represent(ation of) x’ but there is no real x” (2006: 242).

There has been some theoretical work on the nature of entities like phrases and words in linguistics. For example, Ross (2010) argues that the concept of parts of speech is fuzzy. Similarly, Szabó (2015) rejects the idea that parts of speech should be identified by distributional analysis as is common in syntax. Instead he offers a semantic approach based on predicate logic where the aim is to model the major lexical categories directly in terms of open class constants. This, he claims, results in a reduction of the gap between grammar and logic. So, for instance, nouns become not types corresponding to distributionally defined syntactic objects but rather open lexical constants used for reference such that the semantic clause only needs to involve a universal quantifier and a variable specified in terms of reference. Verbs, on the other hand, are constants which purport to predicate (for more details, see Szabó 2015 and Nefdt 2020). For Haspelmath (2011) a central problem is the concept of wordhood. He identifies ten morphosyntactic criteria for words as the best possible candidates over seemingly inferior semantic or phonological options. He shows all of them to be wanting, with the result among other things being that “the notion of lexical integrity is not well supported and should not be appealed to in explaining grammatical phenomena” (Haspelmath, 2011: 33). The very notion of wordhood, although intuitive and central, is unclear upon further scrutiny. Yet, in linguistics there is continual hope for a resolution, that there is something more than essential inexistence at stake. Haspelmath thinks this is a vain hope, and attributes it to the influence of orthography on the thought of linguist researchers.

Philosophers have been traditionally interested in the metaphysics of SLEs with a special focus on the ontological status of words. Interestingly, this literature showcases variations on the foundational debates on the ontology of language. As Miller (2020) notes:

Words play various roles in our lives. Some insult, some inspire, and words are central to communication. The aim of an ontology of words is to determine what entities, if any, can play those roles and possess (or instantiate) these properties. (2)

However the positions advocated are somewhat more nuanced than the original Katzian trichotomy suggests. They usually start with the problem of word individuation expressed in the following manner:

Think of the following line: A rose is a rose is a rose. How many words are there in this line? If we were to count words themselves, not their instances, the answer is three: rose, is, and a. If we were to count the concrete instances we see on a piece of paper, the answer is eight. The line, however, can be taken as an abstract type; a sequence of shapes. (Irmak, 2019: 1140)

Further complications are introduced by reference to words like “color” and “colour”. Here the idea is that the phonological profile of a word is a guide to its identity. But this fails in other cases.

Now take the name MOHAMMED. Since Arabic does not notate vowels, the name has been transcribed in a wide variety of ways in English, and some of such transcriptions present important discrepancies: For example, “Mohammad” and “Mehmood.” Even if we know that they originated from the same source, the difference between the two forms is considerable, and intuitions about their being variants of the same name are less clear. What is the point up to which differences in spelling are consistent with word identity? (Gasparri, 2021: 594)

Word individuation goes beyond this initial characterisation and it is not always clear how the many accounts deal with the more complex questions directly in their metaphysical pursuits. For instance, issues not usually mentioned in the literature, but which seem equally important are related to whether pitch in ‘They poured pitch all over the parking lot’ and ‘The players swarmed the pitch after they won the game’ are different words. What about words within different syntactic categories, such as ‘watch’ (time-telling device) and ‘watch’ (observe)? Are “ain’t” and “isn’t” and “aren’t” different words? What about simple cases of inflectional morphology such as like ‘toy’ and ‘toys’?

According to Nefdt (2019b), the identity of a word is tied to its role in the sentence structure. In which case, “ain’t” and “isn’t” come out as the same word (at least in the singular use) but ‘watch’ (noun) and ‘watch’ (verb) do not. However, counterintuitively, his account might license the identity of words like ‘truck’ and ‘lorry’.

There are two strong but separate traditions which can both lay claim to being the ‘received position’. Within linguistics, the idea of a word as a LEXEME or mental dictionary entry is commonplace (with stipulations for senses, irregular forms, and selectional criteria). Most introductory textbooks assume something of this sort. In the philosophical literature, on the other hand, a mild or methodological version of platonism is often presupposed. This view has it that words can be separated into types and tokens, where the former lack specific spatiotemporal features and the latter instantiate these forms somehow.

The latter intuition seems to characterize most views on the ontology of words. Bromberger (1989) defines what he calls “the Platonic Relationship Principle” or the principle that allows us to ‘impute properties to types after observing and judging some of their tokens’ (Bromberger 1989, 62). While Bromberger (1989, 2011) represents the pinnacle of the classical philosophy of linguistics approach to these questions. In a more metaphysical mode, David Kaplan (1990, 2011) constructs a thoroughly physicalist proposal in which words are modelled in terms of a stages and continuants:

I propose a quite different model according to which utterances and inscriptions are stages of words, which are the continuants made up of these interpersonal stages along with some more mysterious intrapersonal stages. (Kaplan 1990: 98)

For him, what individuates words is the intention of the user (see Cappelen (1999) for an objection to intentional accounts tout court). Unfortunately, fascinating as Kaplan’s proposal is, it does not attempt to reflect on linguistic theory directly. In fact, one major criticism of his view, courtesy of Hawthorne and Lepore (2011), is that it fails to account for uninstantiated word-types whose existence is guaranteed by derivational morphology, whether or not they’ve been tokened or baptized in the real world. Other notable accounts are Wetzel’s (2009) Platonism (see the SEP entry on abstract objects ) and Szabó’s (1999) representational/nominalist view.

The philosophy of words has recently seen a resurgence in interest among philosophers, especially on the ontological issues. Miller (2021), for example, attempts to apply a bundle theory to the task of word individuation and identification. Irmak (2019) suggests that words are abstract artifacts (similarly to Katz and Wetzel) but insists that they are more akin to musical scores or works of fiction which have temporal components (“temporal abstracta” as he calls it). Mallory (2020) advocates the position that words are not really objects in the ordinary sense. However, he opts for an action-theoretic approach in which tokens provide instructions for the performance of action-types where our normal understanding of ‘word’ is to be identified with those types. His view is overtly naturalistic and focuses on the concept of words which is drawn from contemporary linguistic theory. Similarly, Nefdt (2019b) proffers a mathematical structuralist interpretation of SLEs in which the definition of words is continuous with the ontology of phrases and sentences. Here he follows Jackendoff (2018) who uses model-theoretic (Pullum 2013) or constraint-based grammar formalisms to argue for a continuum between words and linguistic rules. In other words, these latter two authors reject the idea that words are somehow sui generis entities in need of discontinuous explanation. Gasparri (2020) suggests pluralism is a more solid foundation for the ontology of words. He evaluates both “bundlistic” views such as Miller’s and causal-historical accounts such as Irmak’s before offering an alternative “view that there is a plurality of epistemically virtuous ways of thinking about the nature of words” (608).

These are of course complex issues and they offer a lens through which to appreciate the erstwhile debate on the ontology of language but with a contemporary and more focused flavor. Not all of the authors who work on the philosophy of words consider the role of linguistic theory to be central. Hence their work might be related but it does not quite qualify as the philosophy of linguistics, where this is viewed as a subfield of the philosophy of science. By contrast, we have focused on the authors who directly engage with linguistic theory in their accounts of the ontology of SLEs. There is also no clear mapping between the various ontological accounts mentioned here and the characterizations of linguistic theorizing in terms of Externalism, Emergentism and Essentialism. No particular metaphysical view unifies any of our three groupings. For example, not all Externalists incline toward nominalism; numerous Emergentists as well as most Essentialists take linguistics to be about mental phenomena; and our Essentialists include Katz’s platonism alongside the Chomskyan ‘I-language’ advocates and pluralists embrace aspects of all of the above.

Linguists’ conception of the components of the study of language contrast with philosophers’ conceptions (even those of philosophers of language) in at least three ways. First, linguists are often intensely interested in small details of linguistic form in their own right. Second, linguists take an interest in whole topic areas like the internal structure of phrases, the physics of pronunciation, morphological features such as conjugation classes, lexical information about particular words, and so on—topics in which there is typically little philosophical payoff. And third, linguists are concerned with relations between the different subsystems of languages: the exact way the syntax meshes with the semantics, the relationship between phonological and syntactic facts, and so on.

With regard to form, philosophers broadly follow Morris (1938), a foundational work in semiotics, and to some extent Peirce (see SEP entry: Peirce, semiotics), in thinking of the theory of language as having three main components:

• syntax , which treats of the form of signs;
• semantics , which deals with the relations of signs to their denotations; and
• pragmatics , which concerns the contextualized use of interpreted signs.

Linguists, by contrast, following both Sapir (1921) and Bloomfield (1933), treat the syntactic component in a more detailed way than Morris or Peirce, and distinguish between at least three kinds of linguistic form: the form of speech sounds (phonology), the form of words (morphology), and the form of sentences. (If syntax is about the form of expressions in general, then each of these would be an element of Morris’s syntax.)

Emergentists in general deny that there is a distinction between semantics and pragmatics—a position that is familiar enough in philosophy: Quine (1987: 211), for instance, holds that “the separation between semantics and pragmatics is a pernicious error.” And generally speaking, those theorists who, like the later Wittgenstein, focus on meaning as use will deny that one can separate semantics from pragmatics. Emergentists such as Paul Hopper & Sandra Thompson agree:

[W]hat is called semantics and what is called pragmatics are an integrated whole. (Hopper and Thompson 1993: 372)

Some Essentialists—notably Chomsky—also deny that semantics can be separated from pragmatics, but unlike the Emergentists (who think that semantics-pragmatics is a starting point for linguistic theory), Chomsky (as we noted briefly in section 1.3) denies that semantics and pragmatics can have any role in linguistics:

It seems that other cognitive systems—in particular, our system of beliefs concerning things in the world and their behavior—play an essential part in our judgments of meaning and reference, in an extremely intricate manner, and it is not at all clear that much will remain if we try to separate the purely linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in technical discussion we call ‘the meaning of [a] linguistic expression.’ (Chomsky 1979; 142)

Regarding the theoretical account of the relation between words or phrases and what speakers take them to refer to, Chomsky says, “I think such theories should be regarded as a variety of syntax” (Chomsky 1992: 223).

Not every Essentialist agrees with Chomsky on this point. Many believe that every theory should incorporate a linguistic component that yields meanings, in much the same way that many philosophers of language believe there to be such a separate component. Often, although not always, this component amounts to a truth-theoretic account of the values of syntactically-characterized sentences. This typically involves a translation of the natural language sentence into some representation that is “intermediate” between natural language and a truth-theory—perhaps an augmented version of first-order logic, or perhaps a higher-order intensional language. The Essentialists who study semantics in such ways usually agree with Chomsky in seeing little role for pragmatics within linguistic theory. But their separation of semantics from pragmatics allows them to accord semantics a legitimacy within linguistics itself, and not just in psychology or sociology.

Such Essentialists, as well as the Emergentists, differ in important ways from classical philosophical logic in their attitudes towards “the syntactic-semantic interface”, however. Philosophers of language and logic who are not also heavily influenced by linguistics tend to move directly—perhaps by means of a “semantic intuition” or perhaps from an intuitive understanding of the truth conditions involved—from a natural language sentence to its “deep, logical” representation. For example, they may move directly from (EX1) to (LF1):

And from there perhaps to a model-theoretic description of its truth-conditions. A linguist, on the other hand, would aim to describe how (EX1) and (LF1) are related. From the point of view of a semantically-inclined Essentialist, the question is: how should the syntactic component of linguistic theory be written so that the semantic value (or, “logical form representation”) can be assigned? From some Emergentist points of view, the question is: how can the semantic properties and communicative function of an expression explain its syntactic properties?

Matters are perhaps less clear with the Externalists—at least with those who identify semantic value with distribution in terms of neighboring words (there is a tradition stemming from the structuralists of equating synonymy with the possibility of substitution in all contexts without affecting acceptability).

Matters are in general quite a bit more subtle and tricky than (EX1) might suggest. Philosophers have taken the natural language sentence (EX2) to have two logical forms, (LF2a) and (LF2b):

But for the linguist interested in the syntax-semantics interface, there needs to be some explanation of how (LF2a) and (LF2b) are associated with (EX2). It could be a way in which rules can derive (LF2a) and (LF2b) from the syntactic representation of (EX2), as some semantically-inclined Essentialists would propose, or a way to explain the syntactic properties of (EX2) from facts about the meanings represented by (LF2a) and (LF2b), as some Emergentists might want. But that they should be connected up in some way is something that linguists would typically count as non-negotiable.

3. Linguistic Methodology and Data

The strengths and limitations of different data gathering methods began to play an important role in linguistics in the early to mid-20th century. Voegelin and Harris (1951: 323) discuss several methods that had been used to distinguish Amerindian languages and dialects:

• Informal elicitation : asking an informant for a metalinguistic judgment on an expression. [E.g., “Is this sentence grammatical?” “Do these two sentences mean the same thing?”]
• Corpus collection : gathering a body of naturally occurring utterances.
• Controlled experimentation : testing informants in some way that directly gauges their linguistic capacities.

They note that the anthropological linguists Boas and Sapir (who we take to be proto-Emergentists) used the ‘ask the informant’ method of informal elicitation, addressing questions “to the informant’s perception rather than to the data directly” (1951: 324). Bloomfield (the proto-Externalist), on the other hand, worked on Amerindian languages mostly by collecting corpora, with occasional use of monolingual elicitation.

The preferred method of Essentialists today is informal elicitation, including elicitation from oneself. Although the techniques for gathering data about speakers and their language use have changed dramatically over the past 60 or more years, the general strategies have not: data is still gathered by elicitation of metalinguistic judgments, collection of corpus material, or direct psychological testing of speakers’ reactions and behaviors. Different linguists will have different preferences among these techniques, but it is important to understand that data could be gathered in any of the three ways by advocates of any tendency. Essentialists, Emergentists, and Externalists differ as much on how data is interpreted and used as on their views of how it should be gathered.

A wide range of methodological issues about data collection have been raised in linguistics. Since gathering data by direct objective experimental testing of informants is a familiar practice throughout the social, psychological, medical, and biological sciences, we will say little about it here, focusing instead on these five issues about data:

• Disputes over the use of linguistic intuitions as linguistic data;
• Differences between grammaticality and acceptability judgments;
• Differences between scales for measuring acceptability judgments;
• Debates about the reliability of informal judgment elicitation methods; and
• Issues concerning the relevance and reliability of corpus evidence.

The debate in linguistics over the use of linguistic intuitions (elicited metalinguistic judgments) as data, and how that data should be collected has resulted in enduring, rancorous, often ideologically tinged disputes over the past 45 years. The disputes are remarkable, if only for their fairly consistent venomous tone.

At their most extreme, many Emergentists and some Externalists cast the debate in terms of whether linguistic intuitions should ever count as evidence for linguistic theorizing. And many Essentialists cast it in terms of whether anything but linguistic intuitions are ever really needed to support linguistic theorizing.

The debate focuses on the Essentialists’ notion of a mental grammar, since linguistic intuitions are generally understood to be a consequence of tacit knowledge of language. Emergentists who deny that speakers have innate domain-specific grammars (competence, I-languages, or FLN) have raised a diverse range of objections to the use of reports of intuitions as linguistic data – though Devitt (2006) offers an account of linguistic intuitions that does not base them on inferred tacit knowledge of competence grammars. The following passages are representative Emergentist critiques of ‘intuitions’ (elicited judgments):

Generative linguists typically respond to calls for evidence for the reality of their theoretical constructs by claiming that no evidence is needed over and above the theory’s ability to account for patterns of grammaticality judgments elicited from native speakers. This response is unsatisfactory on two accounts. First, such judgments are inherently unreliable because of their unavoidable meta-cognitive overtones… Second, the outcome of a judgment (or the analysis of an elicited utterance) is invariably brought to bear on some distinction between variants of the current generative theory, never on its foundational assumptions. (Edelman and Christiansen 2003: 60) The data that are actually used toward this end in Generative Grammar analyses are almost always disembodied sentences that analysts have made up ad hoc, … rather than utterances produced by real people in real discourse situations… In diametric opposition to these methodological assumptions and choices, cognitive-functional linguists take as their object of study all aspects of natural language understanding and use… They (especially the more functionally oriented analysts) take as an important part of their data not disembodied sentences derived from introspection, but rather utterances or other longer sequences from naturally occurring discourse. (Tomasello 1998: xiii) [T]he journals are full of papers containing highly questionable data, as readers can verify simply by perusing the examples in nearly any syntax article about a familiar language. (Wasow and Arnold 2005: 1484)

It is a common Emergentist objection that linguistic intuitions (taken to be reports of elicited judgments of the acceptability of expressions not their grammaticality) are bad data points because not only are they not usage data, i.e., they are metalinguistic, but also because they are linguists’ judgments about invented example sentences. On neither count would they be clear and direct evidence of language use and human communicative capacities—the subject matter of linguistics on the Emergentist view. A further objection is to their use by theorists to the exclusion of all other kinds of evidence. For example,

[Formal linguistics] continues to insist that its method for gathering data is not only appropriate, but is superior to others. Occasionally a syntactician will acknowledge that no one type of data is privileged, but the actual behavior of people in the field belies this concession. Take a look at any recent article on formal syntax and see whether anything other than the theorist’s judgments constitute the data on which the arguments are based. (Ferreira 2005: 372)

“Formal” is Emergentist shorthand for referring to generative linguistics. And it should be noted that the practice by Essentialists of collapsing various kinds of acceptability judgments under the single label ‘intuitions’ masks important differences. In principle there might be significant differences between the judgments of (i) linguists with a stake in what the evidence shows; (ii) linguists with experience in syntactic theory but no stake in the issue at hand; (iii) non-linguist native speakers who have been tutored in how to provide the kinds of judgments the linguist is interested in; and (iv) linguistically naïve native speakers.

Many Emergentists object to all four kinds of reports of intuitions on the grounds that they are not direct evidence language use. For example, a common objection is based on the view that

[T]he primary object of study is the language people actually produce and understand. Language in use is the best evidence we have for determining the nature and specific organization of linguistic systems. Thus, an ideal usage-based analysis is one that emerges from observation of such bodies of usage data, called corpora.… Because the linguistic system is so closely tied to usage, it follows that theories of language should be grounded in an observation of data from actual uses of language. (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Introduction)

But collections of linguists’ reports of their own judgments are also criticized by Emergentists as “arm-chair data collection,” or “data collection by introspection”. All parties tend to call this kind of data collection “informal”—though they all rely on either formally or informally elicited judgments to some degree.

