The Phylosophy of Universal Grammar

The Philosophy of Universal Grammar

The Philosophy ofUniversal Grammar

WOLFRAM HINZEN ANDMICHELLE SHEEHAN

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Contents

Acknowledgements viiiList of Abbreviations xi

Introduction xv

1 The project of a science of language 1

1.1 Grammar as a domain of inquiry 1

1.2 Cartesian linguistics, 1637–1966 4

1.3 Ancient India 15

1.4 The Modistic viewpoint 23

1.5 Conclusions 33

2 Before there was grammar 35

2.1 Overview 35

2.2 Where semantics begins 37

2.3 Lexicalization: the creation of the lexical atom 47

2.4 Concepts $ intentionality $ intensionality $ grammar $ reference 53

2.5 Parts of speech and their grammatical semantics 59

2.6 The modes of signifying reloaded 69

2.7 Conclusions 73

3 The content of grammar 75

3.1 Grammar as relational 75

3.2 From parts of speech to the sentence 80

3.3 Content from composition? 88

3.4 Content from the interface? 95

3.5 The phase as the smallest unit of grammatical organization 101

3.6 The absence of X-within-X in language (with Boban Arsenijević) 110

3.7 Conclusions 115

4 Deriving the formal ontology of language 117

4.1 The grammar of reference 117

4.2 The Topological Mapping Theory (TMT) 119

4.3 Extending the TMT 130

4.4 Extending the Extended TMT (with Txuss Martín) 139

4.4.1 From 3rd-person object reference to pronouns 139

4.4.2 Reference and Person 144

4.4.3 Semantic approaches to the essential indexical 149

4.4.4 The hierarchy of reference revealed through Romanceobject clitics 153

4.4.5 Summary 172

4.5 Conclusions 173

5 Cross-linguistic variation 175

5.1 The apparent problem of linguistic variation 175

5.2 Linguistic variation vs grammatical variation 178

5.3 Diagnosing grammatical variation 181

5.4 Revisiting the head parameter 184

5.5 Revisiting the null subject parameter 193

5.6 Revisiting the alignment parameter 197

5.7 Conclusions 201

6 The rationality of Case 202

6.1 The apparent irrationality of Case 202

6.2 What do the Cases mean? 204

6.3 Vergnaud’s conjecture and ‘abstract Case’ 211

6.4 The Case filter, reference, and Tense 218

6.5 Event mereology and Case 223

6.6 Conclusions 236

7 Language and speciation 238

7.1 Why linguistics is biology 238

7.2 Language evolution in a new key 240

7.3 The speciation of modern Homo sapiens 250

7.4 Conclusions 260

8 Biolinguistic variation 262

8.1 Questioning double dissociations in developmentallanguage disorders 263

8.2 Thought in genetically normal language-lessor language-impaired adults 266

8.3 Thought without the linguistic genotype 275

8.4 Variation in the linguistic genotype 279

8.5 Formal thought disorder and the de-integration of grammar 285

8.6 Grammatical meaning in the brain 292

8.7 Conclusions 295

9 Thought, language, and reality 296

9.1 The nature of semantics 297

vi Contents

9.2 How can it be that truth is a grammatical concept? 304

9.3 The grammar of truth: a unified account 311

9.4 The limit of grammar and the limits of thought 317

9.5 Language and reality 322

9.6 Is there a science of thought? 328

9.7 Conclusions 336

References 339

Index 375

Contents vii

Acknowledgements

WH

In 2008, I received a note from Professor Elisabeth Leiss from the University ofMunich, arguing that the position I had defended in my 2006 book was not so mucha ‘minimalist’ position as a ‘modistic’ one, in the sense of fourteenth-centuryModistic universal grammar. This note would prove to have a profound influenceon the course of my research and that of many others over the next four years.I suggested applying for a project, and it was awarded under the name ‘Un-CartesianLinguistics’ in the frame of a DFG-AHRC bi-national agreement (AHRC award AH/H50009X/1), from 2009 to 2012, to the Durham and Munich departments. Apartfrom the principal investigators, there were three post-doctoral project members,Dr Martina Werner (2009–11), MS (2010–2011), and Dr Alex Drummond (2011–12),and three doctoral students, Ulrich Reichard, Surachai Payawang, and JadwigaPiskorz. Elisabeth’s linguistic thought has had a profound influence on me, andI have seen the fundamental difference between lexical and grammatical meaningmost clearly through conversations with her. I leave to the historians the question ofhow close, in the end, this book has come (back) to the position of the Modists—butit is greatly inspired by them (see also Leiss and Abraham, to appear).

Ulrich Reichard played a bigger role in this project than I could have ever expectedany PhD student to play. An inexhaustible source of energy, inspiration, equilibrium,and constructive criticism, Uli has done wonders to keep the group together, sharpenideas, and drive it in new directions. His role in this project as a co-author of severalpapers has been massive, and also his role in the genesis of this book cannot beoverstressed: he has commented meticulously on every chapter, and the bookwouldn’t be what it is without his help.

At Durham, our project was embedded in my research group on Language &Mind,consisting of six further doctoral students: Tom Hughes, David Kirkby, Alex Malt,JamesMiller, AndrewWoodard, and Pallavi Worah. Thanks to you, David and James,for reading and commenting on major parts of the book. As time passed, the characterand dynamics of this group became extremely special to me. It consisted of research-ers who couldn’t be more different in their intellectual temperaments, but whononetheless appeared to speak a common language, with a lot of common groundand intellectual ambition. Every single one of the projects that emerged out of thisgroup seems unique and special to me (see Kirkby, 2013; Miller, 2013; Reichard, 2013;Malt, 2013; Worah, 2013; Hughes, 2013; Woodard, forthcoming). I sincerely hope that

cooperation in this group was as rewarding for others as it was for me. In this world ofacademia, it seemed a sane place. My ideas, that is, seemed less insane than normally.

Just a train ride of 15 minutes away, a further connection emerged with languagesciences in Newcastle, and I am extremely grateful and honoured by the interest thatAnders Holmberg, Noel Burton-Roberts, and many others in Newcastle took in ourwork. A long stream of visitors, too, deserve special thanks for inspiring and enrich-ing us, particularly Cedric Boeckx, Emma Borg, John Collins, John Mikhail, PaulPietroski, and Ian Roberts. Many further visitors that have helped and inspired us innumerous workshops and conferences over the past years are simply too numerousto mention, but I have been particularly influenced by Eric Reuland and JohanRooryck. Farther away, a number of fabulous philosopher-linguists and friendshave helped me find my way throughout these years, and some of their fingerprintscan be found dotted all over this book: notably Cedric Boeckx, Pino Longobardi,Jaume Mateu, Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Paul Pietroski, Tom Roeper, Anna-Maria diSciullo, Rajendra Singh, and Tom Stroik. The ear that linguists have lent my concernshas been, professionally speaking, the best thing that ever happened to me. This bookwould also be absolutely nothing without those that have become my close collabor-ators and co-authors over many years: apart from my present co-author herself, thisparticularly applies to Boban Arsenijević and Txuss Martín. On the brain sciencesside, Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer has been a never-ending source of wisdom over thelast two years on any matters concerning the brain; David Poeppel, too, has beenfriendly and cooperative indeed. But an extremely special thanks goes to Tim Crow,whose groundbreaking views on human speciation and the aetiology of schizophre-nia has in part changed the course of my research. Last but not least, I feel a deepgratitude for two linguists who, at one point, understood me better than I did, andbrought me on my way: Juan Uriagereka and Noam Chomsky.

A few months into our project, John Davey, our editor, who has been an unfailingsource of advice, wisdom and support for me for more than a decade, took animmediate interest in our plan for a book. He and his co-editor, Julia Steer, aresimply wonderful to work with.

But who would we all be if some human beings did not keep us down to earth:Ariadne and Konstantinos, my beloveds, and my non-linguistic friends: Amandine,Roland, Machiel, Robert, Sylvia, and Vroni. I may not deserve it, but please continuekeeping me down and close.

MS

The project which gave rise to this book took me, in 2010, from the relative comfort ofthe department of English Language and Linguistics in Newcastle to the less familiarterritory of the Department of Philosophy in Durham. This transition, whilstextremely stimulating and thought provoking, could have been difficult had it not

Acknowledgements ix

been for the welcome I received from the people I met in Durham. My co-author was,of course, largely responsible for this, but so too were his PhD students Tom Hughes,David Kirkby, Alex Malt, James Miller, Andrew Woodard, Pallavi Worah, andespecially Ulrich (Uli) Reichard, with all of whom I had the pleasure and privilegeto interact on a regular basis during my brief time in Durham. They each taught me agreat deal about philosophy along the way and introduced me to questions I hadnever before even considered. Teaching the course ‘Language & Mind’ along with Uliwas particularly stimulating in this regard, and I must thank also the undergraduatestudents who took that course for their probing questions and unfailing interest inthe intersection between linguistics and philosophy.

During the writing of this book, I had the pleasure of bouncing ideas off manypeople on many different occasions. Parts of Chapter 4 and the associated LinguisticAnalysis article were presented at the universities of Manchester and Cambridge, at‘Rethinking Parameters’ in Madrid, and at the ‘Workshop on clausal and nominalparallels’ in Aarhus, where the respective audiences provided very useful questionsand critique. Thanks go especially to George Walkden, Ian Roberts, Theresa Biber-auer, and Adam Ledgeway in Cambridge; Silvio Cruschina, Yuni Kim, and AndrewKoontz-Garboden in Manchester; Olaf Koeneman, Olga Fernández Soriano, andGiuseppe Longobardi in Madrid; and Eva Engels, Guglielmo Cinque, Per AnkerJensen, and especially Sten Vikner in Aarhus. A version of Chapter 5 was presented atthe workshop ‘UG: the Minimum’ in Durham in 2011 and my thanks go also to theaudience there and at the associated British Academy-funded conference ‘The Pastand Future of Universal Grammar’ for critical feedback and discussion, especiallyAnders Holmberg, Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson, and Aritz Irurtzun. Other peoplehave also been kind enough to discuss some of the ideas presented in chapters 4, 5,and 6 on a more informal basis, notably Jenneke van der Wal, Joe Emonds, HeatherBurnett, and Norma Schifano. None of the people mentioned, of course, is respon-sible for any errors or omissions in what follows.

Outside of the academic domain, I also received a great deal of support andencouragement from family and friends whilst writing this book. Jenny, my runningpartner, Emily and the rest of my football buddies, Lucy, Richard, Sophie, Emma,Imke, and Simon, you, along with José, did a pretty good job of keeping me sanewhilst my thoughts were elsewhere. Thanks for putting up with me!

x Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

ABS Absolutive Case

ACC Accusative Case

ASD Autism Spectrum of Disorders

BPS Bare Phrase Structure

C-I Conceptual-Intentional

C-T Complementizer-Tense

CL Clitic

CP complementizer phrase

CRTM Computational-Representational Theory of Mind

DP determiner phrase

ECM exceptional case-marking

ECP Empty Category Principle

EPP Extended Projection Principle

ERG Ergative Case

fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging

FOFC Final-over-Final Constraint

FTD formal thought disorder

GB Government and Binding

IM internal Merge

IP Inflectional Phrase

I/T Inflection/Tense

LCA Linear Correspondence Axiom

LOT Language of Thought

MEG magnetoencephalography

MFC medial frontal cortex

MPU Main Point of Utterance

NOM Nominative Case

NP Noun Phrase

NSL null subject language

PART Partitive

PF Phonetic Form

P&P Principles and Parameters

PP prepositional phrase

PSG Phrase Structure Grammar

SC Small Clause

SLI Specific Language Impairment

SMT Strong Minimalist Thesis

STS superior temporal sulcus

SUBJ Subjunctive

TMT Topological Mapping Theory

ToM Theory of Mind

TP tense phrase

UG Universal Grammar

UTAH Universal Theta Assignment Hypothesis

VP verb phrase

WALS World Atlas of Language Structures

XP X Phrase

% variability in acceptability judgements

= glossing convention for clitics

xii List of Abbreviations

Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to befound in the grammar of the language. (Wittgenstein, 1953: }55)

Introduction

As we approach a new domain of inquiry, we typically do it with caution. Initially, wewill barely know what we are talking about. A shifting fabric of data, assumptions,and predictions will form, until we eventually arrive at something that we feel wemight dignify with the term ‘theory’. This theory will give way to others, a processinfluenced by theoretical interests and concerns reflected in various technical con-cepts and idealizations, and unpredictable flights of genius or the imagination.Within layers and layers of theoretical descriptions, an ontology may eventuallycrystallize: a sense of what kind of entities and structures our domain actuallyinvolves.

Grammar is a case in point. Though commonly viewed as simply a social conven-tion, which in more or less useful ways constrains our use of words, it has been thesubject matter of a struggle for properly describing and identifying it as a domain ofscientific inquiry for more than two millennia. This began at the very inceptionof scientific inquiry in India, and it continues today, 400 years after the onset of thescientific revolution in the West. There is little doubt about the existence of grammaras a way of organizing words that is distinct from phonology. But what, exactly, is itthat we are talking about here? What domain of scientific inquiry, if any, is grammar?

The question could be dismissed if it wasn’t actually of genuine human interest.Grammar is among the things most immediately present as we open our mouths andtalk. No word that we utter or that comes to our minds lacks grammatical properties,which are that in virtue of which a word functions in the way it does, in the context ofothers. No word is a ‘bare symbol’. Where there is one word, others are never far, andgrammar is the system within which they find their places, creating ever newmeanings as they combine. Grammar is the chemistry of words.

So grammar is never not there, and as words combine, sentences form, which areamong the most curious objects of nature: they can be true or false. A creatureunderstanding sentences is a creature understanding the notion of a fact. It knowsabout objects and that they can have properties; about events and that they canhappen; about propositions and that can be true, though they need not be. A worldknown in this way is, we will claim, a grammaticalized world: a world that provides aframework for thought, and for science and art.

So grammar may actually matter. But then again, it may not. Perhaps all that itseems to accomplish, as a principle organizing a specifically human form of experi-ence, is really accomplished by something else. Perhaps a creature thinking as we dois not inherently a grammatical creature at all. Thought, as a system, might be

autonomous, and happen in a non-linguistic brain much as it does in ours. And so, ifgrammar is non-arbitrary, it would be only insofar as it reflects such a system ofthought.

That there is a choice in the matter shows there is a question, and this is thequestion we address here. What is grammar really all about? Why does it exist? Whatdoes it do? The caution referred to above will typically, as scientific inquiry tries to getgoing, lead to background such ‘philosophical’ questions—and rightfully so. Wemight, for example, simply ignore the actual functioning and interpretation of thesystem, and start by describing its operations purely formally, regarding it as consist-ing of arbitrary symbols manipulated by formal rules. Yet, we feel that, after twomillennia, it is time to address the question head-on, and defend a specific claimabout the content of grammar. Since grammar is universal in human populations,severe pathologies or environmental circumstances aside, it is ‘universal grammar’that we are addressing: the grammatical, as such.

The claim will be: grammar, in imposing a curious kind of structure on lexicalconcepts—grammaticalizing them—enables a novel form of knowledge of the world,which would not exist otherwise or lexically, involving reference and predication.Grammar, as we will put it, is the world as known. It is the world as it appears in theformat of knowledge, where this format is a uniquely grammatical one. This formatof knowledge is universal in our specific version of humanity, as compared with allother hominins in the prehistory of modern Homo sapiens, and defines this peculiarversion of humanity. For this reason, the topic of universal grammar, we claim, is thetopic of our speciation. Thinking about human biology, about what defines ourspecies, is to think about grammar, and vice versa.

A much more common viewpoint is what we will call the ‘Cartesian’ one (nevermind that Descartes himself may never have defended it): that thought is universaland immutable in this species, while language is merely a contingent way of express-ing it in a physical medium. According to this view, grammar is not an organizingprinciple of our specific kind of mind, or of how meaning is organized in it (though itmay, at least partially and imperfectly, ‘mirror’ it). So if grammar went missing ordisintegrated, much of our mind could stay intact. In a similar way, a printer or faxmachine attached to your personal computer won’t much affect its internal compu-tations as driven by its software. Meaning, on this view, might be said to consist inthings in the world, viewed as the meanings of words and sentences; in mind- andlanguage-independent ‘propositions’; in internal ‘psychological’ or ‘cognitive’ repre-sentations; or in the ‘use’ we make of words. But it doesn’t consist in language.

But it is our linguistic mind, by containing and combining lexicalized and gram-maticalized meanings, we contend, which creates meaning of a new sort. We defendthis alternative, because we claim that grammar explains the species-defining featuresof the mode of thought in question, and because we have no idea how else to explainthem. The kinds of meanings expressed in any human language, at least in part, are

xvi Introduction

not like the contents of the thoughts of any non-linguistic creature. Grammarexplains, in a principled way, why these meanings exist, and how and why theyarise when they do at particular moments in our lives—why, in particular, wordsoccur in acts of reference that can take a narrow range of forms; why there is bothevent and fact reference; why properties are distinguished from objects or states ofaffairs; and why we refer to persons not as we refer to their bodies. One can state—and formalize—these facts. The challenge is to explain them.

Re-thinking the foundations of grammar benefits from putting the contemporaryversion of universal grammar research into perspective, and we do this in Chapter 1.History helps, both to see continuity in our insight into the nature of grammar overthe aeons, and to see quite different takes on it. In contemporary linguistics, historicalawareness of the roots of the contemporary version of the enterprise tends to stopwith the rationalist Port Royal tradition; but there are at least two other sciences ofgrammar, which offer quite different visions of what grammar actually is: in particu-lar, some later instances of Ancient Indian grammar, and Modistic grammar. Wed-ding the enormous descriptive and empirical richness of modern generativegrammar to these more ancient and medieval frameworks of thought, leads, wecontend, to an ultimately more interesting result.

Chapter 2 begins a journey that answers this question: What are the effects ofgrammar on the organization of meaning? A logically possible answer is: none. Thatis, the grammaticalization of the hominin brain changed absolutely nothingregarding what meanings we can grasp or thoughts we can think. But this answerseems far too radical. In our species, we see grammar where we see the mode ofthought in question. In other species, we see, in essence, neither. Where languagebreaks down due to brain lesions or other acquired disorders, much thought can bepreserved. But in this case, the linguistic genotype is normal, and language hasdeveloped normally in the patient’s life. Where the linguistic genotype is not normal,we see an effect of that on our mental phenotype. Prima facie, then, it seemsimplausible that grammar would have no such effect on the organization of ourrational minds. So what is the effect, exactly? Chapter 2 begins from a form ofsemantics already present in prelinguistic perception. But as percepts become lex-icalized as words, and as words then start to develop grammatical functions, theorganization of meaning changes again, and with each step. We specifically developan account of the kind of semantics associated with lexical atoms and with part ofspeech distinctions: the distinction, say between how the word run functions whenread as a noun (‘a run’) or as a verb (‘to run’, ‘runs’). Once we have arrived there, weargue, we have already arrived at grammar, and the semantics in question reflectshow words implement grammatical functions: grammatical semantics.

These grammatical functions seem to be universal: they depend on relationsbetween words, which as such do not depend on the word classes (parts of speechdistinctions, like between nouns, verbs, and adjectives), which we also contend are

Introduction xvii

ultimately language-specific and should not be part of the vocabulary of universalgrammar. And so, in Chapter 3, we develop an account of grammar as purelyrelational, and as defining a novel semantics in which reference and truth arepossible. Moreover, we argue that the recursivity of language can be reconstructed,predicted, and understood on this basis. The chapter also develops an account of thesmallest unit of grammaticality, which we identify with the phase of contemporarygrammatical theory.

This unit of grammatical organization moves to centre stage in Chapter 4, wherewe claim to derive formal-ontological distinctions in the objects we refer to inlanguage from the grammatical dynamics in which such acts of reference areconfigured. An example of what we call a formal-ontological distinction is thedifference between an action and an object, or an object and a fact. These are notdistinctions like those between a man and a woman, or between whisky and water, orbetween water viewed as H2O or as XYZ. They are formal distinctions, not materialones. They do not concern existence in a metaphysical sense. The availability of asystem of reference in which every single act of reference involves such a formal-ontological distinction is the most astonishing fact: it needs to be explained, and tofollow from something. We argue that it follows from grammar, and from nothingelse. Grammar is the only known principle that can, and does, organize the forms ofreference in question. In this sense, formal-ontological distinctions are, in essence,grammatical distinctions, and the world as characterized by such distinctions is agrammaticalized world. The formal ontology of semantics co-varies with grammar,and viewed as a semantic or metaphysical ontology, it has no independent status.

This has an important consequence for the relation between grammar andthought. For the kind of content that comes, in our argument, with grammar, andthe formal ontology in question, is a (or even the) prime feature of the kind ofthought that philosophers since ancient times have highlighted: thought that can betrue or false, that is responsive to reasons, and that can be shared. If the content andformal ontology in question fall out from grammar, there is nothing else for a theoryof thought to accomplish: a theory of (such) thought will be a grammatical theory.Hence there is no independent ‘Language of Thought’: it is not needed.

The reason that it was taken to be needed is that language was merely taken to be aperipheral organ, or an expressive tool. If this expressive tool is subject to massivecross-linguistic variation, as it plainly seems to be, and thought is not, then theremust be a categorial thought-language distinction. And so we need to address theissue of cross-linguistic variation. Does it provide a challenge for our account ofuniversal grammar? Not if the primary dimension of variation is the organizationof language at a lexical and morphological level; not, if traditional dimensions ofvariation, as captured through syntactic parameters, are given their proper place inthe grammar, as only affecting their sensory-motor externalization.

xviii Introduction

Yet there are other, massive challenges to our account. Some aspects of linguisticorganization traditionally identified as grammatical, such as Case, are said not to feedinto the organization of thought or meaning—at least not directly. So why are theythere? If they exist in the organization of grammar, they therefore either disconfirmthe view that grammar necessarily subserves the organization of a special kind ofmeaning, or they are wrongly taken not to feed into the organization of meaning. Weargue that once morphological Case features are carefully distinguished from thegrammatical relations they express, they turn out to be interpretable indirectly in theformal ontology of meaning. This is argued in Chapter 6.

In chapters 7 and 8, which form a unity, we look at variation of a very differentkind, which we call biolinguistic variation, following Boeckx (2012): variation in thelinguistic genotype, and the shifts in our mental phenotypes that such variation cansystematically induce, within the genus Homo and within our own species.

Comparison of these cognitive types lends support to our ‘Un-Cartesian’ contention:that grammar is the fundamental organizational principle behind a cognitive pheno-type that is unique to our species, and defines it. In Chapter 8, we devote particularattention to Formal Thought Disorder in schizophrenia, for which the Un-Cartesianhypothesis makes an obvious prediction: grammar should disintegrate in this condi-tion as well, along with the fragmentation of thought that we observe there. This, weconclude there, turns out to be a real possibility: looking at grammar with Un-Cartesian eyes, therefore, may throw light, not only on thought, but on mental healthas well. That language in its normal use is a condition for mental health seems a naturalsuggestion: a sane thinker is also a speaker. Yet language has barely been looked atas playing this role, which reflects its status in philosophy and psychiatry today.

Having argued all this, we turn into a more philosophical mode in the finalchapter. If forms of reference such as truth and object-reference are grammatical innature, what does this really mean, in terms of the meaning of the notions ofreference and truth involved? ‘Truth’, in what sense? This notoriously inscrutablenotion intrinsically connects with metaphysical issues: issues of objectivity, in par-ticular. If truth is a grammatical concept, as we centrally contend here, how does thisaffect our notion of what truth is? Can we really mean by ‘truth’ what contemporarydiscussions of the notion since Tarski have taken it to mean? Yes, is the answer—it isjust that the notion in question has been presupposed in these discussions. The storywe tell, by contrast, is an explanatory one. It provides an aetiology for it: a rationalefor why it exists, and has the features it does.

Seen as a whole, this book reflects the ambition to rethink the place of grammarin human nature, and thereby to rethink its place in philosophy as well. We wantedto weave inquiry into the nature of grammar into a single scheme, in essentiallyall of its central dimensions: philosophical, linguistic, historical, evolutionary, bio-logical, neurological. We wanted there to be a single book that does all of this,in a coherent and unified, theoretically principled, and empirically sound manner.

Introduction xix

We hope these are benefits that outweigh the inherent difficulties that mar interdis-ciplinary work.

Ultimately, our ambition is philosophical, and we take this to be a philosophicalbook. Yet, at the same time, we do not think that essentially any of the points we willbe making is independent of the empirical facts of language and how we interpretthese. Shielding the philosophy of language from systematic exposure to such factspredicts nothing good, we think. While we are crucially trying to weave a wholepicture, then, quite a few parts of this book delve ruthlessly into linguistic details.This is a risk for us, given that we want this to be a philosophical book and to be readby philosophers as well. But we have trusted that the project is worthwhile, and ofintrinsic human interest, disciplinary separations aside. In more practical terms, wetrust that, where the linguistic details get too gruesome, as for example in Section 4.4of Chapter 4, in Chapter 5, and in parts of Chapter 6, philosophers will simply chooseto read introductions and summaries, and otherwise turn a blind eye. We stress that,apart from its first section, Chapter 5 really is written with linguists in mind, and thesame is true for all but the first two sections of Chapter 6. We are no less concernedfor our linguistic readers, and have reserved much of the metaphysical dimensions ofour story for Chapter 9, leaving our empirical claims about, say, the grammar ofreference or Case assessable independently.

While this is very much a collaborative book, with both authors working closelytogether throughout, WH can be considered primarily responsible for the material inall the chapters with the exception of chapters 4 and 5. The first three sections ofChapter 4 are based on Sheehan and Hinzen (2011) and the fourth on Martín andHinzen (2012). In addition, Section 3.6 and parts of Section 3.5 of Chapter 3 are basedon Arsenijević and Hinzen (2012).

Last but not least, we emphasize that what we call ‘Un-Cartesian linguistics’ is aprogramme. Like the Minimalist Program, you can engage with it or not, but itcannot be refuted, in the way a hypothesis can be (though it can be shown fruitless).As in the case of the Minimalist Program, engaging with our programme promisesrewards: to make more principled sense of grammar. But there is nothing wrong innot pursuing it, and nothing intrinsically right in doing so. If you think that thoughtis ‘mental’ and ‘non-linguistic’, as the (or at least some) Cartesian rationalists did,and that it can be investigated in these terms, we find nothing wrong in this:programmes are judged by their fruits. At the same time, we do not want to over-state this point, for we would like to be refuted: we would like a reader to show us thatgrammar does not organize the formal ontology of semantics, that semantics isautonomous, and that thought is independent of grammar. Therefore, we formulate,over and above an Un-Cartesian programme, an Un-Cartesian hypothesis: that theformal ontology of language, and hence the content of thought, obeys grammaticalprinciples.

xx Introduction

1

The project of a science of language

1.1 Grammar as a domain of inquiry

If you tell me that your father was six foot tall, something normally happens that israther surprising, if we think about it. I may have never seen your father, and he isn’tpresent. Yet I recognize that what you are telling me is a possible item of knowledge.Indeed I will assume, at least more often than not, that you are telling me a truth. Andso I will typically come to assume that it is a fact that your father was six foot tall,which as such obtains independently of what we say or believe. That a notion of truthis involved is part of what defines thought itself: as Frege put it, ‘I call a thoughtsomething for which the question of truth arises’ (Frege, 1918–19/1956: 292).

So somehow it appears as if, quite apart from our perceptual encounters with thenon-linguistic world, we can extract knowledge from grammatical strings of expres-sions, based on thought. While perception and the extraction of adaptively relevantinformation from sensory data via inference are ubiquitous in the animal world, andperception, too, is normally of objects as existing independently of us, knowledgeobtained in this other way is a singularity, and it has a different quality. We cannotperceive that some particular thought is true or false, in some objective sense.Without this peculiar other source of knowledge, then, there would be no science,and humans would have no history. That grammar is a distinctive way of organizingmeaning and thought, making knowledge possible, is the central thesis of this book.It is also the basis of the claim we make for the philosophical and epistemologicalsignificance of grammar. It gives a novel account of what grammar actually is,or does.

Versions of this idea are as old as human scientific inquiry into grammar itself, andthey are at the heart of the very first attempt to develop a ‘science’ of language morethan 2,500 years ago in Ancient India (Matilal, 1990). In the West, grammar wasdiscovered as a potential domain of scientific inquiry only much later, but the idea ofa connection between grammar and a different way of cognizing the world figuresprominently in ‘modistic’ universal grammar in the fourteenth century as well(Covington, 2009). The same applies to Edmund Husserl’s (1900/2009, 1929/1969)remarkable project of a ‘pure logical grammar’, the most elaborate as well as ignored

universal grammar project in the twentieth century to come from philosophy (Edie,1977).1 We do not see this idea as clearly, or indeed at all, in the Port Royal tradition(Arnauld and Lancelot, 1660), or in its modern incarnation (Chomsky, 1966). Sincewe are nowhere near a genuine science of grammar today and the struggle for makingsense of it as a domain of enquiry very much continues, we believe that ourdiscussion will benefit from taking a broader historical perspective, within whichcontemporary assumptions can be properly contextualized.2

The philosophy of grammar we will develop here gives grammar a principled roleto play in the genesis of a particular kind of meaning: grammatical meaning, as wewill call it, which is to say, meaning intrinsically depending on grammatical prin-ciples of organization. In a contemporary setting, such a notion may well strike oneas contradictory. Upon opening a standard philosophy of language textbook (e.g.Lycan, 2008), one finds essentially four theoretical conceptions of meaning discussed:(i) meaning as a psychological ‘idea’ (a ‘mental particular’); (ii) words and sentences‘stand for’ things in the world, which are their meanings (the ‘reference theory’), (iii)meaning as an abstract object outside of both the mental and physical realm (theproposition theory), and (iv) the ‘use theory’ (meaning as deriving from how we usewords). The mental particulars posited on the first conception are not linguistic innature; nor are the physical objects in the world that define the meaning of words andsentences on the reference theory; nor are, evidently, propositions; nor is the use ofwords on the fourth conception, where this ‘use’ is thought of in more generic termsand analogized with chess playing in Wittgenstein (1953), governed by the ‘rules andconventions of a community’ like many other non-linguistic activities.3 So, somehow,it appears as if language simply need not be discussed in a philosophy of meaning,and that there is no grammatical meaning. In line with this, much of the focus of thephilosophy of language is on the word (and indeed, the name) as the basic unit ofmeaning and reference.

