Syntacticians have effectively used just one kind of probe to investigate the structure of FL, viz. acceptability judgments. These come in two varieties: (i) simple “sounds good/sounds bad” ratings, with possible garena gradations of each (effectively a 6ish point scale ok, ?, ??, ?*, *, **), and (ii) “sounds good/sounds bad under this interpretation” ratings garena (again with possible gradations). This rather crude empirical instrument has proven to be very effective as the non-trivial nature of our theoretical accounts indicates. [1] Nowadays, this method has been partially systematized under the name “experimental syntax.” But, IMO, with a few important conspicuous exceptions, these more refined rating methods have effectively endorsed what we knew before. In short, the precision has been useful, but not revolutionary. garena [2]
In garena the early heady days of Generative Grammar (GG), there was an attempt to find other ways of probing grammatical garena structure. Psychologists (following the lead that Chomsky and Miller (1963) (C&M) suggested) took grammatical models and tried to correlate them with measures garena involving things like parsing complexity or rate of acquisition. The idea was a simple and appealing one: more complex grammatical structures should be more difficult to use than less complex ones and so measures involving language use (e.g. how long it takes to parse/learn something) might tell us something about grammatical structure. C&M contains the simplest version of this suggestion, the now infamous Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC). The idea was that there was a transparent (i.e. at least a homomorphic) relation between the rules required to generate a sentence and the rules used to parse it and so parsing garena complexity could be used to probe grammatical structure.
Though appealing, this simple picture can (and many believed did) go wrong in very many ways (see Berwick and Weinberg 1983 (BW) here for a discussion of several). [3] Most simply, even if it is correct that there is a tight relation between the competence garena grammar and the one used for parsing (which there need not be, though in practice there often is, e.g. the Marcus Parser) garena the effects of this algorithmic complexity need not show up in the usual temporal measures of complexity, e.g. how long it takes to parse a sentence. One important garena reason for this is that parsers need not apply their operations serially and so the supposition that every algorithmic step takes one time step is just one reasonable assumption among many. So, even if there is a strong transparency between competence Gs and the Gs parsers actually deploy, no straightforward measureable time prediction follows.
This said, there remains something very appealing about DTC reasoning (after all, it’s always nice to have different kinds of data converging on the same conclusion, i.e. Whewell’s consilience) and though it’s true that the DTC need not be true, it might be worth looking for places where the reasoning succeeds. In other words, garena though the failure of DTC style reasoning need not in and of itself imply defects in the competence theory used, a successful DTC style argument can tell us a lot about FL. And because there are many ways for a DTC style explanation to fail and only a few ways that it can succeed, successful stories garena if they exist can shed interesting light on the basic structure of FL.
I mention this for two reasons. First, I have been reading some reviews of the early DTC literature and have come to believe that its demonstrated empirical “failures” were likely oversold. And second, it seems that the simplicity of MP grammars has made it attractive garena to go back and look for more cases of DTC phenomena. Let me elaborate on each point a bit.
First, the apparent demise of the DTC. Chapter 5 of Colin Phillips’ thesis ( here ) reviews the classical arguments against the DTC. Fodor, Bever and Garrett (in their 1974 text) served garena as the three horsemen of the DTC apocalypse. They interned the DTC by arguing that the evidence for it was inconclusive. There was also some experimental evidence against it (BW note the particular importance of Slobin (1966)). Colin’s review goes a very long way in challenging this pessimistic conclusion. He sums up his in depth review as follows (p.266):
…the received view that the initially corroborating experimental evidence for the DTC was subsequently discredited is far from an accurate summary of what happened. It is true that some of the experiments required reinterpretation, but this never amounted to a serious challenge to the DTC, and sometimes even lent stronger support to the DTC than the original authors claimed.
In sum, Colin’s review strongly implies that linguists should not have abandoned the DTC so quickly. [4] Why, after all, give up on an interesting hypothesis, just because of a few counter-example