On the other side, Essentialists tend to deny that usage data is adequate evidence by itself:

More than five decades of research in generative linguistics have shown that the standard generative methodology of hypothesis formation and empirical verification via judgment elicitation can lead to a veritable goldmine of linguistic discovery and explanation. In many cases it has yielded good, replicable results, ones that could not as easily have been obtained by using other data-gathering methods, such as corpus-based research…[C]onsider the fact that parasitic gap constructions…are exceedingly rare in corpora…. [T]hese distributional phenomena would have been entirely impossible to distill via any non-introspective, non-elicitation based data gathering method. Corpus data simply cannot yield such a detailed picture of what is licit and, more crucially, what is not licit for a particular construction in a particular linguistic environment. (den Dikken et al. 2007: 336)

And Essentialists often seem to deny that they are guilty of what the Emergentist claims they are guilty of. For example, Chomsky appears to be claiming that acceptability judgments are performance data, i.e. evidence of use:

Acceptability is a concept that belongs to the study of performance, whereas grammaticalness belongs to the study of competence… Like acceptability, grammaticalness is, no doubt, a matter of degree…but the scales of grammaticalness and acceptability do not coincide. Grammaticalness is only one of many factors that interact to determine acceptability. (Chomsky 1965: 11)

Chomsky means to deny that acceptability judgments are direct evidence of linguistic competence . But it does not follow from this that elicited acceptability judgments are direct evidence of language use.

And as for the charge of “arm-chair” collection methods, some Essentialists claim to have shown that such methods are as good as more controlled experimental methods. For example, Sprouse and Almeida report:

[W]e empirically assess this claim by formally testing all 469 (unique, US-English) data points from a popular syntax textbook (Adger 2003) using 440 naïve participants, two judgment tasks (magnitude estimation and yes–no), and three different types of statistical analyses (standard frequentist tests, linear mixed effects models, and Bayes factor analysis). The results suggest that the maximum discrepancy between traditional methods and formal experimental methods is 2%. This suggests that … the minimum replication rate of these 469 data points is 98%. (Spouse and Almeida 2012, p. 609, abstract)

This can be read as defending either Essentialists’ consulting of their own intuitions simpliciter, or their self-consultation of intuitions on uncontroversial textbook cases only. The former is much more controversial than the later.

One might also wonder whether an error rate of 2% really is appropriate for the primary data presented in an elementary textbook. If a geography textbook misidentified 2–3% of the rivers of the continental United States, or gave incorrect locations for them, or incorrectly reported their lengths, it would forfeit our trust. Analogous claims could be made about any elementary textbook in other fields: an elementary English literature textbook that misidentified the authors of 2% of the books discussed, or their years of publication, etc.

Finally, both parties of the debate engage in ad hominem attacks on their opponents. Here is one example of a classic ad hominem or tu quoque attack on Emergentists in defense of constructed examples by Essentialists:

[The charge made concerning “armchair data collection”] implies that there is something intrinsic to generative grammar that invites partisans of that framework to construct syntactic theories on the evidence of a single person’s judgments. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The great bulk of publications in cognitive and functional linguistics follow the same practice. Of course, rhetorically many of the latter decry the use of linguists’ own intuitions as data. For example, in … an important collections [sic] of papers in cognitive-functional linguistics, … only two contributors to the volume … present segments of natural discourse, neither filling even a page of text. All of the other contributors employ examples constructed by the linguists themselves. It is quite difficult to find any work in cognitive linguistics (and functional linguists are only slightly better) that uses multiple informants. It seems almost disingenuous … to fault generativists for what (for better or worse) is standard practice in the field, regardless of theoretical allegiance. (Newmeyer 2007: 395)

Clearly, the mere fact that some Emergentists may in practice have made use of invented examples in testing their theories does not tell against any cogent general objections they may have offered to such practice. What is needed is a decision on the methodological point, not just a cry of “You did it too!”.

Given the intolerance of each other’s views, and the crosstalk present in these debates, it is tempting to think that Emergentism and Essentialism are fundamentally incompatible on what counts as linguistic data, since their differences are based on their different views of the subject matter of linguistics, and what the phenomena and goals of linguistic theorizing are. There is no doubt that the opposing sides think that their respective views are incompatible. But this conclusion may well be too hasty. In what follows, we try to point to a way that the dispute could be ameliorated, if not adjudicated.

Essentialists who accept the competence/performance distinction of Chomsky (1965) traditionally emphasize elicited acceptability judgment data (although they need not reject data that is gathered using other methods). But as Cowart notes:

In this view, which exploits the distinction between competence and performance, the act of expressing a judgment of acceptability is a kind of linguistic performance. The grammar that a [generative Essentialist] linguistic theory posits in the head of a speaker does not exercise exhaustive control of judgments… While forming a sentence judgment, a speaker draws on a variety of cognitive resources… The resulting [acceptability] judgments could pattern quite differently than the grammaticality values we might like them to reflect. (Cowart 1997: 7)

The grammaticality of an expression, on the standard generative Essentialist view, is the status conferred on it by the competence state of an ideal speaker. But competence can never be exercised or used without potentially interfering performance factors like memory being exercised as well. This means that judgments about grammaticality are never really directly available to the linguist through informant judgments: they have to be inferred from judgments of acceptability (along with any other relevant evidence). Nevertheless, Essentialists do take acceptability judgments to provide fairly good evidence concerning the character of linguistic competence. In fact the use of informally gathered acceptability judgment data is a hallmark of post-1965 Essentialist practice.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that only Essentialists make use of such judgments. Many contemporary Externalists and Emergentists who reject the competence/performance distinction still use informally gathered acceptability judgments in linguistic theorizing, though perhaps not in theory testing. Emergentists tend to interpret experimentally gathered judgment data as performance data reflecting the interactions between learned features of communication systems and general learning mechanisms as deployed in communication. And Externalists use judgment data for corpus cleaning (see below).

It should be noted that sociolinguists and anthropological linguists (and we regard them as tending toward Emergentist views) often informally elicit informant judgments not only about acceptability but also about social and regional style and variation, and meaning. They may ask informants questions like, “Who would typically say that?”, or “What does X mean in context XYZ?”, or “If you can say WXY, can you say WXZ?” (see Labov 1996: 77).

A generative grammar gives a finite specification of a set of expressions. A psychogrammar, to the extent that it corresponds to a generative grammar, might be thought to equip a speaker to know (at least in principle) absolutely whether a string is in the language. However, elicited metalinguistic judgments are uncontroversially a matter of degree. A question arises concerning the scale on which these degrees of acceptability should be measured.

Linguists have implicitly worked with a scale of roughly half a dozen levels and types of acceptability, annotating them with prefixed symbols. The most familiar is the asterisk, originally used simply to mark strings of words as ungrammatical, i.e., as not belonging to the language at all. Other prefixed marks have gradually become current:

But other annotations have been used to indicate a gradation in the extent to which some sentences are unacceptable. No scientifically validated or explicitly agreed meanings have been associated with these marks, but a tradition has slowly grown up of assigning prefixes such as those in Table 2 to signify degrees of unacceptability:

Table 2: Prefixes used to mark levels of acceptability

Such markings are often used in a way that suggests an ordinal scale , i.e. a partial ordering that is silent on anything other than equivalence in acceptability or ranking in degree of unacceptability.

By contrast, Bard et al. (1996: 39) point out, it is possible to use interval scales , which additionally measure distance between ordinal positions. Interval scales of acceptability would measure relative distances between strings—how much more or less acceptable one is than another. Magnitude estimation is a method developed in psychophysics to measure subjects’ judgments of physical stimuli on an interval scale. Bard et al. (1996) adapted these methods to linguistic acceptability judgments, arguing that interval scales of measurement are required for testing theoretical claims that rely on subtle judgments of comparative acceptability. An ordinal scale of acceptability can represent one expression as being less acceptable than another, but cannot support quantitative questions about how much less. Many generative Essentialist theorists had been suggesting that violation of different universal principles led to different degrees of unacceptability. According to Bard et al. (34–35), because there may be “disproportion between the fineness of judgments people can make and the symbol set available for recording them” it will not suffice to use some fixed scale such as this one:

? < ?? < ?* < * < **

indicating absolute degrees of unacceptability. Degrees of relative unacceptability must be measured. This is done by asking the informant how much less acceptable one string is than another.

Magnitude estimation can be used with both informal and experimental methods of data collection. And data that is measured using interval scales can be subjected to much more mathematically sophisticated tests and analyses than data measured solely by an ordinal scale, provided that quantitative data are available.

It should be noted that the value of applying magnitude estimation to the judgment of acceptability has been directly challenged in two recent papers. Weskott and Fanselow (2011) and Sprouse (2011) both present critiques of Bard et al. (1996). Weskott and Fanselow compared magnitude estimation data to standard judgments on binary and 7-point scales, and claim that magnitude estimation does not yield more information than other judgment tasks, and moreover can produce spurious variance. And Sprouse, on the basis of recent formalizations of magnitude estimation in the psychophysics literature, presents experimental evidence that participants cannot make ratio judgments of acceptability (for example, a judgment that one sentence is precisely half as acceptable as another), which suggests that the magnitude estimation task probably provides the same interval-level data as other judgment tasks.

Part of the dispute over the reliability of informal methods of acceptability judgment elicitation and collection is between different groups of Essentialists. Experimentally trained psycholinguists advocate using and adapting various experimental methods that have been developed in the cognitive and behavioral sciences to collect acceptability judgments. And while the debate is often cast in terms of which method is absolutely better, a more appropriate question might be when one method is to be preferred to the others. Those inclined toward less experimentally controlled methods point out that there are many clear and uncontroversial acceptability judgments that do not need to be shown to be reliable. Advocates of experimental methods point out that many purportedly clear, uncontroversial judgments have turned out to be unreliable, and led to false empirical generalizations about languages. Both seem to be right in different cases.

Chomsky has frequently stated his view that the experimental data-gathering techniques developed in the behavioral sciences are neither used nor needed in linguistic theorizing. For example:

The gathering of data is informal; there has been little use of experimental approaches (outside of phonetics) or of complex techniques of data collection and data analysis of a sort that can easily be devised, and that are widely used in the behavioral sciences. The arguments in favor of this informal procedure seem to me quite compelling; basically, they turn on the realization that for the theoretical problems that seem most critical today, it is not at all difficult to obtain a mass of crucial data without use of such techniques. Consequently, linguistic work, at what I believe to be its best, lacks many of the features of the behavioral sciences. (Chomsky 1969: 56)

He also expressed the opinion that using experimental behavioral data collection methods in linguistics “would be a waste of time and energy” (1969: 81).

Although many Emergentists—the intellectual heirs of Sapir—would accept ‘ask-the-informant’ data, we might expect them to tend to accept experimental data-gathering methods that have been developed in the social sciences. There is little doubt that strict followers of the methodology preferred by Bloomfield in his later career would disapprove of ‘ask the informant’ methods. Charles Hockett remarked:

A language, as a set of habits, is a fragile thing, subject to minor modification in the slightest breeze of circumstance; this, indeed, is its great source of power. But this is also why the transformationalists (like the rest of us!), using themselves as informants, have such a hard time deciding whether certain candidates for sentencehood are really ‘in their dialect’ or not; and it is why Bloomfield, in his field work, would never elicit paradigms, for fear he would induce his informant to say something under the artificial conditions of talking with an outsider that he would never have said in his own everyday surroundings. (Hockett 1968: 89–90, fn. 31)

We might expect Bloomfield, having abandoned his earlier Wundtian psychological leanings, to be suspicious of any method that could be cast as introspective. And we might expect many contemporary Externalists to prefer more experimentally controlled methods too. (We shall see below that to some extent they do.)

Derwing (1973) was one early critic of Chomsky’s view (1969) that experimentally controlled data collection is useless; but it was nearly 25 years before systematic research into possible confounding variables in acceptability judgment data started being conducted on any significant scale. In the same year that Bard et al. (1996) appeared, Carson Schütze (1996) published a monograph with the following goal statement:

I aim to demonstrate…that grammaticality judgments and other sorts of linguistic intuition, while indispensable forms of data for linguistic theory, require new ways of being collected and used. A great deal is known about the instability and unreliability of judgments, but rather than propose that they be abandoned, I endeavor to explain the source of their shiftiness and how it can be minimized. (1996: 1)

In a similar vein, Wayne Cowart stated that he wanted to “describe a family of practical methods that yield demonstrably reliable data on patterns of sentence acceptability.” He observes that the stability and reliability of acceptability judgment collection is

complicated by the fact that there seems to be no consensus on how to gather judgments apart from a widespread tolerance for informal methods in which the linguist consults her own intuitions and those of the first handy informant (what we might call the “Hey, Sally” method). (Cowart 1997: 2)

Schütze also expresses the importance of using experimental methods developed in cognitive science:

[M]y claim is that none of the variables that confound metalinguistic data are peculiar to judgments about language. Rather they can be shown to operate in some other domain in a similar way. (This is quite similar to Valian’s (1982) claim that the data of more traditional psychological experiments have all the same problems that judgment data have.) (Schütze 1996: 14)

The above can be read as sympathetic to the Essentialist preference for elicited judgments.

Among the findings of Schütze and Cowart about informal judgment collection methods are these:

• There is really no agreement in linguistics on what counts as an informal method (though note that Sprouse and Almeida 2012 are much more comfortable with the informal method of consulting one's own intuitions of grammaticality).
• The collection of acceptability judgment data is just as vulnerable to the influence of extraneous variables as are other kinds of psychological data.
• Judgment samples can be biased in informal judgment collection.
• Experimenter bias is often not controlled for in informal judgment collection.
• Judgment materials are often not carefully prepared to present a relevant, well-ordered, contrasting set of minimal pairs.
• The instability of one-off speaker judgments can be controlled for by gathering judgments from a given speaker across time.

Although Schütze (1996) and Cowart (1997) are both critical of traditional Essentialist informal elicitation methods, their primary concern is to show how the claims of Essentialist linguistics can be made less vulnerable to legitimate complaints about informal data collection methods. Broadly speaking, they are friends of Essentialism. Critics of Essentialism have raised similar concerns in less friendly terms, but it is important to note that the debate over the reliability of informal methods is a debate within Essentialist linguistics as well.

Informal methods of acceptability judgment data have often been described as excessively casual. Ferreira described the informal method this way:

An example sentence that is predicted to be ungrammatical is contrasted with some other sentence that is supposed to be similar in all relevant ways; these two sentences constitute a “minimal pair”. The author of the article provides the judgment that the sentence hypothesized to be bad is in fact ungrammatical, as indicated by the star annotating the example. But there are serious problems with this methodology. The example that is tested could have idiosyncratic properties due to its unique lexical content. Occasionally a second or third minimal pair is provided, but no attempt is made to consider the range of relevant extraneous variables that must be accounted for and held constant to make sure there isn’t some correlated property that is responsible for the contrast in judgments. Even worse, the “subject” who provides the data is not a naïve informant, but is in fact the theorist himself or herself, and that person has a stake in whether the sentence is judged grammatical or ungrammatical. That is, the person’s theory would be falsified if the prediction were wrong, and this is a potential source of bias. (Ferreira 2005: 372)

(It would be appropriate to read ‘grammatical’ and ‘grammaticality’ in Ferreira’s text as meaning ‘acceptable’ and ‘acceptability’.)

This critical characterization exemplifies the kind of method that Schütze and Cowart aimed to improve on. More recently, Gibson and Fedorenko describe the traditional informal method this way:

As has often been noted in recent years (Cowart, 1997; Edelman & Christiansen, 2003; Featherston, 2007; Ferreira, 2005; Gibson & Fedorenko, 2010a; Marantz, 2005; Myers, 2009; Schütze, 1996; Wasow & Arnold, 2005), the results obtained using this method are not necessarily generalisable because of (a) the small number of experimental participants (typically one); (b) the small number of experimental stimuli (typically one); (c) cognitive biases on the part of the researcher and participants; and (d) the effect of the preceding context (e.g., other constructions the researcher may have been recently considering). (Gibson and Fedorenko, 2013)

While some Essentialists have acknowledged these problems with the reliability of informal methods, others have, in effect, denied their relevance. For example, Colin Phillips (2010) argues that “there is little evidence for the frequent claim that sloppy data-collection practices have harmed the development of linguistic theories”. He admits that not all is epistemologically well in syntactic theory, but adds, “I just don’t think that the problems will be solved by a few rating surveys.” He concludes:

I do not think that we should be fooled into thinking that informal judgment gathering is the root of the problem or that more formalized judgment collection will solve the problems. (Phillips 2010: 61)

To suggest that informal methods are as fully reliable as controlled experimental ones would be a serious charge, implying that researchers like Bard, Robinson, Sorace, Cowart, Schütze, Gibson, Fedorenko, and others have been wasting their time. But Phillips actually seems to be making a different claim. He suggests first that informally gathered data has not actually harmed linguistics, and second that linguists are in danger of being “fooled” by critics who invent stories about unreliable data having harmed linguistics.

The harm that Phillips claims has not occurred relates to the charge that “mainstream linguistics” (he means the current generative Essentialist framework called ‘Minimalism’) is “irrelevant” to broader interests in the cognitive sciences, and has lost “the initiative in language study”. Of course, Phillips is right in a sense: one cannot insure that experimental judgment collection methods will address every way in which Minimalist theorizing is irrelevant to particular endeavors (language description, language teaching, natural language processing, or broader questions in cognitive psychological research). But this claim does not bear on what Schütze (1996) and Cowart (1997) show about the unreliability of informal methods.

Phillips does not fully accept the view of Chomsky (1969) that experimental methods are useless for data gathering (he says, “I do not mean to argue that comprehensive data gathering studies of acceptability are worthless”). But his defense of informal methods of data collection rests on whether these methods have damaged Essentialist theory testing:

The critiques I have read present no evidence of the supposed damage that informal intuitions have caused, and among those who do provide specific examples it is rare to provide clear evidence of the supposed damage that informal intuitions have caused… What I am specifically questioning is whether informal (and occasionally careless) gathering of acceptability judgments has actually held back progress in linguistics, and whether more careful gathering of acceptability judgments will provide the key to future progress.