In thinking about mind, modern philosophy more generally, and the Port Royaltradition in particular, has favoured the idea that there is a universal system ofthought to which all humans somehow have access, defining the contents of their‘propositional attitudes’ and representing the true locus of meaning, while language is

1 Husserl’s project is different from both the Modistic and the Port Royal one, which Husserl references,and it is crucially meaning-based, involving a notion of grammatical meaning much in our sense below.Unfortunately, for reasons of space, Husserl’s enterprise will receive only scant attention in this book(though see fn. 10).

2 We will, in what follows, write ‘universal grammar’ for the enterprise of a universal science of languageas such, while reserving capital letters (Universal Grammar/UG) for the modern technical sense ofuniversal grammar.

3 The early Wittgenstein thought of sentences as of ‘pictures’, in the so-called ‘picture theory’ ofmeaning (Wittgenstein, 1922: sentence 2.1), which is yet another notion of meaning not invoking linguisticorganization in any specific sense.

2 The Philosophy of Universal Grammar

merely a way of expressing such meaning contents in a public medium. Frege gives aclassical formulation of this picture:

The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence andthereby becomes comprehensible to us. We say a sentence expresses a thought.A thought is something immaterial and everything material and perceptible is excluded

from this sphere of that for which the question of truth arises. (Frege, 1918–19/1956: 292)

As Frege adds on p. 302 in a footnote, comparing a thought to a planet that isindependent of us seeing it:

When one apprehends or thinks a thought one does not create it but only comes to stand in acertain relation, which is different from seeing a thing or having an idea, to what alreadyexisted beforehand.

According to Frege, the thought is thus prior to and independent of its linguisticarticulation. As such it is also the locus of semantics or content, and grammar hasnothing to do with its existence or intrinsic nature. Accordingly, from this point ofview, it is hard to see wherein the epistemological significance of grammar might lie,except for providing us with an arbitrary means to ‘reach out’ to such objects or toconvey them. The empirical study of grammar, it would then seem, is just morepsychology, which Frege and many others after him axiomatically banned from whatwould become analytic philosophy. A position of this nature can motivate theconsistent lack of a systematic study of grammar in philosophical curricula in thephilosophy of language over the last 150 years, where logic and semantics have beenthe frameworks of choice, and linguistics has had little influence on the philosophy oflanguage.4 The inherent epistemological significance of grammar also disappears onanother prominent twentieth century version of the same Cartesian-rationalist view,where language as the expressive system in question is encapsulated in a mental‘module’ (Pinker, 1994; 1997), separate from general cognition and the ‘beliefs’ and‘desires’ that constitute human reason (Fodor, 1975; 2000; 2001).

We explore a different hypothesis here: that grammar, rather than being merelyexpressive of thought, is generative of the specific kind of thought that we findexpressed in languages across the world, and a rationale for its existence. It providesa thought with a novel structural format that makes it possible, thereby enablingknowledge and forming a crucial element in the genesis of human reason itself, aswell as a new species (see Chapter 7).

In this opening chapter, we begin by tracing Cartesian rationalist linguistics to itsbeginnings in the seventeenth century, and identify a core problem in it that we thinkis responsible for the perennial instability of the universal grammar enterprise and

4 The concepts and premises of the two paradigms seem barely compatible, as a look at Chomsky(2000a) or Antony and Hornstein (2003) suggests.

1. The project of a science of language 3

the persistent criticism it has received over the last three centuries. This problem isthe very separation of a universal, immutable world of ‘thought’, ‘concepts’, or‘notions’, on the one side, from an expressive and variable system of ‘language’, onthe other. After the demise of the Port Royal tradition and universal grammar itself inthe nineteenth century, the reinvention of the universalist project in the mid-twenti-eth century in linguistics still proceeded on the old Cartesian premises: a notion ofgrammatical meaning—that some kinds of meaning are intrinsically grammatical—doesn’t surface. Instead, the attempt is to turn grammar into a ‘natural object’ definedby its formal properties only, with no reference to meaning, though perhaps ‘inter-facing’ with it, as in contemporary Minimalist grammar. In the Ancient Indiancontext, as we discuss in Section 1.3, grammarians crucially did work with a notionof grammatical meaning, and they made it the basis of their metaphysics, much as wewill do in Chapter 9. The same applies, in other ways, to Modistic grammarians,which we discuss in Section 1.4. Again, the objective of grammar as a science isachieved there, not by abstracting from meaning, but by attempting to delineate thespecific kind of meaning that comes with grammar—for the Modists, meaningassociated with the parts of speech. We will partially disagree with this particularModistic conclusion in Chapter 2, where we conclude that parts of speech distinc-tions, insofar as they exist in a language, already reflect the grammatical word:grammatical functions that words play in sentence contexts. These can be reflectedin morphological properties of words, but the latter, unlike the grammatical func-tions, are variable across languages. Section 1.5 concludes.

1.2 Cartesian linguistics, 1637–1966

The philosophical conception of language as a tool for the generation of knowledge isquite different from the one that underlies modern linguistics. The latter is aninstance of the rationalism that characterizes Cartesian linguistics in the traditionof Port Royal, which in turn leaned heavily on Descartes’s Regulae and was revived inChomsky (1966). Central to this conception is a distinction between grammar andlogic, with the former viewed as the ‘art of speaking’ (Arnauld and Lancelot, 1660)and the latter as the ‘art of thinking’ (Arnauld and Nicole, 1662). In this Cartesianuniverse, speech is squarely located in the ‘material’ world, while thought uncontro-versially belongs to the ‘mental’ world—a ‘dualism’ that the quote from Frege aboveillustrates again, though in his own nineteenth-century terms. Thought, in short, isuniversal and structured by logic, while grammar is a conventional system forexpressing it ‘materially’.

This directly predicts that any claim about a ‘universal’ grammar will have to comeout as controversial, for it is virtually inconceivable that, given the diversity amongthe world’s languages in their external appearances (and that they are not all likeLatin, which was thought for centuries to codify the canons of logic most closely),


linguistic categories will match up uniformly with the categories of logic (or seman-tics) viewed as given a priori. That is, set against a world that is universal bydefinition, the science of grammar is bound to fall victim to abundant variation. Aswe shall see below, this almost inescapable scepticism about universal grammar isindeed a recurring theme where rationalist assumptions about language and thoughtare made.

The following quote from the Grammaire générale et raisonnée illustrates therationalist viewpoint:

La Grammaire est l’Art de parler. / Parler, est expliquer ses pensées par des signes, que leshommes ont inventez à ce dessein. / On a trouvé que les plus commodes de ces signes, estoientles sons & les voix. (Arnauld and Lancelot, 1660: 5)5

A grammar, therefore, is a ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, ‘general’, or ‘philosophical’ grammar,only insofar as it captures the universal structure of thought, while, to the extent thatit does not, it reflects the arbitrariness of an expressive tool. Put differently, the non-arbitrary aspects of grammar (the ones amenable to science) are precisely the onesthat reflect the ‘manner in which men use [signs] for signifying their thoughts’(Arnauld and Lancelot, 1660: 41). A grammar will be ‘perfect’ when it is a perfectmirror of or transparent ‘window’ into the world of thought. The contents of thisworld are ‘thoughts’ and ‘ideas’, which are structured by operations described as‘mental’, such as conjunction, disjunction, conditioning, affirmation, and denial,which speech is there to externally signify. Characteristically for this conception,the origin of this world of thought—or semantics as such—is not addressed.

Against the background of Cartesian mind–body duality, speech is also a functionof the ‘body’, and segregated from thought viewed as a function of the ‘mind’. Sothere will be no unified science of grammar and thought, any more than there can bea unified theory of noise and meaning. Cartesian dualism soon became obsoletethrough Newton’s destruction of the mechanical philosophy that defined the notionof body involved (Chomsky, 2000a), and even Frege’s nineteenth-century version ofit has recently come to be questioned in approaches that regard propositions as aconsequence of what kinds of mind we possess (Soames, 2010).6 Yet, in some ways,related dualisms have lived on in the study of language.

5 ‘Grammar is the art of speaking. Speaking is to explicate one’s thoughts through signs, which humanshave invented for this purpose. One has found that the most suitable of these signs are sounds and thevoice.’ (Our translation.)

6 Soames (2010: 7) develops what he terms a ‘cognitive realist’ account of propositions, according towhich propositions are types of ‘cognitive events’ involving predication, which is said to be a ‘primitivecognitive act’. But the notion of predication in question is a grammatical one, it is one kind of denotationthat clauses can intuitively have, and the term ‘cognitive’ does not increase understanding of whypropositions (or the other types of clausal denotations) exist and have the structures they do (see furtherReichard, 2013: ch. 1).


Thus, the Strong Minimalist Thesis of Chomsky (2007a) and the comparativeapproach of Hauser et al. (2002) are both based on the view that we need not accountfor thought: it is what provides the constraints for language to satisfy, much as inthe expressive model above. It is a system that is part of the ‘Conceptual-Intentional(C-I) systems’, which are prelinguistic by definition and merely form an ‘interface’with grammar. They are thus exactly what the grammarian does not have to accountfor. There also is the idea that the sensory-motor externalization of language in aphysical medium is only a contingent aspect of language that it in principle could dowithout.7 That internal system, Chomsky (2008: 4) specifically suggests, evolved first,with externalization a later evolutionary development, ‘a secondary process’, whichused already existing sensory-motor articulators. If so, grammar in its core aspects—in what remains after we subtract externalization—will be purely ‘internal’, a mentalsystem (yet even as such still distinct from ‘thought’, from which it is divided by thesemantic ‘interface’).

On the other hand, the Minimalist Program is as such flexible enough to allow forquite different conceptions of what role grammatical structuring might play inregards to the posited internal systems of thought. One view could be that thegrammar merely internally articulates them, giving them a linguistic form. Anotheris that it fundamentally changes and reorganizes these systems, thereby giving us adifferentmode of thought, if not thought as such. In the latter cases we clearly cannotspeak of an ‘interface’ between grammar and thought any more, and this is the viewwe pursue here. Some statements of Chomsky are consistent with this latter perspec-tive, such as the assertion that ‘UG primarily constrains the “language of thought,”not the details of its external expression’ (Chomsky, 2007b: 22). Here the word‘constrains’ could be read as entailing that grammar provides a structural formaton which a distinctly human system of thought inherently depends (something needsthen to be said about what kind of thought this is).

On the other hand, little in current Minimalist syntax gives us any insights aboutwhat it is about grammar that makes it play that role of constraining the language ofthought. This is particularly true for conceptions of narrow syntax that reduce it tothe combinatorial operation Merge: defined as the recursive formation of binary sets,it amounts to no more (or less) than discrete infinity, and thus yields no insights intowhat makes grammar specific, let alone a source of a particular and novel mode ofthought. Indeed, Minimalist syntax has been virtually based on a conception ofgrammar on which it does not change the nature and structure of thought or theC-I systems, reducing grammar to a mere ‘linking system’ between meaning(assumed already given) and sound or sensory-motor articulation (also assumedalready given, cf. Chomsky, 2005).

7 And that partially disguises the essential nature of the internal system that such externalizationencodes (Boeckx, 2008; 2011). See also Burton-Roberts (2011).


Our more specific question in this book then will be how grammar might play arole in regards to a genuine theory of thought (or of semantics), a task that, as noted,was not addressed by the rationalists and has escaped us since. Such a theory is notonly of interest in itself, we will argue in Chapter 7, but is also needed for biologicalreasons, namely in an account of human speciation: the distinctive ‘rationality’ of ourthought is something that can be dated, and there is no good evidence for itsexistence prior to that of modernHomo sapiens, or even in the anatomical beginningsof our species: for in this species itself, there is no such evidence before about 75,000years ago in Africa and 40,000 years ago in Europe, which is when a novel mode ofthought is richly manifest in the unprecedented creativity of the essentially moderncultures arising then. This mode of thought needs to be explained, and we will arguethat language explains it: not merely because we have evidence that language waspresent at these times and not (long) before them, but because the grammaticalorganization of meaning in language yields the characteristic features of this sapiens-specific mode of thought. The theory of thought we offer is therefore a unified theoryof thought and language, and we do not know how to pursue an explanatory theoryof thought or semantics—a genuine cognitive theory—otherwise. That theory will notturn out to be consistent with regard to physical externalization—a merely contin-gent aspect of linguistic organization which language, at least in principle, could dowithout. If we think of cognition as ‘embodied’, then language is the unique embodi-ment of the kind of thought we are addressing here, and embodiment requires aphysical substance. We return to this matter in chapters 8 and 9.

The uncontroversial universality of grammar in our species does not then lie, forus, in the fact that it reflects (or mirrors) a universal system of thought (‘notions’,‘concepts’). This departure from rationalism is a crucial step, since, as noted earlier, itis precisely the virtually unavoidable divergence between a (presupposed) system of‘concepts’ and the variation in their external expression that has historically leadlinguists to reject Universal Grammar, as the following quote from Jespersenillustrates:

With regard to the categories we have to establish in the syntactic part of our grammaticalsystem, we must first raise an extremely important question, namely, are these categoriespurely logical categories, or are they merely linguistic categories? If the former, then it isevident that they are universal, i.e. belong to all languages in common; if the latter, then they, orat any rate some of them, are peculiar to one or more languages as distinct from the rest. Ourquestion is thus the old one: Can there be such a thing as a universal (or general) grammar?(Jespersen, 1924: 46–7)

In other words, on this view the existence of a universal grammar stands and fallswith the alignment of grammar and logic, with logic thought of as structuringthought and regarded as universal and immutable. Similarly, the categories of exter-nal reality (‘corresponding’ to ‘notional categories’ in the ‘mind’) are regarded as


universal and immutable. A universal grammar is then predictably rejected on thegrounds that unlike thought (or reality), grammar appears highly variable and assuch does not seem to reflect the immutable logical and semantic structure of thoughtor reality. As Jespersen specifically observes, citing the examples of ‘Man is mortal’and ‘Men were deceivers ever’:

A logician would have preferred a construction of language in which both sentences were inthe same universal number (‘omnial’, as Bréal calls it) and in the same universal or generictense, but the subject of the former in the common gender and that of the latter in themasculine gender, for then the meaning would have been unmistakable: ‘all human beingshave been, are, and always will be mortal,’ and ‘all male human beings have been, are, andalways will be deceitful.’ But as a matter of fact, this is not the way of the English language, andgrammar has to state facts, not desires. (Jespersen, 1924: 54–5).

The rejection of a universal grammar, then, is the price to pay for maintainingthe ethos of grammar as an empirical science, a pervasive attitude throughout thetwentieth century, notably in Bloomfield. Jespersen at the time of writing in the earlytwentieth century already echoes a conclusion widely endorsed by prominent com-parative linguists in the first half of the nineteenth century, where the death ofCartesian universal grammar was widely taken for granted:

‘A universal grammar is no more conceivable than a universal form of political Constitution orof religion, or than a universal plant or animal form; the only thing, therefore, that we have todo is to notice what categories the actually existing languages offer us, without starting from aready-made system of categories’ (Steinthal, Characteristik, 104f.). Similarly, Benfey says thatafter the results achieved by modern linguistics universal and philosophical grammars havesuddenly disappeared so completely that their methods and views are now only to be traced insuch books as are unaffected by real science (Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 306). Andaccording to Madvig (1856, p. 20, KL p. 121), grammatical categories have nothing to do withthe real relations of things in themselves. (Jespersen, 1924: 48)8

But let us rehearse how this conclusion was arrived at. First, a world of thought or‘notional categories’ is separated from a world of so-called ‘linguistic categories’, andboth of these from the categories of reality itself, where the categories of thought andthose of reality are both taken as given (Jespersen says nothing about their origin, anymore than rationalists did, or cognitive or functional linguists such as Langacker(1987) do, when they define word classes in terms of semantic ‘notions’ such as‘object’, ‘property’, or ‘event’). Universal grammar, we then say, only exists if thecategories of grammar reflect those of either thought or reality in some tight and

8 Steinthal’s conclusion, cited in the quote below, seems very similar to how universal grammar isrejected in writers such as Haspelmath (2007; 2010) today. It is also interesting how much of science isguided by largely a priori intuitions about what is ‘conceivable’ or not. Steinthal’s biological speculationabout the ‘universal animal form’, in particular, is debatable and rejected in Sherman (2007).


universal fashion. But this is not the case, due to linguistic variation. Therefore thereis no universal grammar. This general pattern of argument has not essentiallychanged in the last one hundred years. As Haspelmath (2010: 3) notes,

Typologists have often observed that cross linguistic comparison of morphosyntactic patternscannot be based on formal patterns (because these are too diverse), but has to be based onuniversal conceptual-semantic concepts.

The ‘conceptual-semantic concepts’ in question are effectively Jespersonian ‘notions’,such as ‘agent’, ‘recipient’, and ‘physical transfer’. The concepts meant to allow cross-linguistic comparison are assumed to also include some logical concepts such as‘argument’, defined as, say, a ‘referential phrase that can fill a verb’s semantic valencyposition’ (where, crucially, ‘reference’ is not taken to be a grammatical notion, as itwill be here). The concepts in question are classified as constructs of the typologistthat allow language comparisons, but that do not correspond to anything in either aspeaker’s language or mind. Indeed there are no cross-linguistic categories, fornothing in language corresponds one-to-one to the conceptual-semantic constructs.Haspelmath (2010) illustrates with the putative category ‘dative’: no ‘concept’ definedin conceptual-semantic terms like the above is ‘instantiated’ by, say, the NivkhDative-Accusative case, which, as it happens, encodes the causee of an act ratherthan the recipient. Neither is, Haspelmath argues, such a category instantiated by,say, the Russian Dative or the Finnish Allative, both of which, although they doencode the recipient of physical transfer actions, have many properties that such adefinition will not capture, and which therefore cannot be equated as instances of thesame category.9

Let us now consider how the argument would go if grammatical categories are suigeneris, a genuine innovation in hominin evolution, reflecting a new mode or formatof thought that did not predate grammar. Then the project of wanting to match suchcategories with those of non-linguistic thought is forlorn: one cannot ‘translate’ theminto any other and non-grammatical—say, semantic—terms. Neither can one trans-late them into non-grammatically characterized categories of ‘reality’—say, onto-logical categories viewed as independent from those of language or thought. In fact,even percepts do not reflect external reality as independently (e.g. physically)described, a point to which we return in Chapter 2. Even less we would expect thatthe independent description of reality would reflect the grammatical relations inwhich we argue knowledge becomes possible.

Now the entire starting point changes. If we do not allow ourselves to presupposethe categories of a Cartesian system of ‘thought’ or of ‘notions’, nor a ready-madecategorial structure of external reality as it appears in the format of knowledge to us,then grammatical categories—apart from perceptual ones—are all we have to go by.

9 For our own take on Case see Chapter 6.


We can’t reduce them to anything else. If grammatical categorizations across lan-guages are indeed arbitrary and variable, whereas those of thought and reality areimmutable, there should be some evidence independent of grammar that the relevantnon-grammatical categories exist, and that they can be accessed independently ofgrammar. But we know of no such evidence: they are inherently grammatical, orlinguistic categories and relations in disguise.

Even if so, the question now remains whether grammatical categories and relationsare indeed arbitrarily variable. But there is little if any disagreement over the fact that,in all human languages, one can tell a truth and also say something false; that one canuse a word to refer to an event and distinguish such an act of reference from onereferring to an object; one can refer to an object (a ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’) as distinct fromthe speaker and the hearer; one can express a proposition whose truth value isobjective and distinguish it from an emotive or subjective expression, or an inter-subjectively valid one; one can distinguish a property from the object that has it; andso on. These are defining features of human rationality. Suppose, secondly, that thesevery distinctions in reference are unavailable pre- or non-grammatically, and againthat they cannot be characterized in independent semantic terms, as long as we donot implicitly invoke grammatical distinctions. Thirdly, suppose that a properanalysis of the parts of speech and their grammatical functions exactly aligns withthese very modes of signification. Then the argument from variation would be moot.

If things are so easy, why is the rejection of universal grammar so widespread?Again, history gives us some clues. The first half of the nineteenth century wascharacterized by a revolt in linguistics against the Port Royal model of grammar andthe general attempt to align grammar with logic (Graffi, 2001). Instead, the linguistsof the day—for example Steinthal, mentioned above, but also the earlier Neogram-marians, for example Hermann Paul, whose Principles of Linguistic History is from1880, and the psychologist WilhelmWundt (1832–1920)—tried to align grammar withpsychology, to the extent even that the terms ‘sentence’ and ‘judgement’ (GermanUrteil) came to be used virtually interchangeably. Grammatical processes, in short,reflect psychological ones involved in the genesis of a judgement viewed as a mentaloperation.

In the later parts of the nineteenth century, however, there was a countermove-ment, in which notions such as judgement or ‘thought’ (the German Gedanke) werestressed to have non-psychological meanings, giving rise to the ‘anti-psychologism’defended in various forms by Bolzano, Brentano, Frege, Husserl, Moore, Wittgen-stein, and Russell (prior to 1909). Within philosophy, this indicated the need toreturn to an alignment of language and logic, and to address the issue of meaning inabstract propositional rather than grammatical terms. This alignment would remainin place for much of the twentieth century, where anti-psychologism became anaxiomatic premise of ‘analytic philosophy’, and where the nature and structure of‘content’ is a matter of metaphysics or, on ‘naturalistic’ conceptions, physics and


causal relations, but not grammar. Frege’s contention, that content is not a matter ofpsychological ‘ideas’ internal to the head is thus preserved, as is his idea that contentis non-linguistic. The notion of grammatical meaning—that grammar itself couldprovide or organize a novel form of meaning—does not surface. In our proposal, ofcourse, meaning is not a matter of non-linguistic ‘ideas’, either. But nor is it a matterof metaphysics or causality, being a matter of grammar (and of course the lexicon)instead.10

Nineteenth-century historical-comparative linguists never quite warmed to thequestion of linguistic meaning in the first place, focusing on phonology and the lawsof sound change, in particular. While phonemes are beyond the threshold of humanconscious apperception in ordinary language use, on the other hand, meaningfulwords are not. So, with a move to morphology, the mysterious box of meaning had tobe opened. Bloomfield (1933: ch. 9) thus addresses the matter of meaning, yet goingbarely beyond the word level and treating grammar without reference to meaning.He moreover sticks to a behaviourist methodology where the meaning of a word isassumed to be the situation in which the word is uttered and the response itsutterance elicits. A related position in Skinner (1957) would become a central targetof Chomsky (1959), running directly counter to the creative aspect of language usethat Chomsky adopted from the Cartesian tradition.

But words as such are not the locus of human freedom or reference yet, in thesense that they are largely given to us as something we need to acquire. Freedom ofself-expression and reference to arbitrary objects of our thought depend on thegenerativity that only comes with the phrase and the sentence, which have theirown meanings. Yet, even in twentieth-century linguistics, this matter remaineddifficult to address. By 1930, linguistics as a field had become autonomous fromboth logic and psychology, having become first a comparative-historical disciplineand then a descriptive one, insofar as the historical and comparative study of

10 Some qualifications are appropriate here: for example, as we shall argue in Chapter 3, Frege developedcrucial insights on the formal structure of meaning as aligned with that of grammar. And Husserl, whileengaging in what he called Cartesian Meditations and widely perceived as preoccupied with the intentionalfine-structure of consciousness and its phenomenology, in fact regarded language as a constitutivecondition of rational knowledge (Bruzina, 1981), like Merleau-Ponty (1945) would do later. Husserl alsomade a foundational distinction between ‘empirical grammars’ and ‘the grammatical’ itself, or the ‘idealform of language’, which is the a priori and universal basis for logic, but is crucially conceived, unlike inChomsky, in non-psychological, and indeed normative (but not social-conventional), terms. Like theIndians and the Modists, Husserl’s conception of universal grammar in this sense is crucially meaning-based. We would call nothing ‘language’ that does not consist of structural wholes that are units of meaningbuilt from other such units, in accordance with their structure. The sentence is formed in accordance with apriori laws of signification and must necessarily have a sense, which moreover is necessarily one (the ‘unityof meaning’). This is thought of as an a priori law of meaning (apriorisches Bedeutungsgesetz), which‘normatively determines and guarantees the possibility and the unity of a given independent meaning’(Edie, 1977: 161), with no language failing to be formed on the basis of units of meaning. While being themost elaborated proposal for a universal grammar in the twentieth century, apart from Chomsky’s, Edienotes that it fell ‘upon deaf ears’. I greatly thank Alex Malt and Uli Reichard for discussions of this issue.


languages was eventually seen to depend on the prior availability of descriptive sets ofdata. As transpired in historical-comparative linguistics, even the parts of speechsystem of the generalized Indo-European language family were by no means univer-sal, a relativistic perspective gained ground on which change and diversity were notaccidental but essential aspects of language, which any empirical perspective had torespect.11 As Bloomfield summarized the situation in 1933:

The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations. Features whichwe think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomesaccessible. Some features, such as, for instance, the distinction of verb-like and noun-like wordsas separate parts of speech, are common to many languages, but lacking in others. The fact thatsome features are, at any rate, widespread, is worthy of notice and calls for an explanation:when we have adequate data about many languages, we shall have to return to the problem ofgeneral grammar and to explain these similarities and divergences, but this study, when itcomes, will be not speculative but inductive. (Bloomfield, 1933: 20)

Bloomfield stresses that this study of linguistic variation is autonomous from psych-ology, leading to a more ‘empirical’ approach to grammar:

We have learned, at any rate, what one of our masters suspected 30 years ago, namely, that wecan pursue the study of language without reference to any psychologistic doctrine, and that todo so safeguards our results and makes them more significant. (Bloomfield, 1933: vii)

The evidence, he argues, for the putative ‘mental processes’ that speakers weresupposed to undergo was no more than the linguistic process itself. The postulationof the former adds nothing to the analysis of the latter. Two decades later, thecognitive revolution and Chomsky’s unashamed ‘mentalism’ arrives, wiping thebehaviourist method defended by Bloomfield (1933) off the linguistic scene—thoughthe externalism, functionalism, and empiricism it was founded upon would live on inphilosophy in various guises, notably in the work of W. van Orman Quine, asdiscussed in Hinzen (2006).

As Chomsky (1966) made clear, on the other hand, the ‘new’ perspective was at thesame time an old one: a return to the Port Royal paradigm, though now enriched bythe methods of computational science (such as the theory of recursive functions),which could tackle the generative basis of the creativity of language use, perhaps themost crucial axiom that Chomsky identified in the Cartesian framework (Descartes,1637). Curiously, though, Cartesian rationalism is resuscitated without the project ofaligning grammar and logic—at least initially, before the project of ‘logical form’arrived on the scene (Hornstein, 1984). Rather, maintaining the Cartesian axiom ofthe distinctness of language and thought, Chomsky now focuses on grammar alone,

11 Cf. Evans and Levinson (2009: 446): ‘The diversity of language is, from a biological point of view, itsmost remarkable property.’


making it an autonomous ‘mental’ system consisting of arbitrary formal or algebraicrules, distinct in particular from those of semantics or logic. A decade later, Monta-gue (1973) would do the same for semantics, turning it into an autonomous system aswell, which did not depend on any particular theory of grammar (cf. Jacobson, 2012,for a similar view today).

In the hands of Fodor (1975; 1983), the treatment of grammar as an autonomoussystem would become more than a temporary methodological decision of linguists,namely an architectural assumption, accompanied by notions of ‘modularity’, ‘encap-sulation’, and ‘innateness’ (Pinker, 1994; 1997), wedded to a physicalist metaphysics ofmental representations and mind. Linguistic functions such as phonological encodingor the ‘syntax-module’ now morph into domain-specific, ‘informationally encapsu-lated’ components of the mind, part of a genetically fixed modular architecture.Having each their own distinctive ontologies, they operate serially (with ‘syntax’ e.g.coming ‘before’ semantic interpretation, which is read off from it). Very explicitly,now, thought is independent of grammar—it is a ‘central’ rather than ‘peripheral’system, domain-general and integrative in character—or else it is an independentlygenerative component operating in ‘parallel’ with syntax and phonology, as in Jack-endoff (2002). The idea of an inherent connection between grammar and thoughtremains lost and becomes hard to even formulate.