Either Phillips is fronting the surprising opinion that generative theorizing has never been led down the wrong track by demonstrably unreliable data, or he is changing the subject. And unless clear criteria are established for what counts as “damage” and “holding back,” Phillips is not offering any testable hypothesis about data collection methodology. For example, Phillips discounts the observation of Schütze (1996) that conflicting judgments of relative unacceptability of violations of two linguistic universals held back the development of Government and Binding (GB), on the grounds that two sets of conflicting judgments and their analyses “are now largely forgotten, supplanted by theories that have little to say about such examples.” But the fact that the proposed universals are discarded principles of UG is irrelevant to the effect that unreliable data once had on the (now largely abandoned) GB theory. A methodological concern cannot be dismissed on the basis of a move to a new theory that abandons the old theory but not its methods!

More recently, Bresnan (2007) claims that many theoretical claims have arguably been supported by unreliable informally gathered syntactic acceptability judgments. She observes:

Erroneous generalizations based on linguistic intuitions about isolated, constructed examples occur throughout all parts of the grammar. They often seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility (Taylor 1994, 1996, Bresnan & Nikitina 2003, Fellbaum 2005, Lødrup 2006, among others), reflect relative frequency instead of categorical grammaticality (Labov 1996, Lapata 1999, Manning 2003), overlook complex constraint interactions (Green 1971, Gries 2003) and processing effects (Arnon et al. 2005a, b), and fail to address the problems of investigator bias (Labov 1975, Naro 1980, Chambers 2003: 34) and social intervention (Labov 1996, Milroy 2001, Cornips & Poletto 2005). (Bresnan 2007: 301)

Her discussion supports the view that various highly abstract theoretical hypotheses have been defended through the use of generalizations based on unreliable data.

The debate over the harm that the acceptance of informally collected data has had on theory testing is somewhat difficult to understand for Essentialist, Externalist, and Emergentist researchers who have been trained in the methods of the cognitive and behavioral sciences. Why try to support one’s theories of universal grammar, or of the grammars of particular languages, by using questionably reliable data?

One clue might be found in Culicover and Jackendoff (2010), who write:

[T]heoreticians’ subjective judgments are essential in formulating linguistic theories. It would cripple linguistic investigation if it were required that all judgments of ambiguity and grammaticality be subject to statistically rigorous experiments on naive subjects. (Culicover and Jackendoff 2010)

The worry is that use of experimental methods is so resource consumptive that it would impede the formulation of linguistic theories. But this changes the subject from the importance of using reliable data as evidence in theory testing to using only experimentally gathered data in theory formulation . We are not aware of anyone who has ever suggested that at the stage of hypothesis development or theory formulation the linguist should eschew intuition. Certainly Bard et al., Schütze, Cowart, Gibson & Fedorenko, and Ferreira say no such thing. The relevant issue concerns what data should be used to test theories, which is a very different matter.

We noted earlier that there are clear and uncontroversial acceptability judgments, and that these judgments are reliable data. The difficulty lies in distinguishing the clear, uncontroversial, and reliable data from what only appears to be clear, uncontroversial, and reliable to a research community at a time. William Labov, the founder of modern quantitative sociolinguistics, who takes an Emergentist approach, proposed a set of working methodological principles in Labov (1975) for adjudicating when experimental methods should be employed.

The Consensus Principle : If there is no reason to think otherwise, assume that the judgments of any native speaker are characteristic of all speakers. The Experimenter Principle : If there is any disagreement on introspective judgments, the judgments of those who are familiar with the theoretical issues may not be counted as evidence. The Clear Case Principle : Disputed judgments should be shown to include at least one consistent pattern in the speech community or be abandoned. If differing judgments are said to represent different dialects, enough investigation of each dialect should be carried out to show that each judgment is a clear case in that dialect. (Labov 1975, quoted in Schütze 1996: 200)

If we accept that ‘introspective judgments’ are acceptability judgments, then Labov’s rules of thumb are guides for when to deploy experimental methods, although they no doubt need refinement. However, it seems vastly more likely that careful development of such methodological rules of thumb can serve to improve the reliability of linguistic data and adjudicate these methodological disputes that seem largely independent of any particular approach to linguistics.

In linguistics, the goal of collecting corpus data is to identify and organize a representative sample of a written and/or spoken variety from which characteristics of the entire variety or genre can be induced. Concordances of word usage in linguistic context have long been used to aid in the translation and interpretation of literary and sacred texts of particular authors (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas) and of particular texts (e.g. the Torah, the rest of the Old Testament, the Gospels, the Epistles). Formal textual criticism, the identification of antecedently existing oral traditions that were later redacted into Biblical texts, and author identification (e.g. figuring out which of the Epistles were written by Paul and which were probably not) began to develop in the late 19th century.

The development of computational methods for collecting, analyzing, and searching corpora have seen rapid development as computer memory has become less expensive and search and analysis programs have become faster. The first computer searchable corpus of American English, the Brown Corpus, developed in the 1960s, contained just over one million word tokens. The British National Corpus (BNC) is a balanced corpus containing over 100 million words—a hundredfold size increase—of which 90% is written prose published from 1991 to 1994 and 10% is spoken English. Between 2005 and 2007, billion-word corpora were released for British English (ukWaC), German (deWaC), and Italian (itWaC)—a thousand times bigger than the Brown corpus. And the entire World Wide Web probably holds about a thousand times as much as that—around a trillion words. Thus corpus linguistics has gone from megabytes of data (∼ 10 3 kB) to terabytes of data (∼ 10 9 kB) in fifty years.

Just as a central issue concerning acceptability judgment data concerns its reliability as evidence for empirical generalizations about languages or idiolects, a central question concerning the collection of corpus data concerns whether or not it is representative of the language variety it purports to represent. Some linguists make the criterion of representativeness definitional: they call a collection of samples of language use a corpus only if it has been carefully balanced between different genres (conversation, informal writing, journalism, literature, etc.), regional varieties, or whatever.

But corpora are of many different kinds. Some are just very large compilations of text from individual sources such as newspapers of record or the World Wide Web—compilations large enough for the diversity in the source to act as a surrogate for representativeness. For example, a billion words of a newspaper, despite coming from a single source, will include not only journalists’ news reports and prepared editorials but also quoted speech, political rhetoric, humor columns, light features, theater and film reviews, readers’ letters, fiction items, and so on, and will thus provide examples of a much wider variety of styles than one might have thought.

Corpora are cleaned up through automatic or manual removal of such elements as numerical tables, typographical slips, spelling mistakes, markup tags, accidental repetitions ( the the ), larger-scale duplications (e.g., copies on mirror sites), boilerplate text ( Opinions expressed in this email do not necessarily reflect …), and so on (see Baroni et al. 2009 for a fuller discussion of corpus cleaning).

The entire web itself can be used as a corpus to some degree, despite its constantly changing content, its multilinguality, its many tables and images, and its total lack of quality control; but when it is, the outputs of searches are nearly always cleaned by disregarding unwanted results. For example, Google searches are blind to punctuation, capitalization, and sentence boundaries, so search results for to be will unfortunately include irrelevant cases, such as where a sentence like Do you want to? happens to be followed by a sentence like Be careful .

Corpora can be annotated in ways that permit certain kinds of analysis and grammar testing. One basic kind of annotation is part-of-speech tagging, in which each word is labeled with its syntactic category. Another is lemmatization, which classifies the different morphologically inflected forms of a word as belonging together ( goes , gone , going , and went belong with go , for example). A more thoroughgoing kind of annotation involves adding markup that encodes trees representing their structure; an example like That road leads to the freeway might be marked up as a Clause within which the first two words make up a Noun Phrase (NP), the last four constitute a Verb Phrase (VP), and so on, giving a structural analysis represented thus:

Such a diagram is isomorphic to (and the one shown was computed directly from) a labeled bracketing like this:

(.Clause. (.NP. (.D. ‘that’ ) (.N. ‘road’ ) ) (.VP. (.V. ‘leads’ ) (.PP. (.P. ‘to’ ) (.NP. (.D. ‘the’ ) (.N. ‘freeway’ ) ) ) ) )

and this in turn could be represented in a markup language like XML as:

A corpus annotated with tree structure is known as a treebank . Clearly, such a corpus is not a raw record of attested utterances at all; it is a combination of a collection of attested utterances together with a systematic attempt at analysing their structure. Whether the analysis is added manually or semi-automatically, it is ultimately based on native speaker judgments. (Treebanks are often developed by graduate student annotators tutored by computational linguists; naturally, consistency between annotators is an issue that needs regular attention. See Artstein and Poesio, 2008, for discussion of the methodological issues.).

One of the purposes of a treebank is to permit the further investigation of a language and the checking of further linguistic hypotheses by searching a large database of previously established analyses. It can also be used to test grammars, natural language processing systems, or machine learning programs.

Going beyond syntactic parse trees, it is possible to annotate corpora further, with information of a semantic and pragmatic nature. There is ongoing computational linguistic research aimed at discovering whether, for example, semantic annotation that is semi-automatically added might suffice for recognition of whether a product review is positive or negative (what computational linguists call ‘sentiment analysis’).

Notice, then, that using corpus data does not mean abandoning or escaping from the use of intuitions about acceptability or grammatical structure: the results of a corpus search are generally filtered through the judgments of an investigator who decides which pieces of corpus data are to be taken at face value and which are just bad hits or irrelevant noise.

Difficult methodological issues arise in connection with the collection, annotation, and use of corpus data. For example, there is the issue of extremely rare expression tokens. Are they accurately recorded tokens of expression types that turn up only in consequence of sporadic errors and should be dismissed as irrelevant unless the topic of interest is performance errors? Are they due to errors in the compilation of the corpus itself, corresponding to neither accepted usage nor sporadic speech errors? Or are they perfectly grammatical but (for some extraneous reason) very rare, at least in that particular corpus?

Many questions arise about what kind of corpus is best suited to the research questions under consideration, as well as what kind of annotation is most appropriate. For example, as Ferreira (2005: 375) points out, some large corpora, insofar as they have not been cleaned of speech errors, provide relevant data for studying the distribution of speech disfluencies. In addition, probabilistic information about the relation between a particular verb and its arguments has been used to show that “verb-argument preferences [are] an essential part of the process of sentence interpretation” (Roland and Jurafsky 2002: 325): acceptability judgments on individual expressions do not provide information about the distribution of a verb and its arguments in various kinds of speech and writing. Studying conveyed meaning in context and identification of speech acts will require a kind of data that decontextualized acceptability judgments do not provide but semantically annotated corpora might.

Many Essentialists have been skeptical of the reliability of uncleaned, unanalyzed corpus data as evidence to support linguistic theorizing, because it is assumed to be replete with strings that any native speaker would judge unacceptable. And many Emergentists and Externalists, as well as some Essentialists, have charged that informally gathered acceptability judgments can be highly unreliable too. Both worries are apposite; but the former does not hold for adequately cleaned and analyzed corpora, and the latter does not hold for judgment data that has been gathered using appropriately controlled methods. In certain contested cases of acceptability, it will of course be important to use both corpus and controlled elicitation methods to cross-compare.

Notice that we have not in any way suggested that our three broad approaches to linguistics should differ in the kinds of data they use for theory testing: Essentialists are not limited to informal elicitation; nor are Emergentists and Externalists denied access to it. In matters of methodology, at least, there is in principle an open market—even if many linguists seem to think otherwise.

4. Language Acquisition

The three approaches to linguistic theorizing have at least something to say about how languages are acquired, or could in principle be acquired. Language acquisition has had a much higher profile since generative Essentialist work of the 1970s and 1980s gave it a central place on the agenda for linguistic theory.

Research into language acquisition falls squarely within the psychology of language; see the entry on language and innateness . In this section we do not aim to deal in detail with any of the voluminous literature on psychological or computational experiments bearing on language acquisition, or with any of the empirical study of language acquisition by developmental linguists, or the ‘stimulus poverty’ argument for the existence of innate knowledge about linguistic structure (Pullum and Scholz 2002). Our goals are merely to define the issue of linguistic nativism , set it in context, and draw morals for our three approaches from some of the mathematical work on inductive language learning.

The reader with prior acquaintance with the literature of linguistics will notice that we have not made reference to any partitioning of linguists into two camps called ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’ (see e.g. Matthews 1984, Cowie 1999). We draw a different distinction relating to the psychological and biological prerequisites for first language acquisition. It divides nearly all Emergentists and Externalists from most Essentialists. It has often been confused with the classical empiricist/rationalist issue.

General nativists maintain that the prerequisites for language acquisition are just general cognitive abilities and resources. Linguistic nativists , by contrast, claim that human infants have access to at least some specifically linguistic information that is not learned from linguistic experience. Table 3 briefly sketches the differences between the two views.

Table 3: General and linguistic nativism contrasted

There does not really seem to be anyone who is a complete non-nativist: nobody really thinks that a creature with no unlearned capacities at all could acquire a language. That was the point of the much-quoted remark by Quine (1972: 95–96) about how “the behaviorist is knowingly and cheerfully up to his neck in innate mechanisms of learning-readiness”. Geoffrey Sampson (2001, 2005) is about as extreme an opponent of linguistic nativism as one can find, but even he would not take the failure of language acquisition in his cat to be unrelated to the cognitive and physical capabilities of cats.

The issue on which empirical research can and should be done is whether some of the unlearned prerequisites that humans enjoy have specifically linguistic content. For a philosophically-oriented discussion of the matter, see chapters 4–6 of Stainton (2006). For extensive debate about “the argument from poverty of the stimulus”, see Pullum and Scholz (2002) together with the six critiques published in the same issue of The Linguistic Review and the responses to those critiques by Scholz and Pullum (2002).

Linguists have given considerable attention to considerations of in-principle learnability —not so much the course of language acquisition as tracked empirically (the work of developmental psycholinguists) but the question of how languages of the human sort could possibly be learned by any kind of learner. The topic was placed squarely on the agenda by Chomsky (1965); and a hugely influential mathematical linguistics paper by Gold (1967)has dominated much of the subsequent discussion.

4.2.1 The Gold paradigm

Gold began by considering a reformulation of the standard philosophical problem of induction. The trouble with the question ‘Which hypothesis is correct given the totality of the data?’ is of course the one that Hume saw: if the domain is unbounded, no finite amount of data can answer the question. Any finite body of evidence will be consistent with arbitrarily many hypotheses that are not consistent with each other. But Gold proposed replacing the question with a very different one: Which tentative hypothesis is the one to pick , given the data provided so far, assuming a finite number of wrong guesses can be forgiven?

Gold assumed that the hypotheses, in the case of language learning, were generative grammars (or alternatively parsers; he proves results concerning both, but for brevity we follow most of the literature and neglect the very similar results on parsers). The learner’s task is conceived of as responding to an unending input data stream (ultimately complete, in that every expression eventually turns up) by enunciating a sequence of guesses at grammars.

Although Gold talks in developmental psycholinguistic terms about language learners learning grammars by trial and error, his extremely abstract proofs actually make no reference to the linguistic content of languages or grammars at all. The set of all finite grammars formulable in any given metalanguage is computably enumerable, so grammars can be systematically numbered. Inputs—grammatical expressions from the target language—can also be numerically encoded. We end up being concerned simply with the existence or non-existence of certain functions from natural number sequences to natural numbers.

A successful learner is one who uses a procedure that is guaranteed to eventually hit on a correct grammar. For single languages, this is trivial: if the target language is L and it is generated by a grammar G , then the procedure “Always guess G ” does the job, and every language is learnable. What makes the problem interesting is applying it to classes of grammars. A successful learner for a class C is one who uses a procedure that is guaranteed to succeed no matter what grammar from C is the target and no matter what the data stream is like (as long as it is complete and contains no ungrammatical examples).

Gold’s work has interesting similarities with earlier philosophical work on inductive learning by Hilary Putnam (1963; it is not clear whether Gold was aware of this paper). Putnam gave an informal proof of a sort of incompleteness theorem for inductive regularity-learning devices: no matter what algorithm is used in a machine for inducing regularities from experience, and thus becoming able to predict events, there will always be some possible environmental regularities that will defeat it. (As a simple example, imagine an environment giving an unbroken sequence of presentations all having some property a . If there is a positive integer n such that after n presentations the machine will predict that presentation number n + 1 will also have property a , then the machine will be defeated by an environment consisting of n presentations of a followed by one with the incompatible property b —the future need not always resemble the past. But if on the other hand there is no such n , then an environment consisting of an unending sequence of a presentations will defeat it.)

Gold’s theorems are founded on certain specific idealizing assumptions about the language learning situation, some of which are intuitively very generous to the learner. The main ones are these:

• Pre-set grammar class . A class of grammars from among which to select is fixed ab initio, and the learner’s strategy can be one that only works for that class.
• Pre-set vocabulary . A finite universal vocabulary of elements V is fixed ab initio, and the learner can rely on not encountering any other elements (though the learner does not know which subset of V is used in the target language).
• Unending input . The input (the evidence presented to the learner) goes on forever—though it may contain arbitrary repetitions, and a successful learner will always reach a point where no future evidence will cause a change of guess.
• Exhaustive evidence . Ultimately every expression in the language will appear in the evidence presented to the learner.
• No noise . Every input example is a grammatical expression of the target language.
• No ordering restrictions . Any expression may appear at any point in the input data stream.
• No memory limit . The learner can remember every expression ever presented.
• No time limit . Learning must be achieved after some finite time, but no fixed bound is set in advance.
• Generative grammar target . What is ultimately learned is a generative grammar.
• No statistics . Frequency of particular expressions in the input plays no role in the learning process.

The most celebrated of the theorems Gold proved (using some reasoning remarkably similar to that of Putnam 1963) showed that a language learner could be similarly hostage to malign environments. Imagine a learner being exposed to an endless and ultimately exhaustive sequence of presented expressions from some target language—Gold calls such a sequence a ‘text’. Suppose the learner does not know in advance whether the language is infinite, or is one of the infinitely many finite languages over the vocabulary V . Gold reasons roughly thus:

• There must be some n such that an environment consisting of a sequence of n presented expressions all taken from a certain finite language L 1 (possibly with many repetitions) will cause the learner to guess the target language is L 1 . (If there is not, then we already know how to baffle the learner: the learner will be unable to learn L 1 from any text.)
• But if there is such an n , then the learner will be baffled by any infinite target language that is a superset of them all: a text consisting of n presentations of expressions from L 1 followed by n presentations of a slightly larger finite language L 2 , and so on forever (there is no largest finite language, and ex hypothesi the learner will keep trying them all).