Fodor’s Cartesian rationalism is crucially distinct from that of the Cartesianrationalists cited in Chomsky (1966), who hardly saw a difference between grammar,insofar as it is a science, and thought. Chomsky (1966) himself, however, citing therationalist Beauzée saying that ‘the science of language differs hardly at all from thatof thought’, particularly stresses the need for what we may call a restrictive andexplanatory theory of semantics. As he complains, this very task was effectivelytrivialized in the way that the Cartesian rationalists carried out their project. While‘deep’ structures that convey semantic content (thought) were proposed, no explicitand restrictive principles for their generation were formulated, and no independentevidence provided. Deep structures are posited that simply consist of actual sentencesin a simpler or more natural organization. Illustrating with a well-known examplefrom the Port Royal grammar (Chomsky, 1966: 80), for the ‘Surface Structure’Invisible God created the visible world, say, the ‘Deep Structure’ might be ‘GodWHO is invisible created the world WHICH is visible’, which combines three simplesentences: 1. God is invisible, 2. He created the world, 3. The world is visible.Chomsky characterizes this as an empirical hypothesis for which effectively norelevant evidence is provided. As he concludes, a ‘general’ theory of language thatis not restrictive in regards to what is a possible Deep Structure AND what is apossible Surface Structure is empty. Any science of language—any universal gram-mar in the Cartesian sense—needs to respect this double constraint.

This insight has not proved to be influential in the tradition to follow, however. Infact, the project of a restrictive and explanatory theory of semantics has barely begun


today (see Pietroski, 2011, for one formulation). And it is clear that while forCartesian rationalists the connection between language and thought was, from theviewpoint of ‘scientific’ grammar, extremely close, Chomsky has been substantiallymore cautious in this respect, and in essence has maintained the independence ofthought from language. From the viewpoint of syntactic autonomy and modularity,the aforementioned project in its original Cartesian shape must seem positivelymisguided.

The paradigm of Principles and Parameters (P&P), too, is barely relevant inrelation to this aim. Rather than focusing on the question of the (universal) structureof thought, P&P is focused on the question of linguistic variation again, much asnineteenth-century linguistics was: none of the ‘principles’, let alone the parameters,are conceived as having any intrinsic rationale in the organizational principles ofuniversal human thought. We return to ‘syntactic parameters’ in Chapter 5. As late as1995, by a time when the ‘interfaces’ had become highly relevant to the design ofgrammar, Chomsky (1995) describes the derivational process as largely one ofeliminating (‘checking’) ‘uninterpretable’ (hence purely ‘formal’) features insyntax—a process that continues until representations are generated that only con-tain information that external semantic and sensory-motor systems can ‘read’. Hencethese systems are still constituted independently and ‘wait’ for syntax to deliversomething substantively interpretable to them. As noted, the very metaphor of the‘interface’ of grammar with systems of thought (the ‘Conceptual-Intentional’ or C-Isystems of Chomsky, 1995) implies a separation.

In short, while the generative enterprise in the twentieth century is substantiallyless ambitious than the original Cartesian one in regard to the theory of grammar, itadheres to some crucial elements of its conceptual scheme, such as the conception oflanguage as a medium for expressing or signifying thought, viewed as the locus ofsemantics and logic. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it also inherits some of the problemsof the rationalist picture: thus, prima facie it remains hard to imagine how or why anexpressive tool should be universal or biologically ‘hardwired’, rather than a mereconvention. Variation is still what we would expect, when the rationalization ofuniversality through an intrinsic grammar-thought connection is not available.

It is fair, then, to describe the present project as ‘Un-Cartesian’ in spirit.12 It makesno assumptions on a pre-existing system of thought with which grammar interfaces(with qualifications on a system of ‘concepts’ partially lexicalized in a mental lexicon,as we will discuss in Chapter 2). It centrally consists in working out a principlednotion of grammatical meaning, reflecting the fact that the grammaticalization ofconcepts in linguistic constructions itself has a semantics to it—a semantics that, we

12 There is a historically interesting question, though, how ‘Cartesian’Descartes in fact was. Cottingham(1998) in particular, argues that thought depended on language for Descartes.


contend, cannot be replicated in the absence of the relevant principles of grammaticalstructuring. Grammatical meaning, we will argue, and nothing else, is what givesgrammar a universal rationale: it is why grammar is there, and explains how it isbuilt. It can thus also be used to divert criticisms of universal grammar that are basedon the rejection of the claim that there is a ‘language-module’ in the sense of anautonomous, genetically based and linguistically specific endowment for language inhumans, consisting in arbitrary formal rules (Pinker, 1994). That very rejection unitessuch writers as Evans and Levinson (2009), Christiansen and Chater (2008), andTomasello (2008). We react to their criticisms on these grounds in Chapter 7.

As unexpected as our claim may sound in a contemporary context, however, it wasa central and prominent idea in two universal grammar traditions that predated PortRoyal. We turn to the Indian tradition first.

1.3 Ancient India

Systematic inquiries into the nature of language in the West do not begin beforePlato’s Cratylos, and are confined to some speculations about words or names(onomata) even there. The paradigm of scientific theorizing in the early Greektradition is mathematics, and geometry in particular. Scientific theorizing aboutgrammar in the shape of a distinct discipline separate from the study of the universalforms of thought or metaphysics, is largely missing in the foundations of Westernscience. Aristotle in De interpretatione I–IV didn’t fail to leave his stamp in regards toan identification of the parts of speech making up a proposition (see Moro, 1997:appendix), but his treatment is still embedded within larger concerns in semanticsand metaphysics, with the latter as the most foundational discipline. His medievalinterpreters, in any case, took him to be a logician not a grammarian.13

Basically, a scientific treatment of grammar has to wait until the arrival of Modisticgrammar in the fourteenth century, which would set out by discarding much of theLatin (and Greek) grammar of the time (in particular Priscian’s, of the sixth centuryad) and attempting to get both the connection between, and the distinctness of, logicand grammar right, an insight documented in Abelard’s Dialectica (twelfth century)(Covington, 2009: 11; and see Section 1.4 below). Yet, Modistic grammar blossomedfor barely half a century, when Occam’s nominalism wiped it off the philosophicalscene. In the subsequent early modern scientific revolution, grammar does not figureon the agenda of science. Galilean physics is based on the mathematization of nature

13 Later commentary suggests that Aristotle in fact rejected the distinction between semantic andsyntactic analysis (Moravcsik, 1968). Aristotle aimed to find the basic elements of sentences of subject-predicate form as these would be the entities that also fall into only one category of metaphysical existence.This for Aristotle was where the link between language and metaphysics existed. We thank James Miller forthis reference.


again, and in the scheme of Descartes’s version of mechanistic explanation, languagecannot in principle figure: for it cannot be conceived without thought, which itexpresses, and to which mechanical principles of explanation do not apply.

In this way language is excluded from the Western scientific paradigm. Curiously,the opposite is true of the Indian scientific tradition, where from the inception ofhuman theoretical speculation the very paradigm of scientific theorizing is grammar,the most important so-called ‘limb’ in the curriculum for the study of the Vedas,where it figures along with phonetics, etymology, metrics, astronomy, and the science(or art) of ritual. Of these limbs grammar was the ‘prime mover’ (Matilal, 1990: 7).The study of language is formally identified as Vyākarana, and linguistics as adiscipline is joined by the philosophy of language from early on, unlike in thenineteenth or twentieth century, where these two disciplines have proceeded onlargely separate paths and with disparate goals, virtually indicating different ‘para-digms’ in thinking about language, as Chomsky (2000a) and Antony and Hornstein(2003) systematically document. The philosophy of language is pursued by sages whowrite on grammar (the grammar of Sanskrit) and call themselves ‘grammarians’,recognized as having distinct concerns from the ‘logicians’ (Matilal, 1990: 42). Wewill re-encounter this same important dichotomy in the case of the Modistic gram-marians in the next section.

At a time when Plato was still reflecting on whether names are conventional ornatural devices, Pāṇini completed a monumental oeuvre, the As·t.ādhyāyī, whichconsists in a system of about 4,000 interacting rules of four different types thattogether aim to give a maximally economical and complete, as well as theoreticallyconsistent, description of the grammar of Sanskrit, a language initially based on thesacred and ancient texts (collections of hymns) guarded by the Brahmin religion. AsBloomfield (1933: 11) would famously put it, ‘No other language, to this day, has beenso perfectly described’, in a way that is ‘complete and accurate’, and based ‘not upontheory but upon observation’. In the context of colonial Europe, this grammar wouldlay the foundations of historical-comparative linguistics and the systematic study oflanguage change in the Indo-European language family: this was after William Jones,in 1786, announced the hypothesis, based on the method of the comparisons of word(sound) forms, that Greek, Latin, Germanic, and Sanskrit must have had a commonorigin in some ancient language of ‘Proto-Indo-European’.

Pāṇini’s methods would teach nineteenth-century historical linguists how to domorphological analysis in the descriptive characterization of their own languages,effectively contributing to the emergence and foundations of modern structuralistlinguistics in the early twentieth century, as it eventually emerged out of the Westernencounter with Sanskrit. The indebtedness of both Saussure and Bloomfield to Pāṇiniis acknowledged and clear (Singh et al., 1995): it was Pāṇini, after all, who hadfirst delivered a system for structurally analysing each and every word-form of alanguage, leaving nothing to the informal understanding of the language user, thus


giving a proof of concept for a full and scientific account of a language in thestructuralist sense.

Rather than dealing with a particular corpus of Vedic texts, Pāṇini’s grammar, at abasic level, reflects the insight that Sanskrit exhibits a structural complexity that issubject to formal rules and regularities, which, together with relevant exceptions totheir application and a list of primitives (roots) to which they apply, capture aninfinity of cases, thereby doing justice to the unboundedness of language. Sentences,the Indians recognized, are ‘innumerable’, requiring some kind of formal structure(Cardona, 2009: 148, 154). This structure is analysed at a number of different ‘levels’—semantics/meaning, morphosyntax, morphology, and phonology, with asymmetricdependencies between these (so that, e.g., semantics can influence morphology, butnot the other way around) (Kiparsky, 2002). It is noteworthy in this regard that,although Pāṇinian grammar is no doubt ‘formal’, grammatical description startsfrom meanings to be signified, serving as conditions for the introduction of affixesafter bases, making semantics ‘intimately linked with grammar’ (Cardona, 2009).

In this tradition, the epistemological and philosophical significance of the study ofgrammar runs deep. Pāṇini’s grammar was widely recognized, particularly by Pa-tanjali (2nd centuryad) and Bhartrihari (5th century), not to belong to any particularVedic school but to be common to them all (Cardona, 2009). One might thuscharacterize it as a general analysis of the structure of Vedic knowledge (the Vedas,literally, are ‘the body of knowledge’) and an organizing principle behind the ritualsthat were associated with it. In the perception of the time, the Vedas, by laying anancient foundation for language, lay a foundation for the fundamental distinctionsand classifications of the world, and for the rituals that sustain and ground the socialand natural order (Halbfass, 1991). Moreover, according to the ‘Advaitic’ positiondefended by Bhartrihari as well as the Manu-smrti and other dharma texts, theUltimate Reality itself, or Brahman, is of the nature of word (sabdabrahman, wheresabdameans ‘word’) (Aklujkar, 2009). As Tripath (2009) puts it, ‘the Ultimate Realityis the Word-principle’, not unlike perhaps in the Christian Genesis. Accordingly, itmakes sense that whatever is created can be linguistically analysed, comprehended,and communicated—it has a linguistic nature—and all science must adhere to theprinciples of grammar. It also makes sense that the study of grammar becomes part ofspiritual practice, i.e. yoga, the attempt to realize a supreme state of being.

Naturally, Brahman isOne, andwithout beginning and end, asGod is in theChristiantradition. But we can only perceive creation in its multiplicity and in space and time.The same is true for the word-principle: whereas meaning is something unitary, wecan only study it by looking at verbal activity, which is temporal and sequential. Yetthe study of grammar aims beyond this surface. Viewed as a spiritual practice,

it has been termed sabdapurvayoga or the yoga of transcending the verbal multiplicity orplurality through the words themselves. All such verbal multiplicity occurs in time; hence, it is


an activity, temporal and sequential. Spiritual practice of grammar shows the path to submergesuch a sequentiality into the plenitude of the Self, the Consciousness. (Tripath, 2009: 183)

The Indian tradition, then, gave language and hence grammar a role to play in thescientific study of the world and our place therein that was both principled andsystematic. Ultimately, this appears to be the reason why linguistic discussions in theWest came to fruition only so much later, while in India both grammar and thephilosophy of language were cornerstones of science in a consistent fashion for morethan a thousand years after the onset of human scientific speculation as such.

These considerations also help us to understand why the study of grammar in theIndian tradition has a normative significance that it is taken to lack today. Of course,Pāṇini’s grammar is now widely regarded as ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘prescriptive’ incharacter (Matilal, 1990: 10), which is to say: it is not prescriptive in the sense inwhich Latin set a standard for grammaticality of European languages in the eyes ofsome eighteenth-century linguists, whose moulding of all languages on the Latinmodel would be ridiculed by nineteenth-century comparativists (recall Jespersen’scomments above). In Pāṇini’s case, however, understanding how complex wordsarise by strictly rule-based application of such operations as replacement, affixation,augmentation, and compounding seems to, at the same time, serve to better under-stand how they function, i.e. what they mean or signify when occurring in the ancientlanguage in which the scriptures are written. Indeed, the process of inflecting a givenroot is being compared to a process of ‘cleansing’ the root in question, making it fitfor the purposes of ritual—a ‘raw’ concept (root) cannot be so used or occur as suchin a sentence (Matilal, 1990: 9). In this sense, word and sentence formation rules docontribute to the fixation of a norm for the formulation of knowledge and for thepractice of ritual. As we shall see in Bhartrihari’s case, this conclusion is strengthenedin a different and crucial way.

To assert the same of modern generative grammar would be untrue, particularlyunder the understanding of syntactic autonomy, where formal rules are arbitrarymanipulations of ‘symbols’ that are thought not to inherently relate to their use orsemantics, which has its independent ontology and formal structure. As Chomskyfamously puts it, the computational system of language that is governed by the rulesin question could be just what it is now, yet be used for purposes of locomotion(Chomsky, 2000a: 27). It becomes linguistic in character only through its contingentembedding in already existing ‘performance’ systems, such as the C-I systemsmentioned above, which have a non-linguistic semantics. In this sense, the connec-tion between grammar and thought is something of an evolutionary accident.

Relatedly, Chomsky implies (2000a: 106) that the ordinary term ‘language’ maynot actually describe anything in nature, or a ‘natural kind’: a nominalist stance, onwhich the term ‘language’ is merely an informal label that is eliminated, as scientificinquiry proceeds, by technical abstractions (e.g. ‘I-language’), which need not cohere


with how we intuitively describe the world. Perhaps, indeed, no essence is hiddenunder such common-sense terms as ‘chemical’, ‘physical’, or ‘electrical’. Perhaps, thename ‘language’, too, may just be a name, referring loosely to a scattered range ofphenomena that form no unity of which there could be a single science, as the Indiantradition conceived it. But then again, maybe not: maybe the term ‘language’ doesdepict a natural kind or distinctive principle. In the Indian tradition, it depicts theprinciple of reality itself. A non-nominalist stance of this sort invites probing deeperinto the question of what grammar actually is—a question that might well have somesubstantive and principled answer in naturalistic inquiry.

The connection between language and speciation that we tackle in Chapter 7 willsupport this perspective in its own ways. Today we assume that there is only onehuman ‘spirit’—the ‘psychic unity of mankind’—and only one living human species,originating in a Sub-Saharan population that found itself biologically endowed to putits sensory-motor apparatus to a fundamentally novel use: talking, manifesting a modeof thought apparently equally novel, as pre-sapiens hominin culture suggests nothinglike it. As a consequence of this, an essentially modern culture erupts, rather abruptly(Tattersall, 2008), defining a novel way of being in the world after millions of years ofrelative evolutionary stagnation. The biological endowment furthermore must havestabilized genetically in this species by 40,000 years ago, when it reached Australia(Crow, 2002a). The species has remained a single one. Its language capacity is such thatany child can learn any language; it unifies this species, drawing a boundary around it.Speciation, language, and thought are thus virtually a single evolutionary event, whichasks for a unified principle behind it (Crow, 2008): a principle with the power ofreformatting human thought and defining a new species. Species however are real asbiological entities. So if language defines a species, it is also real, as a biological kind.

It is worth asking, then, what grammar, as such, is or does—not allowing us anynominalist escape routes, and hence taking it as a fundamental and unified elementof nature and cognition, which perhaps cannot be decomposed. In this regard,Bhartrihari gave an answer that is particularly interesting in the present context.Bhartrihari considers grammar as the essential guide to the reality of language: unlikepronunciation, it is the inner essence of language. But for Bhartrihari, language alsolies at the heart of the universe. If so, the study of grammar is the foundation of allknowledge. But why exactly should this be? He tells us:

Words are the sole guide to the truths about the behaviour of objects; and there is nounderstanding of the truth about words without grammar. (Vakyapadiya I.13)

The first sentence is correct in the perhaps obvious sense that to state or evencontemplate a truth about anything, we need words to refer to objects and saysomething about them. Of course it is true that we may capture the behaviour ofobjects in the form of another notation that makes no use of words, say a differentialequation. Yet, this is using a language too, that of mathematics, which moreover has a


formal grammar to it. That mathematical language depends on natural language,moreover, and the mathematician’s thinking about these equations and his regardingthem as true will presumably take a propositional format (it is certainly logical). Thesecond sentence in the quote is also correct in the equally obvious sense that wordsare inherently grammatical entities (they can combine by grammatical rules) andgrammar alone tells us about their behaviour. Knowledge of reality is thus madepossible by grammar. But why does it follow that language is therefore at the basis ofthe universe?

This, again, is correct—though now not in an obvious way—in the sense that it ispart of what it means to say that some proposition P is true (or that it is an item ofknowledge), that the world is as P says. If (i) words are needed to state a truth, (ii)grammar is the essential guide to the behaviour of words, and (iii) we can formulate(at least some) truths in terms of such words, grammar is therefore the study ofreality.14 One can, of course, redefine what truth means. One could say, perhaps, thatwe never really quite claim that something is true, but only that it is likely, or wellconfirmed. Or we could say that whatever truth we can claim, it will be true of theworld as appearance, not as reality. But it is undeniable that ‘true’ is not what ‘likelyto be confirmed’ means. ‘True’ means true, and it is arguably an analytic claim thatP can only be true if, not only language, but also the world is a certain way: indeed, ithas to be in the exact way that P says. One could also redefine the term ‘reality’, andsay that it is not really reality we mean, but appearance. Yet, again, when we say thatsomething is real, we are not saying that it appears to be real. ‘Real’ does not mean‘appears/seems to be real’, and to master the grammar of such raising verbs is tomaster the metaphysical distinctions in question.

If truth depends on grammar, therefore, grammar is a guide to the real, which iswhat Bhartrihari says: by learning about how words function in language, we learnabout objects in the world. The argument for the normativity of grammar madeabove, and for the epistemological significance of grammar, is thereforestrengthened. Interestingly, Bhartrihari adds to his argument that ‘all thing-classesdepend upon word-classes’ (Vakyapadiya I.15), a claim that will play an importantrole in the second chapter. We interpret this as saying that in the way we think about,refer to, and know the world, objects fall under certain formal classes: they are‘objects’, ‘events’, ‘propositions’, and so on, exhibiting what we call a formal ontology.No such ontology can be defined in purely perceptual terms. The question then iswhether this formal ontology is independent of the form of language. On Bhartri-hari’s view, it is only through words, and in the way these figure in sentences, thatthings are understood or become known. We know the world through seeing, tasting,touching, and hearing it, too; but this is knowledge in a non-propositional sense. In

14 We return to this argument at greater length in Chapter 9. The three premises of this argument areobviously crucial.


this sense, Bhartrihari’s conclusion makes sense that what we know as the world is thecreation of language. This does not mean that when we talk about a tiger, it is not atiger we are talking about, but instead a word. Rather, it means that, as an object ofknowledge, the tiger is inherently referred to under a grammatical form.

Like Pāṇini’s grammar, Bhartrihari’s is meaning-based. Much of his work revolvesaround reflections about what grammatical meaning is, for which Bhartriharireserves the term sphota. Word and meaning, on this view, relate like cause andeffect. Strictly, sentence (i.e. grammatical) meanings have no parts, and that sen-tences are uttered in a temporal sequence of words, he argues, shouldn’t confuse usinto thinking that they do. Sentence meanings, in short, are indivisible unities, andthe words are no more than ‘instructions’ for calling up a certain sphota. We shallcome back to Bhartrihari’s rejection of the principle of compositionality, which isdefended in the Indian tradition by the opposing empiricist Nyaya and Mimamsaschools (Pradhan, 2009: 287), in Chapter 3. The same non-compositional view isendorsed by Bhartrihari for the meaning of words: while a word has phonemes asparts, its meaning has no parts, leading to an ‘atomist’ position in contemporaryterms (Fodor, 1998; Hinzen, 2012).

Bhartrihari’s view of grammar must be centrally meaning-based, for language hasa ‘potency to reveal the world’, which depends on its having meaning, which ‘lies inthe inner structure of the sentence’ (Pradhan, 2009: 284). Without meaning, that is,language cannot be the source of knowledge it is on this view. In more contemporaryterms, we might say, language has a ‘representational power’ or ‘intentionality’. Yet,characteristically, these twentieth-century terms from the philosophy of mind exactlyleave out the grammatical nature of the meanings in question, much as language andspeech are commonly regarded as arbitrary ways of expressing knowledge ratherthan constituting it.

Again rightly in our opinion, Bhartrihari rejects an empiricist and psychologisticposition on the nature of meaning, as was held in the Nyaya and Mimamsa schools.On this empiricist view, meaning depends on the occurring of certain ‘ideas’ or otherpsychological processes in our minds. Bhartrihari, like Frege, rejects such a view,while also rejecting Frege’s contention that a thought is objective and independent ofthe mind that grasps it, or of whether any mind grasps it. As noted earlier, Fregean‘senses’ have no linguistic nature, much as planets don’t, even though, unlike planets,they belong to a ‘Third Realm’.15 Bhartrihari’s sphota is abstract too, but inherentlylinguistic in nature, and hence grammatical.

As we will here interpret Bhartrihari’s view, it treats meaning under the viewpointof triangulation (Davidson, 1984), though it articulates the latter in a novel (and in agrammarian’s) way, much as we will in Chapter 9: it views the dynamics of language

15 For some qualifications of this claim about Frege, see Section 3.2.


as part of a single scheme in which language, reality, and thought are intrinsicallyconnected. Language is not conceived as a system of formal rules or as independentof its use, but as the ‘unity of three distinct elements, i.e., thought, language, and theobject meant’ (Patnaik, 2009: 200). We will in this sense call Bhartrihari a ‘substanti-vist’ as opposed to a ‘formalist’. It is clear that the term ‘rationalism’ does not describethis view in an appropriate way, despite the fact that Bhartrihari anticipated manyaspects of modern nativism (Patnaik, 2009: 202): unless a child has some innateability, it cannot acquire language, he argues. Without such a ‘seed’, languagecouldn’t be acquired through effort or instruction. Language is an inherent constitu-ent of our awareness, even prior to becoming gradually conscious of it in the courseof development.

The conception of language as triangulation makes it easier to grasp the positionthat Bhartrihari takes on the relation between language and thought, illustrated by aquote from Matilal’s seminal book (1990):

Language is not the vehicle of meaning or the conveyor-belt of thought. Thought anchorslanguage and language anchors thought. Sabdana, ‘languageing’, is thinking; and thought‘vibrates’ through language. In this way of looking at things, there cannot be any essentialdifference between a linguistic unit and its meaning or the thought it conveys. Sphota refers tothis non-differentiated language-principle. (Matilal, 1990: 85)

Wittgenstein will later formulate related views.16 Of course it didn’t escape Bhartri-hari that sometimes it appears to us that we didn’t say what we thought; or thatsometimes, we don’t know how to say what we think. But the idea is that, withoutlanguage, we wouldn’t have a particular mode of thought in the first place. Hespecifically distinguishes three stages on the path to an utterance: in the first stage,he metaphorically suggests, the language and what it means is like the yolk of apeahen’s egg, whose eventual rich coloration lies dormant in an undifferentiatedstate. There is the same potency for forming meanings in every speaker. At the stageof this potency, language and thought are still identical. Then there is an intermediatestage of speech-planning, prior to an utterance, where the sentence/thought is aboutto be given an articulated shape in a sequential form. Finally, there is the actualspeech event, the emission of a sound. Given the generativity of grammar, there is onthis model an immediate explanation for the generativity and discrete infinity ofthought—for which an explanation in, say, a Gricean framework is missing, asPatnaik (2009: 196, 200) points out. There is also an explanation for the fact that,as Davidson argues at length, the notion of a true belief depends on the notion of a

16 Cf. ‘When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to theverbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought.’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,}329). ‘Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in thegrammar of the language’ (Wittgenstein 1967: }55). We thank Pallavi Worah for these quotations.


true utterance (Davidson, 1984: essay 11). We return to these points, and to otheradvantages of Bhartrihari’s view, in Chapter 9.

Summing up, what can we extract from this Indian tradition, regarding ourpurposes here? Despite the richness of more than a thousand years of Ancient Indianphilosophy of language, apparently anticipating many of the main paradigms oftwentith-century theorizing about meaning, as documented in Matilal (1990) orChaturvedi (2009), it has barely come to the attention of the Western reader. Butthe Indian grammatical tradition not only clearly anticipates and positively informsformalist and structuralist thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it alsogoes far beyond it in developing a more ‘substantivist’ viewpoint amenable to informnovel philosophical theorizing. The Indian speculative mind gave the organizationalprinciples of language—grammar, in short—a metaphysical and epistemologicalsignificance that is distinctively different from the role that language has played inWestern theorizing since the Greeks. It is also crucially different from the metaphys-ics and epistemology of Port Royal (or of Chomsky, 1966), where language reflectsthought but is not a constitutive principle of reality, truth, or knowledge. With bothstructuralist and generativist theorizing in the domain of language in the twentiethcentury, the door to such metaphysical and epistemological theorizing was firmlyshut—perhaps necessarily so, if the discipline was to be set on a new foundation. Yet,in this way explanatory problems in the foundations of semantics and knowledgedisappeared from the agenda, at the price of depriving the study of grammar of aphilosophical and normative significance it clearly once had, and perhaps of losing aclear sense of what its essence might be.

1.4 The Modistic viewpoint

The major grammarian of antiquity, whose work formed the starting point for theModistic Universal grammarians, was Priscian (6th century). His Institutiones gram-maticae comprise eighteen books and lean heavily on the Greek grammarian Apol-lonios Dyscolos’ work On syntax (second century ad). A contemporary of Priscianwas Boethius, reckoned to be the last great logician of antiquity, who translated worksof Aristotle such as the Categories and De interpretatione. Aristotle was perceivedmore as a logician than as a grammarian as well, since to some extent he had dealtwith semantics, which Priscian had ignored, with the consequence that semanticsand grammar were divorced.

A focal point in Priscian’s work is a system of ‘parts of speech’ (partes orationis),the number of which he identified, like Dionysios Thrax (ad 217–145) in his ‘art ofgrammar’ before him, as no less than eight. The parts of speech played (and play) amuch lesser role in logic, where, as Aristotle’s De interpretatione (I–IV) teaches, theessential two elements of every proposition are the noun and the verb (playing theroles of subject and predicate, respectively), plus a connecting element, which


Aristotle identifies as grammatical Tense. In fact, as Covington (2009: 9) discusses, asystematic connection between logic and grammar had been lost by the time Priscianwrote. It was re-established gradually, however, from the eleventh century onwards,through the works of writers such as Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and PeterAbelard (1079–1142), and then in the twelfth century in the Priscian commentaries byWilliam of Conches (1125) and his pupil Petrus Helias, which set the scene for theModistae.

On the one hand, at this point, logic and grammar were re-united and recognizedas dealing in some way with the same phenomena. On the other hand, it dawned ontheorists that they were nonetheless doing so in quite different ways. It appears as ifthe deepest and most innovative insights were achieved in the course of a productiveconflict between logical and grammatical points of view, with the parts of speech asone important dividing line between these. Thus, the author of the DialecticaMonacensis (early 13th century: see de Rijk, 1967) notes that the logician has no usefor more than two parts of speech (subject and predicate) since he is ‘only concernedwith relations between whole propositions’ (Covington, 2009: 11) and hence can takethem for granted, not analysing their internal composition. The same reduction isnoticeable in twentieth-century discussions in philosophical logic, where there is asimilar austerity in descriptive vocabulary, as for example in the dualities between‘singular’ vs ‘general’ propositions, or ‘referential’ vs ‘attribute’ expressions: none ofthese dualities map onto grammar in any precise way, where, as we will show inChapter 4, reference is a notion that rather requires a scale. A related difference in the‘lens’ with which grammar is looked at transpires in the thought that the grammaticaldifference between subject and predicate maps onto the difference between ‘refer-ence’ and ‘generality’, or ‘objects’ and ‘properties’, understood as semantic notions.But clauses can be subjects (or at least topics), and predicates can lack generality (asin nominal Small Clauses: see Moro, 1997).