Leaping too soon to the conclusion that the target language is infinite will be disastrous, because there will be no way to retrench: no presented examples from a finite language L k will ever conflict with the hypothesis that the target is some infinite superset of L k .

The relevance of all this to the philosophy of linguistics is that the theorem just sketched has been interpreted by many linguists, psycholinguists, and philosophers as showing that humans could not learn languages by inductive inference based on examples of language use, because all of the well-known families of languages defined by different types of generative grammar have the crucial property of allowing grammars for every finite language and for at least some infinite supersets of them. But Gold’s paper has often been over-interpreted. A few examples of the resultant mistakes follow.

It’s not about underdetermination . Gold’s negative results are sometimes wrongly taken to be an unsurprising reflection of the underdetermination of theories by finite bodies of evidence (Hauser et al. 2002 seem to make this erroneous equation on p. 1577; so do Fodor and Crowther 2002, implicitly—see Scholz and Pullum 2002, 204–206). But the failure of text-identifiability for certain classes of languages is different from underdetermination in a very important way, because there are infinite classes of infinite languages that are identifiable from text. The first chapter of Jain et al. (1999) discusses an illustrative example (basically, it is the class containing, for all n > 0, the set of all strings with length greater than n ). There are infinitely many others. For example, Shinohara (1990) showed that for any positive integer n the class of all languages generated by a context-sensitive grammar with not more than n rules is learnable from text.

It’s not about stimulus poverty . It has also sometimes been assumed that Gold is giving some kind of argument from poverty of the stimulus (there are signs of this in Cowie 1999, 194ff; Hauser et al. 2002, 1577; and Prinz 2002, 210). This is very clearly a mistake (as both Laurence and Margolis 2001 and Matthews 2007 note): in Gold’s text-learning scenario there is no stimulus poverty at all. Every expression in the language eventually turns up in the learner’s input.

It’s not all bad news . It is sometimes forgotten that Gold established a number of optimistic results as well as the pessimistic one about learning from text. Given what he called an ‘informant’ environment rather than a text environment, we see strikingly different results. An informant environment is an infinite sequence of presentations sorted into two lists, positive instances (expressions belonging to the target language) and negative instances (not in the language). Almost all major language-theoretic classes are identifiable in the limit from an informant environment (up to and including the class of all languages with a primitive recursive characteristic function, which comes close to covering any language that could conceivably be of linguistic interest), and all computably enumerable languages become learnable if texts are allowed to be sequenced in particular ways (see the results in Gold 1967 on ‘anomalous text’).

Gold did not give a necessary condition for a class to be identifiable in the limit from text, but Angluin (1980) later provided one (in a result almost but not quite obtained by Wexler and Hamburger 1973). Angluin showed that a class C is text-identifiable iff every language L in C has a finite “telltale” subset T such that if T is also proper subset of some other language in C , that other language is not a proper subset of L . This condition precludes guessing too large a language. Once all the members of the telltale subset for L have been received as input, the learner can safely make L the current conjecture. The language to be identified must be either L or (if subsequent inputs include new sentences not in L ) some larger language, but it can’t be a proper subset of L .

Johnson (2004) provides a useful review of several other misconceptions about Gold’s work; e.g., the notion that it might be the absence of semantics from the input that makes identification from text impossible (this is not the case).

4.2.2 Gold’s paradox

Some generative Essentialists see a kind of paradox in Gold’s results—a reductio on one or more of the assumptions he makes about in-principle learnability. To put it very crudely, learning generative grammars from presented grammatical examples seems to have been proved impossible, yet children do learn their first languages, which for generative Essentialists means they internalize generative psychogrammars, and it is claimed to be an empirical fact that they get almost no explicit evidence about what is not in the language (Brown and Hanlon 1970 is invariably cited to support this). Contradiction. Gold himself suggested three escape routes from the apparent paradox:

• Assume tighter limits on the pre-set grammar class. Perhaps, for example, learners have an ‘innate’ grasp of some definition of the pre-set grammar class that guarantees its learnability. (For example, identifiability in the limit from text could be guaranteed by ensuring that the class of candidate languages does not contain both (a) some infinite set of finite languages and (b) some infinite language that is the union of all of them.)
• Assume learners get systematic information about what is not in the language (perhaps indirectly, in ways not yet recognized), so that the environment is of the informant type rather than the text type.
• Assume some helpful feature is present in learning environments. The ‘no order restrictions’ assumption might be false: there could be regularities in the order of expressions in texts that can support inferences about what is ungrammatical.

All three of these paths have been subsequently explored. Path (1) appealed to generative Essentialists. Chomsky (1981) suggested an extreme restriction: that universal grammar permitted only finitely many grammars. This claim (for which Chomsky had little basis: see Pullum 1983) would immediately guarantee that not all finite languages are humanly learnable (there are infinitely many finite languages, so for most of them there would be no permissible grammar). Osherson and Weinstein (1984) even proved that under three fairly plausible assumptions about the conditions on learning, finiteness of the class of languages is necessary—that is, a class must be finite if it is to be identifiable from text. However, they also proved that this is not sufficient: there are very small finite classes of languages that are not identifiable from text, so it is logically possible for text-identification to be impossible even given only a finite number of languages (grammars). These two results show that Chomsky’s approach cannot be the whole answer.

Path (2) proposes investigation of children’s input with an eye to finding covert sources of negative evidence. Various psycholinguists have pursued this idea; see the entry on language and innateness in this encyclopedia, and (to cite one example) the results of Chouinard and Clark (2003) on hitherto unnoticed sources of negative evidence in the infant’s linguistic environment, such as parental corrections.

Path (3) suggests investigating the nature of children’s linguistic environments more generally. Making evidence available to the learner in some fixed order can certainly alter the picture quite radically (Gold proved that if some primitive-recursive generator controls the text it can in effect encode the identity of the target language so that all computably enumerable languages become identifiable from text). It is possible in principle that limitations on texts (or on learners’ uptake) might have positive rather than negative effects on learnability (see Newport 1988; Elman 1993; Rohde and Plaut 1999; and the entry on language and innateness ).

4.2.3 The claimed link to ‘rationalism’ versus ‘empiricism’

Gold’s suggested strategy of restricting the pre-set class of grammars has been interpreted by some as a defense of rationalist rather than empiricist theories of language acquisition. For example, Wexler and Culicover state:

Empiricist theory allows for a class of sensory or peripheral processing mechanisms by means of which the organism receives data. In addition, the organism possesses some set of inductive principles or learning mechanisms…Rationalist theory also assumes that a learner has sensory mechanisms and inductive principles. But rationalist theory assumes that in addition the learner possesses a rich set of principles concerning the general nature of the ability that is to be learned. (Wexler and Culicover 1980: 5)

Wexler and Culicover claim that ‘empiricist’ learning mechanisms are both weak and general: not only are they ‘not related to the learning of any particular subject matter or cognitive ability’ but they are not ‘limited to any particular species’. It is of course not surprising that empiricist learning fails if it is defined in a way that precludes drawing a distinction between the cognitive abilities of humans and fruit flies.

Equating Gold’s idea of restricting the class of grammars with the idea of a ‘rationalist’ knowledge acquisition theory, Wexler and Culicover try to draw out the consequences of Gold’s paradigm for the Essentialist linguistic theory of Chomsky (1965). They show how a very tightly restricted class of transformational grammars could be regarded as text-identifiable under extremely strong assumptions (e.g., that all languages have the same innately known deep structures).

Matthews (1984) follows Wexler and Culicover’s lead and draws a more philosophically oriented moral:

The significance of Gold’s result becomes apparent if one considers that (i) empiricists assume that there are no constraints on the class of possible languages (besides perhaps that natural languages be recursively enumerable), and (ii) the learner employs a maximally powerful learning strategy—there are no strategies that could accomplish what that assumed by Gold cannot. These two facts, given Gold’s unsolvability result for text data, effectively dispose of the empiricist claim that there exists a ‘discovery procedure’. (1989: 60)

The actual relation of Gold’s results to the empiricism/rationalism controversy seems to us rather different. Gold’s paradigm looks a lot more like a formalization of so-called ‘rationalism’. The fixed class of candidate hypotheses (grammars) corresponds to what is given by universal grammar—the innate definition of the essential properties of language. What Gold actually shows, therefore, is not “the plausibility of rationalism” but rather the inadequacy of a huge range of rationalist theories: under a wide range of different choices of universal grammar, language acquisition appears to remain impossible.

Moreover, Matthews ignores (as most linguists have) the existence of large and interesting classes of languages that are text-identifiable.

Gold’s result, like Putnam’s earlier one, does show that a certain kind of trial-and-error inductive learning is insufficient to permit learning of arbitrary environmental regularities. There has to be some kind of initial bias in the learning procedure or in the data. But ‘empiricism’, the supposed opponent of ‘rationalism’, is not to be equated with a denial of the existence of learning biases. No one doubts that humans have inductive biases. To quote Quine again, “Innate biases and dispositions are the cornerstone of behaviorism, and have been studied by behaviorists” (1972: 95–96). As Lappin and Shieber (2007) stress, there cannot be such a thing as a learning procedure (or processing mechanism) with no biases at all.

The biases posited in Emergentist theories of language acquisition are found, at least in part, in the non-linguistic social and cognitive bases of human communication. And the biases of Externalist approaches to language acquisition are to be found in the distributional and stochastic structure of the learning input and the multitude of mechanisms that process that input and their interactions. All contemporary approaches to language acquistion have acknowledged Gold’s results, but those results do not by themselves vindicate any one of our three approaches to the study of language.

Gold’s explicit equation of acquiring a language with identifying a generative grammar that exactly generates it naturally makes his work seem relevant to generative Essentialists (though even for them, his results do not provide anything like a sufficient reason for adopting the linguistic nativist position). But another key assumption, that nothing about the statistical structure of the input plays a role in the acquisition process, is being questioned by increasing numbers of Externalists, many of whom have used Bayesian modeling to show that the absence of positive evidence can function as a powerful source of (indirect) negative evidence: learning can be driven by what is not found as well as by what is (see e.g. Foraker et al. (2009)).

Most Emergentists simply reject the assumption that what is learned is a generative grammar. They see the acquisition task as a matter of learning the details of an array of constructions (roughly, meaning-bearing ways of structurally composing words or phrases) and how to use them to communicate. How such learning is accomplished needs a great deal of further study, but Gold’s paper did not show it to be impossible.

5. Language Evolution

Over the past three decades a large amount of work has been done on topics to which the term ‘language evolution’ is attached, but there are in fact four distinct such topics:

• the phylogenetic emergence of non-human communication capacities, systems, and behaviors in various animals;
• the phylogenetic emergence of uniquely human communication capacities, systems, and behaviors;
• the phylogenetic emergence, unique in humans, of the capacity (or capacities) to develop , acquire , and use language;
• the course of historical evolution through intergenerational changes in particular languages as they are acquired and used by humans.

Emergentists tend to regard any of the topics (a)–(d) as potentially relevant to the study of language evolution. Essentialists tend to focus solely on (c). Some Essentialists even deny that (a) and (b) have any relevance to the study of (c); for example:

There is nothing useful to be said about behavior or thought at the level of abstraction at which animal and human communication fall together… [H]uman language, it appears, is based on entirely different principles. This, I think, is an important point, often overlooked by those who approach language as a natural, biological phenomenon; in particular, it seems rather pointless, for these reasons, to speculate about the evolution of human language from simpler systems… (Chomsky 1968: 62)

Other generative Essentialists, like Pinker and Bloom (1990) and Pinker and Jackendoff (2005), seem open to the view that even the most elemental aspects of topic (b) can be directly relevant to the study of (c). This division among Essentialists reflects a division among their views about the role of adaptive explanations in the emergence of (b) and especially (c). For example:

We know very little about what happens when 10 10 neurons are crammed into something the size of a basketball, with further conditions imposed by the specific manner in which this system developed over time. It would be a serious error to suppose that all properties, or the interesting properties of the structures that evolved, can be ‘explained’ in terms of ‘natural selection’. (Chomsky 1975:59, quoted by Newmeyer 1998 and Jackendoff 2002)

The view expressed here that all (or even most) interesting properties of the language faculty are not adaptations conflicts with the basic explanatory strategy of evolutionary psychology found in the neo-Darwinian Essentialist views of Pinker and Bloom. Piattelli-Palmarini (1989), following Chomsky, adopts a fairly standard Bauplan critique of adaptationism. On this view the language faculty did not originate as an adaptation, but more plausibly “may have originally arisen for some purely architectural or structural reason (perhaps overall brain size, or the sheer duplication of pre-existing modules), or as a by product of the evolutionary pressures” (p. 19), i.e., it is a kind of Gouldian spandrel.

More recently, some Essentialist-leaning authors have rejected the view that no analogies and homologies between animal and human communication are relevant to the study of language. For example, in the context of commenting on Hauser et al. (2002), Tecumseh Fitch (2010) claims that “Although Language, writ large, is unique to our species (many probably most) of the mechanisms involved in language have analogues or homologues in other animals.” However, the view that the investigation of animal communication can shed light on human language is still firmly rejected by some. For example, Bickerton (2007: 512) asserts that “nothing resembling human language could have developed from prior animal call systems.”

Bickerton fronts the following simple argument for his view:

If any adaptation is unique to a species, the selective pressure that drove it must also be unique to that species; otherwise the adaptation would have appeared elsewhere, at least in rudimentary form. (2007: 514)

Thus, the mere fact that language is unique to humans is sufficient to rule out monkey and primate call systems as preadapations for language. But, contra Bickerton, a neo-Darwinian like Jackendoff (2002) appeals to the work of Dunbar (1998), Power (1998), Worden (1998) to provide a selectionist story which assumes that cooperation in hunting, defense (Pinker and Bloom 1990), and “ ‘social grooming’ or deception” are selective forces that operated on human ancestors to drive increases in expressive power that distinguishes non-human communication and human linguistic capacities and systems. Bickerton (2014), however, combines aspects of Essentialism, Emergentism, and Externalism by taking equal parts of Minimalism, primatology, and cultural evolution into a more holistic account. He specifically tailors a niche construction theory to explain the emergence of displaced, discrete symbolization in a particular kind of primate, namely human beings. He thus allows for (a) and (b) to figure in an explanation of (c). This is somewhat of a departure from his earlier positions.

Within the general Essentialist camp, language evolution has taken center stage since the inception of the Minimalist Program. An explanation of the evolution of language now became one of the main theoretical driving forces behind linguistic theory and explanation. Again, the focus seems to have stayed largely on (c). Berwick and Chomsky explicitly state:

At some time in the very recent past, apparently sometime before 80,000 years ago, if we can judge from associated symbolic proxies, individuals in a small group of hominids in East Africa underwent a minor biological change that provided the operation Merge-an operation that takes human concepts as computational atoms and yields structured expressions that, systematically interpreted by the conceptual system, provide a rich language of thought. (2016: 87)

Such theories rely heavily on the possibility of the evolution of language being explained in terms of saltation or random mutation. This postulate has come under significant scrutiny (see Steedman 2017). Saltation views, however, rely on one of the core assumptions mentioned in the quote above, i.e. that language evolved circa 100 000 years old. This central claim has recently been challenged by Everett (2017) who cites paleontological evidence from the alleged nautical abilities of Homo Erectus to dismantle this timeline. If true, this would mean that language evolved around two million years ago and random mutation need not be the only viable explanation as many in the Essentialist framework assume (see Progovac 2015 for a particular gradualist account).

While generative Essentialists debate among themselves about the plausibility of adaptive explanations for the emergence of essential features of a modular language capacity, Emergentists are perhaps best characterized as seeking broad evolutionary explanations of the features of languages (topic (c)) and communicative capacities (topics (b) and (c)) conceived in non-essentialist, non-modular ways. And as theorists who are committed to exploring non-modular views of linguistic capacities (topic (c)), the differences and similarities between (a) and (b) are potentially relevant to (c).

Primatologists like Cheney and Seyfarth, psychologists like Tomasello, anthropologists like Terrence Deacon, and linguists like Phillip Lieberman share an interest in investigating the communicative, anatomical, and cognitive characteristics of non-human animals to identify biological differences between humans, and monkeys and primates. In the following paragraph we discuss Cheney and Seyfarth (2005) as an example, but we could easily have chosen any of a number of other theorists.

Cheney and Seyfarth (2005) emphasize that non-human primates have a small, stimulus specific repertoire of vocal productions that are not “entirely involuntary,” and this contrasts with their “almost openended ability to learn novel sound-meaning pairs” (p. 149). They also emphasize that vocalizations in monkeys and apes are used to communicate information about the vocalizer, not to provide information intended to “rectify false beliefs in others or instruct others” (p. 150). Non-human primate communication consists in the mainly involuntary broadcasting of the vocalizer’s current affective state. Moreover, although Cheney and Seyfarth recognize that the vervet monkey’s celebrated call system (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990) is “functionally referential” in context, their calls have no explicit meaning since they lack “any propositional structure”. From this they conclude:

The communication of non-human animals lacks three features that are abundantly present in the utterances of young children: a rudimentary ability to attribute mental states different from their own to others, the ability to generate new words, and lexical syntax. (2005: 151)

By ‘lexical syntax’ Cheney and Seyfarth mean a kind of semantic compositionality of characteristic vocalizations. If a vocalization (call) were to have lexical syntax, the semantic significance of the whole would depend on the relation of the structure of parts of the call to the structure of what they signify. The absence of ‘lexical syntax’ in call systems suggests that it is illegitimate to think of them as having anything like semantic structure at all.

Despite the rudimentary character of animal communication systems when compared with human languages, Cheney and Seyfarth argue that monkeys and apes exhibit at least five characteristics that are pre-adaptations for human communication:

• their vocalizations are representational;
• they have competitive/cooperative relations in which alliances, friendships, and rivalries that “create selective pressures for the kind of complex, abstract conceptual abilities that are likely to have proceeded the earlier linguistic communication”;
• because of (ii), their representations of social relations between individuals and themselves are hierarchally structured;
• certain monkeys, e.g. baboons, have open-ended, rule-governed systems of social knowledge;
• their knowledge is propositional.

It is, of course, controversial to claim that monkeys have rule-governed propositional social knowledge systems as claimed in (iv) and (v). For instance, Tomasello’s (2008) ‘Cooperative Communication’ approach makes a case for primate intentional systems not based on their vocalizations but on their gestural systems. Therein he claims that “great ape gestural communication shares with human linguistic communication foundational aspects of its manner of functioning, namely, the intentional and flexible use of learned communicative signals” (2008: 21).