The first flickering of a novel grammatical interest and insight revolved around themultiplicity of the parts of speech, their exact definitions, and their rationales.Grammarians wondered why they exist, which they thought was a question to beanswered by finding out about their function. This is illustrated in Covington (2009:9–10) with William of Conches (12th century), who complained about the obscurityof Priscian’s definitions of these parts, and in Petrus Helias’s query about what theirfunctional explanations might be. We will raise and answer the same question inChapter 2. The search for functional explanations illustrates a concern with seman-tics that grammarians certainly had, despite the fact that ‘semantics’ was primarilyassociated with logic, in this broadly Aristotelian tradition.

However, as just illustrated with Aristotle’s slimmed-down version of the parts ofthe speech, the grammarian’s interest in meaning, insofar as it depends on its finerarticulation within the sentence or the internal organization of speech, is cruciallydifferent from the logician’s. In particular, it was clearly recognized that although the


grammarian cares for meaning, he does not care for the relation between words andthe real-world objects they are used to refer to. For the same reason, truth (in thesense of what facts really obtain in the world) is also not the grammarian’s concern.Identifying the exact sense, therefore, in which grammatical meaning is a crucialconcern of the linguistic theorist, while at the same time truth and reference are not,is very important for understanding the novel universal grammar paradigm thatevolves in the middle and late 13th century, as well as for re-conceptualizing universalgrammar on the lines attempted here.

The productive conflict between logicians and grammarians we see in late Medi-eval Europe is strikingly similar to the one we have found above in the Indiantradition, where the struggle for the right meta-theoretical framework for philosophyand metaphysics divided the Nyayaikas (logicians) from the Vaiyakaranas (gram-marians, effectively Pāṇinians). The former are artha-pramanakah: ‘those whoregard things and events as authority’: they were, as Matilal (1990: 42) puts it,‘interested in the way the world is (or is supposed to be), not particularly in howpeople speak about it’. The grammarians on the other hand, are sabdapramanakah(sabdameans ‘word’): they are ‘those who regard speech patterns as authority’. As thepost-Pāṇinian linguist Patanjali put it, they ‘accept the authority of the speech. Whatspeech “tells” us is what we depend on (for deciding issues).’ From this point of view,to understand the way in which we know the world it is not irrelevant how we speakabout it. On the contrary, it is a source of philosophical insight. For example, why canwe say things like sthali pacati (‘the cauldron cooks’), when it is clear semanticallythat a cauldron is not a cook but that wherein he cooks? Is it just a confusion ofgrammar that ‘John cooks’ and ‘The cauldron cooks’ look the same, indicating amismatch between grammar and the logical structure of thought or the ontologicalstructure of reality? The confusion disappears if we realize that being a ‘subject’engaged in an action is not the same as being an ‘agent’. Hence the cauldron, even insubject position, is not grammatically depicted as the thematic Agent—and nor as theundergoer or Patient (as which it would be the thing cooked). As the grammaticalsubject, it is rather involved (and in some sense actively) in the action of cookingthe food inside it, which is what the speaker is here saying.17 So the grammar getsthis right. The identity of a cauldron as that of a physical object defined by, say,shape, size, and weight, is irrelevant to the grammarian—and it does not reflect theway in which we have natural knowledge of the world when we speak about thingsthat cook.

Looked at in these terms, Chomsky’s (2000a) attacks on the philosophical notionof reference as applied to natural language is simply an instance of a grammarian’sinsight that had dawned in human history twice before. Chomsky notes, for example,

17 Similar remarks apply to British weathermen speaking of ‘many places struggling to see temperaturesrising above freezing’, or ‘temperatures struggling to get above freezing’.


that a ‘person’ such as Sylvester the baby donkey may well be turned into a rock by awitch, while the little girl who owns him tries to convince the world that it—therock—is her baby donkey: physical criteria of individuation are irrelevant for how werefer to the world when we use language (Chomsky, 2009). In a similar vein,Chomsky (2000a: 37) notes that a city such as London can be destroyed and rebuilt200 miles away, with people thinking of it as ‘the same city’, referring to it with thesame name. So the way in which we refer to a city is not based on an individuation ofsuch objects under a physical perspective. At the very least, a city is at a place, ratherthan a place.

However, twentieth-century philosophy and semantics has sided with logiciansnot the grammarians, and for the (mathematical) logician it is irrelevant how theworld appears in the format of speech. Frege in particular was interested in theimmutable laws of truth, ascribed to propositions in a Third Realm. Chomsky’s viewson reference as inapplicable to natural language (see e.g. Ludlow, 2011; Antony andHornstein, 2003) are the last instance of a continuing struggle to tell logic andgrammar apart. The same problem mars work on ‘thematic roles’ (Agent, Theme,Goal, Instrument, etc.), which are in part semantically individuated, without leavingany grammatical reflex.18 If the list gets too long, their identification depends onmixing grammatical and logical or conceptual criteria for them, which is to say:grammatical and logical semantics.

It does not follow from the above, on the other hand, that truth and reference haveno role to play in the theory of grammar. Indeed, as stressed earlier, both Indian andModistic grammarians had a systematic concern with meaning, unlike structural orgenerative linguistics. This illustrates our claim that a clear-cut and principled notionof grammatical meaning remains to be developed, giving a rationale for grammar itself.Crucial to the Modistic attempt to provide such a rationale was a novel theory of theparts of speech. Lying at the heart of Modistic grammar, they are probably one of theleast developed aspects of generative linguistic theory, where they play essentially norole in syntax at all and there is little theory of them, as Baker (2003) notes. X-bartheory, Minimalist Merge, and phase theory all abstract from (or generalize over) theirdistinctions, or postulate them as part of a universal set of innate (perhaps internallydecomposed) ‘features’. Generative typology is criticized for taking such features asuniversally available and instantiated, a priori primitives (Haspelmath, 2010). For theModists, by contrast, grammar begins with the emergence of a system of parts ofspeech, and without a theory of the latter, there is no theory of grammar. Such a theorycannot come from Merge/recursion in the Minimalist sense, which is generic andfound in all sorts of discretely infinite domains in nature. Nor can it come from thelexicon, if the latter is pregrammatical (see also Boeckx, 2010, and Chapter 2).

18 Hale and Keyser (2002) is an attempt to constrain this number by identifying thematic roles with anarrow range of grammatical configurations.


Generative grammar—rightly from a grammarian’s point of view—has distanceditself from (logical) semantics: it is not concerned with what is true or false, likewhether water is H2O, or whether peanuts are inanimate. Whether the phonologicalword sounding ‘water’ is used to refer to H2O depends on historically contingentfacts like whether or not we have been abducted overnight and wake up on a planetcalled Twin Earth where what looks to us like water happens to be XYZ (Putnam,1973). As for peanuts, it is in the power of grammar to make them animate, if we tell anarrative in which two little peanuts fell in love (Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2006).But the generative tradition has remained sufficiently attached to the formal view-point of logic to relegate semantics to an autonomous ‘semantic component’, and tonot perceive parts of speech distinctions as central to the organization of grammar.It rather tried to reduce the last two remaining Aristotelian parts of speech, subjectand predicate, to formal or ‘configurational’ notions (phrase structure): not onlycould logicians thus do without (much of ) grammar, but grammatical theory, or soit appeared, could, too.19 While reducing ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ to grammaticalnotions would at least make them grammatical, parts of speech in the sense of nounsand verbs are essentially treated as formal features entering the syntactic process asprimitives, hence as lexical.

Recent developments in Minimalist syntax have continued the traditional trend.Pietroski (2011), in particular, when identifying the ‘minimal semantic instructions’that the grammar gives to the semantic component, makes no reference to any partsof speech, including even the Aristotelian template of subject and predicate. As heshows, to obtain a logic or semantics one does not need subjects and (sentential)predicates. All one needs is (monadic) predicates and a way of conjoining them, plussome relevant adjustments for thematic roles, and a closure operation (existentialquantification as in the Neo-Davidsonian framework). The implication is that, ifthese are what the grammar minimally ‘tells’ the semantics, semantics does not needto know about parts of speech: they are semantically inert. Ipso facto, semantics willnot know about grammatical meaning, which is reflected in part of speech distinc-tions, and logic and semantics will not illuminate semantic distinctions, if any, thatdepend on grammar. It follows that, either, grammatical meaning does not exist—asnominalist logicians in the fourteenth century concluded, bringing down the Mod-istic enterprise—or it does, in which case semantics as so construed will not touchupon what is linguistically specific and requires grammar (and Bhartrihari wouldhave been wrong when he claimed that word and meaning relate as cause and effect).

What, then, did the Modists have to say about the parts of speech that has escapedgenerative theorizing in the twentieth century? Their innovation is embedded in an

19 Moro (1997) argues against this trend and proposes that the notions of ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ are notonly independent of the notions of ‘noun’ and ‘verb’, thus providing no analysis for them, but aregrammatical primitives crucial to syntactic analysis.


explicit reflection on what it takes for grammar to be a science (scientia) rather thanthe art (ars) that it had been in the Western world until the twelfth century. As an art,grammar is taught as a means to speak better Latin. As a science, by contrast, it aimsat truth, and indeed it has to uncover necessary truths, which obtain universally in aparticular domain of inquiry. Yet universality as such is not the essential issue here,insofar as things can be universal without having any force of necessity. Enumeratinglinguistic universals empirically is thus no contribution to grammar as science in theModistic sense. They need to follow from first principles, which should apply to alllanguages. Since languages vary, a need arises to distinguish dimensions whereinvariation is inessential from a core where languages are the same.

Such a core arguably must exist: the linguistic ability and grammatical organiza-tion as such are species-universal. So we need to determine what these consist in.There are not two human species, a linguistic and a non-linguistic one; or one whosegrammatical ability linguistic theory captures, while there is another that requires acompletely different theory. So whatever grammatical theory we wish to develop, itneeds to capture a biological property that defines a species and sets its boundary(Crow, 2002a). The search for necessary truths, too, appears barely controversial incontemporary terms: in a science such as physics we don’t want it to be an accidenthow objects move (as long as idealized circumstances obtain). The Modistic view-point therefore simply means that the internal organization of language is not anaccident or an arbitrary convention either. Using the Aristotelian distinction betweenthe practical and theoretical (= ‘speculative’) sciences, grammar thought of in theseterms is thus scientia speculativa, which does not aim at action or at changing howpeople behave, but at truth.

On the other hand, precisely the parts of speech do not seem to be universal, and itis even unclear what they are, and how many they are. How then can we turngrammar into a scientific domain? The proposal of Chomsky has been to studylanguage as a ‘natural object’, ‘a real object of the natural world‘ (Chomsky, 1995: 11),identified as a purely formal structure, arbitrarily interpreted, which is then embeddedin a number of performance systems, hence viewed much as the formal symbols of alogical language. This is not only what naturalism in the study of grammar has cometo mean, but is also in concord with what twentieth-century philosophical naturalistswould accept a naturalistic account of grammar to be: for philosophical naturalismprecisely struggles with the integration of meaning into the natural world, regardingintensions in particular as ‘creatures of darkness’ (Quine, 1956). No engagement withsuch creatures is required if grammar consists in the manipulation, by formal rules,of physically individuated symbols encoding various ‘features’ of language. Thisobject of study, as is appropriate for a natural object, is then equally deprived ofnormative aspects. In line with this, Davidson (2004: 131–3) argues that an account oflanguage cannot be fully naturalistic because it is inherently normative; but this does


not affect Chomskyan generative grammar as a naturalistic enterprise, he argues, forthat enterprise simply doesn’t bear upon meaning—and it can be naturalistic, asclaimed by Chomsky, precisely for this reason.

Naturalism in this sense is exactly not the avenue on which the Modists sought toreveal the essential nature of language and turn it into an object of science. On thecontrary, the essential move consisted in the claim that every word, in addition topronunciation and meaning, has a set of properties called modi significandi (modesof signifying), with (speculative) grammar defined as the study of these. A science oflanguage, the idea was, must start from a principled identification and classificationof these modi, which can be combined in a way that is again not due to semanticreasons and distinctive of this particular system. For example, Socrates and philoso-pher combined does not merely yield Socrates, philosopher (except in apposition).Rather, it can yield something where a specific relation between the two is grammat-ically specified, yielding a new object with a completely different mode of signifying,as in Socrates is a philosopher (Covington, 2009: 26, 32).

The modi in question must also define the parts of this peculiar system, which theModists took to be the parts of speech that much of grammatical theory sinceantiquity had been about. But now, a principled explanation for these had to befound—one couldn’t just enumerate them, as Priscian had done. They should forman ordo naturalis, a natural order governed by some principle. Now, clearly, wordshave two kinds of properties, sound (vox) and (lexical) meaning. But sound isarbitrary and hence cannot form the basis of a science of language. Neither can theword-forms and their derivations (morphology), which differ radically across lan-guages, as was clear to the Modists from even a cursory look at Greek and Latin. Sothere must be some other properties that words have and that form the basis of a‘universal’ grammar. Since, on the Modistic view, the basis of language is significa-tion, it makes sense to look for universals right there. This is where the modes ofsignification, as special new properties postulated for words, come in. They define theparts of speech, on this view, and nothing else can. In particular, the parts of speechcannot be defined in terms of either lexical meaning or semantic reference (what issignified, or the significatum). For example, currere (Vrun) and cursus (Nrun) havethe same meaning in this sense—they might be used to refer to the exact sameenvironmental event—but they clearly differ in how they signify. Hence they aredifferent parts of speech, and meaning (in a non-grammatical sense), therefore doesnot account for what parts the system has.

The modes of signifying, then, reflect what we may call the first stage in thegrammaticalization of meaning, or grammatical semantics. In response to the obvi-ous objection that the parts of speech do not seem to be the same across languages,the Modists replied that some modes of signifying define a part of speech, and make itwhat it is. Others are ‘accidental’, and some of these are in turn such that the parts ofspeech only have them by forming a dependency with others (i.e. relationally: they


are modi respectivi). Moreover, accidental modes can be missing, like Tense on theverb, which therefore is crucially not part of the ‘essential’modes defining the notionof ‘verb’).

But words also combine and enter grammatical constructions. A principle for‘construction’ (principium constructionis) therefore has to be found, too. Vox, again,clearly does not provide it, and neither does non-grammatical meaning: indeed, we canagain see that currere (Vrun) and cursus (Nrun), although having the samemeaning (inthe sense of significatum), enter constructions in very different ways. The modes ofsignification, therefore, must also be that in virtue of which words can enter construc-tions. This is the second stage of grammaticalization: constructio. They are the rationesconsignificandi—the rationale behind words having meaning in context, i.e. in relationto other words. There is then also a well-formedness condition for any construction,which is congruitas (congruence, concord). It applies to every construction and isstated in terms of the modes of signifying of the words joined, depending on theircompatibility. Forming all constructions involves resolving grammatical relationsof dependency (between a dependens and a terminans). The sentence is the levelwhere all dependencies are resolved, and perfectio (completeness) is achieved.

The Modistic theory of the sentence regards it as both partially independent of thetheory of constructions and of the theory of the parts of speech: a sentence, in anobvious sense, is not a part of speech (it isn’t a part of anything grammatical)—exceptwhen it is embedded, in which case it becomes a part of speech and does require amode of signifying. As we shall see in Chapter 3, when discussing embedding, and inChapter 4 when discussing the forms of reference, a clause indeed changes its modeof signification when embedded: it never refers as a matrix clause can, exhibitingalways a degree of intensionality and hence not being referentially ‘complete’.Importantly, compatibility of modes of signifying in the process of construction canexist even if there is no compatibility of meaning (significatum), as in ‘cappacategorica’ (‘categorical cape’), which is congruous but not meaningful in a non-grammatical sense, showing that non-grammatical meaning does not interfere withconstructio. As Thomas of Erfurt explains:

Grammaticality and ungrammaticality are caused by the compatibility or incompatibility ofmodes of signifying, which are intrinsically the concern of the grammarian. But the semanticwell-formedness or deviance of the utterance is caused by the compatibility or incompatibilityof the meanings of the words. Hence ‘black cape’ is grammatical and semantically well-formed,and ‘categorical cape’ is semantically deviant; but both are grammatical. [ . . . ] But the com-patibility or incompatibility of the specific meanings of the words is not the concern of thegrammarian, but rather the logician; hence it is not the cause of grammaticality or ungram-maticality. (Grammatica speculativa, p. 304, cited from Covington, 2009: 34)

Effectively, then, both stages of grammaticalization are independent of meaning orreference in a non-grammatical sense, and they are independent of the notion of


truth condition, which the Modists saw as belonging to the province of logic and notto be a principium constructionis. Thomas’s statement completely echoes Chomsky’sstatement in Chomsky (1965) that grammar cannot be accounted for in independ-ently given semantic terms. But this crucially did not mean, for the Modists, thatgrammar has no content of its own. Like the Indian grammarians, Modistic gram-marians had a ‘substantivist’ take on grammar—not a formalist or minimalist one. Itis not a feature (the ‘edge’-feature in Chomsky, 2008) that allows a word to enter aconstruction, but a mode of signifying, associated with a lexical item grammaticalizedthrough its part of speech status. Modes of signifying cannot be said to be ‘features’ inthe contemporary sense at all, any more than semantic reference or presuppositionare such a ‘feature’. The edge-feature is a purely technical and generic device thatcould be used to formally describe any system that has a combinatorial property(chemistry, say), and it thus does not characterize grammar specifically.

It was precisely the claim that words lack the modes of signifying which finallybrought the Modistic enterprise down, in the first decades of the fourteenth century.As nominalist logicians would conclude at the time: there is thought, and there islanguage, and there is the world out there. Words are arbitrary representations of theelements of thought; but these are concepts, in a non-linguistic sense, not words, andthese concepts stand in a natural, not a linguistic or conventional, relation to objectsout there. No new ways of signifying come with words. Language does not speak tomatters of meaning. In fact it is often misleading, and studying the syntax of naturallanguage is in no way to study cognition. Grammar thus ceases to be a cognitivetheory and loses its epistemological significance. One could well argue (cf. Leiss,2009) that this early fourteenth-century nominalist conclusion, for the most part, hasnot been abandoned since.

One strategy, then, is to turn grammar into a science by depriving it of ‘obscure’notions such as meaning and effectively throw out from it the notions of referenceand truth that are taken not to be naturalizable (Pietroski, 2005; Chomsky, 2000a).An appropriate ‘natural object’ of study is thus created, justified by an appeal to theneed for idealizations, with a concession that the result may not really capture in anyintimate way what we mean by ‘language’, giving it different labels such as ‘I-language’ or ‘competence’ instead. The Modistic move is fundamentally different.Grammar becomes a science by including meaning as well as the normative signifi-cance it unavoidably brings with it, and reconstructing grammatical theory aroundthe specific kind of meaning that grammar organizes. The result can now hardly besaid to be a ‘natural object’ like others: it is—inherently—a grammatical one. This,however, given the Aristotelian conception of science involved, does not mean it isnot a science. Nor is the object of study a purely formal one, and a natural object forthis reason.

Grammar, then, defines our species and is an aspect of our biology. Yet, at thesame time, it is sui generis, not a ‘natural object’ among others, to be studied like


them. No natural object exhibits ‘modes of signification’, or so it would seem—whichis precisely the reason why from within a Chomskyan point of view one may wantto abstract from such obscurities when aiming to naturalize the theory of grammar.But this may deprive grammar of a rationale, which the Minimalist Programcentrally seeks. From this point of view the enterprise of biolinguistics—atleast under one standard way of construing it—is as problematic as is the searchfor a ‘biomusic’ or a ‘biomathematics’, if this means that music or mathematicsshould be studied in biological terms. They should not. In fact, the opposite maybe true: (some aspects of) biology should be studied in musical, grammatical ormathematical terms.

Let us summarize, as we have attempted in the Indian case, what we can extract forthe purposes of this book from this short episode in the history of linguistic thought.The articulation of the concept of modi significandi allowed for a crucial move: toattempt to give a principled account, lacking and unneeded in logic, of the parts ofthe system of grammar, thereby distinguishing the tasks of the grammarian and thelogician. The move depends on distinguishing the modi essendi—the nature andproperties of objects in the world that we refer to—from how we refer to them whenwe use grammar to do so, or themodi significandi. This gives rise to a distinctive kindof grammatical cognition, which cannot be accounted for in terms of (lexical)meaning or (semantic) reference, and thus points us to the essence of grammar asa domain of scientific inquiry distinct from logic or semantics. What grammar yields,is a system of signification that allows us to represent the world under the perspectiveof knowledge. The imposition of a parts of speech system on ungrammaticalizedlexical concepts (the first step of grammaticalization), and the imposition ofthe principium constructionis on the parts of speech subject to the constraints ofcongruence (second step), finally gives rise to a mode of signification that isinherently propositional, and in which the grammatical process terminates. This isthe rationale of grammar.

This account is also very different from that of contemporary cognitive or func-tional linguistics, which shares the rationalism of the Port Royal tradition, insofar aslanguage on this account is there to communicate thoughts, but a theory of thought ismissing. The proposal is equally different from the Port Royal model itself and its(undeveloped) conception of a ‘Deep Structure’ as ‘reflecting’ an independent worldof thought governed by the principles of logic. There is a notion of grammaticalmeaning in the Modistae, none in the Cartesians: the epistemological and philosoph-ical significance of grammar thus returns. Even metaphysical significance does, if werecognize how the Modists, like the Indians, weaved their model of grammar togetherwith a form of realism that is incompatible with a philosophy of grammar on whichthere is no intrinsic connection between grammar and knowledge, or grammar andontology, or on which language is purely ‘internal’ or formal.


1.5 Conclusions

The twentieth century has seen a revival of the concept of universal grammar after itswidespread rejection in the nineteenth century, in the course of a gradual departurefrom the Port Royal model. This rationalist model aims to align grammar with logic,and hence necessarily falters in its universalist ambitions when this alignment, quitepredictably, does not withstand the test of cross-linguistic variation. As a conse-quence, linguistics in the nineteenth century became comparative-historical, focusingon the study of variation and historical change, particularly in the case of phonology,endorsing an inductive and particularist spirit that seemed the only option if thestudy of grammar was to be kept empirical, eventually leading to structuralistlinguistics in the early twentith century. This spirit retains its repercussions intypology today.20

By the mid-twentieth century, Chomsky (1957; 1965; 1966) had re-introduceddeductive theorizing and a search for ‘first principles’ into linguistics, returning tothe rationalism of Port Royal in a twentieth-century setting, where computationalscience and naturalism had changed the theoretical landscape. Moving the creativeaspect of language use to centre-stage, the formulation of recursive rules that canformally generate an infinite output eventually became the heart of the grammaticalenterprise. This was carried out against a background of architectural assumptions inwhich the language faculty is a ‘module’ of the brain that ‘interfaces’ with a logicalsystem of thought, the true locus of semantics, described in the autonomous vocabu-lary of formal semantics and the theory of sets and types. In this way, the task of anexplanatory theory of semantics or of thought was not systematically addressed oreven formulated. In linguistic practice, much if not most work still focused on cross-linguistic variation, rather than the way in which grammar constrains thought.21

Pre-Port Royal, we see that the project of a science of language is set up in a verydifferent way. It is not premised by the naturalistic context of a ‘biolinguistics’ or thenaturalism of the computational theory of mind, in which mental activity is describedas the manipulation of formal symbols implemented physically in the brain, con-nected on standard views to the world via a causal relation of ‘reference’ (Fodor,

20 Haspelmath (2010: 2): ‘It was one of the major insights of structuralist linguistics of the 20th century(especially the first half ) that languages are best described in their own terms (e.g. Boas 1911), rather than interms of a set of pre-established categories that are assumed to be universal, although in fact they aremerely taken from an influential grammatical tradition (e.g. Latin Grammar, or English grammar, orgenerative grammar, or Basic Linguistic Theory). This alternative, non-aprioristic approach to categoriescan be called categorial particularism. In this approach, language-particular analyses can be carried outindependently of comparative linguistics.’

21 At the same time, the creative aspect of language use was not really addressed. The idea of a brainimplementing recursive rules does not really speak to it. Thus a computer can have recursive output, yetnot be creative (or even thoughtful), while a human being can be creative even within a finite (if large)domain (see Pullum and Scholz, 2010, for discussion).


1990). On the contrary, grammar is a science in its own terms—not in biological orcomputational ones. It is science because it organizes a domain of knowledge that theIndians first realized has a systematic structure to it that can be described formallyand algebraically in terms of rules. At the same time, this is not a meaninglessstructure. On the contrary, it correlates with a specific mode of thought, whichgives rise to a unique form of knowledge that is inherently linguistic in character.Indian linguistics and its technical methods swept into the West in colonial Europe,changing the landscape of linguistics and laying the foundation for the disciplineitself as it is taught today. Yet this latter idea was not sent along, and it is only slowlyrediscovered today (Chaturvedi, 2009; Ford et al., 1997).

In a little-known episode six centuries earlier, grammarians in Paris and acrossEurope had come up with a related view: that grammar and logic are in fact cruciallydistinct, and that the former offers a pathway for understanding the genesis of asystem of signification centred on the parts of speech that has a uniquely grammaticalcharacter. In the twentieth century, the parts of speech as a theoretical concept werebarely addressed in generative grammar, while typologists would make their vari-ation across languages the prime argument in their rejection of universal grammar.

On both the Indian and the Modistic paths, grammar has a normative signifi-cance—a reason for why, as philosophers and linguists, we should actually beinterested in the study of grammar as a domain. In correlating with a particularnovel mode of thought, it speaks to our nature and rationality. It may not then be a‘natural object’ studied as other such objects. But this does not prevent its naturalisticstudy. On the contrary, as we will discuss further in Chapter 7, there is, within ourown species, systematic genetic variation in regards to our rationality and languagefaculty. Where we see human reason fragmented, as in autism or schizophrenia, andgrammar fragmenting alongside, the study of such variation in naturalistic (inparticular genetic) terms informs both the nature of grammar and of human reason.Kinds of language—linguistic phenotypes—are kind of minds: mental phenotypes.


2

Before there was grammar

2.1 Overview

This chapter needs to take us to the beginnings of grammar, and so it needs to beabout what came before grammar. So, before there was grammar, what was there?What was the world like? What kind of meaning existed? Of course, the world wasperceived, and as we will argue in Section 2.1, there is a kind of semantics inperception alone, long before language arrived in evolution. Perception serves acognitive function: it filters a mass of environmental stimuli in terms of unifiedand recurring percepts. Perception is of objects as falling undermeaningful categories:we see sunlight beaming into the room or persons walking in the street, hear carsstarting their engines or a piano playing, or feel a dog’s skin under our fingers. We donot perceive photons, acoustic waves, or molecules, which physically correspond tosuch objects of perception. Instead, stimuli that can be otherwise quite different aregrouped together into more abstract classes equivalent under perception. Cars’engines can sound quite differently, yet this need not make them sound like anythingother than cars’ engines, qua auditory objects. A more trained ear may hear aMercedes, or even father’s Mercedes, showing that the genesis of such perceptualobjects is not driven by instinct alone, and can differ from individual to individual,and of course species to species. Even so, perception is still largely an involuntary andonline process, occurring as and when the stimulus does. Yet, since it has a semanticcontent not definable in terms of independently describable or physical features ofthe stimulus, it seems right to say that it is not stimulus-determined, and that it comeswith a semantics: a content that does not mirror objects out there as independentlydescribed.

Eventually, in this pregrammatical world, percepts became lexicalized: they weregiven a phonological identity and became entities freely available in our minds,manipulable irrespective of any perceptual stimulus present. We call this processlexicalization. But these lexical items, as such, did not have a referential semantics yet.As such, they only had a lexical content, and they were not used to refer. Their lexicalcontent, moreover, was still largely defined in terms of perceptual features: thefunction of the lexicon remains classification of an experienced world, not reference

to it. In order for intentional reference to arise, grammar had to come into play: it iswhat provides the rules for the manipulation of such entities. In this manipulation,the lexical contents of the items concerned play little role, and it has a sole purpose: togenerate acts of reference on the basis of such lexical contents, where these acts cantake a number of grammatically distinct forms (see Chapter 4).

Intentionality (with a ‘t’) refers, as we will use the term, to our ability to refer to anobject in the world deliberately and flexibly, using some meaningful category thatidentifies the referent. Apart from perceiving cars, persons, musical instruments,cities, and dogs, we clearly also refer to such things, conceived in these very terms(as cars, persons, etc.). When we do so, intensionality (with an ‘s’) arises systematic-ally. This is because, if we refer to an object as a table (as in using the expression ‘thistable’ to point to a particular table), the external physical and social environment inwhich such an act takes place would equally allow us to refer to this same object as asurface, a place to sit, a piece of furniture, and so on. Such meaningful categories,therefore, while all applying to objects in the external world, are not determined bythem. Because objects of reference do not determine the category involved in suchacts, two different categories can be involved on different occasions with regard to thesame external object.

In that case, the percept need not change alongside: while staring at a given table,I can think of it, first as a table, then as a surface, then as a place to sit, then as aBauhaus design, then as a place to sit or to stand on, then as Granny’s heritage, etc. Itis true that our attention may well direct itself to different aspects of our percepts asthe categories change in terms of which we think of them. Still, it appears that there isalso significant continuity: the percept does not keep track of the near infinitude ofways in which we might think of any given object, in addition to perceiving it. This isindeed an indication that it makes sense to say that, over and above perception,thought is involved as we come to refer to objects intentionally and intensionally.Where it is, my thought that this is a table is not the same thought as my thought thatthis is a Bauhaus design, even if it is the exact same external object that is on thisoccasion thought to be either a table or a Bauhaus design. If there is such anintensionality effect, this suggests that thought is involved: intensionality, as David-son (1982) points out, is a criterion of thought.

Another such indication is that any act of intentional reference can take place whenthe object of reference is not present in the speech context. I can, for example, refer toSocrates, who died a long time ago, or to ice-cream, when I am lacking it. While I canfreely imagine ice-cream, when it is not there, this is typically not the same asperceiving one. But it is also different from intentionally referring to ice-cream.Percepts have a semantic content, then, but they are not manipulable objects in theway that words are, which can also be used to refer. I perceive something as a table, oras green. But this does not mean or entail that I refer to the table, or to the colour


green, or indeed think of either of these. Equally, as we refer, for example to ‘Plato’steacher’, we need not perceive.

Where words are used to refer, grammar is involved. The moment words domore than perceptually classifying environmental stimuli, and come to exhibit referentialproperties, they are already grammaticalized, acting as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. Withwords falling into such classes, their referential properties dissociate: nouns, the commonintuition is, refer to objects, verbs to actions, adjectives to properties. Words functioningreferentially, therefore, are already parts of speech. Distinctions among these, we willargue, are grammatical distinctions, part of grammatical semantics in our sense.

The path to intentional reference that we will describe, thus leads from perceptionto grammar, via the parts of speech. Along this path, semantics changes multipletimes. Hence semantics as such cannot predict or explain that any transition willhappen: it is the other way around, that cognitive changes happened, with at least thefinal one induced by grammar, with consequences for the organization of meaningensuing from this. Only at the end of this path is there anything in our experiencethat is an object of intentional reference, and a mode of thought that such actsmanifest. Reference is therefore not a base notion of semantics: for it arises onlywith grammar. Nor is there any intensionality before there is intentionality, and viceversa.

We begin by laying out in more detail what we mean by the prelinguistic semanticsof perception, in Section 2.2, and argue further that once words come along inevolution or development, the meanings of these words are not plausibly prelin-guistic ‘concepts’. We then discuss the semantics that came along with a process oflexicalization, in Section 2.3. Section 2.4 defends the correlation claim, which is thatintentionality, intensionality, concepts, and grammar, arise only together. Section 2.5develops a systematic account of the parts of speech as reflecting a grammaticalsemantics already. Section 2.6 lays out the connection with this account with that ofthe Modists. Section 2.7 concludes.

2.2 Where semantics begins

Where does ‘semantics’ begin? Let us start with a broad sense of the term, where itcovers the emergence of ‘meaning’ long before words exist, and independently ofwhether there is communication. In any creature that has a brain at all, the analysis ofsensory stimuli involves a transduction of such stimuli into neural signals, whichtransmit the information contained in the receptors to the brain. The brain thenextracts information from the sensory signals and at least some brains will form‘representations’ of environmental variables in some particular domain. These can inturn be structured, with different mental ‘symbols’ representing different environ-mental variables, and formal computations can be defined over them. In the well-studied case of bee navigation, for example, the representations can represent such

2. Before there was grammar 37

variables as food sources, the time of day, or the compass direction of the sun as afunction of the time of day (Gallistel, 1998).

A structured formal semantics, mediating a perception-action circuit, is thus inplace long before language arrives on the evolutionary scene. Ipso facto, a semanticsof this kind will not tell us what is special about language or the organization ofmeaning in it—our basic question here. Nonetheless, there has been a temptation tothink that when words came along, their semantics was already there: this, forexample, would be so if human words ‘expressed’ prelinguistic ‘concepts’, whichare their meanings. At this stage, therefore, we need to be more precise about what weactually mean by a word. First, there is the notion of the word as a prosodic unit (the‘phonological word’); then there is the notion of the semantic word or lexeme, whichis the word understood as an abstract vocabulary item with a given meaning that cantake different forms, such as the verb run, which can take the forms runs, ran, run,etc. Even more abstract is the notion of a lexical root, which involves a semantic corepossibly shared across lexemes of different categories, e.g. the root √run as involvedin the verb run and the homophonous noun run, which occurs in the expressions arun, many runs, running, Mary runs, etc. Finally, there is the grammatical word: theword as a morphosyntactic unit or as functioning in a sentence context.

The second notion of ‘word’ appears to be virtually identical to what are called‘concepts’ in the philosophical literature (e.g. Fodor, 1998), where indeed there is thesame notational convention of referring to such entities with small capitals. Presum-ably, the words ‘runs’ and ‘ran’ express the same ‘concept’—or at least, the questionof whether they do seems barely, if ever, discussed. Since the technical notion of alexeme is more precise, it is not clear why one should invoke the notoriously unclearnotion of ‘concept’ at all. That notion is often applied to non-linguistic beings (Carey,2009), and if we do not wish to ascribe lexemes to the animals, then the term‘concept’ has an advantage over ‘lexeme’. It appears, however, that we will loseimportant distinctions in this process. While meaningful categories in the senseabove seem to be involved in both perception and in intentional reference, they arestimulus-controlled in perception, while being freely manipulable in intentionalreference. When manipulated for purposes of reference, they are symbolic unitsthat have a phonological identity. Hence lexicalization has taken place: the brainhas created items that can be freely called up, partially independent of perception.This is unlike in the case of percepts, where there is no reference and no need for it,and no creative and systematic combinatorics.1

None of this takes the point away that perception in prelinguistic cognitive systemscan involve classes of considerable abstraction, as when prelinguistic human infantsindividuate objects via sortal kinds (e.g. box, car, toy, cat) (Xu, 2005), a process that

1 The imagination is creative, but it is not combinatorial, it appears, in any systematic way, and it is notpropositional either (see Reuland, 2010, for discussion).


is to some extent independent of the object’s perceptual properties. Objects that areall toys, for example, can be perceptually quite different. One of the most abstract ofsuch sortals is object: whether something counts as an object in perception (or isidentical to another) does not solely depend on its spatio-temporal properties. Thesame is true for sorts such as agent, cause, attention, or plurality, which againare, although not independent of perceptual features, only obscurely related to themand not apparently defined in such terms (Carey, 2009: chs. 5, 6).2 If so, we might callthem ‘concepts’, also because they are ‘inferentially rich’ in the sense that howsomething is sortally analysed enters into the child’s decisions on how to act (e.g.whether to reach for an object). However, although such representations differ from‘perceptual representations in their abstractness and their conceptual content’, Carey(2009) stresses that this is in part a ‘matter of degree’ (p. 449). Indeed, like theabstract concepts of core cognition, the outputs of perceptual input analysers(whether an object is red, round, and distant, for example) are accessible to so-called‘central’ systems as well, where they enter into inferential processes and determineactions such as reaching. Moreover,

like representations of depth, the representations of objects, agents, and number are the outputof evolutionarily ancient, innate, modular input analyzers. Like the perceptual processes thatcompute depth, those that create representations of objects, agents, and number continue tofunction continuously throughout the life span. And like representations of depth, their formatis most likely iconic. (Carey, 2009: 450)

An iconic representation is an analogue one whose parts correspond to the parts ofthe object represented: the head of a tiger in a photo, say, to its actual head in reality.No word or sentence has meaning in this analogue fashion. Related to that, no issueof intensionality arises with iconic representations, as Fodor (1998) argues: an iconicrepresentation of a giraffe cannot help being a representation ofmy favourite animal,if the giraffe is my favourite animal. When we use words, however, intensionalityeffects arise pervasively and systematically: thinking about animals identified asgiraffes is not thinking about my favourite animals, even if they are my favouriteanimal. Representations in the linguistic format are also not reflexively and causallytriggered by a perceptual input, as concepts in Carey’s sense are; and they are notmodular, being capable of describing any domain whatsoever (Spelke, 2003), even ifperhaps imperfectly, as in the case of emotions; and neither percepts nor coreconcepts nor iconic representations are normatively constrained, in the sense that

2 As Carey (2009) stresses even for object kind sortals, although these are perceptually based, ‘it isunknown what these bases are’ (p. 273). That I perceive you as a person, rather than as a surface or aphysical object, does not appear to be explained by the visual properties of your surfaces, or your physicaland spatiotemporal properties—even though, equally clearly, there are correlations between the physicalproperties of an object and the way we perceive it.


there are correctness conditions that they can fail to meet: indeed, we do not controlperception. Neither percepts nor concepts based on them require reasons, and thequestion of truth does not arise for them. For illustration, consider the Heider–Simmel (1944) demonstration that normal subjects endow a movement pattern ofanimated geometrical shapes as depicted in Figure 1 with rich social meaning,reporting percepts such as the large triangle ‘chasing’ the small triangle, shapes‘looking for’ one another, ‘hiding’, ‘conferring’, being ‘furious’ or ‘frightened’.

Percepts of this nature, which arise without conscious control, systematicallydeteriorate or disappear when the movement pattern is slowed down or sped up.Subjects then report merely seeing shapes and geometrical paths again. This becomesthe general situation with patients suffering from bilateral amygdala damage, whoalso describe the same animations in asocial and purely geometric terms, despiteotherwise normal visual perception (Heberlein and Adolphs, 2004). No questions oftruth or correctness arise in either the patients or the normal controls.

Yet this perceptual semantics is rich, and explanatory questions arise that arecompletely unresolved even in this domain (never mind grammatical semantics). Inline with this, Mausfeld (2011) stresses the ‘explanatory gap between the informationavailable in the sensory input and the meaningful categories that characterize theoutput of the perceptual system’ (p. 159). As he illustrates, objects that we perceive areendowed with an abundance of material qualities. In the case of perceived surfaces,for example, these are captured in verbal descriptions such as ‘soft’, ‘wet’, ‘malleable’,‘silky’, ‘juicy’, ‘edible’, or ‘deformable’. Many such perceptual attributes correspond,in metaphysical terms, to dispositional and causal properties of the objects perceived.Again, the explanatory connection between such attributes and the physical or visualproperties of the stimulus that trigger their perception remains largely obscure.We do not know where the semantic contents of our percepts and core conceptscome from.

These problems deepen as we move up from perception to relational concepts suchas cause, which David Hume famously noted have no basis in our sensory-motor‘impressions’. There is similarly no perceptual basis for our notion of truth, or therelational notion of a ‘predicate’. We perceive things as objects external to ourselves,but this construal is reflex-like and requires no concept of what an object is, nor

FIGURE 1


thoughts involving such a concept. Thinking in this sense is, unlike perception, notan ‘online’ process: as we think, we don’t necessarily externally perceive anything orattend to what we perceive—most of which will typically be irrelevant to the contentsof our thought. In turn, most things that are physically present and that we perceive,we don’t also name, when we see them—fortunately so, for there is so much that wesee all the time, most of which is of no relevance at all to what we are thinking: forexample, the font type of the words you are perceiving as you read this, or yourmood, both of which you largely ignore as you try to come to grips with what youread. As you do, perceptual stimuli associated with reading, while processed, are thusswitched to offline in conscious processing. The phenomenology of reading iscrowded out by the phenomenology of thought.

Much of the latter phenomenology is accompanied by silent soliloquy, withsentences or fragments of them flicking through our minds incessantly, to variousdegrees of (usually silent) articulation—a barely controllable predicament that canannoy and keep us awake at night, requiring extraordinary efforts to be terminatedaltogether, as in long-term meditational practices. It is as if each of these thoughtscries out for our attention, not leaving us in peace, showing that linguistic thought ofthis nature tends to be inherently related to consciousness. That relation is very clearin actual speech itself, where we virtually always know that we speak, when we do,and indeed normally know what we say. Most normal utterances appear to bespontaneous rather than carefully planned and executed, yet the moment we makethese utterances, we are consciously aware of them and their content (though we mayget distracted by something we see or hear while we speak, including the quality ofour voice). Both in soliloquy and actual speech, moreover, it is linguistically mean-ingful units that we are consciously aware of, such as words, phrases, or wholeutterances, but not, say, arbitrary stretches of phonation within an utterance lastingexactly 300 milliseconds, or three quarters of a word or phrase. The phenomenologyin question thus obeys in part linguistic principles.

Not only does semantics systematically change as we move from perception togrammar, therefore, but conscious experience does as well. Consciousness presumablybegins with perception—percepts are conscious virtually by definition—but then,perception need not be accompanied by percepts that we actually consciously process(like the letters you perceive as you read, when focusing on the content of what youread). Consciousness thus changes fundamentally as language intrudes and takes overour conscious attention, switching non-linguistic perception to ‘offline’. This in turnchanges our non-linguistic experience. If Helen Keller is any source, the sensory-motorexperience of water is not the same when we can name it and when we cannot. Withwords, experience itself becomes a matter of reflection. Even if other species have a‘mind’ or ‘think’ (in some senses of these words), only we may be aware that we do,which in turn influences what we think about: about thought itself, for example.


The source of this transformation in both semantics and consciousness plainlycannot be semantic: for semantics is what is being transformed. If ‘semantics’ means‘relations to the external world’ (perhaps specified causally), it cannot at presentmuch illuminate or explain the contents even of percepts. The same applies to thephenomenon of intentional reference, in either acts of pointing or the use of words.A young infant pointing declaratively points, say, to an elephant, viewed as anobjective entity that the adult also sees and understands in the same way, as fallingunder the same ‘concept’. As words come along, the infant might mutter ‘elephant’while pointing to the elephant, and in any act of reference that we make as adults,some meaningful descriptive category is involved in a similar way (for qualificationssee below and Chapter 4). None of this follows from anything semantic. Thus,reference in non-linguistic animals takes a completely different form (and may wellbe explainable causally). Intentional reference, in the human sense, involves lan-guage, and it needs to be explained linguistically, not semantically.

When, under the causal control of an external trigger, monkeys or chickens call foralarm, the call can be acoustically distinct depending on what predator is perceived tocause the threat (Hauser, 1996; Cheney and Seyfarth, 1990; 1998). But the great apesdo not call for alarm as the monkeys do, which we expect if such reference isfunctional and apes simply are not under the relevant kind of threats. Alarm callsare not for conceptualization or reference to the world, but for ensuring that the rightaction is performed under the right external circumstances, expedited by a reflex-like,emotional reaction to a given trigger, with perhaps no underlying communicativeintention at all. For that reason, the question of which ‘concept’ is being expressed byany of these calls appears to be mute. Is it eagle, or into the bushes, or dangerfrom the air? No concept appears needed because, even without one, the trianglebetween the caller, the stimulus, and the action is causally and adaptively closed. Thecalls occur when the stimulus does, which is also when the percept does, whichidentifies the predator. There is no evidence that the calls in question are ever appliedto anything other than the stimulus, in the very adaptive context in question; or thatthe percept involved in one such call can be targeted as such, and be combined withanother percept, a process that we argue requires lexicalization. Every one of the callsis complete in itself, requiring no further specification of what is to be done by therecipient (see also Bickerton, 2009: 44–7, 68–9).3

Lexemes by contrast not only can be used referentially in the physical absence of theirreferent, but are also very incomplete in theirmeaning. Theword ‘eagle’ by itself does notdenote anything in particular: not this eagle or that, not all eagles or some, not a kind

3 We second Bickerton (2009: 69) in his claim that the units of alarm call systems:

‘don’t really translate into human language. We can give an approximate meaning, or several possiblemeanings, in terms of our language, but the idea that underlying both is the exact same semantic expressionis simply baseless.’


of bird as opposed to another, not the property of being an eagle, etc.—things that itcan denote only once it appears in the right grammatical configurations. It is alsoused for purposes of reference and predication, in addition to being used as a directivefor action, and it again requires a phrasal context, hence grammar, when it is soused. As a lexical item, moreover, it automatically stands in relations of hyponymy (aneagle is an animal, as is a leopard), and hyperonomy (there are several kinds ofeagles). The existence of such a system of hierarchical relations is not driven merelyby instinct, in the way that animal categorizations of environmental stimuli develop,as the facts suggest that it is subject to significant variation across speakers andlanguages.

The use of a lexeme is also never indexical in the sense in which animal alarm callsare. Not even words standardly classed as ‘indexicals’, such as pronouns or demon-stratives, are indexical in the sense of the monkey calls. Thus the 1st-person pronounneed not denote the speaker: ‘I’ denotes the logophoric agent of the embedded clausein (1) below and the sentence subject in (2), hence in neither case the speaker. Moro(1997) makes a case that ‘io’ (‘I’) in (3) plays the role of the predicate (hence not of areferential expression). In (4), ‘he’ refers to whoever enters through this door, not aparticular person. (5) can be said intelligibly by an academic speaking in Durhamwhile currently employed as a guest professor in Barcelona:

(1) He said to me: ‘I love you.’ (Sigurðsson, 2004)

(2) Kon K@gna n@-ññ y�l-all AmharicJohn hero be.PF-1sO 3M.say-AUX.3M‘Johni says that hei is a hero.’(Lit.: ‘Johni says that Ii am a hero.’) (Schlenker, 2003: 68)

(3) Sono io. Italian

‘It’s me’ (Moro, 1997)

(4) He who enters through this door will be crowned.

(5) Yes, I am there now.

Even so-called ‘indexical expressions’, then, exhibit intensionality and allow fordisplaced, predicative and descriptive readings, apart from their more paradigmaticreferential ones. Even in the referential readings, a concept is always involved. Thus ifI refer to myself as ‘I’, I am plainly not conceptualizing myself in the same way aswhen I point to my body and say:

(6) I feel totally happy in this body now.

The referential behaviour of indexicals, moreover, as we shall see in more detail inSection 4.4, co-varies with their grammatical behaviour. What we find again, then, isa correlation between grammar, lexemes, reference, and intensionality: these occurtogether. Correlatively, intensionality is absent and reference is most ‘direct’, when no


content word is involved, as in interjections. In that case, emotional content iscritically involved in the utterances, and there is very little grammar:

(7) a. Wow!b. Sh***!c. Hey!

Where there is no language or lexemes at all, any case for either ‘concepts’ orreference is very hard to make. As Davidson (2004) stresses, neither a ‘concept’ norreference can sensibly be attributed simply because an animal makes an adaptivelysignificant distinction. Sunflowers can direct themselves towards the sun withoutanything we would be tempted to call thought. To take a more complex case,cephalopod mollusks vary their appearance to suit the surroundings. To find themost adaptive camouflage from within their coloration repertoire, they must usespatial information. The common cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, uses multiple cues suchas spatial scale, contrast, and depth to select between the ‘Mottle’ body pattern(displayed on continuous patterned surfaces) and the ‘Disruptive’ one, used ondiscrete objects such as pebbles. The nature of the cues can be investigated experi-mentally. Juvenile cuttlefish classify visual textures according to whether they areuniform or patterned, and whether the pattern includes visual edges. Specifically,they detect edges by sensing the relative spatial phases of two spatial frequencycomponents (Zylinski et al., 2009). There is a function, therefore, from visual featuresof the external environment, to a certain output (a camouflage), which is internallymediated in the animal by a classification of visual textures. The classification schemeis more abstract than the more detailed visual features that are so classified.

Yet the terms ‘uniform’ and ‘patterned’ are clearly merely two labels from withinthe human conceptual repertoire that are descriptively useful to capture theseclassifications. That the former is the human concept uniform—or perhaps themeaning of the English phrase ‘uniform surface’ or ‘not a pattern including visualedges’ is a suggestion that the data do not support. Why should the cuttlefish havethoughts about surfaces and edges, when it suffices to simply detect and classify themcorrectly, and incorrect classification will lead to death rather than falsehood?Referring in our present sense is again not merely representing: this is particularlyclear if we view reference on the model of pointing, as we do here. If I point to a manwith my index finger, my finger does not represent the man. Neither does the word‘the’, when I use a definite noun phrase. A pack of hunting wolves must have someshared internal representation of the prey, but they do not use it to refer to it.

Infants can manage the distinction between singular and plural nouns betweentwenty-two and twenty-four months of age, and in parallel with this their capacitydevelops to distinguish non-linguistically between singular and plural sets, in amanual search paradigm. Li et al. (2009) found no evidence that, in languagessuch as Japanese or Mandarin where number marking on nouns is impoverished,


the non-linguistic ability in question is delayed. If so, there is a sense in which there isa mental representation with the content ‘singular’—as opposed to ‘plural’—set thatdoes not depend on its morphological realization. Yet there is no reference in thiscase, and the suggestion that these very young infants think about sets with theconcept ‘singular’, and that intensionality effects might arise, seems unwarranted.

While these infants belong to the linguistic species, representations of distinctionsrelating to number are well known to have a basis in non-linguistic species. Analoguerepresentations of magnitudes of number by no means depend on language and arenot specific to humans, forming a ‘foundational’ abstraction of very ancient origin(Gallistel, 2009). This arguably includes (i) the ability to individuate in parallel themembers of 1, 2, 3, and 4-membered sets, (ii) quantifying over such sets with suchquantifiers as some, all, singular, dual, or plural, and (iii) representing the analoguemagnitude of sets and the ability to compare these on the basis of approximatecardinal values. On the other hand, the representation of large (greater than three)exact numerosities, i.e. the list of integers, does not develop in children unless alanguage model is available in which such numerosities can be systematically referredto with numerals (Carey, 2009). It also fails to develop in the home sign systemsdeveloped by deaf children among one another when they are born to non-signingparents (Spaepen et al., 2011; for similar evidence of the absence of large exactrepresentations of number in cultures whose languages lack a verbal count routine,see Gordon, 2004; Frank et al., 2008; Pica et al., 2004).

Again, this illustrates both in what way there is cognitive continuity betweenhumans and non-humans in terms of representations, and discontinuity in regardsto reference, once language and lexemes are involved. This suggestion is consistentwith what lies at the heart of the continuist position, namely the central assumptionof the computational-representational theory of mind, that both the human and non-human brain forms ‘symbolic representations’ that are physically realized and subjectto computation in the causation of behaviour. Words, on the other hand, are not inany clear sense causally efficacious in the generation of action. Using words is adeliberate action in itself, independent of perception, with no non-circularly identifi-able causes (Chomsky, 1959), taking place for purposes of reference rather thanaction, at least if we disregard imperatives and other performatives. Functionsdefined over symbolic mental representations, furthermore, are constrained to bemirrored by functions over what they represent (the mapping between entities inthe represented domain and the symbols is structure-preserving or ‘homomorphic’:cf. Gallistel and King, 2009: ch. 4). It is unclear how this constraint is evenmeaningful in the case of words and the way they are connected in grammar.Thus, when grammar categorizes a given lexical root as either a verb or a noun (torun vs a run), it does something that nothing in the external environment, asindependently described, needs to reflect: as the Modists noted, it reflects a differencein perspective or reference, not lexical content. When we will look at grammatical


relations (see Chapter 3), it will be even less clear how such a homomorphism couldbe defined. These considerations underscore that the issue of representation is to bedistinguished from the phenomenon of intentional reference as described here. Thegrammatical word appears to be no representation in the sense of the computationaltheory of mind at all, which thereby falls short of capturing what makes our speciesunique and our cognitive mode discontinuous with any other.

Demoting the cognitive significance of language, Gallistel (2010), takes a strongerposition, pitched against Carey’s (2009) ‘discontinuist’ view, which gives language acrucial role to play in the genesis of uniquely human concepts. Yet the evidenceprovided is again about representational power, not reference. Thus, for example:

Both mice and adult human subjects represent the uncertainty in their estimates of elapsingdurations (a probability distribution defined over a continuous variable) and discrete prob-ability (the proportion between the number of trials of one kind and the number of trials of adifferent kind) and combine these two representations multiplicatively to estimate an optimaltarget time. (Balci et al., 2009)

Yet, how seriously should we take the idea that the mouse can think ‘quite sophisti-cated thoughts’ about how a given probability should be ‘combined with its repre-sentation of its uncertainty regarding the duration of an elapsed interval in order tochoose the optimal decision point in a timing task’ (Gallistel, 2010)? If we follow theold Leibnizian idea that thought just is calculation, it follows definitionally that themouse thinks. In a similar way, twentieth-century functionalist philosophy of minddefinesmental states as computational, with computations performed over physicallyrepresented symbols in the brain that are causally and homomorphically related totheir referents in the world. If we make this definitional move, the question ofwhether mouse thought is like human thought is begged.

What is missing in the mouse’s thought is, we claim, not only concepts, but aformal ontology, by which we mean a system of formal distinctions by which objectsof reference are classified as objects and events, propositions and facts, properties orstates. In any human language, reference is to objects of a small number of specificformal types, of some of which we can predicate existence or truth: a creature that canform sentences has a concept of being. This formal ontology comes, not withsymbolic representation as such, which is pervasive in animal cognition and foundin animal communication as well, but grammar, which is unique to our species. It isfirst manifest in the emergence of a classification of lexical items into parts of speech(Section 2.5). Mice neither lexicalize their ‘concepts’ (= symbolic mental representa-tions), nor do they turn them into parts of speech. Humans seem to be the onlycreature that, apart from performing computations over symbolic mental represen-tations co-varying with environmental variables, also and additionally refers to thesevariables, in specific ways that depend on a grammar and a lexicon. This claim entailsthat what the generative grammar tradition, given its ‘internalist’ stance (Chomsky,


2000a; Hinzen, 2006; Pietroski, 2008), has characteristically excluded from the studyof grammar is essential to it. But it is not externalism to incorporate notions such asreference and truth into grammar: not if grammar is the only system in which suchphenomena arise, in the systematic ways described in Chapter 4, and not if no singlegrammatical expression is ever completely free of them, making them part of what itis to be grammatical.

2.3 Lexicalization: the creation of the lexical atom

Until now, we have sought to distinguish percepts from concepts, which we take topresuppose lexicalization, and distinguished the intentional reference that involveslexemes from mental representation in a much broader sense. Let us now look atlexicalization and its semantic rationale in more detail. What is lexicalized is aselection of perceptual features from classes of percepts that together create a moreabstract percept, reducing the sensory complexity of the world even further. Percep-tual features themselves are already abstractions from an infinity of data that thesensory world presents us with, creating an initial order in it. The process oflexicalization de-couples the percepts that are selected from their respective visualstimuli, giving us new and more abstract entities, lexical items, which are stimulus-free and independently manipulable, enabling creative thought and reference. Forthis reason, we may describe this process as one of ‘de-indexicalization’. Any suchprocess will require another process of re-indexicalization: freedom from experienceis bought at the cost of having to re-establish a link with experience. It is what we aretrying much of our waking lives to achieve (when we are not day-dreaming): sayingsomething true rather than false, seeking evidence, exercising doubt. Where conceptsare de-indexicalized, a mechanism is needed to relate them back to the world onoccasions of activating them: a system converting concepts into referential expres-sions. In this reference-system, reference to the world will be a creative (intentional)act subject to conscious control—and of error as well. We identify this system withgrammar.

Lexemes are the basis of this reference system and anchor it in a world of sharedconceptualization. They are the non-creative part in a system that is otherwisethe hallmark of individual creativity: which lexical items exist in a language issomething we have to learn. They are given to us, as a public way of organizinghuman experience. In a linguistic community into which a child is born, an inventoryof lexical items offers a precategorization of the experienced world that the child cantake over without having to create its own. Various experiences will now presentthemselves as instances of ‘the same’, with lexicalized concepts defining the criteria of(cross-modal) ‘sameness’. As lexemes are manipulated in the place of the perceptualfeatures defining them, we come to live in a symbolic world of culture (a Popperian


‘Third World’), an abstract domain of sharable thought, in addition to the world ofsense experience, which we only confront individually.

In the generation of lexical items on the basis of selections among perceptualfeatures there can be no ‘mistake’ yet: any such selection will still simply correspondto perceived reality. There is no need for a notion of reference. Variation invocabulary across languages is therefore not harmful and quite expected: colour isperceived, and perception is causally controlled. The possibilities of mistake ordisagreement arise later, as a reference system develops in the form of a grammar,and truth and falsehood along with it. Since neither reference nor truth are percep-tual categories, and hence external control is lost, we would expect language to bemore constraining in its grammatical aspects than in its lexicon: grammar providesthe control now needed.

Once a particular perceptual class has become a lexeme, the grammatical processoris not sensitive any more to what perceptual features define it, and the lexeme willtherefore occur in the grammar as a lexical atom: its lexical content is not visible tothe grammatical processor. As that processor builds structures, however, the processof lexicalization can apply again, now to whole configurations. Thus, the lexical itemin (8a) might have the structure in (8b):

(8) a. killb. [cause [to die]]

However, the insight that Fodor articulated in (1970) is that (8a) and (8b) actually differin meaning. Ipso facto, if (8a) is grammatically complex underneath its mono-mor-phemic surface (contrary to what Fodor himself suggested), it follows that the lexica-lization of its underlying structure makes a semantic difference. Lexicalization ismeaningful, whether it takes place before or after the grammar operates: this is whatwe will have learned from Fodor. By now, lexical decomposition is widely assumed,though the details have changed. Harley (2012) argues that the right way to analyse killas cause to die is to have a stative predication embedded under the causative predicate,as in The bride [made [SC Bill dead]], where SC stands for a Small Clause denoting theresultant state, and the whole structure in (9a) is spelled out as (9b):

(9)

Pred

DEAD

DP

SC

‘kill’DP

a. b.

u�

uP

uCAUSE


As Hinzen (2012) discusses, the lexicalization of (9a) as (9b) is indeed semanticallymeaningful. We can generate a configuration in the grammar, as in (9a), and thenpack it into a single lexical item, but the lexical item will then crucially denote a singleevent that, unlike the one in (9a), is not decomposed into two parts (or an event and aresultant state). Thus, whereas the decomposed form (10) is naturally interpretable,the same intended meaning is unavailable or unnatural in (11):

(10) John caused Bill to die by the time he reached the hospital.