But Emergentists, Externalists, and Essentialists could all, in principle, agree that there are both unique characteristics of human communicative capacities and characteristics of such capacities that are shared with non-humans. For example, by the age of one, human infants can use direction of gaze and focus of attention to infer the referent of a speaker’s utterance (Baldwin and Moses 1994). By contrast, this sort of social referencing capacity in monkeys and apes is rudimentary. This suggests that a major component of humans’ capacity to infer a specific referent is lacking in non-humans.

Disagreements between the approaches might be due to the perceived significance of non-human communicative capacities and their relation to uniquely human ones.

We mentioned earlier that both early 20th-century linguistics monographs and contemporary introductory textbooks include discussions of historical linguistics, i.e., that branch that studies the history and prehistory of changes in particular languages, how they are related to each other, and how and why they change. Again, this topic is distinct from the emergence of language in hominoid species and concerns mostly the linguistic changes that have occurred over a much shorter period within languages.

The last decade has seen two kinds of innovations related to studying changes in particular languages. One, which we will call ‘linguistic phylogeny’, concerns the application of stochastic phylogenetic methods to investigate prehistoric population and language dispersion (Gray and Jordan 2000, Gray 2005, Atkinson and Gray 2006, Gray et al. 2009). These methods answer questions about how members of a family of languages are related to each other and dispersed throughout a geographic area. The second, which we will call the effects of transmission, examines how interpreted artificial languages (sets of signifier/signified pairs) change under a range of transmission conditions (Kirby et al. 2008, Kirby 2001, Hurford 2000), thus providing evidence about how the process of transmission affects the characteristics, especially the structure, of the transmitted interpreted system.

5.2.1 Linguistic phylogeny

Russell Gray and his colleagues have taken powerful phylogenetic methods that were developed by biologists to investigate molecular evolution, and applied them to linguistic data in order to answer questions about the evolution of language families. For example, Gray and Jordan (2000) used a parsimony analysis of a large language data set to adjudicate between competing hypotheses about the speed of the spread of Austronesian languages through the Pacific. More recently, Greenhill et al. (2010) used a NeighbourNet analysis to evaluate the relative rates of change in the typological and lexical features of Austronesian and Indo-European. These results bear on hypotheses about the relative stability of language types over lexical features of those languages, and how far back in time that stability extends. If there were highly conserved typological and lexical features, then it might be possible to identify relationships between languages that date beyond the 8000 (plus or minus 2000) year limit that is imposed by lexical instability.

5.2.2 Effects of transmission

The computational and laboratory experiments of Kirby and his collaborators have shown that under certain conditions of iterated learning, any given set of signifier/signified pairs in which the mapping is initially arbitrary will change to exhibit a very general kind of compositional structure. Iterated learning has been studied in both computational and laboratory experiments by means of diffusion chains, i.e., sequences of learners. A primary characteristic of such sequences of transmission is that what is transmitted from learner to learner will change in an iterated learning environment, in a way that depends on the conditions of transmission.

The children’s game called ‘Telephone’ in the USA (‘Chinese Whispers’ in the UK), provides an example of diffusion chains under which what is transmitted is not stable. In a diffusion chain learning situation what a chain member has actually learned from an earlier member of the chain is presented as the input to the next learner, and what that learner has actually learned provides the input to the following learner. In cases where the initial learning task is very simple: i.e., where what is transmitted is both simple, completely transmitted, and the transmission channel is not noisy, what is transmitted is stable over iterated transmissions even in cases when the participants are young children and chimpanzees (Horner et al. 2006). That is, there is little change in what is transmitted over iterated transmissions. However, in cases where what is transmitted is only partially presented, very complex, or the channel is noisy, then there is a decrease in the fidelity of what is transmitted across iterations just like there is in the children’s game of Telephone.

What Kirby and colleagues show is that when the initial input to a diffusion chain is a reasonably complex set of arbitrary signal/signifier pairs, e.g. one in which 27 complex signals of 6 letters are randomly assigned to 27 objects varying on dimensions of color, kind of motion, and shape, what is transmitted becomes more and more compositional over iterated transmission. Here, ‘compositional’ is being used to refer to the high degree to which sub-strings of the signals come to be systematically paired with specific phenomenal sub-features of what is signified. The transmission conditions in these experiments were free of noise, and for each iteration of the learning task only half of the possible 27 signifier/signified pairs were presented to participants. Under this kind of transmission bottleneck a high degree of sign/signified structure emerged.

A plausible interpretation of these results is that the developing structure of the collection of signs is a consequence of the repeated forced inference by participants from 14 signs and signifieds in the training set to the entire set of 27 pairs. A moral could be that iterated forced prediction of the sign/signified pairs in the entire set, on the basis of exposure to only about half of them, induced the development of a systematic, compositional structure over the course of transmission. It is reasonable to conjecture that this resulting structure reflects effects of human memory, not a domain-specific language module—although further work would be required to rule out many other competing hypotheses.

Thus Kirby and his colleagues focus on something very different from the prerequisites for language emergence. Linguistic nativists have been interested in how primates like us could have become capable of acquiring systems with the structural properties of natural languages. Kirby and his colleagues (while not denying that human cognitive evolution is of interest) are studying how languages evolve to be capable of being acquired by primates like us .

5.2.3 Trends in the Philosophy of Language Evolution

Lastly, language evolution has amassed a great deal of interdisciplinary work in recent times. This has allowed philosophers to directly contribute to this emerging field. The trends in the philosophical work have only loosely followed the Externalist, Emergentist and Essentialist divisions we advocate here. Most philosophical work has largely been focused on Emergentist conceptions within the evolution of linguistic meaning specifically.

Bar-On (2013) distinguishes between Gricean and Post-Gricean approaches to the evolution of language. The former requires an attribution of Gricean speaker meaning to our languageless ancestors which in turn seems to assume intentional actions govern by rationality (‘nonnatural meaning’). This task is as fraught as explaining the evolution of language itself. She thus proposes the latter, specifically a Post-Gricean (Orrigi and Sperber 2000) approach which takes expressive communication (found widely in non-human animal species) as a basis for the emergence of linguistic meaning between signalers and receivers. She states:

Expressive communication, I will argue, exhibits features that foreshadow significant aspects of linguistic communication. In its domain, we can identify legitimate natural precursors of meaningful linguistic communication. (For present purposes, by ‘legitimate natural precursors’, I mean behavioral interactions that at least: a. can be found in the natural world; b. go beyond Tomasello’s mere ‘communicative displays’; c. do not depend on crediting the relevant creatures with language-like propositional thought or post-Gricean communicative intentions, and; d. exhibit features that foreshadow important semantic and pragmatic features of linguistic communication so in that sense are proto-semantic and proto-pragmatic.) (2013: 354)

Recent work in Evolutionary Game Theory has also lent credence to the emergence of signaling systems involving non-intentional states. Taking Lewis (1969) as a spring-board, Skyrms (2010) investigates the structure of signaling behavior beyond the existence of mutual conventions. His framework starts from the most basic non-trivial cases and gradually introduces complexity (such as deception and the introduction of new signals etc.). Skyrms’ account views propositional or semantic content as a special case of informational content thereby reintroducing information theory as a tool to philosophers of language and linguistics interested in the emergence of linguistic communication and/or semantic meaning.