(11) John killed Bill by the time he reached the hospital.

Similarly, (12) is fine, and while (13) describes a rather unusual activity (making a fishdead would be less unusual), it is interpretable. However, (14) is completely out:

(12) John made Mary happy and it surprised me that she was.

(13) John made Mary dead and it surprised me that she was.

(14) *John killed Mary and it surprised me that she was.

Moreover, while the j-option in (15) is quite bad but still available, the sameinterpretation in (16) is completely unavailable:

(15) Maryi made [Johnj sick] by PROi/?j eating too much.

(16) Mary sickened John by eating too much.

Moreover, we notice that while certain grammatical configurations such as (9a) canfind their way into lexical items, with a consequent change in meaning, this becomesimpossible when the configurations become too large. Thus, sentences that carrytruth values when asserted cannot be lexicalized, indicating a fundamental dichot-omy between grammatical and lexical meaning: no lexical item is, as such, true orfalse.4 Such complexity does not fit into a lexical atom. The same applies to areferential phrase such as the man: there is no lexical item ‘the-man’. Reference,like truth, is not a lexical property, showing that if concepts, as we have argued, areused referentially, they have to be grammaticalized. Lexicalization—the creation of alexical address for a set of perceptual features—then, is meaningful, and so isgrammaticalization. But the two are crucially distinct.

The conclusion that lexical items are atoms for the grammar does not take thepoint away that these items, as organized lexically, are nonetheless bundles ofperceptual features, and hence are internally complex in this sense. This is suggestedby a task such as detecting the common features of such lexemes as ‘table’, ‘chair’,‘fish’, and ‘lamp’, which allow us to identify ‘the odd one out’. The same conclusion issuggested by the fact, noted above, that lexical roots form relations of hyponymy,

4 Pythagoras’ Theorem is a sentence, which is presumably true. But when we refer to it, using a nominalphrase or name, i.e. ‘Pythagoras’ Theorem’, we only refer to it, and do not assert it as true.


which atoms, being structureless, cannot do. Roots start acting as atoms when theyenter the grammar, and together with that, enter into acts of reference. The way theydo so appears to be subject to cross-linguistic variation. Armoskaite (2011) argues thatin Blackfoot the specification of a grammatical category is required at the lexical level,while Lithuanian exemplifies the option that roots are precategorial. Vinokurova(2005) similarly argues that, in Sakha, a notion of ‘lexically primitive’ (rather thangrammatically derived) Nouns and Verbs is required. Yet other languages such asTagalog have been argued to have a morpholexically defined word class of verbs, inthe absence of morphosyntactic distinctions among content words (Himmelmann,2007). There appears to be variance, in short, in how roots enter the linguistic system,and the degree to which their lexical encoding reflects grammatical roles they tend toplay. This variance in itself suggests that the lexicon represents a distinct way oforganizing semantic information, which is independent of grammatical ways oforganizing meaning. Meaning changes (roots can be used to refer) as lexical rootsbecome grammaticalized, but this need not be reflected in how such items are storedlexically, as the cross-linguistic variance in question suggests.5

Nonetheless, it is unclear to what extent lexical roots really live an independentmental life, or a life independent of the actual words in which we see them occurring.If we abstract out a lexical root such as √run from English nouns or verbs thatcontain it, it is not clear what we are really thinking about. In pondering thisquestion, we must be telling ourselves that we are not supposed to be thinkingabout a run, several runs, running in general, the fact that John runs, etc., butabout √run, pure and simple. What kind of meaning is this?

Modistic grammarians were well aware of the problem of properly characterizingthe difference between ‘mental concepts’ and the words that express them. Theycarefully reflected on the extent to which the former were actually distinct from thewords, as rationalist grammarians in the Port Royal traditions would later assume (andthe majority of philosophers in the field of ‘concepts’ do today, cf. Fodor, 1998, andsubsequent debates). By the early fourteenth century the contention gained groundthat the grammatical features of words are at least partially irrelevant to the conceptsthey express, and should not be ascribed to these. Even if there is some kind ofgrammaticality to human thought (as there must be in a Language of Thought), andthere are ‘mental sentences’, this ‘mental grammaticality’ need not be the same as‘spoken grammaticality’. According to the nominalists, the former kind of grammat-icality was indeed radically different, making language systematically misleading in the

5 In line with this, according to Levelt et al. (1999), information about ‘grammatical class’, in his terms,although lexically represented, is only activated when necessary, namely when sentences are produced orunderstood, but not when processing single words. On a related view, the grammatical category of a worddoes not enter into the brain’s processing of its content when the word appears outside of a sentencecontext (e.g. in picture naming or quotation contexts) (cf. Vigliocco et al., 2011).


study of pure thought (thought cleansed of linguistic distortions). As the Modistsnoted, however, some of the grammatical specifications are more relevant semantic-ally than others—like the fact that a given word is a Noun. To the extent that this wasthe case, the (circular) suggestion was made that, in such cases, the mental concept inquestion is a ‘noun-like concept’. Thus the late fourteenth-century author Pierred’Ailly writes:

The exact reason why a particular word is a noun is that it is the representation of a noun-likeconcept, or that it is the symbol for a mental noun, which is the same thing. (Cf. Covington,2009: 125)

This concept, on this view, explains why the word has the grammatical meaningit does, illustrating a semantic account of word classes of exactly the kind wewill encounter and reject in Section 2.5. Other grammatical specifications of wordsin sentence-contexts appeared to traditional and contemporary grammarians as lessrelevant semantically. Morphological Case marking, for example, is a standardexample of what is arbitrary and language-specific, as we will discuss further inChapter 6. There is less reflection on this methodological problem in analytic phil-osophy, where the term ‘concept’ is often used virtually equivalently with the notionof ‘mental representation’. Yet the methodological problem in question is obviouslynot overcome if, as customary in philosophical practice, we effectively take conceptsto be lexemes, denoted by capitalizing words. In this case, the ‘concepts’ so created—man, kill, etc.—are trivially mapped from the words, usually with a grammaticalcategory assumed to be specified. At the same time, it is also said to be of the essenceof such concepts to be (i) shared and (ii) to compose with one another (Fodor, 1998).Yet it is words, which do not belong to anyone, which are ‘shared’ between speakers,not concepts, which are in individual speakers’ heads. Moreover, it is not clear whatevidence there is for a systematic combinatorics of concepts independently of how wesee words involved in such a combinatorics. Thus, a typical psychological study ofwhat is called ‘concept combination’ for example may compare the following com-binations (Wisniewski and Love, 1998):

(17) a. zebra bagb. zebra trapc. donkey trap

The finding is that when the modifier noun has a particular ‘salient’ feature, as in(17a), and the head noun refers to an entity that can naturally receive this feature, it ismore likely that subjects will generate interpretations where the feature is ascribed asa ‘property’ to the referent of the head noun (‘bag with black and white stripes’). Thisis less likely when the modifier noun has a salient feature, but that feature cannoteasily be ascribed to the head noun (17b); or when there is no salient feature (17c). Inthese cases, a ‘relational’ interpretation is preferentially generated (e.g. ‘trap for a


zebra’), where ‘zebra’ plays the role of a thematic argument. The methodologicalproblem is that what is being investigated here is plainly not ‘conceptual’ combin-ation but word combination, more specifically noun–noun combination, with one ofthe nouns playing the role of head and the other as modifier (in 17a), or argument(in 17b–c). ‘Noun’, ‘head’, ‘modifier’, and ‘argument’ are grammatical notions, andalthough the lexical concepts involved will trigger different readings depending onthe plausibility of the result, these readings are ones that are made available gram-matically. Thus it is because ‘bag’ is perceived as the head of the construction in (17a)that this combination is not interpreted as a zebra in the form of a bag (which is alogically and conceptually possible combination, grammatically expressed throughthe phrase bag zebra), but a bag with the stripes of a zebra. The head determines thereferent, the other word is grammaticalized as a modifier.

An alternative experiment that would eliminate the language confound, yet tests aproductive and systematic conceptual combinatorics, seems hard to fathom. We alsocannot simply endow putative non-linguistic concepts with a semantics in which,say, the concept man is interpreted as a ‘predicate’, and a predicate in turn is a set ofindividual men. For at the pregrammatical stage we are now imagining, there arenot yet either predicates or referential expressions, both of which are relationaland grammatical notions again. Only words can have these semantic properties,and words have them only when they occur in appropriate syntactic positions(see Chapter 3). The evidence, then, for concepts, their combinatorics, and theirsemantics, comes from words and how these function grammatically. The world ofconcepts, insofar as they combine, is a grammatical world.

Stockall and Marantz (2006) argue on the basis of magnetoencephalography(MEG) evidence in priming tasks that the brain processes all morphologicallycomplex words so as to initially decompose them into independently meaningfulmorphemes—not only in the processing of regular allomorphs (like–liked), but inirregular allomorphs (e.g. teach–taught) as well.6 Even when the brain processes theletter string ‘taught’, that is, it separately activates the stem teach and the functionalmorpheme that denotes the grammatical meaning ‘past tense’. How two words arerelated in terms of their morphemic decomposition, moreover, is different from thembeing related in terms of orthography or phonological similarity, and indeed fromwhether they involve non-grammatical semantic similarities that occur in the absenceof any plausible morphological relationship (as in the pairs boil–broil or crinkle–winkle, see Feldman, 2000, and Rastle et al., 2000). If so, there is a level of lexicalsemantic organization prior to and independent of morphology, and there is a MEGcomponent to index it (the M350). But the semantics of the stems is then stillnot semantics in a generic, non-linguistic sense: access to or activation of this

6 For obligatory decomposition approaches to polymorphemic words see also Taft (2004) and deAlmeida and Libben (2005).


semantics is after decomposition of a given morphological structure, in which therelevant stem appears. There is no evidence here for access to pristine, purely lexicaland not-yet-categorized roots or non-linguistic ‘concepts’. The problem of whethersuch lexical roots are psychologically real, independently of their occurrence in alinguistic (morphological) format, thus remains.

In summary, in the course of lexicalizing a given percept, a bundle of perceptualfeatures is given a phonological and semantic identity that makes it available to anovel system: grammar. These bundles are internally complex and organized hier-archically in relation to one another, as relations of hyponymy suggest, yet they aresingle objects or atoms from the viewpoint of this novel system, grammar, in whichthey function as atoms that cannot be further analysed. Atomization is a process thatcan apply to (small) chunks of grammatical structure itself, and is in itself ameaningful process, which makes a difference to how we refer to the world, whensuch atoms show up in grammatical configurations. With lexicalized concepts thatcan play the role of such atoms, we leave the world of perception, which is stillstimulus-bound, and enter a world that can be crucially shared, unlike a stimulus,which only affects us individually. A new semantics arises from this, resting onwords, on which all acts of (intentional) reference seem to depend. With a lexiconin place in a language, the world becomes a place that is precategorized. The mentalactivity of generations is off-loaded into a public resource, a residue of sharedexperience, in which the world is structured through words and their possiblereferents, rather than merely through what we individually sense and feel. Throughshared words, our minds form a single connected system, harbouring knowledge, bythe time a language is mastered. As lexemes, words may be partially independent ofthe grammatical specifications that words in sentence contexts come to exhibit, sincelanguages seem to differ in the extent to which words come with prespecifications ofhow they grammatically behave. Moreover, the way they can combine systematicallydoes not depend on the feature specifications that define their lexical content: theirstatus as grammatical words appears to be independent of that. Lexemes are notconnected to stimuli as percepts are, but they form a necessary resource for acts ofreference that presuppose a shared world interpreted in terms of such lexemes. Asacts of reference are enabled, the system thus remains necessarily connected to theworld through lexicalized concepts that may in turn be largely based on percepts. Butfalsehood can now happen, too.

2.4 Concepts ´ intentionality ´ intensionality ´ grammar ´ reference

So far we have (i) looked at the transition from percepts to lexical items, (ii) distin-guished (mental) representation from reference, and (iii) distinguished the lexicalcontent of lexemes or roots, which is specified in terms of perceptual features, fromthe grammatical meaning that words acquire when they occur in a grammatical


context and are used to refer. We have referred the term ‘concept’, but generallyconcluded that what we were really talking about were either percepts (or at leastentities continuous with percepts), mental representations, or lexemes. If so, thenotion of a ‘concept’ is of little use, no case for prelinguistic concepts distinct frompercepts remains, and we arrive at what is generally considered a ‘harsh’ stance on theanimals. Our stance effectively assumes the existence of concepts only where there arelexemes, and indeed only where such lexemes enter into acts of intentional andintensional reference, which in turn require grammar. It is this correlation that thetitle of this section expresses, and we will use the term ‘concept’ in what follows withthis meaning: there are concepts in this sense only where there are lexemes, there isgrammar, and there is intentional and intensional reference. This is our answer to thequestion of what ‘concepts’ really are, who has them, and what their semantics is.

To defend this answer, let us start from a natural suggestion: a concept is alwaysinvolved when we use a word to refer to a thing. The speaker will always have some‘concept’ of what it is he is referring to, viewing it as a person, a kiss, an emotion, aconversation, etc. We have suggested that even acts like referring with such a word as‘this’ or index finger pointing depend on some such descriptive concept of what it iswe are pointing to, and they would not work without it. As in the case of perception,the objects of such acts of reference are also never individuated in terms of theirphysical properties, as noted in Chapter 1 (and cf. Chomsky, 2000a), and this wouldfollow if, instead, their identities are grounded in what concepts we apply to them, orhow we think of them: as a person, a city, a river, etc., where usually multiple suchchoices can be made for any one external object. Thus we can refer to a building as ‘ahouse’, ‘the university’, or ‘Old Shire Hall’, among an indefinite number of otherpossibilities. None of these are physical descriptions, or descriptions of an object as aphysical one. When the building is destroyed through an earthquake, the universityneed not be: it may retain its identity. The house by contrast will most likely be takento be destroyed. As for Old Shire Hall, it may or may not go out of existence: for itmay be rebuilt stone by stone or otherwise, retaining its name. What causes thesefacts? What explains that houses get destroyed by earthquakes, while named build-ings need not be? Plainly, the concepts we have of these things, and not any independ-ent fact about the external world as physically described. Concepts in the substantivelexicon have descriptive contents—person, house, kiss, etc.—which determine iden-tity conditions of objects of reference: viewed as persons, they change in other waysthan viewed as bodies.

Any act of reference, then, contains an identifying description, however reduced itmay be, which as such must involve a concept, which is what supplies the descriptivecontent in question, and hence the identity conditions for the referent (we return toso-called ‘rigid’ or ‘direct’ reference, which is often taken to be unmediated by adescription and seemingly contradicts the claim just made, in Chapter 4). Because theact of reference is anchored in the description, the thing referred to therefore need


not causally affect us when we refer to it, and it need not be perceivable orcharacterizable in sensory-motor vocabulary: for it is grounded in the conceptinvolved, as a basis for the act of reference. For the same reason, the referents ofthe words, as characterized independently of how we refer to them, will never exhaustthe words’ meaning, and thus intensionality arises: what we mean can never begleaned from what we refer to as independently described, since how we describe athing systematically affects what we can be truthfully said to refer to. Lois Lane mayrefer to Clark Kent as ‘Superman’, yet it may be false to say of her that she referred toClark Kent. We may refer to a building as Fountains Abbey or as The Wonder of theNorth, and then, as in the case of Lois, circumstances may arise in which it might notbe right to report us as attributing this property to the ruin in North Yorkshire thatwe can see as the speech act takes place.

So if human linguistic reference is structurally based on concepts, and conceptshave a semantics independently of what they are used to refer to (as independentlydescribed), we predict that human linguistic reference will systematically exhibitintensionality. If reference depends on concepts, it is sensitive to a description, andhence it need not be transparent in relation to the object referred to. But even if actsof reference are necessarily based on concepts, it is not yet clear that withoutreference, there will be no concepts. Maybe there are some concepts, but they simplyaren’t used to refer. In that case, they might not be lexemes, and independent oflanguage and words. Qua concepts they would have a descriptive content, but maybethere can be description without reference. This, however, does not seem intuitivelyright: whoever describes, describes something, an object of reference, even if theobject is not named or directly referred to.7 Let us explore, then, the opposite thesis,which is entailed by the following claim:

The Correlation Claim:There are concepts if and only if there is intensionality.

We just argued for the right-to-left direction: Where intensionality exists—there isreference and it is sensitive to a description—concepts must be involved: the onesthat provide for the lexical content of the description used. No human act ofreference is ever fully free of intensionality in this sense, interjections and indexicalityincluded, a point to which we return. Intensionality is thus a plausible sufficientcriterion for concept possession. The left-to-right direction, however, is much lessobvious, especially on ‘internalist’ conceptions of concepts such as Chomsky (2000a)or Pietroski (2008). Intensionality, we may grant, requires two things: that words areused referentially, and that different concepts can be involved in such acts that are

7 And even if, as it may later turn out, we make an informed judgement that such objects of reference donot in fact exist. Existence claims arise at the level of full propositions, not acts of reference, where existenceis presupposed but not judged (see further pp. 99–100 below).


true of the same external referent. A creature to which we ascribe intensionality thusneeds both a sense of extensional reference and truth, and it needs to engage in suchacts of reference under the kind of perspectives that concepts encode. But why shouldthis link between concepts and reference be made, which will exclude concepts alongwith intensionality from non-pointing and non-(intentionally-)referring creatures?There would then be no concepts, in particular, in core cognition (Carey, 2009),and they would have to be called by a different name, and maybe be aligned withpercepts. Why burden, the internalist might ask, a theory of concepts with a notion ofreference that Chomsky (2000a) doesn’t even consider to apply to natural language?

Yet it is a virtual triviality to state that to have a concept is to know what it appliesto—apply truly, that is, for a concept applies to a thing if it is true that the thingreferred to with the concept falls under the concept.8 How can we avoid a connectionbetween concepts and reference/truth if it amounts to a virtual triviality? What is aconcept if it is not true of something? How is saying that the concept of a bookapplies truly to books even different from saying that ‘book’ refers to books?9 Howelse would we state what the content of a concept is? And how could we do so moreminimally than by saying that ‘book’ applies to books? Clearly we couldn’t say: ‘book’applies to books if it appears to us to so apply. This would not only be incorrect, butthe notion of appearance is in fact more complex than that of truth, presupposing itanalytically. The truth, however, is independent of what we think—nothing is truebecause we think it is, and this is constitutive of what truth means for us. Similarly,reference on occasions of language use is to objects that are (taken to be) independentof the speaker and hearer—this again being constitutive of what reference means. Soif there is an intrinsic nexus between concepts and reference/truth, then knowing aconcept requires a notion of ‘the world’ as independent of (or to be distinguishedfrom) what we think about it. Without such a notion, we wouldn’t be thinking at all.Thinking requires both a notion of the world and of thought; and concepts, asinvolved in thinking (as opposed to perception), must therefore be used to refer.

This is our argument. If, in all acts of reference, concepts are involved, and in orderfor there to be concepts they have to be used to refer, concepts and intensionalityarise together, grounding the correlation claim above.10 Where intensionality cannotbe established, a case for non-human concepts (in the same sense of this term)

8 This is to say absolutely nothing about how we know when a concept applies truly.9 This is again to say absolutely nothing about what books are—and in particular whether they are

viewed as abstract (‘Bill and Bob have both read Buddenbrooks’) or concrete objects (‘Bill wrappedBuddenbrooks in Christmas paper’) (see Chomsky, 2000a). These are conceptual distinctions arisingwhen words are used to refer on occasions of language use, not at the level of stating their lexical content:both of the above sentences refer to what is (lexically or descriptively) a book.

10 Crucially, though, the descriptive content of the concept involved can enter into the act of referencein different ways, giving rise to the different forms of reference that we distinguish in Chapter 4. In purelypredicative forms of reference, the concept is the main determinant of the referent; in ‘rigid’ forms ofreference, it plays a minimal role; definite and quantificational forms are in the middle between these.


cannot be made. That it cannot be established in the non-human case follows fromthe well-known observation (Hauser, 1996; Fitch, 2005) that while functional refer-ence is quite ubiquitous in animal communication, reference in the present sense(intentional reference) is present only in Homo sapiens. We return to these data inthe next subsection. Concepts, then, along with reference, present an evolutionarynovelty, and their connection with words may be intrinsic.

Whenever concepts are used to refer, words are normally involved (though theyneed not always be, as in acts of pointing). In philosophical and psychologicalpractice, concepts effectively are identified as the meanings of words, and theredoes not appear to be any other way to name or identify concepts than throughthe words that express them. Concepts identified with word meanings, however,already reflect processes of lexicalization and grammaticalization. The assumptionthat these are irrelevant to the existence or identity of the concept involved begs thequestion against the possibility we entertain here: that the grammaticalization of thebrain may affect the organization of meaning. By now we have a first indication ofhow it may do: through the evolution of reference, which, we have argued above, is,in fact, a co-evolution of reference and concepts, for one depends on the other. Theintrinsic semantics of concepts, as a novelty in evolution that arose with or in ourspecies, is a referential semantics, where the notion of reference is intentionalreference.

We could, of course, if we wished, simply abstract the meanings that words have inthe human lineage from them—abstracting from the fact that they are linguistic, asmost discussion of ‘concepts’ in philosophy and psychology tends to do—call themconcepts, and ascribe them to non-human species. But this is to impose our concep-tual scheme on the cognitive systems we study. Since non-human animals neverrespond linguistically to what we say about their minds, it is unclear how to testwhether they share this conceptual scheme with us or not. Put differently, if they hadconcepts, they would necessarily share our conceptual scheme—for there is no otherway we could understand them except by mapping their scheme onto ours. But thenthere is no empirical question of whether they share our scheme or not (Davidson,2004), and the question of animal concepts is unresolvable.

The question, in turn, of whether they have our conceptual scheme, arguablyreduces to whether we can interpret them using our scheme: and the fact is wecannot. Pet owners and their pets can without doubt communicate and coordinateon many things, like a ball to be fetched or a game to be played. Nonetheless, thepoint of owning a pet is not that the pet has a mind like ours, but that it does not.What makes it so charming to have a dog—as opposed to a human pet (or slave)—isthat we precisely don’t share a world with him/it: a realm in which thoughts can betrue independently of whether we think them, and words are true of things that are


independent of these words. Contrary to popular opinion, imposing our mind onnon-human animals is not a sign of our respect for them: perhaps it is the opposite, tocolonize a territory that we cannot chart.

Do we perhaps lack the means to chart it, even in the case of our fellow-humans?Might ‘other minds’ be like a foreign country whose customs are completely differ-ent? What if we cannot establish intensionality—shared reference and concepts, evenif the chosen concepts are not always the same when reference takes place—even inhuman communication? Have we not learned that external behavioural and otherphysical data, no matter how rich, cannot uniquely determine or fix any conceptinvolved in an act of reference? Is it not that nothing a person says or does will everpossibly conclusively determine the concepts she expresses, leaving an infinity ofinterpretive options (Kripke, 1982)? Not if we are right that reference to a world thatis independent of how we think of it is a precondition of having concepts and thoughtin the first place. Divergence in concepts when faced with a given referent is thenbased on sameness of reference. Concepts are objectively anchored. For concepts toexist, we must be aware that thoughts that involve them can be wrong, which in turnmeans that we must have a concept of thought. That concept in turn entails that athought that I think need not be a thought that you think, and we both can bewrong—at least in particular cases. But then, I have to distinguish the 1st Person(‘me’) from the 2nd Person (‘you’), and both of these from the ‘it’—the object ofreference. These are distinctions involving the system of grammatical Person, andhence are linguistic ones.11 If so, in order for there to be thought, I have to havelanguage.

This gives an indication of the direction of our answer to the Kripkean sceptic: no,concepts are not inscrutable even in the human case, for it is a condition on havingthem that we use them to refer, which not only requires a shared world but also anintersubjective dimension that is linguistically configured. Reference underdeter-mines concepts, leading to intensionality; but intensionality presupposes reference.Intensionality in word reference means that we can distinguish concepts, as some-thing that we share with others, from the referents to which these concepts may ormay not apply, independently of what we think. This is why Lois Lane can beconfused about who is Superman and who is Clark Kent. But then, her conceptwhen she references Superman is just the one we would have, if we had the beliefsthat she does. Moreover, such confusions are typically short-lived.

Language, then, we will assume, enables reference and truth, and via referenceand truth enables concepts, which can enter into thoughts but in a way that the

11 They are not non-grammatical semantic ones, as the same external object (me, say), can be thereferent of ‘I’, ‘you’, or ‘he’. But acts of reference to the same person involving these items differ ingrammatical meaning, and hence use (see Section 4.4).


truth of these thoughts (or external circumstances) does not determine whichconcept is chosen. This in itself is an indication of thought taking place.

2.5 Parts of speech and their grammatical semantics

Given our account of percepts, lexicalization, and lexemes, what can we say about the‘grammatical word’ and how semantics changes again when the latter evolves? Thegrammatical word is the word as occurring in specific grammatical configurationswhere it carries out grammatical functions, such as that of predicate or modifier.From an Un-Cartesian point of view, we do not expect in that case that the explan-ation for what the words mean could be non-grammatically semantic: for we expecttheir semantics to change upon grammaticalization (the alternative would be thatgrammatical organization makes no difference to meaning at all). It is thereforesurprising to see that (lexical or non-grammatical) semantics has virtually universallybeen the basis upon which linguists and typologists outside of generative grammarhave attempted to found a theory of the parts of speech. Almost invariably, thestarting point of discussions of the word classes in functional and cognitive linguistics(where most attention has been devoted to this problem) is that the lexicon ispartitioned into (notional) ontological classes such as object, action, and prop-

erty (often called ‘lexical semantic classes’), corresponding to the parts of speech‘Noun’, ‘Verb’, and ‘Adjective’, respectively (see e.g. Croft, 1991; 2001; 2007; Lan-gacker, 1987).12 The most crucial two equations appear in (18) (see e.g. Bisang, 2011):

(18) The parts of speech

Action-denoting lexemes (= verbs)Object-denoting lexemes (= nouns)

It is then commonly recognized that such a characterization of the parts of speech isclearly not sufficient. Yet, discussions nonetheless often start out from the intuition

12 While I will take opposition below to either ‘cognitive’ or ‘semantic’ accounts of part of speechdistinctions, Langacker (1999: section 1.3) makes an important distinction within the framework ofcognitive grammar between ‘semantic construal’ and ‘conceptual content’. The former involves a particularperspective on reality enabled by grammar, in line with a conception of grammar that regards semantics asinherently present in syntactic form (syntax is meaningful, but the kind of meaning is different from lexicalcontent). Semantic construal is used to define the parts of speech, so that ‘run’ as a noun and as a verbinvolve different construals of the same conceptual content. Langacker’s distinction is clearly related to theModistic distinction between structured perspectives on reality and what they termed the modus essendi,and it is also compatible with the present approach. All three are radically incompatible with an approachsuch as Jackendoff ’s (2002), who deprives syntax of meaning altogether and sees no distinctive abstractsemantics in parts of speech distinctions. The present approach is different from Langacker’s insofar as hisstarting point is cognition, whereas ours is grammar, so that we are coming from different directions.However, the heuristic ideas that grammar reduces to ‘semantic construal’ is shared between his and ourapproach. We are extremely thankful for Jaume Mateu for raising these interesting points.


that they should be, in a perfect system. That is, if grammatical categories do notmirror notional ones, things are ‘imperfect’ somehow. As Himmelmann (2005)points out, however, if word classes were directly predictable from the notional-ontological class of their lexical meanings, there would be no need for establishingword classes on the basis of grammatical criteria. Grammatical categories, on thisview, are only useful insofar as there is no perfect match between lexical meaning andgrammatical category: in other words, when grammar adds something new. It can dothis by giving words particularmorpholexical characteristics that make them fall intoequivalence classes defined by these characteristics—e.g. affix sets with which a givenlexical root occurs, distinct conjugation or declension classes, etc.—and/or morpho-syntactic characteristics—like occurring in particular syntactic positions in a phrasestructure tree, forming the complement of a definite article, playing the role ofpredicate, etc.

What we propose here is that the emergence of parts of speech classes amongcontent words reflects a distinct kind of grammatical semantics as well. According tothis idea, grammar itself has an abstract semantics to it. This view appears to bevirtually absent from discussions of parts of speech, which, apart from lexicalsemantics, largely seem to focus on morphosyntax and pragmatics (though see fn.12). We would expect this on the view that we here dispute: that grammar never addsanything to meaning. Morphology, however, which is one of the prime loci of cross-linguistic variation and also largely absent in many languages, can hardly ground anaccount of parts of speech that is meant to have universal validity. To the extent thatthere is anything universal about parts of speech distinctions, therefore, it wouldseem better to ground it in a semantics specifically reflected in such distinctions. Ifand to the extent that this semantics reflects grammatical functions that such partsplay, it would be an aspect of grammatical semantics in our sense, which in general isthe most likely candidate for cross-linguistic universals.

We will contend in this subsection that categories like ‘Noun’ and ‘Verb’ indeedare ultimately language-specific and morphological entities, making them slightlydifferent categories in different languages, though family resemblances can be seen.But they are one way in which a language can morpholexically and morphosyntacti-cally manifest a grammatical semantics (grammatical functions that words play) thatis unavailable through lexical content (feature specifications) alone. If this semanticsis universal, it would provide a rationale for why a Noun–Verb distinction is sowidely attested among languages. Arguably, this grammatical semantics relates to thepossibility of making formal-ontological distinctions in how words are used to refer,or what perspective we take on reality. In particular, the distinction between action-denoting and object-denoting lexemes in (18) above, we will argue, is already agrammatical one, which cannot be explicated in (non-grammatical) semanticterms: it is not entailed by the classes of lexical-perceptual features defining thecontents of particular lexemes.


In short, there is a universal formal distinction between referring, on an occasionof language use, to something as an ongoing action or as an object, which is groundedgrammatically. And there are partially language-specific ways in which parts ofspeech classes can reflect the availability of such grammatically configured forms ofreference.13 A content word used to refer to a specific object, for example, will co-occur with a determiner in a language that has determiners, like English (‘this man’).The referential expression as a whole will then typically also be an argument.Moreover, such words will then typically also be nouns. But this does not showthat the same category of ‘noun’ is found in all languages where such referentialfunctions can be enacted. Nor does it show that the connection between the notion of‘argument’, which is a purely grammatical notion, and the notion of ‘noun’, isintrinsic. Distinctions of formal ontological category and grammatical functioningwithin acts of reference can be coded at the level of the word itself, turning it from alexeme into a grammatical word. But they need not. Even when coded at the level ofthe word, they prove inherently unstable: in English, for example, we can insert thesame lexeme into several different grammatical configurations and thereby changethe formal ontology associated with it, as when re-categorizing the word laugh, whichnormally is used to denote an action, to refer to something viewed formally as anobject (a laugh, laughter). This process is very systematic and does not in this senseseem to be lexical. To whatever extent ontology is lexically coded, therefore, it is notfixed at this level, whereas the ontology of a particular word used referentially withina grammatical context is necessarily determined.

This of course is not to deny that perceptual aspects of the object–action distinc-tion are available pregrammatically. Rocks, water, and persons have different anddistinctive perceptual features from things that we perceive as ongoing actions, suchas flying, kicking, or swallowing. It is also not to deny, as discussed in Section 2.2, thatbabies parse the world into perceptual objects in many ways like we do when we referto them, applying abstract criteria of identity to them and viewing them as instancesof basic-level kinds such as dog or hammer, or even global kinds such as animal,vehicle, or furniture (Mandler, 2004; Carey, 2009). None of this, however, givesrise, in our terminology, to a formal ontology, which rather arises with (intentional asmuch as intensional) reference to such entities, which is absent in the babies inquestion. Reference in this sense is to entities falling under a narrow range of formalontological types that systematically relate to one another (with objects, e.g. beinginherent parts of events, and events parts of propositions), in ways that we will seegrammar, and no other system, governs and restricts.

To properly develop this account, we will proceed contrastively, by discussingan approach to the parts of speech that deprives grammar of the epistemological

13 ‘N and V-features’, then, are not part of universal grammar, as contended in Boeckx (2010). They arenot coded into the linguistic genotype.


significance that we here want to credit to it: Croft’s (2007) cognitive-functionalapproach to the word classes. It assumes that we need to start our explanations fromwhat Croft calls ‘conceptual frameworks’. These are defined as:

inventories of the types of semantic structures that are expressed in language and the semanticfeatures or properties that must be instantiated in utterances, and therefore must be expressedin grammatical inflections and constructions. (Croft, 2007: 340)

Of course, this stance fully entails what we call a Cartesian rationalist point of view:the ‘semantic structures’ in question—contents of possible thoughts—are viewed asnon-linguistic in nature, given to language from the outside, as something to be‘expressed’ in it. Croft (2007) interestingly aims to expand this general stance into aprincipled explanation of the elements of grammar, in an effort to answer thequestion of why there is such a thing as grammar in the first place, with a specificorganization into parts of the sort that we find in it. The answer given, following thelead of Chafe (1994), is that the origin and nature of grammar lie in the ‘verbalizationof experience in the process of communication’ (Croft, 2007: 341). Precommunica-tion, that is, there is assumed to be an ‘experience’, called a ‘unified whole’, which iscrucially not ‘propositional’ in character. Indeed we cannot circularly presuppose anygrammatical structuring principles in characterizing what such an experience is like(p. 348). In the process of communicating it, this ‘undivided whole’ is then firstbroken into parts (called ‘concepts’ and ‘relations’, which seem non-linguistic innature), by non-grammatical operations such as ‘sub-chunking’, which decomposethe whole in question, and ‘construal’ or ‘framing’ (called ‘propositionalizing’). Theresult of these operations is a structured propositional representation that hasindividuals and predicates in it, foregrounded and backgrounded information, andan ontology (events, situations, etc.). The third basic operation is ‘categorization’,which yields the word classes. In the verbalization process, these parts of speech arethen put together again, so as to reconstruct the original ‘unified whole’, which afterall is what the speaker wanted to communicate. Again, none of these operations aretaken to be grammatically specific. They are called ‘cohering’, ‘structuring’, and‘particularizing’. Together, they provide for the unity of a sentence. Insofar as thegrammar of a sentence instantiates the results of all of these various analytic andsynthetic operations (which are not formally defined), a principled explanation forgrammar is found.

The crucial question in the present context must be whether the operations inquestion are independently explanatory or whether they merely re-describe independ-ently attested grammatical operations in non-grammatical terms, with no addedexplanatory value. An immediate problem for the account is that ‘experience’ is aspecies-specific notion co-varying with the cognitive resources available to a givencreature. How we experience and are in the world changes radically, in particular, aslanguage intrudes into our mind. Only a grammaticalized world is a world with a past


and future—a history—or with facts that can be items of propositional knowledge.When characterized in non-linguistic terms, therefore, the notion of experience doesnot yield (or somehow latently contains) the primitives and operations of grammar,and certainly cannot fully explain them. Experience as such even fails to entail theexistence of ‘concepts’, as we have seen: a creature can experience long before itcan conceptualize. Perceptual experience is richly structured, but does not reflectthe categories of grammar, and ‘sentence’ is not an experiential category in anysensory-motor sense, similarly to an experience of pain, redness, or sadness. As wethink, judge, and articulate, no sensory-motor experience of the world needs to beinvolved.14

Croft’s example sentence, Next the boy comes upon a slide, invokes a perceptualcontent. Even so, it is structured by grammatical relations that have no experientialcontent, such as subject, predication and modification. The word ‘next’ is not clearlya perceptual category, as it denotes a sequential relation between a number of eventsthat is given as part of a grammatical process of intentionally referring to a number ofobjects viewed formally as events. The specific definiteness of ‘the boy’ is not anexperiential category either. There is also no known characterization of predicationin non-grammatical terms. One could define predicates in formal-semantic or set-theoretical terms, but as Davidson (2005) discusses, the original grammatical predi-cates enter into the definition of the sets that then represent the predicates, whichmeans that the definition explains nothing.

Croft (2007) points to the ‘difference between individuals (arguments) and events(predicates) in propositionalizing’ (p. 363), yet ‘argument’ is a grammatical notionthat cannot be captured by a non-grammatical distinction between individuals andevents. Thus, subjects that do not denote individuals (e.g. phrases such as all men,mass nouns such as beef, or clauses such as that John is silly) can be grammaticalarguments (or at least topics); individuals can be parts of grammatical predicates (e.g.John is the man, John [killed Bill]; events can be subjects and arguments (e.g. Johnwanted to kiss Mary, Kissing Mary is a delight) and they are interpreted as individualsin the Davidsonian paradigm (Davidson, 1970). Generality, referentiality, and sub-types of the latter, such as definiteness and specificity, are also grammatical proper-ties, insofar as words have them when and only when they are introduced by relevantfunctional heads and occur in relevant syntactic positions in the sentence. Thesame applies to aspectual distinctions at the level of the verb, and correspondingdistinctions in the noun (mass, count, Number, Person, etc.). Like Bisang (2011),Croft further analyses reference and predication as pragmatic discourse functions thatcan co-define the parts of speech, but again there is no evidence that these exist

14 Of the sort that clearly is involved in the storage and neural processing of lexical items, which doconnect with sensory-motor representations (Barsalou, 2008; Pulvermueller, 2012).


independently of grammar, and as we have seen, reference takes a very differentformat when grammar is absent.15

Croft acknowledges some of the problems with the idea that the part-wholeorganization of the sentence is determined or explained by non-linguistic processesof composing and decomposing an experience, in the following passage:

One cannot simply equate the predicate-argument contrast with the syntactic noun-verbdistinction, or even the semantic classes that are prototypically taken to represent the noun-verb distinction. Verbs and/or predicates are usually equated with actions, nouns and/orarguments with objects (persons or things), and adjectives with properties. But actions andqualities can be nouns (explosion, length) and as such, function as arguments in a clause (Theexplosion reverberated through the valley). Conversely, both objects and properties can bepredicated. In English, nonverbal predication is a syntactic construction with an independentcopula and no morphological alteration of the object/property word (She is tall, She is astudent); but in other languages, the object/property word is directly inflected with ‘‘verbal’’affixes and its category status is therefore often disputed ( . . . ). Finally, both objects and actionscan function as modifiers (a doglike creature, industrial policy, a sleeping fox).

On top of this, whole clauses can function as arguments or modifiers. Clauses functioningas arguments are complement clauses, as in She believes that he’ll call back this afternoon.Clauses functioning as modifiers are relative clauses, as in the house that sold last week. (Croft,2007: 364)

The natural conclusion to draw from these observations is that the predicate-argument distinction, which is purely grammatical, cannot be explicated in termsof word classes: adjectives and nouns are equally good predicates as verbs, yieldingtruth-value bearing propositions in exactly the way that verbs do, after Tense isspecified; and word classes in turn cannot be explicated in formal-ontologicalterms. Grammar, that is, rather than predictable in its workings from the way thatwords can be grouped into classes by lexical semantic criteria, is substantivelyinnovative in regards to the organization of meaning. It adds meaningful structure

15 As Baker (2003: 15, fn. 3) points out, the attempt to ‘externally ground’ the tripartite Noun/Verb/Adjective distinction in a THING/ACTION/PROPERTY distinction and pragmatic functions betweenreferring, predicating, and modifying, makes us wonder why there are these three distinctions andfunctions. ‘These “external groundings” look like different labels for the language-internal noun/verb/adjective distinction’. Elsewhere (p. 293) he points out that ‘what we really mean by a thing is “whatever canbe referred to by a noun” ’. Our crucial departure from Baker is that, for him (Baker, 2003: 15), referring issomething inherent in nouns just as predicating is inherent in verbs. He is in this sense a lexicalist aboutwhat we consider inherently grammatical functions, and which we think nothing in the organization of themental lexicon as described above predicts. The organization of meaning at the level of the lexicon as wellas the parts of speech have different functions. On the other hand, in an interesting passage Baker agrees‘with the medieval grammarians ( . . . ) and with Langacker (1987): the lexical category distinctionscorrespond not so much to ontological distinctions in the kinds of things that are out there in the world,but rather to the different perspectives we can take on those things, the different ways that our linguisticcapacities give us of describing them’ (p. 294), with the slight qualification that we would like to replace theword ‘describing’ in the end by ‘referring to’.


rather than recapitulating one that is already given, or else merely messing it up in anarbitrary way.

The same conclusion follows from the consideration that the terms ‘argument’ and‘predicate’ are relational or correlative ones. Something can only be an argument ifthere is a predicate of which it is an argument, and vice versa. This is not clearly trueof either the distinction between nouns and verbs or between objects and events.Thus, in a metaphysical ontology, ontological categories might simply be listed, inwhich case they are not relational and co-dependent.16 The same applies to nounsand verbs, if claims are true that some languages have word classes of nouns but notof verbs (e.g. Tongan: Broschart, 1997) or of verbs but not of nouns (Cayuga:Helmbrecht, 2005). If so, there can be arguments and predicates without any neces-sary reflection of this distinction in an either semantically, morpholexically, ormorphosyntactically based classification of lexical items. As Himmelmann (2005:87) points out:

it is widely agreed that the members of the major lexical categories NOUN and VERB haveprototypical discourse (or pragmatic) functions, i.e. reference and predication, respectively. Itis also widely, if not unanimously, agreed that these major discourse functions are universal inthe sense that all languages have to provide means for performing these functions. However, itwould be wrong to conclude from these two widely held views that the distinction between thetwo word classes noun and verb is also universal [our emphasis]. That is, from the fact that alllanguages have to provide means for performing the acts of reference and predication it doesnot follow that the linguistic units used as referring and predicating expressions are formallydistinguishable (in terms of phonological, morphological or syntactic properties). And even ifone were to grant that in most, if not all languages referring expressions in some way can bedistinguished from predicating expressions with regard to at least one formal property, it doesnot necessarily follow that such formal differences are found on the lexical level. It is very wellpossible that one may distinguish between referring phrases (marked, for example, by somekind of article) and predicating phrases (which may be unmarked or have a specific marker oftheir own) without being able to claim that the content words of the language fall into twoclasses with regard to their propensity to occur in one or the other phrase type.

Tagalog arguably illustrates how a language may set up its basic grammaticalfunctions without any distinction among content words in regards to the syntacticpositions they can occur in: reference and predication—the relational core of gram-mar and the essence of its significative function—arise without a classification ofwords into nouns and verbs. In Tagalog this applies, as Himmelmann argues, morespecifically to four of the major grammatical functions of words: predicate, subject,non-subject argument or adjunct, and modifier. That a word or phrase performsany one of these functions is not predictable either semantically (on the basis of

16 Some ontological categories, however, are commonly recognized to form relations of ontologicaldependence with other categories (Fine, 1995).


notional-ontological class of the head involved), morpholexically, or morphosyntac-tically. This is expressed as:

The syntactic uniformity claim for Tagalog:‘All content words may occur, without further derivation or conversion, in the same kind ofphrase-structural positions.’ (Himmelmann, 2007; for an older tradition supporting variousversions of the same claim, see e.g. Müller, 1882: 99 ff., Bloomfield, 1917; Lemaréchal, 1989; Gil,1993; Naylor, 1995).

For example, content words that can semantically (notionally-ontologically) beclassed as actions and that are fully inflected for voice and mood can occur in allthe positions where, in English, one would expect a noun to occur, for example as thecomplement of the specific article ang in (19), or with quantifiers such as theexistential quantifier may as in (20) (from Himmelmann, 2007:266):17

(19) iuuwi nya ang àalagaani-RED1-uwí' niyá ang RED1-alaga'-anCV-RED1-returned_home 3.SG.POSS SPEC RED1-cared_for-LVnyaniyá3.SG.POSS‘He would return the ones he was going to care for.’

(20) may ipàpakita ako sa iyomay i-RED1-pa -kita akó sa iyoEXIST CV-RED1-CAUS-visible 1.SG LOC 2.SG.DAT‘I have something to show you.’ ‘There are things to be shown.’

At the same time, Tagalog roots arguably do form classes defined by morpholexicalcriteria—a classification which is neither reflected in what grammatical functions aparticular word takes up nor in the ontological classes into which un-affixed uses ofthe roots in question fall (such as action/object). Himmelmann (2007) calls onesuch class ‘V-words’, where V stands for ‘voice’-markers with which the relevantroots occur. V-verbs may denote the actual performance of an action, which heargues roots cannot do, yielding an interesting insight into the nature of grammatical

17 Abbreviations:CAUS causativeCV conveyance voiceDAT dativeLOC locativeLV locative voicePOSS possessiveRED reduplication (numbers indicate different formal types of reduplication)SPEC specific article


meaning. While this makes V-words similar to English verbs in some respects,Himmelmann stresses that they are crucially different in others. In particular, theclassification of an English word as a verb constraints its morphosyntactic behaviour,i.e. its position in the phrase-structure tree. But a Tagalog V-word can, like all othercontent words in this language, occur in any position, picking up a grammaticalfunction accordingly, in line with Syntactic Uniformity.

If so, definitions of parts of speech—such as ‘V-word’ or ‘verb’—will always and tosome extent be language-specific: for they necessarily depend on the formal resourcesof a language, and these resources will typically differ. So different languages will havedifferent morpholexical and morphosyntactic classes. These are defined by variousontological, morpholexical, and morphosyntactic criteria to different degrees,yielding word classes of various overlapping sorts. Does that create a problem for auniversal grammarian? Not if we set our sights on the grammatical functions andrelations that hold, in particular languages, between the words that fall into suchclasses. As long as it is agreed that what basic grammatical functions and relationsthere are (such as reference, predication, and modification) is not affected by whatword classes there are, and that they are universal, such cross-linguistic variation inthe parts of speech systems does not create a problem for our view. On the contrary,it enhances the conclusion that grammar is more than an ‘expansion of the lexicon’.It is the relational and referential character of grammar that is of the essence in thereformatting of cognition that we are investigating here. The functions and relationsin question, and the new cognitive format they describe, may be partially independ-ent of morphology, but they are not merely semantically given: they only arise ingrammatical configurations, and are grammatical in this sense. They cannot bepredicted from or are determined by what kinds of words there are. Thus, performingthe referential function is not the same as being a noun, though nouns can performthis function, as can adjectives, in relevant configurations. Performing the predicativefunction is not the same as being a verb, though verbs tend to function as predicates;and performing the modificational function is not the same as being an adjective.

This stance makes some of Croft’s observations in the long quote above completelypredictable: it explains without further ado why ‘clause-type’ syntactic objects canfunction as both modifiers and arguments. Similarly, it explains why the lexical-semantic status of a root such as √explode does not determine an ontology, allowingfor both verbal (explode) or nominal (explosion) uses. The way Croft puts this fact isby saying that ‘actions and qualities can be nouns (explosion, length) and as such,function as arguments in a clause (The explosion reverberated through the valley)’.But there is no necessary correlation—not cross-linguistically, or even in English—between the grammatical function ‘argument’ and the word-class ‘Noun’. If anaction-root is grammaticalized as a noun, this does not mean that an action canbe a noun: for when we grammaticalize the root √explode as the noun explosion,ontology changes: we refer to it as if to an object. The way in which we refer to this


root differs when we say (The bomb) exploded and The explosion (happened). What isdifferent in these two acts of reference is not lexical content but grammaticalperspective: whether we take the referent in view as something that happened atsome point prior to the point of speech, or whether it is an object that can as such bereferred to without any signification of it as an event.

If we connect ontology to what we refer, an object or an event, there is therefore nopartial mismatch between formal-ontological and grammatical category, indicatingan imperfection, but rather a perfect match. Similarly, the fact that adjectives andnouns can be predicates entails no such mismatch, contrary to Croft’s claim that‘both objects and properties can be predicated’. If we look at a sentence like She is astudent, the fact is not that an ‘object is predicated’, which in our terms is non-sensical, but that, grammatically, there is a predicate here, like in any sentence, which,like any other sentential predicate, expresses (in ontological terms) a property(namely, being a student). As it happens, the syntactic constituent playing thisgrammatical functional role on this occasion can also function referentially onother occasions (as in A student came in). The same phrase can thus be bothreferential and predicative, depending on which grammatical relations hold betweenparts of speech involved. In short, if ‘nominal’ stops to mean ‘refers to an object’,which rather is a grammatical function, there is nomismatch when the nominal doesnot refer to an object but to a property. For in that case, its grammatical function isthat of predicate, and its semantics is in accordance with that. A mismatch only arisesby misidentifying the relevant notion of meaning as a lexical one, when it must begrammatical. Analogous observations apply to the alleged mismatch leading Croft tothe assertion that ‘both objects and actions can function as modifiers’.

The problem that forms the starting point of most attempts to define the parts ofspeech (Bisang, 2011), then, arguably does not exist. It arises from a blind spot withregards to how grammar itself organizes semantic information: there is an abstractsemantics that goes with grammatical classifications of words and the relations inwhich these stand. One cannot, therefore, relegate semantics to an autonomousrealm of ‘conceptual structure’ as in Jackendoff (2002), which cannot by its natureand definition capture the reformatting that concepts undergo when they becomeparts of speech, and when parts of speech enter grammatical relations. The result ofthis reformatting is what we are calling grammatical semantics here. A systematicand determinate formal ontology of reference is the most crucial aspect of thissemantics, and there are no mismatches between ontology and grammar if thepresent perspective is adopted. Since reference and truth is of the essence of thoughtas viewed in the philosophical tradition for several thousands of years, our claim thatthought with such properties is of its essence grammatical, begins to make sense.

In the last section of this chapter we will see how the Modistic account of the partsof speech anticipates many of these conclusions and is directly woven into an accountof grammar as having a crucial epistemological function that nothing else can


substitute: it is a mode of cognizing the world that is not available non-grammat-ically. This element is manifestly missing in Croft’s account of the origin of grammaras arising from the verbalization of experience, and points us to a conclusion that weargue any philosophy of grammar should move to centre-stage.

2.6 The modes of signifying reloaded

According to Bursill-Hall (1971: 102), the Modists were well-aware that ‘syntax isbased on the relations between words’ (our emphasis), yet they insisted—probablymore than cross-linguistic data such as the above warrant—that such syntacticrelationships can be expressed only by means of the properties of words viewed asparts of speech, characterized by particular modes of signifying. Thesemodi organizemeaning at the word level—they are an ens rationis simplex—whereas sentencescrucially are complex entities, and therefore a theory of words yields no theory of thesentence. This is consistent with the above, as is their insight that, as Bursill-Hall(1971: 103) puts it, ‘notional meaning is not enough’: ‘if a grammatical system is to beset up in terms of meaning, it has to be done in terms of syntactic meaning, not root(or primary) meaning’ (p. 103). In other words, the parts of speech cannot be definedin terms of conceptual or lexical content. Indeed, as noted, the Modists also sawclearly that ‘semantic content’ in the contemporary philosophical sense cannot be ofany interest to the grammarian. The intellect, for the Modists, is a ‘passive’ power,indeterminate in itself. In the process of mentally representing reality, language doesnot enter, and the same applies to the external and metaphysical properties of the res(thing) of which such an organism forms conceptions. By contrast to the passivity ofthe intellect, grammatical meaning—our understanding of the external res as it isexpressed in speech—is an active and dynamic process. It changes the passiverelations in which we stand to reality when we are causally exposed to it.

Speech reflecting this mode of cognition requires a physical medium, say the voice(vox), which signifies the thing (res). But it is only when speech (dictio) is organizedinto parts of speech (partes orationis) by means of modes of signifying that it comesto reflect the understanding of reality in a form that is expressed in language. At thisstage, words never merely signify an external content. They always also ‘con-signify’ aproperty of the referent, like its number or Tense. Con-signified meaning can bedifferent when both the voice and signification (what is signified) are the same orsimilar, as in the examples of dolor (pain) and doleo (I feel pain) and dolenter(painful), or of currere (to run) and cursus (run), which have the same primary(notional) meaning but reflect different modes of signifying (cursus is used to referper modum permanentis, while currere is used per modum fluxus). This is clearly nota difference in their perceptual features, and indeed the external reality (perceived ornot) can be exactly the same, no matter whether we refer to it using the word dolor or


the word doleo. Nonetheless there is a clear difference in meaning, and this differencegoes with grammar.

Simplifying the Modistic theory greatly, we can say that nouns con-signify stability,permanence, and substance (modus substantiae seu entis), whereas verbs con-signifybecoming (modus esse et fieri) (Bursill-Hall, 1971: 117). Othermodi distinguish betweensubclasses of nominals, such as nouns and pronouns, or verbs and participles. Theformer pair share the ‘static’ mode of con-signifying, but we obtain pronouns fromnouns by dropping the feature of ‘determinate understanding’ (modus apprehensionisdeterminatae): by referring to a thing with a pronoun, we do not so much refer to it ashaving some particular descriptive property (apart from the ç–features of the pro-nouns, in contemporary terms), but simply as an object. For some of the Modists, andSiger de Courtrai in particular (Bursill-Hall, 1971: 121), but interestingly not all ofthem, all parts of speech were also rigorously ordered in mereological relations, ratherthan merely forming an arbitrary assorted set. As a consequence they stand inrelations of presupposition, with e.g. verbs presupposing nouns (see similarlyKayne, 2011), and we obtain one part from another by adding relevant features,preserving all previous ones. In terms of the phasal architecture that we will describein the next chapter, nominals are ‘first phase’ denotations, which are presupposed asparts in ‘second phase’ denotations, i.e. the verbal phase (see p. 104 below).

We take over from the Modists the insight that the meaning difference that ariseswhen the same precategorial root appears with different categories, does not have todo with perceptual features, semantic content, or external reality as such. For, again,external reality can be exactly the same whether we use doleo or dolor, and perceptioncannot distinguish between these. Neither is the ‘permanence’ of the latter properlycharacterized as an aspect of its semantic content: how long the pain lasts makes noprediction whatsoever in regards to the question of whether the noun or the verb willbe used. An explosion may last a millisecond, a minute, or an hour, but that makes nodifference to whether we say The bomb exploded or refer to The explosion of the bomb.There are events (such as subliminal perception) which do not last long enough tocross the threshold of consciousness, yet when we refer to one such event, it can bepermanently available as that object of nominal reference. By contrast, we canonly use a verb in relation to a speech event, and when we say The bomb explodes,it is ipso facto said to do so at the very time that the speech act takes place, and inan unbounded (non-telic) fashion. Yet again this is not predicted by any inherentfeatures of the event as such, and says nothing about how permanent or non-permanent it is. A verb used as a grammatical predicate can depict a change ofstate such as blush, which is fast, or a change of state such as decay, which can be veryslow (such as the decay of uranium), or indeed be a state, which never changes at all,according to some, such as God lives. None of these features, which are distinctions ofconceptual content rather than grammar, make any difference whatsoever to thestatus of any of these words as verbs or as predicates.


Just as grammatical distinctions of the kind just illustrated need not make anydifference to the perceptual features of the external event or be reflected in them,differences in the formal ontology of objects need not make any such differenceeither. We may have a stain of wine on our shirt, yet this makes no predictions aboutwhether we will refer to it as a stain, this Bordeaux, a glass of Bordeaux, or wine.However, once we refer to it grammatically as this glass of wine on your shirt, we arenecessarily bound by the mereological structure that the choice of part of speech andits internal organization induces: a glass of wine is, necessarily, also wine (or involvesthis substance), while this is evidently not true the other way around.

By the time we have reached the parts of speech, therefore, truth does not anymore reflect what causally affects us (either internally or externally). It reflects, rather,how we grammaticalize reality. If parts of speech are ordered in part-whole relations,and aspectual distinctions and analogous distinctions in the noun reflect mereologi-cal relations, then to grammaticalize reality is to mereologize it—again, not merely inthought or in our concepts, but crucially in the ways that we refer to and make claimsof truth about it, using words. This is a process that is not merely ‘active’ in theModistic sense, but creative: it doesn’t passively reflect properties that the experien-tial world independently has. In adding a systematic ontology that yields a mereo-logical structure for its elements, grammar sets a perspective on what we perceive,rather than adding more perceptual features or conceptual ones. This perspectivedoes not reflect reality but gives it a different format: the way it appears to us when wethink and know it. Perspectives are not to be found in reality. They are what realitybecomes when it is known.

The difference between the Modistic account, which gives grammar an epistemo-logical significance, and Croft’s functionalist account, now becomes stark. If any-thing, on Croft’s account, grammar destabilizes a proper functioning of language inthe representation of knowledge, by letting different lexical semantic classes performany given propositional act function, and reference and predication in particular.This, the claim was, induces mismatches, like when dog, belonging to the lexicalsemantic class object, functions as a modifier as in a doglike creature, which onlyproperty words are meant to do. The puzzle disappears when we credit grammarrather than the lexicon with setting the formal ontology of reference. ‘Modifier’ is agrammatical relation, not a morphological or semantic category. Where a contentword such as dog functions as a modifier, we do not construe its denotation as anentity (we do not refer per modum entis), nor do we simply refer to it as a property (aswe would in saying something about doglikeness). Indeed, doglike is not in a referen-tial position at all, but adds a further predicate to a referent determined by a givenhead noun, a grammatical fact that the morphology marks by making it an adjective.