• Adger, David, 2003, Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Akmajian, Adrian, Demers, Richard, Farmer, Ann, and Harnish, Robert, 2010, Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 6th ed.
• Angluin, Dana, 1980, “Inductive inference of formal languages from positive data”, Information and Control , 45: 117–135.
• Artstein, Ron and Poesio, Massimo, 2008, “Inter-Coder Agreement for Computational Linguistics”, Computational Linguistics , 34: 555–596.
• Atkinson, Quentin D. and Gray, Russell D., 2006, “How old is the Indo-European language family? Progress or more moths to the flame?”, in J. Clackson, P. Forster, and C. Renfrew, (eds.), Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages , Cambridge: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 91–109.
• Azzouni, Jody, 2004, Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Baldwin, Dare A. and Moses, L. J., 1994, “Early understanding of referential intent and attentional focus: Evidence from language and emotion”, in C. Lewis and P. Mitchell (eds.), Children’s Early Understanding of Mind: Origins and Development , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 133–156.
• Bard, Ellen, Robertson, David, and Sorace, Antonella, 1996, “Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability”, Language , 72(1): 32–68.
• Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, Leda, and Tooby, J., 1992, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Barlow, Michael and Kemmer, Suzanne (eds.), 2002, Usage-Based Models of Language , Stanford: CSLI Press.
• Bar-On, Dorit, 2013, “Origins of Meaning: Must We ‘Go Gricean’?” Mind and Language , 38(3): 342–375.
• Baroni, M., Bernardini, S., Ferraresi, A., and Zanchetta, E., 2009, “The WaCky Wide Web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora”, Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation , 43(3): 209–226.
• Bates, Elizabeth, Elman, Jeffrey, Johnson, Mark, Karmiloff-Smith, Annette, Parisi, Domenico, and Plunkett, Kim, 1998, “Innateness and emergentism”, William Bechtel and George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science , Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 590–601.
• Berwick, Robert, and Chomsky, Noam, 2016, Why only us? Language and evolution , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bickerton, Derek, 2007, “Language evolution: A brief guide for linguists”, Lingua , 117: 510–526.
• Bickerton, Derek, 2014, More than nature needs: Language, mind, and evolution , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Bloomfield, Leonard, 1914, An Introduction to the Study of Language , New York, NY: Henry Holt.
• –––, 1933, Language , New York, NY: Henry Holt.
• –––, 1939, Linguistic Aspects of Science (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science: Volume 1/Number 4), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Boroditsky, Lera, Schmidt, L., and Phillips, W., 2003, “Sex, syntax, and semantics”, in Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 61–80.
• Bresnan, Joan, 2007, “A few lessons from typology”, Linguistic Typology , 11: 297–306.
• Bresnan, Joan, Cueni, Anna, Nikitina, Tatiana, and Baayen, Harald, 2007, “Predicting the dative alternation”, in G. Boume, I. Kraemer, and J. Zwarts (eds.), Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation , Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, 69–94.
• Bresnan, Joan and Ford, Marilyn, 2010, “Predicting syntax: Processing dative constructions in American and Australian varieties of English”, Language , 86: 168–213.
• Bromberger, Sylvain, 1989, “Types and tokens in linguistics”, in Reflections on Chomsky , A. George, (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 58–88.
• –––, 2011, “What are words? Comments on Kaplan (1990), on Hawthorne and Lepore, and on the issue”, The Journal of Philosophy , 108(9): 486–503.
• Brown, Roger and Hanlon, Camille, 1970, “Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child speech”, in Cognition and the Development of Language , J. R. Hayes, (ed.), New York: John Wiley and Sons, 11–54.
• Brown, Roger and Lenneberg, Eric, 1954, “A study in language and cognition”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 49: 445–453.
• Bybee, Joan and McClelland, J. L., 2005, “Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition”, The Linguistic Review , 22(2–4): 381–410.
• Cappelen, Herman, 1999, “Intentions in words”, Noûs , 33(1): 92–102.
• Cheney, D. L. and Seyfarth, R. M., 1990, “The assessment by vervet monkeys of their own and another species’ alarm calls”, Animal Behavior , 40: 754–764.
• –––, 2005, “Constraints and preadaptations in the earliest stages of language evolution”, The Linguistic Review , 22: 135–159.
• Chierchia, Gennaro, 1998, “Reference to kinds across languages”, Natural Language Semantics , 6: 339–405.
• Chomsky, Noam, 1955, “The logical structure of linguistic theory”, Unpublished manuscript; revised in 1956 and distributed from MIT Library; published with some abridgement in 1975 by Plenum Press, New York.
• –––, 1959, “On certain formal properties of grammars”, Information and Control , 1: 91–112.
• –––, 1965, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• –––, 1968, Language and Mind , New York: Harper and Row.
• –––, 1969, “Linguistics and philosophy”, in Language and Philosophy: A Symposium, Sidney Hook, (ed.), New York: New York University Press, 51–94.
• –––, 1975, Reflections on Language , New York, NY: Pantheon.
• –––, 1979, Language and Responsibility , [translated by John Viertel from the 1977 French edition produced by Mitsou Ronat], Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press.
• –––, 1981, Lectures on Government and Binding , Dordrecht: Foris.
• –––, 1986, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use , Westport, CT: Praeger.
• –––, 1988, Language and Problems of Knowledge , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• –––, 1992, “Explaining language use”, Philosophical Topics , 20: 205–231.
• –––, 1995, “Language and nature”, Mind , 104: 1–61.
• –––, 2003, “Reply to Millikan”, in Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein (eds.), Chomsky and His Critics , Oxford: Blackwell, 308–315.
• Chouinard, M. M. and Clark, E. V., 2003, “Adult reformulations of child errors as negative evidence”, Journal of Child Language , 30(3): 637–669.
• Cowart, Wayne, 1997, Experimental Syntax: Applying Objective Methods to Sentence Judgments , Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
• Cowie, Fiona, 1999, What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Culicover, Peter W. and Jackendoff, Ray S., 2010, “Quantitative methods alone are not enough: Response to Gibson and Fedorenko”, Trends in Cognitive Science , 14(6): 234–235.
• den Dikken, Marcel, Bernstein, Judy, Tortora, Christina, and Zanuttini, Raffaella, 2007, “Data and grammar: Means and individuals”, Theoretical Linguistics , 33: 269–318.
• Derwing, Bruce, 1973, Transformational Grammar as a Theory of Language Acquisition: A Study in the Empirical, Conceptual and Methodological Foundations of Contemporary Linguistics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Devitt, Michael, 2006, Ignorance of Language , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Dummett, Michael, 1986, “‘A nice derangement of epitaphs’: Some comments on Davidson and Hacking”, in Truth and Interpretation , Ernest Lepore (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 459–476.
• Dunbar, Robin, 1998, “Theory of mind and the evolution of language”, in James R. Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, and Chris Knight (eds.), Approaches to the Evolution of Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 92–110.
• Eckert, Penelope, 1989, Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School , New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• Edelman, Shimon and Christiansen, Morten, 2003, “How seriously should we take minimalist syntax?”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 7: 60–61.
• Elman, Jeffrey L., 1993, “Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small”, Cognition , 48: 71–99.
• Everett, Daniel, 2017, How language began: The story of humanity’s greatest invention , New York: W. W. Norton.
• Ferreira, Fernanda, 2005, “Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science”, The Linguistic Review , 22: 365–380.
• Field, Hartry, 1980, Science without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism , Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 2010, “Prolegomena to a future science of biolinguistics”, Biolinguistics , 3(4): 283–320.
• Fodor, Janet Dean and Crowther, Carrie, 2002, “Understanding stimulus poverty arguments”, The Linguistic Review , 19(1–2): 105–146.
• Fodor, Jerry A., 1983, The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Fodor, Jerry A. and Pylyshyn, Zenon W., 1988, “Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis”, Cognition , 28: 3–71.
• Foraker, Stephani, Regier, Terry, Khetarpal, Naveen, Perfors, Amy, and Tenenbaum, Joshua, 2009, “Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one”, Cognitive Science , 33: 287–300.
• Gasparri, Luca, 2021, “A pluralistic theory of wordhood”, Mind and Language , 36(4): 592–609.
• George, Alexander, 1989, “How not to become confused about linguistics”, in Reflections on Chomsky , Alexander George (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 90–110.
• Gibson, Edward and Fedorenko, Evelina, 2013, “The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research”, Language and Cognitive Processes , 28: 88–124. (See also the authors’ summary in Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 2010, Volume 14, pp. 233–234.)
• Gold, E. Mark, 1967, “Language identification in the limit”, Information and Control , 10: 447–474.
• Goldberg, Adele, 1995, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Gray, Russell D., 2005, “Pushing the time barrier in the quest for language roots”, Science , 209: 307–308.
• Gray, Russell D., Drummond, A. J., and Greenhill, S. J., 2009, “Phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement”, Science , 323: 479–483.
• Gray, Russell D. and Jordan, Fiona M., 2000, “Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion”, Nature , 405: 1052–1055. Minor technical correction noted in Nature , 409: 743 (8 February 2001).
• Greenhill, S. J., Atkinson, Q. D., Meade, A., and Gray, R. D., 2010, “The shape and tempo of language evolution”, Proceedings of the Royal Society B , 277: 2443–2450.
• Harris, Zellig, 1957, “Co-occurrence and transformation in linguistic structure”, Language , 33: 283–340.
• Haspelmath, Martin, 2011, “The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax”, Folia Linguistica , 45(1): 31–80.
• Hauser, Marc D., Chomsky, Noam, and Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 2002 [HCF], “The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve”, Science , 298: 1569–1579.
• Hawthorne, John, and Lepore, Ernest, 2011, “On words”, The Journal of Philosophy , 108(9): 447–485.
• Hellman, Geoffrey, 1989, Mathematics without Numbers: Towards a Modal-Structural Interpretation , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Hockett, Charles F., 1968, The State of the Art , The Hague: Mouton.
• Hoijer, Harry, 1954, “The Sapir Whorf hypothesis”, in Language in Culture , Harry Hoijer (ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 92–105.
• Hopper, Paul and Thompson, Sandra, 1993, “Language universals, discourse pragmatics, and semantics”, Linguistic Sciences , 15: 357–376.
• Horner, Victoria, Whiten, Andrew, Flynn, Emma, and de Waal, Frans B. M., 2006, “Faithful replication of foraging techniques along cultural transmission chains by chimpanzees and children”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 103: 13878–13883.
• Hurford, James R., 2000, “Social transmission favours linguistic generalization”, in J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy, and C. Knight (eds.), The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 219–230.
• Irmak, Nurbay, 2019, “An ontology of words”, Erkenntnis , 84(5): 1139–1158.
• Itkonen, Esa, 1978, Grammatical Theory and Metascience: A Critical Investigation into the Methodological and Philosophical Foundations of ‘Autonomous’ Linguistics , Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
• –––, 2013, “The philosophy of linguistics”, in Keith Allan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 747–774.
• Jackendoff, Ray S., 2002, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2018, “Representations and Rules of Language”, in The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett , B. Huebner (ed.), Oxford University Press, 95–126.
• Jacobson, Pauline, 1996, “The syntax/semantics interface in categorial grammar”, in Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory , Shalom Lappin (ed.), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Oxford University Press, 89–116.
• Jain, Sanjay, Osherson, Daniel N., Royer, James S., and Sharma, Arun, 1999, Systems That Learn , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2nd ed.
• Johnson, Kent, 2004, “Gold’s theorem and cognitive science”, Philosophy of Science , 70(4): 571–592.
• –––, 2007, “On the systematicity of language and thought”, Journal of Philosophy , 101: 111–139.
• –––, 2015, “Notational variants and invariance in linguistics”, Mind and Language , 30(2): 162–186.
• Joos, Martin (ed.), 1966, Readings in Linguistics I: The Development of Descriptive Linguistics in America 1925–56 , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, fourth ed.
• Kaplan, David, 1990, “Words”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 64: 93–119.
• –––, 2011, “Words on words”, The Journal of Philosophy , 108(9): 504–529.
• Karlsson, Fred, 2007, “Constraints on multiple center-embedding of clauses”, Journal of Linguistics , 43(2): 365–392.
• Katz, Jerrold J., 1980, “Chomsky on meaning”, Language , 56(1): 1–41.
• –––, 1981, Language and Other Abstract Objects , Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
• ––– (ed.), 1985, Philosophy of Linguistics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1996, “The Unfinished Chomskyan Revolution”, Mind and Language , 11(3): 270–294.
• –––, 1998, Realistic Rationalism , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Kay, Paul and Regier, Terry, 2006, “Language, thought and color: Recent developments”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 10(2): 51–53.
• Kay, Paul, Berlin, Brent, Maffi, Luisa, Merrifield, William, 2011, The World Color Survey , Stanford, Center for the Study of Language and Information.
• Kirby, Simon, 2001, “Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure: An iterated learning model of the emergence of regularity and irregularity”, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation , 5(2): 102–110.
• Kirby, Simon, Cornish, Hannah, and Smith, Kenny, 2008, “Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 101(31): 10681–10686.
• Kousta, S. T., Vinson, D. P., and Vigliocco, G., 2008, “Investigating linguistic relativity through bilingualism: The case of grammatical gender”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition , 34(4): 843–858.
• Labov, William, 1966, The Social Stratification of English in New York City , Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. 2nd edition Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• –––, 1975, “Empirical foundations of linguistic theory”, in The Scope of American Linguistics , R. Austerlitz (ed.), Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 77–133.
• –––, 1996, “When intuitions fail”, in L. McNair, K. Singer, L. Dobrin, and M. Aucon (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Theory and Data in Linguistics , Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 77–106.
• Lappin, Shalom and Shieber, Stuart, 2007, “Machine learning theory and practice as a source of insight into universal grammar”, Journal of Linguistics , 43: 393–427.
• Larson, Richard, 1988, “On the double object construction”, Linguistic Inquiry , 19: 335–391.
• Laurence, Stephen and Margolis, Eric, 2001, “The poverty of the stimulus argument”, British Journal of Philosophy of Science , 52(2): 217–276.
• Levelt, W. J. M., 2008, An Introduction to the Theory of Formal Languages and Automata , Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Lewis, David, 1969, Convention: A Philosophical Study , Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Li, P. and Gleitman, Lila, 2002, “Turning the tables: Language and spatial reasoning”, Cognition , 83: 265–294.
• Lucy, John, 1996, “The scope of linguistic relativity: An analysis and review of empirical research”, in J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 37–69.
• Ludlow, Peter, 2011, The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacWhinney, Brian, 2005, “The emergence of grammar from perspective taking”, in D. Pecher and R. A. Zwaan (eds.), The Grounding of Cognition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198–223.
• Mallory, Fintan, 2020, “Linguistic types are capacity-individuated action-types”. Inquiry , 63(9–10): 1123–1148.
• Martinet, André, 1960, Elements of General Linguistics , London: Faber.
• Matthews, Robert, 1984, “The plausibility of rationalism”, Journal of Philosophy , 81: 492–515. Reprinted in Matthews and Demopoulos (1989), 51–75.
• –––, 2007, “The case for linguistic nativism”, in Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science , Robert J. Stainton, (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 81–96.
• Matthews, Robert and Demopoulos, William (eds.), 1989, Learnability and Language Acquisition , Dordrecht: Foris.
• Miller, James, 2020, “The ontology of words: Realism, nominalism, and eliminativism”, Philosophy Compass , 15(7): e12691.
• –––, 2021, “A bundle theory of words”, Synthese , 198: 5731–5748.
• Millikan, Ruth Garrett, 2003, “In defense of public language”, in L. M. Antony and N. Hornstein (eds.), Chomsky and His Critics , Oxford: Blackwell, 215–237.
• Montague, Richard, 1974, Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague , New Haven: Yale University Press. Edited by R. Thomason.
• Morris, Charles, 1938, Foundations of the Theory of Signs , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Napoli, Donna Jo, 1996, Linguistics: An Introduction , New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Nefdt, Ryan, 2016, “Languages and other abstract structures”, in Essays on Linguistic Realism , C. Behme and M. Neef (eds.), Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 139–184.
• –––, 2019a, “The philosophy of linguistics: scientific underpinnings and methodological disputes”, Philosophy Compass , 14(12): e12636.
• –––, 2019b, “The ontology of words: a structural approach”, Inquiry , 62(8): 877–911.
• –––, 2019c, “Infinity and the foundations of linguistics”, Synthese , 196: 1671–1711.
• –––, 2020, “Formal semantics and applied mathematics: an inferential account”, Journal of Logic, Language and Information , 29(2): 221–253.
• –––, 2021, “Structural realism and generative linguistics”, Synthese , 199: 3711–3737.
• Newmeyer, Frederick J., 1986, Linguistic Theory in America , New York: Academic Press, 2nd edition.
• –––, 1991, “Functional explanation in linguistics and the origins of language”, Language and Communication , 11(1–2): 3–28.
• –––, 1998, “On the supposed ‘counterfunctionality’ of universal grammar: Some evolutionary implications”, in J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy, and C. Knight (eds.), Approaches to the Evolution of Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 305–319.
• –––, 2007, “Commentary on Sam Featherston, ‘Data in generative grammar: The stick and the carrot”’, Theoretical Linguistics , 33: 395–399.
• Newport, Elissa L., 1988, “Constraints on learning and their role in language acquisition: Studies of the acquisition of American sign language”, Language Sciences , 10: 147–172.
• O’Grady, William, 2008, “The emergentist program”, Lingua , 118: 447–464.
• Osherson, Daniel N., Stob, Michael, and Weinstein, Scott, 1984, “Learning theory and natural language”, Cognition , 17(1): 1–28. Reprinted in Matthews and Demopoulos (1989), 19–50.
• Partee, Barbara, 1975, “Montague grammar and transformational grammar”, Linguistic Inquiry , 6: 203–300.
• Pelletier, Francis Jeffry, 1991, “The principle of semantic compositionality”, Topoi , 13: 11–24; reprinted, with additions, in S. Davis and B. Gillon, Semantics: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 133–156.
• Penn, Julia, 1972, Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas: The Origins of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in German Thought , Paris: Mouton.
• Phillips, Colin, 2010, “Should we impeach armchair linguists?”, in S. Iwasaki, H. Hoji, P. Clancy, and S.-O. Sohn (eds.), Japanese-Korean Linguistics 17 , Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 49–64.
• Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo, 1989, “Evolution, selection, and cognition: From ‘learning’ to parameter setting in biology and the study of language”, Cognition , 31: 1–44.
• Pinker, Steven, 1994, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind , New York, NY: Morrow Press.
• –––, 2007, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature , New York, NY: Viking Penguin.
• Pinker, Steven and Bloom, Paul, 1990, “Natural language and natural selection”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 13: 707–726.
• Pinker, Steven and Jackendoff, Ray S., 2005, “The faculty of language: What’s special about it?”, Cognition , 95: 201–236.
• Postal, Paul, 2003, “Remarks on the foundations of linguistics”, The Philosophical Forum , 34: 233–251.
• Power, Camilla, 1998, “‘Old wives’ tales’: The gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals”, in J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy, and C. Knight (eds.), Approaches to the Evolution of Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 111–129.
• Prinz, Jesse, 2002, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Progovac, Ljiljana, 2015, Evolutionary syntax (Oxford Studies in the Evolution of Language), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Pullum, Geoffrey K., 1983, “How many possible human languages are there?”, Linguistic Inquiry , 14: 447–467.
• –––, 2013, “The central question in comparative syntactic metatheory”, Mind and Language , 28(4): 492–521.
• –––, 2019, “Philosophy of linguistics”, in Kelly Michael Becker and Iain Thomson, (eds.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 49–59.
• Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Scholz, Barbara C., 1997, “Theoretical linguistics and the ontology of linguistic structure”, in T. Haukioja, M.-L. Helasvuo, and M. Miestamo, (eds.), SKY 1997: 1997 Yearbook of the Linguistic Association of Finland , Turku: Suomen kielitieteelinen yhdistys [Linguistic Association of Finland], 25–47.
• –––, 2002, “Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments”, The Linguistic Review , 19: 9–50.
• –––, 2007, “ Systematicity and Natural Language Syntax”, Croatian Journal of Philosophy , 21: 375–402.
• –––, 2010, “Recursion and the infinitude claim”, in Recursion in Human Language , Harry van der Hulst (ed.), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, no. 104 in Studies in Generative Grammar, 113–138.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1963, “Probability and confirmation”, in The Voice of America Forum Lectures (Philosophy of Science Series, No. 10), Hilary Putnam, (ed.), Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency. Reprinted in Mathematics, Matter and Method , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 293–304.
• Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1972, “Linguistics and philosophy”, in Language and Philosophy: A Symposium , Sidney Hook (ed.), New York: New York University Press, 95–98.
• –––, 1987, Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary , Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Rey, Georges, 2006, “The intentional inexistence of language—But not cars”, in R. J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary debates in cognitive science , Oxford: Blackwell, 237–255.
• –––, 2020, Representation of Language: philosophical issues in a Chomskyan linguistics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Rohde, D. L. T. and Plaut, D. C., 1999, “Language acquisition in the absence of explicit negative evidence: How important is starting small?”, Cognition , 72: 67–109.
• Roland, Doug and Jurafsky, Daniel, 2002, “Verb sense and verb subcategorization probabilities”, in S. Stevenson and P. Merlo (eds.), The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational, and Experimental Issues , Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 325–346.
• Ross, John R., 2010, “The Category Squish: Endstation Hauptwort”, Cognitive Linguistics Bibliography (CogBib) , Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 316–339.
• Sampson, Geoffrey, 2001, Empirical Linguistics , London: Continuum Press.
• –––, 2005, The Language Instinct Debate , London: Continuum Press.
• Santana, Carlos, 2016, “What Is Language?” Ergo , 3(19): 501–523.
• Sapir, Edward, 1921, Language , New York, NY: Harcourt.
• –––, 1929, “The status of linguistics as a science”, Language , 5: 207–214. Reprinted in David Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language Culture and Personality , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968, 160–166.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1916, Cours de linguistique générale , Paris and Lausanne: Payot. Edited and published after Saussure’s death by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. English translation by Roy Harris (1998) in Ferinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics , New York: Open Court.
• Scholz, Barbara C. and Pullum, Geoffrey K., 2002, “Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism”, The Linguistic Review , 19: 185–223.
• –––, 2006, “Irrational nativist exuberance”, in Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science , Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 59–80.
• –––, 2007, “Tracking the origins of generative grammar”, Journal of Linguistics , 43: 701–723.
• Schütze, Carson, 1996, The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Seuren, Pieter A. M., 1998, Western Linguistics: An Historical Introduction , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Shapiro, Stewart, 1997, Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology , Oxford University Press.
• Shinohara, Takeshi, 1990, “Inductive inference of monotonic formal systems from positive data”, in S. Arikawa, S. Goto, S. Ohsuga, and T. Yokomori (eds.), Algorithmic Learning Theory , Berlin: Springer, 339–351.
• Skyrms, Brian, 2010, Signals: Evolution, Learning and Information , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Slobin, Dan, 1996, “From thought and language to thinking for speaking”, in J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 70–96.
• Soames, Scott, 1984, “Linguistics and psychology”, Linguistics and Philosophy , 7: 155–179.
• Sperber, Dan, and Origgi, Gloria, 2010, “A pragmatic perspective on the evolution of language”, in R. K. Larson, V. Déprez, and H. Yamakido (eds.), The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 124–132.
• Sprouse, Jon, 2011, “A test of the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation: Commutativity does not hold for acceptability judgments”, Language , 87(2): 274–288.
• Sprouse, Jon and Almeida, Diogo, 2012, “Assessing the reliability of textbook data in syntax: Adger’s Core Syntax ”, Journal of Linguistics , 48(3): 609–652.
• Stainton, Robert J. (ed.), 2006, Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Stainton, Robert J., 2014, “Philosophy of Linguistics”. Oxford Handbooks Online , published online July 2014. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935314.013.002
• Steedman, Mark, 2000, The Syntactic Process , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• –––, 2017, “The emergence of language”, Mind and Language , 32(5): 597–590.
• Szabó, Zoltan, 1999, “Expressions and their representation”, The Philosophical Quarterly , 49(195): 145–163.
• –––, 2015, “Major parts of speech”, Erkenntnis , 80: 3–29.
• Szabolcsi, Anna, 1997, “Strategies for scope taking”, in Ways of Scope Taking , Anna Szabolcsi (ed.), Dordrecht: Kluwer, 109–155.
• Thierry, Guillaume, Athanasopulous, Panos, Wiggett, Alison, Dering, Benjamin, and Kuipers, Jan-Rouke, 2009, “Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on pre-attentive color perception”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 106(11): 4567–4570.
• Tomalin, Marcus, 2006, Linguistics and the Formal Sciences: The Origins of Generative Grammar , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Tomasello, Michael, 1998, “Introduction”, in The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure , Michael Tomasello (ed.), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• –––, 2003, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2008, Origins of Human Communication , Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
• Tomlin, Russell S., 1990, “Functionalism in second language acquisition”, Studies in Second Language Acquisition , 12: 155–177.
• Valian, Virginia, 1982, “Psycholinguistic experiment and linguistic intuition”, in T. W. Simon and R. J. Scholes (eds.), Language, Mind, and Brain , Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 179–188.
• Van Valin, Robert, 1991, “Functionalist linguistic theory and language acquisition”, First Language , 11: 7–40.
• Voegelin, Carl F. and Harris, Zellig S., 1951, “Methods for determining intelligibility among dialects of natural languages”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , 95(3): 322–329.
• Wasow, Thomas and Arnold, Jennifer, 2005, “Intuitions in linguistic argumentation”, Lingua , 115: 1481–1496.
• Weinreich, Max, 1945, “Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt”, Yivo Bleter , 25: 3–18.
• Weskott, Thomas and Fanselow, Gisbert, 2011, “On the informativity of different measures of linguistic acceptability”, Language , 87(2): 249–273.
• Weisberg, Michael, 2013, Simulation and Similarity: Using Models to Understand the World , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Wetzel, Linda, 2009, Types and tokens: An essay on abstract objects , Boston, MA: MIT Press.
• Wexler, Kenneth and Culicover, Peter, 1980, Formal Principles of Language Acquisition , Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Wexler, Kenneth and Hamburger, Henry, 1973, “On the insufficiency of surface data for the learning of transformational languages”, in J. Hintikka, J. Moravcsik, and P. Suppes (eds.), Approaches to Natural Language , Dordrecht: Reidel, 16–179.
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 1956, Language, Thought and Reality , Cambridge University Press: MIT Press. Edited by John B. Carroll.
• Worden, Robert, 1998, “The evolution of language from social intelligence”, in J. R. Hurford, M. Studdert-Kennedy, and C. Knight (eds.), Approaches to the Evolution of Language , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 148–166.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Treebank , Wikipedia.
• The Switchboard Corpus .
• The British National Corpus .

analysis | assertion | compositionality | defaults in semantics and pragmatics | descriptions | empiricism: logical | idiolects | innate/acquired distinction | innateness: and language | language of thought hypothesis | linguistics: computational | logic: intensional | mental representation | pragmatics | propositional attitude reports | reference | relativism | rigid designators

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the two SEP referees, Tom Wasow and William Starr, who provided careful reviews of our drafts; to Bonnie Webber and Zoltan Galsi for insightful comments and advice; and to Dean Mellow for some helpful corrections. BCS was the lead author of this article throughout the lengthy period of its preparation, and worked on it in collaboration with FJP and GKP until the post-refereeing revision was submitted at the end of April 2011. She died two weeks later, on May 14. FJP and GKP oversaw the few final corrections that were made when the HTML version was first published in September 2011.

Copyright © 2024 by Barbara C. Scholz Francis Jeffry Pelletier < francisp @ ualberta . ca > Geoffrey K. Pullum < pullum @ gmail . com > Ryan Nefdt < ryan . nefdt @ uct . ac . za >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

• Linguistics as a Science

In this Book

• Victor H. Yngve
• Published by: Indiana University Press

Table of Contents

• Half Title Page
• 1. Questions and Clues
• 2. Language and Linguistics
• 3. Analysis: The Domain of Language
• 4. Analysis: The Domain of People
• 5. Implications
• 6. A Scientific Foundation for Linguistics
• 7. Laws of Communicative Behavior
• 8. The Linguistic Structure Of Properties Of People
• 9. The Linguistic Structure of Communities
• 10. Tests of Theory against Observation
• Index of Proper Names and Terms

Additional Information

Project MUSE Mission

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

+1 (410) 516-6989 [email protected]

©2024 Project MUSE. Produced by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with The Sheridan Libraries.

Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires

Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

Linguistics as a Science

This pathbreaking work lays a new foundation for linguistics: It focuses on people rather than on language and is governed by science rather than grammar or philosophy. A linguistics built on this foundation avoids many intellectual problems, it can confront the full observational details of how people communicate, and provides greater relevance to studies in psychology, sociology, culture, and literature. The goal is nothing less than to provide the basis for a new scientific linguistics.

The thesis that grammar and science are incompatible is developed in a carefully reasoned argument that explores the ancient foundations of grammar and considers the widely accepted goals of modern scientific linguistics. Out of this comes the insight that linguistics must choose between being a discipline of pure grammar that studies language as an abstract relation between sound and meaning and rejects science or a scientific discipline that studies people and how they communicate as part of the physical world.

Professor Yngve lays out a new and formal notational apparatus capable of confronting in detail all the evidence of how people communicate . His approach provides formal methods suitable for studying previously difficult pragmatic, contextual, and variational phenomena. And it promises to provide greater relevance to adjacent disciplines, such as physiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, semiotics, cultural and literary studies.

Table of Contents

• isbn 978-0-253-05355-8
• publisher Indiana University Press
• publisher place Bloomington, Indiana USA
• restrictions CC-BY-NC-ND
• rights Copyright © Trustees of Indiana University
• rights holder Indiana University Press
• rights territory World
• doi https://doi.org/10.2979/LinguisticsasaScienc

• Utility Menu

Department of Linguistics

• Why Linguistics?

About the field

Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is perhaps the ultimate interdisciplinary enterprise, cutting across the humanities, social sciences, cognitive sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences. Since it is not taught in high school, most undergraduates, including many future Linguistics concentrators, only "discover" linguistics after they come to college. Some are intrigued by the prospect of discovering formal rules to model a complex form of behavior like language; others are interested in the relationship of natural languages to other symbolic systems; still others are curious about similarities and differences they have noticed among individual languages. In exploring these and similar topics, students of linguistics not only learn a great deal about a fascinating field; they also master a variety of conceptual and empirical techniques that stand them in good stead after graduation. 

Career Opportunities 

The Department understands that undergraduates are interested in linguistics for a variety of reasons. Some plan to pursue graduate studies in linguistics or a related discipline; some plan to go on to professional work:  and some see a concentration in Linguistics as interesting and valuable intellectually, but do not base their future vocational plans upon it. The Department has kept all of these considerations in mind in designing its course offerings and concentration requirements. Recent Harvard Linguistics concentrators have gone on to graduate school in linguistics, mathematics, computer science, cognitive science, English, and music; to medical school, law school, and business school; and into employment fields as diverse as editing, writing, translating, and language-processing software design. 

Interdisciplinary Appeal

Modern linguistic theory attempts to characterize a very complex domain of human knowledge, and is thus an area of central concern to philosophers of mind as well as to cognitive psychologists. Furthermore, since the models of language constructed by theoretical linguists are formal in character and inspired by computational and mathematical methodologies, linguistics has a mutually beneficial relationship with computer science and the study of artificial intelligence. Linguistics also offers a firm understanding of the nature of language to literary scholars and language teachers. Finally, since languages are cultural artifacts, the reconstruction of an extinct language can shed light on the physical surroundings and the social institutions of its speakers, making linguistics a topic of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, and archaeologists.

The courses offered by the Department of Linguistics reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field. The emphases are on linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and the cognitive aspects related to language.

• Courses 2023-24 AND Fall 2024
• Requirements for Concentrators
• Honors Theses
• Recommendations for Honors
• Secondary Field in Linguistics
• Joint A.B./A.M. Program

American Sign Language (ASL) at Harvard

• Concentrators' Corner

Course Descriptions

Full course descriptions, fall 2024 courses are subject to change, fall 2024 courses, fall 2024 course schedule, fall 2024 asl course schedule, fall 2023 courses, fall 2023 course schedule, spring 2024 courses, spring 2024 course schedule.

The Role of Language in the Cognitive Sciences

• First Online: 31 March 2021

Cite this chapter

• Ryan M. Nefdt 4  

337 Accesses

1 Citations

This chapter concerns the contemporary challenges to the place of language and linguistics in the cognitive sciences (Jackendoff, The foundations of language . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Culicover 2007). The specific aim is to investigate some recent arguments for replacing linguistics with psychology as the core of the interdisciplinary field emanating from the so-called Second Generation of Cognitive Science (Sinha, Cognitive linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics , 1–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

In its short history, formal generative linguistics found itself informed by mathematical logic, philosophy, psychology and the biological sciences. I argue that it is the mentalism of the former that has led to the connections with the latter, where mentalism is the view that linguistics is a subfield of cognitive psychology (Chomsky 1972). Mathematical logic was introduced to solve the problem of infinite expressions in a finite human mind/brain (Chomsky, New horizons for the study of mind and language . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Lobina, Recursion: A computational investigation into the representation and processing of language . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), philosophy was incorporated in order to expand the notion of mind necessary for scientific inquiry (among other things), psychology was used to ground the intuitions which inform grammar construction and finally biology represented the future of the field (hence the later coinage ‘biolinguistics’, Lenneberg, Biological foundations of language . New York: Wiley, 1967).

I consider two rival architectures for the cognitive sciences, one based on the intersection of related fields and another on their union. I show that the intersectional approach is preferable and favors linguistics as a central field and language as a central cognitive phenomenon. Hence, language studies can still be a viable core discipline on one interpretation of cognitive science, in spite of certain problems facing generative linguistics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

By “formal” here I refer to the mathematical underpinnings of linguistics inspired by Post’s developments of canonical production systems in proof-theory. For more information, see Pullum ( 2011 ).

I avoid the terms “first” and “second” here as Chomsky ( 1991 ) and Boeckx ( 2005 ) claim the first cognitive revolution occurred in the eighteenth century in the form of the Cartesian representational theory of perception.

For instance, the influential philosopher W.V. Quine even constrained solutions to his infamous indeterminacy arguments to involving only observable behavioral evidence.

Of course, there were many more components of this result including Bar-Hillel’s work on applying recursion theory to syntax, Harris’ transformations and Goodman’s constructional systems theory. See Tomalin ( 2006 ) for a detailed review. See also Pullum and Scholz ( 2007 ) for requisite detail on Post’s influence somewhat neglected by Tomalin’s account.

Although it should be noted that the clinical psychology of the time largely resisted the behavioristic scruples of experimental psychology.

This date is corroborated by Gardner ( 1985 ).

A more full account would include reference to the work of Vygotsky and Luria in the Soviet Union among other things. I thank Anastasia Saliukova for pointing this out to me.

The formal grammars of generative grammar correspond to various automata in accordance with the Chomsky Hierarchy. For instance, context free grammars can be represented by pushdown automata while regular grammars only map onto a more restrictive class of finite state automata.

This view is the subject of the philosophical critique of Devitt ( 2006 ) in the philosophy of linguistics and also the more recent so-called 4E approaches to cognitive science represented by embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted cognition. In fact, Menary ( 2010 ) argues that perhaps one of the only things connecting these latter views is their mutual rejection of cognitivism or representationalism.

This last field has seen a resurgence of interest in the connection between language and thought exemplified by the erstwhile Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. See Reines and Prinz ( 2009 ) for an overview of this literature.

For instance, Langendoen and Postal ( 1984 ) provided an argument for the cardinality of natural language being that of a proper class.

Of course, mentalism in linguistics was more explicitly established after some of these procedural mechanisms were incorporated into the theory.

Psychology itself has been less receptive to linguistic theory for numerous reasons; its formalism, data collection techniques and, of course, the many theory changes within generative linguistics did not help matters either. “When Chomsky made significant changes to his theory of grammar, this discouraged many psychologies” (Chipman 2017 : 5).

Bartlett, Frederic. 1932. Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Google Scholar  

Bechtel, William, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. 2001. Cognitive science: History. In International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences , 2154–2158. New York: Elsevier Ltd.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Bickerton, Derek. 2016. More than nature needs: Language, mind and evolution . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1936. Language or ideas? Language 12: 89–95.

Article   Google Scholar  

Boeckx, Cedric. 2005. Generative grammar and modern cognitive science. Journal of Cognitive Science 6: 45–54.

Cappelen, Herman. 2017. Why philosophers should not do semantics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4): 743–762.

Carruthers, Peter. 2006. The architecture of mind: Massive modularity and the flexibility of thought . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Chalmers, David. 2011. A computational foundation for the study of cognition. The Journal of Cognitive Science 12: 323–357.

Chipman, Susan. 2017. An introduction to cognitive science. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive science , ed. S. Chipman, 1–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1956. Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2: 113–123.

———. 1957. Syntactic structures . The Hague: Mouton Press.

———. 1959. Review of Skinner’s verbal behavior. Language 35: 26–58.

———. 1965. Aspects of a theory of syntax . Cambridge: MIT Press.

———. 1991. Linguistics and adjacent fields: A personal view. In The Chomskyan turn , ed. A. Kasher, 3–25. Oxford: Blackwell.

———. 1995. The minimalist program . Cambridge: MIT Press.

———. 2000. New horizons for the study of mind and language . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Christiansen, Morten, and Nick Chater. 2016. The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language. Behavioural and Brain Sciences : 1–72.

Devitt, Michael. 2006. Ignorance of language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Epstein, William, and Gary Hatfield. 1994. Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of mind. Philosophical Psychology 7 (2): 163–181.

Fodor, Jerrold. 1975. The language of thought . New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

———. 1981. Representations . Cambridge: MIT Press.

———. 1987. Psychosemantics . Cambridge: MIT Press.

Fodor, Jerrold, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. 2010. What Darwin got wrong . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Fodor, Jerrold, Thomas Bever, and M. Garrett. 1974. The psychology of language . New York: McGraw-Hill Publishers.

Gardner, Howard. 1985. The mind’s new science: A history of the cognitive revolution . New York: Basic Books.

Hintikka, Jaakko. 1999. The emperor’s new intuitions. The Journal of Philosophy 96 (3): 127–147.

Jackendoff, Ray. 2002. The foundations of language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joseph, John. 1999. How structuralist was “American structuralism?”. Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 33: 23–28.

Lakoff, George. 1991. Cognitive versus generative linguistics: How commitments influence results. Language & Communication 11 (1/2): 53–62.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh . New York: Basic Books.

Langendoen, Terence, and Paul Postal. 1984. The vastness of natural languages . Hoboken: Blackwell Publishers.

Lenneberg, Eric. 1967. Biological foundations of language . New York: Wiley.

Lobina, David. 2017. Recursion: A computational investigation into the representation and processing of language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martorell, Jordi. 2018. Merging generative linguistics and psycholinguistics. Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1–5.

Matthews, Peter. 2001. A short history of structural linguistics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maynes, Jeffrey, and Steven Gross. 2013. Linguistic intuitions. Philosophy Compass 8 (8): 714–730.

Menary, Richard. 2010. Introduction to the special issue on 4E cognition. Phenomenology ad the Cognitive Sciences 9: 459–463.

Miller, George. 2003. The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. TRENDS in Cognitive Science 7 (3): 141–144.

Miller, George, and Noam Chomsky. 1963. Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages. In The handbook of mathematical psychology , ed. R. Duncan Luce, R. Bush, and E. Galanter, vol. II. New York: Wiley.

Nefdt, Ryan. 2019a. Why philosophers should do semantics (and a bit of syntax too): A reply to Cappelen. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10: 243–256.

———. 2019b. Linguistics as a science of structure. In Form and formalism in linguistics , ed. J. McElvenny, 175–196. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Newmeyer, Frederic. 1996. Generative linguistics: A historical perspective . London: Routledge.

Piaget, Jean. 1976. Piaget’s theory. In Piaget and his school , ed. B. Inhelder et al. New York: Springer.

Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the mind works . New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Proudfoot, Diane, and Jack Copeland. 2012. Artificial intelligence. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy of cognitive science , ed. E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich, 147–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pullum, Geoffrey. 2011. On the mathematical foundations of Syntactic Structures. Journal of logic, language and information 20 (3): 277–296.

Pullum, Geoffrey, and Barbara Scholz. 2007. Tracking the origins of transformational generative grammar. Journal of Linguistics 43 (3): 701–723.

Pylyshyn, Zenon. 1991. Rules and representations: Chomsky and representational realism. In The Chomskyan turn , ed. A. Kasher, 231–251. Oxford: Blackwell.

Reines, Maria, and Jess Prinz. 2009. Reviving Whorf: The return of linguistic relativity. Philosophy Compass 4 (6): 1022–1032.

Samuels, Richard, Eric Margolis, and Steven Stich. 2012. Introduction: Philosophy and cognitive science. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy of cognitive science , ed. E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich, 1–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sinha, Chris. 2010. Cognitive linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics , 1–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Skinner, Burrbus Frederic. 1957. Verbal behavior . New York: Copley Publishing Group.

Stabler, Edward. 2011. Meta-meta-linguistics. Theoretical Linguistics 37 (1/2): 69–78.

Stainton, Robert. 2006. Meaning and reference: Some Chomskian themes. In The Oxford handbook of philosophy of language , ed. E. Lepore and B. Smith, 913–940. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tomalin, Marcus. 2006. Linguistics and the formal sciences . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Philosophy Department, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Ryan M. Nefdt

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ryan M. Nefdt .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Carita Klippi

Science and Technology Studies Rathenau Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands

Bart Karstens

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Nefdt, R.M. (2020). The Role of Language in the Cognitive Sciences. In: Nefdt, R.M., Klippi, C., Karstens, B. (eds) The Philosophy and Science of Language. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55438-5_9

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55438-5_9

Published : 31 March 2021

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-55437-8

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-55438-5

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Get science-backed answers as you write with Paperpal's Research feature

What is an Argumentative Essay? How to Write It (With Examples)

We define an argumentative essay as a type of essay that presents arguments about both sides of an issue. The purpose is to convince the reader to accept a particular viewpoint or action. In an argumentative essay, the writer takes a stance on a controversial or debatable topic and supports their position with evidence, reasoning, and examples. The essay should also address counterarguments, demonstrating a thorough understanding of the topic.

Table of Contents

• What is an argumentative essay?  
• Argumentative essay structure 
• Argumentative essay outline 
• Types of argument claims 

How to write an argumentative essay?

• Argumentative essay writing tips 
• Good argumentative essay example 

How to write a good thesis

• How to Write an Argumentative Essay with Paperpal? 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an argumentative essay.

An argumentative essay is a type of writing that presents a coherent and logical analysis of a specific topic. 1 The goal is to convince the reader to accept the writer’s point of view or opinion on a particular issue. Here are the key elements of an argumentative essay: 

• Thesis Statement : The central claim or argument that the essay aims to prove. 
• Introduction : Provides background information and introduces the thesis statement. 
• Body Paragraphs : Each paragraph addresses a specific aspect of the argument, presents evidence, and may include counter arguments. 

Articulate your thesis statement better with Paperpal. Start writing now!

• Evidence : Supports the main argument with relevant facts, examples, statistics, or expert opinions. 
• Counterarguments : Anticipates and addresses opposing viewpoints to strengthen the overall argument. 
• Conclusion : Summarizes the main points, reinforces the thesis, and may suggest implications or actions. 

Argumentative essay structure

Aristotelian, Rogerian, and Toulmin are three distinct approaches to argumentative essay structures, each with its principles and methods. 2 The choice depends on the purpose and nature of the topic. Here’s an overview of each type of argumentative essay format.

Have a looming deadline for your argumentative essay? Write 2x faster with Paperpal – Start now!  

Argumentative essay outline

An argumentative essay presents a specific claim or argument and supports it with evidence and reasoning. Here’s an outline for an argumentative essay, along with examples for each section: 3  

1.  Introduction : 

• Hook : Start with a compelling statement, question, or anecdote to grab the reader’s attention. 

Example: “Did you know that plastic pollution is threatening marine life at an alarming rate?” 

• Background information : Provide brief context about the issue. 

Example: “Plastic pollution has become a global environmental concern, with millions of tons of plastic waste entering our oceans yearly.” 

• Thesis statement : Clearly state your main argument or position. 

Example: “We must take immediate action to reduce plastic usage and implement more sustainable alternatives to protect our marine ecosystem.” 

2.  Body Paragraphs : 

• Topic sentence : Introduce the main idea of each paragraph. 

Example: “The first step towards addressing the plastic pollution crisis is reducing single-use plastic consumption.” 

• Evidence/Support : Provide evidence, facts, statistics, or examples that support your argument. 

Example: “Research shows that plastic straws alone contribute to millions of tons of plastic waste annually, and many marine animals suffer from ingestion or entanglement.” 

• Counterargument/Refutation : Acknowledge and refute opposing viewpoints. 

Example: “Some argue that banning plastic straws is inconvenient for consumers, but the long-term environmental benefits far outweigh the temporary inconvenience.” 

• Transition : Connect each paragraph to the next. 

Example: “Having addressed the issue of single-use plastics, the focus must now shift to promoting sustainable alternatives.” 

3.  Counterargument Paragraph : 

• Acknowledgement of opposing views : Recognize alternative perspectives on the issue. 

Example: “While some may argue that individual actions cannot significantly impact global plastic pollution, the cumulative effect of collective efforts must be considered.” 

• Counterargument and rebuttal : Present and refute the main counterargument. 

Example: “However, individual actions, when multiplied across millions of people, can substantially reduce plastic waste. Small changes in behavior, such as using reusable bags and containers, can have a significant positive impact.” 

4.  Conclusion : 

• Restatement of thesis : Summarize your main argument. 

Example: “In conclusion, adopting sustainable practices and reducing single-use plastic is crucial for preserving our oceans and marine life.” 

• Call to action : Encourage the reader to take specific steps or consider the argument’s implications. 

Example: “It is our responsibility to make environmentally conscious choices and advocate for policies that prioritize the health of our planet. By collectively embracing sustainable alternatives, we can contribute to a cleaner and healthier future.” 

Types of argument claims

A claim is a statement or proposition a writer puts forward with evidence to persuade the reader. 4 Here are some common types of argument claims, along with examples: 

• Fact Claims : These claims assert that something is true or false and can often be verified through evidence.  Example: “Water boils at 100°C at sea level.”
• Value Claims : Value claims express judgments about the worth or morality of something, often based on personal beliefs or societal values. Example: “Organic farming is more ethical than conventional farming.” 
• Policy Claims : Policy claims propose a course of action or argue for a specific policy, law, or regulation change.  Example: “Schools should adopt a year-round education system to improve student learning outcomes.” 
• Cause and Effect Claims : These claims argue that one event or condition leads to another, establishing a cause-and-effect relationship.  Example: “Excessive use of social media is a leading cause of increased feelings of loneliness among young adults.” 
• Definition Claims : Definition claims assert the meaning or classification of a concept or term.  Example: “Artificial intelligence can be defined as machines exhibiting human-like cognitive functions.” 
• Comparative Claims : Comparative claims assert that one thing is better or worse than another in certain respects.  Example: “Online education is more cost-effective than traditional classroom learning.” 
• Evaluation Claims : Evaluation claims assess the quality, significance, or effectiveness of something based on specific criteria.  Example: “The new healthcare policy is more effective in providing affordable healthcare to all citizens.” 

Understanding these argument claims can help writers construct more persuasive and well-supported arguments tailored to the specific nature of the claim.  

If you’re wondering how to start an argumentative essay, here’s a step-by-step guide to help you with the argumentative essay format and writing process.

• Choose a Topic: Select a topic that you are passionate about or interested in. Ensure that the topic is debatable and has two or more sides.
• Define Your Position: Clearly state your stance on the issue. Consider opposing viewpoints and be ready to counter them.
• Conduct Research: Gather relevant information from credible sources, such as books, articles, and academic journals. Take notes on key points and supporting evidence.
• Create a Thesis Statement: Develop a concise and clear thesis statement that outlines your main argument. Convey your position on the issue and provide a roadmap for the essay.
• Outline Your Argumentative Essay: Organize your ideas logically by creating an outline. Include an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Each body paragraph should focus on a single point that supports your thesis.
• Write the Introduction: Start with a hook to grab the reader’s attention (a quote, a question, a surprising fact). Provide background information on the topic. Present your thesis statement at the end of the introduction.
• Develop Body Paragraphs: Begin each paragraph with a clear topic sentence that relates to the thesis. Support your points with evidence and examples. Address counterarguments and refute them to strengthen your position. Ensure smooth transitions between paragraphs.
• Address Counterarguments: Acknowledge and respond to opposing viewpoints. Anticipate objections and provide evidence to counter them.
• Write the Conclusion: Summarize the main points of your argumentative essay. Reinforce the significance of your argument. End with a call to action, a prediction, or a thought-provoking statement.
• Revise, Edit, and Share: Review your essay for clarity, coherence, and consistency. Check for grammatical and spelling errors. Share your essay with peers, friends, or instructors for constructive feedback.
• Finalize Your Argumentative Essay: Make final edits based on feedback received. Ensure that your essay follows the required formatting and citation style.

Struggling to start your argumentative essay? Paperpal can help – try now!   

Argumentative essay writing tips

Here are eight strategies to craft a compelling argumentative essay: 

• Choose a Clear and Controversial Topic : Select a topic that sparks debate and has opposing viewpoints. A clear and controversial issue provides a solid foundation for a strong argument. 
• Conduct Thorough Research : Gather relevant information from reputable sources to support your argument. Use a variety of sources, such as academic journals, books, reputable websites, and expert opinions, to strengthen your position. 
• Create a Strong Thesis Statement : Clearly articulate your main argument in a concise thesis statement. Your thesis should convey your stance on the issue and provide a roadmap for the reader to follow your argument. 
• Develop a Logical Structure : Organize your essay with a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Each paragraph should focus on a specific point of evidence that contributes to your overall argument. Ensure a logical flow from one point to the next. 
• Provide Strong Evidence : Support your claims with solid evidence. Use facts, statistics, examples, and expert opinions to support your arguments. Be sure to cite your sources appropriately to maintain credibility. 
• Address Counterarguments : Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and counterarguments. Addressing and refuting alternative perspectives strengthens your essay and demonstrates a thorough understanding of the issue. Be mindful of maintaining a respectful tone even when discussing opposing views. 
• Use Persuasive Language : Employ persuasive language to make your points effectively. Avoid emotional appeals without supporting evidence and strive for a respectful and professional tone. 
• Craft a Compelling Conclusion : Summarize your main points, restate your thesis, and leave a lasting impression in your conclusion. Encourage readers to consider the implications of your argument and potentially take action. 

Good argumentative essay example

Let’s consider a sample of argumentative essay on how social media enhances connectivity:

In the digital age, social media has emerged as a powerful tool that transcends geographical boundaries, connecting individuals from diverse backgrounds and providing a platform for an array of voices to be heard. While critics argue that social media fosters division and amplifies negativity, it is essential to recognize the positive aspects of this digital revolution and how it enhances connectivity by providing a platform for diverse voices to flourish. One of the primary benefits of social media is its ability to facilitate instant communication and connection across the globe. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram break down geographical barriers, enabling people to establish and maintain relationships regardless of physical location and fostering a sense of global community. Furthermore, social media has transformed how people stay connected with friends and family. Whether separated by miles or time zones, social media ensures that relationships remain dynamic and relevant, contributing to a more interconnected world. Moreover, social media has played a pivotal role in giving voice to social justice movements and marginalized communities. Movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #ClimateStrike have gained momentum through social media, allowing individuals to share their stories and advocate for change on a global scale. This digital activism can shape public opinion and hold institutions accountable. Social media platforms provide a dynamic space for open dialogue and discourse. Users can engage in discussions, share information, and challenge each other’s perspectives, fostering a culture of critical thinking. This open exchange of ideas contributes to a more informed and enlightened society where individuals can broaden their horizons and develop a nuanced understanding of complex issues. While criticisms of social media abound, it is crucial to recognize its positive impact on connectivity and the amplification of diverse voices. Social media transcends physical and cultural barriers, connecting people across the globe and providing a platform for marginalized voices to be heard. By fostering open dialogue and facilitating the exchange of ideas, social media contributes to a more interconnected and empowered society. Embracing the positive aspects of social media allows us to harness its potential for positive change and collective growth.

• Clearly Define Your Thesis Statement:   Your thesis statement is the core of your argumentative essay. Clearly articulate your main argument or position on the issue. Avoid vague or general statements.  
• Provide Strong Supporting Evidence:   Back up your thesis with solid evidence from reliable sources and examples. This can include facts, statistics, expert opinions, anecdotes, or real-life examples. Make sure your evidence is relevant to your argument, as it impacts the overall persuasiveness of your thesis.  
• Anticipate Counterarguments and Address Them:   Acknowledge and address opposing viewpoints to strengthen credibility. This also shows that you engage critically with the topic rather than presenting a one-sided argument. 

How to Write an Argumentative Essay with Paperpal?

Writing a winning argumentative essay not only showcases your ability to critically analyze a topic but also demonstrates your skill in persuasively presenting your stance backed by evidence. Achieving this level of writing excellence can be time-consuming. This is where Paperpal, your AI academic writing assistant, steps in to revolutionize the way you approach argumentative essays. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Paperpal to write your essay: 

• Sign Up or Log In: Begin by creating an account or logging into paperpal.com .  
• Navigate to Paperpal Copilot: Once logged in, proceed to the Templates section from the side navigation bar.  
• Generate an essay outline: Under Templates, click on the ‘Outline’ tab and choose ‘Essay’ from the options and provide your topic to generate an outline.  
• Develop your essay: Use this structured outline as a guide to flesh out your essay. If you encounter any roadblocks, click on Brainstorm and get subject-specific assistance, ensuring you stay on track. 
• Refine your writing: To elevate the academic tone of your essay, select a paragraph and use the ‘Make Academic’ feature under the ‘Rewrite’ tab, ensuring your argumentative essay resonates with an academic audience. 
• Final Touches: Make your argumentative essay submission ready with Paperpal’s language, grammar, consistency and plagiarism checks, and improve your chances of acceptance.  

Paperpal not only simplifies the essay writing process but also ensures your argumentative essay is persuasive, well-structured, and academically rigorous. Sign up today and transform how you write argumentative essays. 

The length of an argumentative essay can vary, but it typically falls within the range of 1,000 to 2,500 words. However, the specific requirements may depend on the guidelines provided.

You might write an argumentative essay when:  1. You want to convince others of the validity of your position.  2. There is a controversial or debatable issue that requires discussion.  3. You need to present evidence and logical reasoning to support your claims.  4. You want to explore and critically analyze different perspectives on a topic. 

Argumentative Essay:  Purpose : An argumentative essay aims to persuade the reader to accept or agree with a specific point of view or argument.  Structure : It follows a clear structure with an introduction, thesis statement, body paragraphs presenting arguments and evidence, counterarguments and refutations, and a conclusion.  Tone : The tone is formal and relies on logical reasoning, evidence, and critical analysis.    Narrative/Descriptive Essay:  Purpose : These aim to tell a story or describe an experience, while a descriptive essay focuses on creating a vivid picture of a person, place, or thing.  Structure : They may have a more flexible structure. They often include an engaging introduction, a well-developed body that builds the story or description, and a conclusion.  Tone : The tone is more personal and expressive to evoke emotions or provide sensory details. 

• Gladd, J. (2020). Tips for Writing Academic Persuasive Essays.  Write What Matters . 
• Nimehchisalem, V. (2018). Pyramid of argumentation: Towards an integrated model for teaching and assessing ESL writing.  Language & Communication ,  5 (2), 185-200. 
• Press, B. (2022).  Argumentative Essays: A Step-by-Step Guide . Broadview Press. 
• Rieke, R. D., Sillars, M. O., & Peterson, T. R. (2005).  Argumentation and critical decision making . Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. 

Paperpal is a comprehensive AI writing toolkit that helps students and researchers achieve 2x the writing in half the time. It leverages 21+ years of STM experience and insights from millions of research articles to provide in-depth academic writing, language editing, and submission readiness support to help you write better, faster.  

Get accurate academic translations, rewriting support, grammar checks, vocabulary suggestions, and generative AI assistance that delivers human precision at machine speed. Try for free or upgrade to Paperpal Prime starting at US$19 a month to access premium features, including consistency, plagiarism, and 30+ submission readiness checks to help you succeed.  

Experience the future of academic writing – Sign up to Paperpal and start writing for free!  

Related Reads:

• Empirical Research: A Comprehensive Guide for Academics 
• How to Write a Scientific Paper in 10 Steps 
• What is a Literature Review? How to Write It (with Examples)
• Life Sciences Papers: 9 Tips for Authors Writing in Biological Sciences

Make Your Research Paper Error-Free with Paperpal’s Online Spell Checker 

The do’s & don’ts of using generative ai tools ethically in academia, you may also like, what is hedging in academic writing  , how to use ai to enhance your college..., how to use paperpal to generate emails &..., ai in education: it’s time to change the..., is it ethical to use ai-generated abstracts without..., do plagiarism checkers detect ai content, word choice problems: how to use the right..., how to avoid plagiarism when using generative ai..., what are journal guidelines on using generative ai..., types of plagiarism and 6 tips to avoid....

Home — Essay Samples — Science — Language and Linguistics — Linguistics

Essays on Linguistics

Writing an essay on Linguistics is important for several reasons. Firstly, it allows the writer to demonstrate their understanding of language and its structure, which is a crucial aspect of communication. Secondly, it provides an opportunity to explore various theories and concepts within Linguistics, helping to deepen one's knowledge of the subject. Finally, writing an essay on Linguistics can also contribute to the overall body of knowledge within the field, as it allows for the dissemination of new ideas and research findings.

When writing an essay on Linguistics, it is important to consider the following tips:

• Define your topic: Clearly define the specific aspect of Linguistics that you will be addressing in your essay. This will help you to focus your research and ensure that your essay remains coherent and well-structured.
• Conduct thorough research: Take the time to gather a wide range of sources, including academic papers, books, and scholarly articles. This will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the topic and enable you to present a well-informed argument.
• Organize your thoughts: Before you start writing, create an outline that outlines the main points and arguments that you will be making in your essay. This will help you to stay focused and ensure that your essay flows logically.
• Support your arguments: Use evidence and examples to support your arguments. This could include citing research studies, linguistic data, or real-life examples of language use.
• Edit and revise: Once you have completed your first draft, take the time to edit and revise your essay. Check for grammar and spelling errors, and ensure that your argument is clear and well-supported.

What Makes a Good Linguistics essay topic

When it comes to choosing a topic for a linguistics essay, it's important to consider a few key factors. Firstly, brainstorming is essential. Think about your interests, current issues in the field of linguistics, and any recent research that has caught your attention. Consider the level of complexity you want to tackle and the availability of credible sources for your chosen topic. Additionally, a good linguistics essay topic should be relevant, thought-provoking, and have the potential to contribute to the existing body of knowledge in the field.

Best Linguistics Essay Topics

• The impact of technology on language evolution
• The role of cultural and societal influences on language development
• The linguistic challenges and opportunities of multilingualism
• The relationship between language and cognitive processes
• The future of endangered languages in a globalized world
• The linguistic implications of artificial intelligence and machine learning
• The influence of gender on language use and perception
• The linguistic analysis of political discourse and rhetoric
• The intersection of language and identity in immigrant communities
• The linguistic representation of emotions and feelings
• The role of language in shaping individual and collective memory
• The linguistic strategies for persuasion and manipulation in advertising
• The impact of linguistic diversity on educational practices
• The linguistic analysis of online communication and social media
• The language of humor and its cross-cultural variations
• The linguistic patterns in the speech of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders
• The linguistic implications of code-switching and language mixing
• The role of language in the construction of power dynamics and social hierarchies
• The linguistic analysis of nonverbal communication and body language
• The linguistic representation of time and space in different cultures

Linguistics Essay Topics Prompts

• Imagine a world without language. How would human communication and interaction be affected?
• Explore the linguistic challenges and opportunities of creating a universal language.
• Create a linguistic analysis of a popular song or piece of literature.
• Investigate the linguistic strategies used in political speeches to evoke specific emotions and reactions.
• Consider the linguistic implications of the growing trend of voice-activated technology and virtual assistants.

By considering these prompts and unique topics, you can craft a compelling and thought-provoking linguistics essay that stands out from the crowd.

English Class Reflection

Analysis of penelope eckert and mcconnell-genet's "learning to be", made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

The Crucial Role of Language in Communication

Linguistics and its main categories, using linguistics to understand the importance of dialect and its connection to language, comparison of language and linguistics, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

How New Words Are Created and How It Affects Language as a Whole

Acquiring of language and dyslexia, the importance of grammar, the importance of language during the ww2, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

How and Why Anthropological Linguistics is Related to Ethnocentrism

Children’s first language acquisition under the scope of noam chomsky’s nativist theory, connection between language and self-concept, semantics as the field of linguistics, my passion of french language and linguistics, language and individual identity in society, factors that govern the acquisition of language, analysis of english and urdu clause, the eight parts of speech in english language, david foster wallace and his perspective on american life in connection to authority, a study on the tactics of linguistic phenomenon, emerging technology to address language barriers in urban areas, theoretical perspectives on plural morphology, a rhetorical analysis: linguistic power dynamics in oleanna, understanding language: acquisition and loss, the comparison of grammars in noam chomsky's syntactic structures theory, relations between the translators and linguists, noam chomsky and his theory of language acquisition device, language online by david barton and carmen lee: impact of the internet on the learning of language, application of neuroscience in the english learning class, relevant topics.

• Language Diversity
• Time Travel
• Engineering
• Natural Selection
• Biotechnology

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Bibliography

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

9.3: The Argumentative Essay

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 58378
• Lumen Learning

Learning Objectives

• Examine types of argumentative essays

Argumentative Essays

You may have heard it said that all writing is an argument of some kind. Even if you’re writing an informative essay, you still have the job of trying to convince your audience that the information is important. However, there are times you’ll be asked to write an essay that is specifically an argumentative piece.

An argumentative essay is one that makes a clear assertion or argument about some topic or issue. When you’re writing an argumentative essay, it’s important to remember that an academic argument is quite different from a regular, emotional argument. Note that sometimes students forget the academic aspect of an argumentative essay and write essays that are much too emotional for an academic audience. It’s important for you to choose a topic you feel passionately about (if you’re allowed to pick your topic), but you have to be sure you aren’t too emotionally attached to a topic. In an academic argument, you’ll have a lot more constraints you have to consider, and you’ll focus much more on logic and reasoning than emotions.

Argumentative essays are quite common in academic writing and are often an important part of writing in all disciplines. You may be asked to take a stand on a social issue in your introduction to writing course, but you could also be asked to take a stand on an issue related to health care in your nursing courses or make a case for solving a local environmental problem in your biology class. And, since argument is such a common essay assignment, it’s important to be aware of some basic elements of a good argumentative essay.

When your professor asks you to write an argumentative essay, you’ll often be given something specific to write about. For example, you may be asked to take a stand on an issue you have been discussing in class. Perhaps, in your education class, you would be asked to write about standardized testing in public schools. Or, in your literature class, you might be asked to argue the effects of protest literature on public policy in the United States.

However, there are times when you’ll be given a choice of topics. You might even be asked to write an argumentative essay on any topic related to your field of study or a topic you feel that is important personally.

Whatever the case, having some knowledge of some basic argumentative techniques or strategies will be helpful as you write. Below are some common types of arguments.

Causal Arguments

• In this type of argument, you argue that something has caused something else. For example, you might explore the causes of the decline of large mammals in the world’s ocean and make a case for your cause.

Evaluation Arguments

• In this type of argument, you make an argumentative evaluation of something as “good” or “bad,” but you need to establish the criteria for “good” or “bad.” For example, you might evaluate a children’s book for your education class, but you would need to establish clear criteria for your evaluation for your audience.

Proposal Arguments

• In this type of argument, you must propose a solution to a problem. First, you must establish a clear problem and then propose a specific solution to that problem. For example, you might argue for a proposal that would increase retention rates at your college.

Narrative Arguments

• In this type of argument, you make your case by telling a story with a clear point related to your argument. For example, you might write a narrative about your experiences with standardized testing in order to make a case for reform.

Rebuttal Arguments

• In a rebuttal argument, you build your case around refuting an idea or ideas that have come before. In other words, your starting point is to challenge the ideas of the past.

Definition Arguments

• In this type of argument, you use a definition as the starting point for making your case. For example, in a definition argument, you might argue that NCAA basketball players should be defined as professional players and, therefore, should be paid.

https://assessments.lumenlearning.co...essments/20277

Essay Examples

• Click here to read an argumentative essay on the consequences of fast fashion . Read it and look at the comments to recognize strategies and techniques the author uses to convey her ideas.
• In this example, you’ll see a sample argumentative paper from a psychology class submitted in APA format. Key parts of the argumentative structure have been noted for you in the sample.

Link to Learning

For more examples of types of argumentative essays, visit the Argumentative Purposes section of the Excelsior OWL .

Contributors and Attributions

• Argumentative Essay. Provided by : Excelsior OWL. Located at : https://owl.excelsior.edu/rhetorical-styles/argumentative-essay/ . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Image of a man with a heart and a brain. Authored by : Mohamed Hassan. Provided by : Pixabay. Located at : pixabay.com/illustrations/decision-brain-heart-mind-4083469/. License : Other . License Terms : pixabay.com/service/terms/#license