Grammar and formal ontology thus move hand in hand, and it is descriptivelyincorrect to say that a word such as dog, by belonging to a particular lexical semantic


class, can perform the role of a predicate: it cannot, unless it becomes an adjective orverb. How, Thomas of Erfurt asks, is liber philosophiae (book of philosophy) differentfrom liber philosophicus (philosophical book) (Covington, 2009: 37)? Why doesgrammar distinguish these, given that the significatum (semantic content) seems tobe identical? Because, in the second case, we do not think of philosophy as a distinctand separate entity from the book, but rather as an attribute: the mode of signifyingchanges. This change does not track any change in external reality or content. Whatpartially ‘corrects’ for mismatches induced by grammar for Croft, by contrast, isprecisely said to be the ‘nature of reality’. Despite the fact that on his account anylexical semantic class can be used to perform any propositional act function,

the nature of reality makes one lexical semantic class a better fit for each propositional actfunction than others. The nature of reality is that entities in the world differ as to theirtemporal duration, their stability over time, and their relationality. This reality leads certaintypes of entities to be more likely to be used for certain propositional act functions in the act ofcommunication (Croft 1991: 123). Objects are more lasting, more stable, and non-relational,and hence are best suited for reference. Actions are transitory, involve change over time, andare relational, and hence are best suited for predication. Properties are lasting and stable, butrelational, and hence are best suited for modification. ( . . . ) The facts of reality, and the waythey guide speaker choices, are manifested in the typologically unmarked grammar of theprototypical nouns, verbs and adjectives. (Croft, 2007: 368)

However, as was pointed out above, objects that last only a few milliseconds make forperfect objects of reference, as do all actions when we refer to them throughnominals, a decision that has nothing to do with how long they last. It seems to beprecisely our grammatical ability to use nominals in referential expressions thatstabilizes an object of reference, irrespective of its real-time permanence, makingthis object available for reference and predication over an arbitrary period of time. Inturn, actions such as atomic decay or cosmic expansion are among the most stablephenomena in the universe, more stable than chairs and persons. Yet this makesthem neither less nor more suited for purposes of either reference or predication. It isthus tempting to suspect that the nature of reality precisely imposes no constraints onwhat becomes an ‘object’ of reference and what is predicated of it. Again, this doesnot take the point away that all human languages, in different ways, group perceptualstimuli into equivalence classes of perceptual features, leading to a first layer ofsemantic structure or lexemes, prior to the point where different perspectives onaspects of reality that are so selected become possible through a grammaticalsystem.18 But that the match between grammar and ontology becomes perfect the

18 According to Davidson (1984) and Neo-Davidsonian semanticists (Pietroski, 2005), actions areobjects/individuals, and verbs are predicates of such objects. This is taken to be a lexical fact true ofverbs. However, a predicate such as explodes becomes an object of reference (rather than a predicate)precisely when we refer to it with a nominal such as explosion or the exploding of the bomb. This fact does


moment that we accord grammar the function of reference under a perspective, andhence the generation of a formal ontology, is in itself an argument for the view thatgrammar has this very function. Other things being equal, an account of grammarthat has this consequence is to be preferred over an account where grammar inducesmismatches and its epistemological function is unclear.

2.7 Conclusions

In this chapter we have traced back a grammatical mode of signifying to the origins ofmeaning as such in perception, where a rich and largely internally induced semanticsexists long before language arrives. The same applies to computational systems in thebrains of insects, birds, and mammals with which such animals perform on tasks thatrequire the computations of values for variables in such a way that a homomorphismexists between the internal computations and the perceived structure of externalreality. All of this is long before animals obtain internal address systems (roots) fortheir representations of environmental features, which can be used to symbolicallyrefer to the world.

From the point that they do, tapping into the ‘concepts’ of non-verbal animalsconfronts us with considerable methodological obstacles. However we may overcomethese, a distinction between the ‘concepts’ expressed as lexemes and whatever‘concepts’ may exist without these seems appropriate, with the possibility of anextensionality-intensionality distinction as a marked dividing line between the two.The moment that lexical semantic classes defined by perceptual features obtain agrammatical layer of structure, or grammatical words form, the organization ofmeaning changes again, crucially without any new perceptual features being addedto their content: it would make no sense to add an ‘object’-feature to the lexeme run,when we decide to use it to refer to an object (the great North run) as opposed to anaction, as in run fast. Grammar does here not add more content but a new mode ofcognizing, in which a structured formal ontology emerges with the modes of refer-ence that grammar provides us with. It yields perspectives on a reality alreadyperceptually analysed, which are themselves not a part of this reality, but correspondto the specific grammatical way in which it is known by us. We give credit to theModists for exactly this point.

The availability of these perspectives appears to be universal, while morphologic-ally defined classes of lexical items with which particular languages implement them,

not entail that actions (or events) are objects before we have grammatical means of referring to them assuch. Indeed, nouns need not denote objects either when they are used as predicates or parts of predicates.Ontology is not fixed at a lexical level, and Neo-Davidsonianism mixes up grammatical functions(including those encoded in the parts of speech) and lexical semantic classes.


do not appear to be. In this sense, we cannot build a theory of grammar on a theory ofthe parts of speech, as the Modists proposed. We have to do it the other way around:building a theory of the parts of speech, where they exist in language, from a theory ofgrammar and the relational structures it provides within its configurations. We thusdevote the next chapter to an account of the relations in which such parts stand whenthey occur in a sentence, with a view to reconstructing the recursive nature oflanguage on this novel basis.


3

The content of grammar

3.1 Grammar as relational

The previous chapter dealt with the imposition of a first grammatical layer on words,which thereby become ‘parts of speech’. The emergence of part of speech distinctionscannot be the key to grammar, however. An adjective (e.g. ‘male’) may function as apredicate (‘[is] male’), but need not do so (‘the male and the female’). A verb (e.g.‘fly’) can be a predicate (‘flies’), but need not be (‘Flying is beautiful’). A nominal like‘a man’ can be used to refer to an object, but can be a predicate (‘[is] a man’),resulting in a truth value when applied to a subject, much as a predicate realizedthrough an adjective or verb. Predication, therefore, is a grammatical categoryindependent of the parts of speech, though it can be realized by them. A verb isalso statistically more often a predicate than a nominal, but this does not show thatthe notion of ‘predicate’ can be defined as a ‘verb’, or as ‘either an adjective or a verb’,or as ‘either an adjective or a verb or sometimes a noun’. On the contrary, under-standing what an adjective or verb is will in part involve understanding whatgrammatical roles they play in relation to other parts of speech. ‘Predicate’, weargue, is a term indicating a grammatical relation or function, and it cannot beaccounted for by any morpholexical distinctions.

We stress that, in what follows, we will use the term ‘predication’ in a purelygrammatical sense, not a broader logical one: namely, to denote the sententialpredicate that is applied to a sentential subject, as ‘flies’ is applied to ‘Socrates’ in‘Socrates flies’, yielding a truth value as a result. In this sense of predication, asentence only ever has one predicate (which again can be realized through differentparts of speech, with language-specific differences in which parts of speech can playwhich roles), exactly as it only ever has one truth value. In the phrase kill Bill, the verb‘kill’ is also predicated of the internal argument ‘Bill’, but the result is crucially not atruth value: a verb phrase is not evaluated for truth, in the way a sentence is.

Predication, in this sense of a grammatical relation between the subject andpredicate of a sentence, is not a part of speech: it relates different parts of speechplaying distinct grammatical roles, and hence is not present in either of them.Predication in this sense is not found in morphology, let alone the lexicon. In

morphology, as Di Sciullo (2005) points out, a complex word can, say, encodethematic structure (bank-robber, shop-lifter, etc.), but neither predication, nor quan-tification, reference, and truth can be found within a single word, encoded in itsinternal structure. Relatedly, a sentence is not a part of speech, although clauses canbe arguments, a different matter, and although the temptation has arisen to turn thesentence into a part of speech, say an ‘inflectional’ or ‘extended’ projection of theverb. Of course, predication is not a lexical concept either. There is a word ‘predica-tion’, which we can use to refer to the topic under discussion, namely predication: butthis topic is the grammatical relation of predication, not a lexical concept.

This chapter, then, is about the transition from parts of speech to grammar proper,which is a far better candidate for a genuine invariance in the species than morph-ology-based distinctions. But what is grammar, so that it can be invariant? To answerthis question, we will ask about its content. What is the ‘content of grammar’, asdistinct from the content encoded in lexical concepts or parts of speech distinctions?To explain this question, consider how one might answer it after looking at acontemporary textbook on Minimalist syntax. The content of grammar, one wouldthen conclude, consists of a ‘computational system’ made up of the following:

A. The local relation of (recursive) Merge, where Merge(A,B) = {A,B} and A can becontained in B or vice versa.

B. The long-distance relation Agree.

C. Constraints on computation.

D. Interface constraints.

(A) gives an arguably minimal account of the combinatoriality of language. (B)accounts for the fact that elements in a grammar can enter long-distance relationswith other such elements elsewhere in a given structure. (C) prominently includesprinciples of computational efficiency that are argued in Minimalism to be expectedto be operative in any well-designed computational system in nature, and to beindeed factually operative in language (Chomsky, 1995). (D) encodes the assumptionthat what computations take place is constrained by demands imposed by interfacingperformance systems in the mind that access the computational system.

As we would conclude from this list, the content of grammar is purely formal.Merge in particular, as noted, is a generic operation that will not tell us anythingabout what is specific to language. Language-specific content will thus rather comefrom what Merge applies to or from what enters Agree relations: lexical features, saidto make up lexical items, which are conceived as sets of such features in standardMinimalism. These features are morphologically visible in language-specific ways, forexample in the form of Case and ç-features (Person, Number, Gender), which aretaken to play a crucial role in driving the grammatical derivation forward in thisframework. But some of these features, too, in some or all of their occurrences, are


commonly taken to be ‘uninterpretable’, and grammar is said to be designed so as to‘check’ and eliminate them through Agree and Merge, before the semantic compon-ent is accessed which is said not to be able to ‘read’ them. Constraints on computa-tion (C), finally, are commonly regarded as ‘third factor’ conditions: constraints notdue to either experience or UG (Chomsky, 2005). Hence they aren’t language-specificand certainly not semantic in nature either. In short, interpretable content andlanguage-specific information comes either from the lexicon or the interfaces—it isexternal to grammar, and grammar is completely content-free.

Feature-specifications in the lexicon, however, do not seem the right placeto account for grammaticality. Moreover, a theory is lacking of which ‘features’the lexicon contains or fails to contain. Against the above picture, therefore, andconsistent with Boeckx’s (2010; 2012) critique of the role of features in Minimalistsyntax, we will argue in this chapter against a lexico-centric focus in the theoryof grammar, and the implicit contention in Minimalism that grammar is not—ornot directly—involved in the generation of content. Note that if semantics isdistinguished from syntax as ‘content’ is from ‘form’, we may expect that theprogramme of a universal grammar will become harder to formulate, not easier.This is because semantics is commonly regarded—in typology as well as (andessentially uncontroversially) in the philosophy of language, where language-specificvariation in general is barely discussed—as the invariant part of the organization ofhuman language. So if semantics is independent of syntax in the way that content isof form, then we have no particular reason to expect invariance in syntax: for syntaxwill now be arbitrary and ungrounded in semantics. Why should such an arbitrarysystem be invariant? It would seem like an unmotivated evolutionary accident (seealso Christiansen and Chater, 2008). We could maximize the explanatory force ofthird factor conditions, so as to make the syntactic system less arbitrary, but this, asnoted, will not lead to insight specific to language, and will divorce us from thefunctions of language.

The field of comparative syntax has sought to model variation in syntax through asystem of (arbitrary) ‘Principles and Parameters’, but as we will discuss in Chapter 5,this programme faces significant challenges today (Newmeyer, 2005; Boeckx, 2011),which has resulted in the suggestion to shift the locus of variation solely to the lexiconand morphophonology (Berwick and Chomsky, 2011). Yet, the claim that the essenceof universal syntax is recursion or hierarchical organization (or A and perhapsC above) is too weak to be an inroad into the language-specific content of grammar;and it also leaves the principles of semantic content unaddressed, giving grammar nointrinsic semantic rationale and semantics no intrinsic grammatical rationale.

A foundational—even if initially maybe unsurprising—claim in what follows willbe that the content of grammar is essentially relational. If grammar is relational, itscontent cannot be accounted for by any content that is intrinsic to any word or‘concept’. Indeed, we stress throughout this book that how words function is—apart

3. The content of grammar 77

from their substantive lexical content or the concept they encode—itself a matterof what grammatical relations they enter into: these change how a given wordsignifies. Grammar is about relations between words, and about what novel contentarises from this: this is grammatical meaning, in our sense. We claim that this contentcannot be reconstructed from the contents of words. It does not reside in ‘features’,e.g. ‘Person’, or ‘ACC’ (for Accusative) either. Instead, theoretical descriptive termsof traditional grammar such as ‘Person’ or ‘Case’ refer to grammatical relations ordependencies into which nominal arguments enter. These hold in the case of Personbetween determiner phrases (DPs) and T/C in the left periphery of the clause,and they show up on the surface of languages as a morphological feature markedon (pro-)nouns, verbs, both, or neither. Similarly, we will argue in Chapter 6 that‘ACC’ is a morphological feature that, where it exists in a language, encodes syntac-tic dependencies between v and an argument DP. The dependencies are part ofgrammar; the feature itself is not. Grammar appears to contain no uninterpretablefeatures at all (cf. also Sigurðsson, 2009; 2012; Kayne, 2008). Consider an example. Itmakes no difference to the interpretation of German (1) that the 1st Person singular isalso marked on the verb, which it isn’t in its English translation (‘I go’):

(1) Ich geh-eI go-1p

Hence the Person feature on the verb might be said to be ‘uninterpreted’. However, ifgrammar is relational and what is interpreted is not words or features but relations, itmakes perfect sense for there to be a relation of ‘Person’ expressing that a givenreferent (a person) carrying a certain theta-role is the subject of a given sententialpredicate, resulting in a proposition involving an event, whose only participant is alsothe speaker in the speech event, and hence the one asserting the proposition that thisevent obtains. This (highly complex) relation holding between the DP in subjectposition and the verbal predicate then shows up in the form of morphologicalfeatures on the subject, the predicate, both, or neither, in language-specific waysthat make no difference to the interpretation just depicted. While there can be noquestion that Person, as a relation, is interpretable, the same question, however, arisesfor other syntactic dependencies such as Case-relations, where, as we shall see inChapter 6, the answer is more complex.

A long tradition resists the contention that the content of grammar is relationaland that it cannot be accounted for in terms of the contents of words. For example, ifthe relations in question are denoted by (or the ‘referents’ of ) words, as has beenwidely assumed since Russell (1903), all content can be reconstructed lexically, and nocontent needs to be grammatical—if there are relational aspects of grammar thatmatter to meaning, there are lexical items to denote them. They exhibit theserelational aspects as part of their meaning. For example, instead of saying that


‘being a predicate of a subject’ is a grammatical relation, we could say that this is anintrinsic property of certain lexical items, say verbs, or even certain ‘concepts’, sayblue.

We think this is a mistake and will rather follow Frege in this regard, who, as wewill argue, did importantly not hold such a lexicalist view. He rightly saw that termsdenoting the grammatical functioning of a given word, and associated formal-onto-logical distinctions in their denotation, co-vary with grammar and its intrinsic modesof signification.1 In particular, the distinction between ‘object’ and ‘concept’ is, atheart, a grammatical one—part of the intrinsic content of grammar—not a meta-physical one. It arises on occasions of language use, where acts of reference areconfigured. We develop this claim in Section 3.2, which contains our basic case forgrammar having a content of its own.

Even Frege himself, however, sticks to a word-based conception of semantics, ashis puzzlement about so-called identity sentences (and intensionality more generally)illustrates. Thus, (2) is supposed to have the logical form ‘a = b’, where ‘a’ and ‘b’ arenames, whose referent is an object:

(2) Hesperus is Phosphorus.

If the content of such a sentence is ‘composed’ of the meanings of its parts (ultim-ately, words), then of course the content should be the same as that of ‘Hesperus isHesperus’—which it intuitively isn’t. Hence the puzzle that Frege’s theory of‘senses’—which are equally word-based as well as non-linguistic entities—wasmeant to solve. But the puzzle disappears if what a word contributes to the meaningof a sentence is its grammatical meaning as well, not merely its lexical meaning: inparticular, whether it functions as a predicate or subject, properties that make therelation of the two nominals in a clause always and necessarily asymmetric (seeMoro, 1997; and Woodard, in preparation).

If the content of grammar cannot be reconstructed lexically, or by somehowputting together (‘composing’) the intrinsic contents that the lexical items havethat it contains, the standard claim that meaning in language is ‘compositional’ hasto be qualified, and we turn to this issue in Section 3.3. In essence, the principle ofcompositionality as standardly viewed deprives grammar of a content again, at thecost of having to misinterpret it as lexical: for compositional meaning is ultimatelysolely word-based again. But neither reference, predication, nor intensionality belongto either lexical or compositional semantics. Section 3.4 revisits another claim, thatthe content of grammar could come from an ‘interface’ with non-linguistic systemsof thought, which of course we are committed to reject here: such systems couldnever interpret the outputs of grammar, if grammar has a content of its own. If

1 In this point we are indebted to Uli Reichard.


grammar is productive of a new kind of meaning—reference in its various forms, wecontend—then the architecture assuming an ‘interface’ is not correct.

The crucial grammatical relations transpire within grammatical templates that wewill here identify with the phases of contemporary Minimalist syntax, reinterpretedin Section 3.5 as the smallest units of grammatical organization and as units of(intentional) reference, which can take a number of different forms in humanlanguage, ordered on a scale. The root meaning (and earliest developmental mani-festation) of this notion of reference we take to be (e.g. index finger) pointing, whichis deictic. By vastly expanding the range of possible reference beyond where our indexfinger can point, grammar becomes a device for ‘extended’ deixis. Its organizationreflects this function. This notion of deictic reference has to be carefully distinguishedfrom a notion of (i) lexical reference or content, which content words and conceptshave intrinsically to their lexical specifications and without mediation by grammar;and (ii) functional reference that we find in other species. Crucially, the invariance ofsuch a system of (extended) deictic reference in the human species is not in doubt,and hence it is a candidate for grounding the invariance that grammar represents.

Finally, this relational reconstruction of grammar is, in Sections 3.5 and 3.6, thebasis of reconstructing the recursivity of grammar, which is a derived notion ratherthan a primitive here (Arsenijević and Hinzen, 2012). This reconstruction will explainwhy grammatical recursion cross-linguistically takes on a specific form and is subjectto restrictions, which we argue current Merge-based accounts of ‘narrow syntax’,which leave the matter to the ‘interfaces’, neither explain nor predict. The restrictionsalso do not seem to be due to lexical specifications of the lexical items merged. Wesuggest that they need to follow from the organization of the grammar itself, or itsintrinsic content, and that they do indeed fall out freely from the phasal dynamics asinterpreted here.

3.2 From parts of speech to the sentence

The sentence, as structured by a predication, is traditionally the core unit of gram-mar. But it has remained unclear how to explain the sentence for many decades. Thetraditional Aristotelian notion of the sentence conceives it as consisting of a subject, apredicate, and a sign of Tense. But generative grammar has resisted regardingputatively ‘semantic’ notions such as subject or predicate as theoretical primitivesof grammatical description, attempting to reduce them to formal notions, and thenotion of sentence has not fared better. This is manifest in how early generativegrammar in the era of Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) registers the puzzle that thesentence causes in a rule such as (3), where the category ‘S’, unlike the ‘lexical’categories N or V, stands in no inherent relation to the categories of its parts. Neitherthe noun nor the verb ‘projects’:


(3) S!NP VP

While stipulative, this rule brings out the fact that a sentence is not a part of speech,or projected from the lexicon. This same insight is later brought out in Moro’s (1997;2000) configurational analysis of predication, which maintains that ‘all and only baresmall clauses instantiate predicative linking’ (Moro, 2000: 71), where the form of sucha Small Clause is as in (4), where X and Y are categories and XP and YP are theirrespective maximal projections, none of which projects further or lends its label tothe structure as a whole:

(4) [SC XP YP]

If predication is not lexical, it should have no label within PSG. On this view, nopredicative linking exists where a head takes a complement (5), or a head combineswith another head (6)2:

(5) [X YP]

(6) [X Y]

Moro’s hypothesis is highly restrictive: it gives us a specific grammatical correlateof predication, before one element of the Small Clause moves out of it and a sentence-level predication is generated. If Moro is right, we may therefore conclude thatpredication does indeed have a grammatical signature to it.3 We might as wellconclude that predication is the relation that is realized in the [XP YP] configuration,since no other system appears to exhibit a similarly specific signature for this relation.Logic, in particular, presupposes a classification of primitive symbols into terms andpredicates in its lexicon. Thus, in a logic class on first order predicate logic, a studentmight be given a sentence like ‘Socrates flies’. He is then told to look for the argumentand the predicate. The sentence is viewed as containing two lexical items. As long asproper names are regarded as referential, the choice is clear: ‘Socrates’ is the argu-ment and ‘flies’ is the predicate. So the ‘logical form’ isflies (Socrates). The lexicalentries for these two words tell us that Socrates is mapped to an object,flies to a setor property. This approach not only takes predication for granted, but it misinter-prets it as lexical: as the denotation of a designated set of lexical items. This is thelogical version of the lexicalist misunderstanding of parts of speech distinctions:‘predicate’ does not mean the same as ‘verb’. No word is a predicate lexically; nor isany part of speech.

2 A form of combination that is the grammatical origin of the noun–verb distinction, hence the parts ofspeech, according to Kayne (2011).

3 Whether Moro’s analysis is ultimately successful in reducing the notion of predication configuration-ally is another question, discussed in Rosselló (2008), who however agrees with the need for a configur-ational analysis.


Moro’s analysis brings out this latter point formally as well: being the predicate in apredicational relation is not an intrinsic property of YP. For YP as such also occurs in,say, (5), where it functions as an argument. YP thus is the predicate in question onlyrelationally, relative to a subject. The same then applies to the notion of subject.Nothing is a subject because of its phrasal status, say as a DP, or its lexical status, sayas a nominal, or its semantic status as being ‘about some object’. Thus, a subject neednot be a DP, it need not be a nominal, and it need not pick out some object: rather, itis a grammatical notion. The same is true again for the logical opposite of predica-tivity, namely referentiality. Referentiality is not a property determined by a phrase inisolation, let alone a lexical item in isolation. ‘Man’ does not refer to any particularman; ‘the man’ can. The former is a lexical item; the latter is not. Even a definitedescription need not be singularly referential. ‘The bus’ can be used to refer to aspecific bus (‘the bus is here’), but it need not be (‘I always take the bus after work’).

The point is reinforced once more, and in a more dramatic way, if we realize thatthe same phrase can play different grammatical roles at different stages of thederivation. Thus, a DP like ‘this man’, looked at in isolation, certainly seems to beboth referential and a paradigmatic argument. But as an argument it is nonethelessinterpreted as a thematic role, which is technically a predicate. Similarly, a CP like‘this is the man’, looked at non-relationally, is referential in the sense of denoting atruth value when asserted. But embedded as an argument, it will act as a predicateapplying to a mental event, as in ‘believes [this is the man]’, and it will not beinterpreted as a truth value.

The combination of a subject with a predicate resulting in a predication with atruth value moreover does not have the nature of either a subject or a predicate, anymore than it is a noun or a verb. This is also what the traditional semantic intuitionsuggests that a YP (e.g. ‘loves Mary’) predicated of an XP (‘John’) denotes neitherwhat X denotes nor what Y denotes, but a truth, which is neither X nor Y and formal-ontologically distinct from either of them. A grammatical relation, then, again,cannot be captured lexically. A predication, rather, has no conceptual-lexical contentat all, and it is no lexical category, in the sense of reflecting processes of categorizationof environmental features.

If so, we would not expect predication to be illuminated by ‘mapping’ such aconfiguration to any kind of external and non-relational and non-grammaticalobject, such as some ‘relation of predication’ (perhaps a set-theoretical construct)or a metaphysical object, such as a state of affairs. In fact, the search for objectual orconceptual correlates for the structural relation in question—for something out therein the world that corresponds to subjects, predicates, grammatical Tense, andsyntactic configurations—will seem misguided.

Such an attempt can be found in Russell’s (1903) attempt to map ontology from theparts of speech rather than grammar: in this framework, ‘substantives’ denoteobjects, adjectives denote properties, and verbs denote relations. For example, in


‘A is different [differs] from B’, the verb denotes the relation of ‘difference’ (Russell,1903, }54). The verb, Russell suggests, accounts for the character of the sentence astruth-evaluable. This leads Russell to consider (and leave unresolved) the immediatepuzzle of why, in a list consisting of A, the relation of difference, and B, no truth valuearises, and of why, in a nominalization such as ‘A’s being different from B’, a verbshould be present and yet evaluability for truth is absent. If predication and truthevaluability is due to a lexical fact, it should be present when the relevant lexical itemis present. This puzzle illustrates the problems of a lexicalist and intrinsicalistapproach, which regards grammatical function as intrinsic to lexical items or phrases.Such an approach, which is maintained throughout much of the history of analyticphilosophy and in formal compositional semantics, is also illustrated in Davidson’s(1967) suggestion to replace the Russellian ‘verb-as-relation’ view with the ‘verb-as-object’ view, where the object in question is said to be an ‘event’. We come back tosemantic compositionality more systematically in the next subsection.

As noted, when X-bar theory replaced PSG, it ‘corrected’ the ‘defect’ noted in (3)by making sentences come out as projections of a lexical inflectional feature after all,namely Inflection/Tense (I/T), with subjects as specifiers of the node that these head.But as we would expect from the above discussion, the X-bar theoretic conception ofthe sentence as a projection of I/T has never seemed particularly illuminating,inviting the suspicion of some contemporary thinkers that perhaps grammaticaltheory should not regard the sentence as an explanandum at all. Pietroski (2011), inparticular, on the basis of a Neo-Davidsonian semantic motivation, suggests that thesentence is not the central organizing principle of grammar, and that notions such assingular reference and truth should be relegated to post-syntactic components.Recent Merge-based syntax has even less to say about the notion of sentence thanPSG or X-bar theory, continuing the traditional tendency and bringing it to a peak: ifwe deplete the structure-building algorithm of any category-specific elements, redu-cing it to recursion, what PSG left out can be accounted for even less.

The insight from (3) and fromMoro that we want to maintain is that predication isnot a relation between a lexical category label and itself: it is not the result ofprojection. It is, rather, a relation between two lexically specified and functionallyfully expanded/projected categories, the combination of which, in the right configur-ation, takes us somewhere else: the grammatical. The question of the content ofgrammar now arises again: What cognitive transition does it mark?With grammar atour disposal, we now can, as Frege famously noted, refer to a given concept (as in ‘theconcept horse’), in which case it will be an object (of reference), and it will then becorrect to say, as Frege famously did, that ‘the concept horse is not a concept’. Butwe can also use it as a predicate (as in ‘Ellie is a horse’ or ‘every horse’), in whichcase it will be a function, in Frege’s terminology. So is ‘horse’ a function or an object?Is ‘Vienna’ an object (a city)? It certainly can be, as in ‘Vienna is a city’, but it neednot, as in ‘Trieste is no Vienna’, where it, in ontological parlance, ‘denotes a property’(the property of being Vienna). So does ‘Vienna’ denote a property, then, as on the


‘predicate’ view of proper names (Burge, 1973)? Does a verb denote a relation, as onRussell’s view, or an object, as on Davidson’s? These questions, we argue, aremeaningless, since they involve a category mistake: questions of denotation areanswered by an analysis of grammatical function on an occasion of language use,not lexical content. Grammar enables the forms of reference in question, dependingon what structures it generates.

A percept lexicalized as a lexeme makes as such no predictions about how it will begrammaticalized—whether it becomes a noun or a verb, a predicate or an argument,etc. Imagine a creature that perceives and can form equivalence classes of perceptualinputs, applying them adaptively. One such class—let us call it water—will beapplied to things that we would call water when it perceives this substance, and inthese moments it will be connected causally to H2O, as a chemical analysis reveals.With another such concept, horse, it will be connected causally to a certain naturalkind, a species. But no such creature need thereby be able to refer to something as asubstance as opposed to an object, say, as we can when we use the bare noun water asopposed to the phrase a drop of water; or to refer to an object as opposed to aproperty, as when using a proper name such as ‘Ellie’ or a referential DP such as ‘thishorse’, as opposed to using a verb phrase predicatively, such as ‘BE a horse’; or to putthe two together to obtain a judgement with a truth value (‘Ellie is a horse’), whichcould be asserted or denied and will reflect the way the world is, if asserted andindeed true. Unlike the question of whether a particular substance we call ‘water’ isindeed H2O, or whether H2O exists, the availability of a system of such formal-ontological distinctions is not a question of material existence or empirical inquiry:we cannot investigate the non-linguistic material world so as to find out. Thequestion of ‘whether there are properties’ out there, along with tables, water, andhorses, cannot be decided by empirical inquiry. Grammar, in inducing such distinc-tions, is foundational for experience, not itself given in experience.

With the notion of truth, a notion of ‘world’ arrives, and the same considerationsapply here. The world, as Wittgenstein (1922) put it in the opening proposition of theTractatus, ‘ist alles, was der Fall ist’ (all that is the case). What is the case is what istrue. But truth requires predication (in the present sense), and thus the sentence(viewed as a grammatical object). It follows logically that there is no ‘world’ withoutthe sentence (though, obviously, there always is an ‘environment’, in which theanimal behaves adaptively in its niche). Whatever a chimpanzee might think,he doesn’t think about ‘the world’ as such, as philosophizing hominins tend to do.The arrival of the sentence, for these reasons, or the transition from a perceptuallyand conceptually given world to one that is grammaticalized, is a truly momentousone. Only in such a world can there be such a thing as a metaphysics, or science.

Nothing we have got so far accounts for this transition. Predication has noconceptual content; there is nothing to visualize it; and it is not a part of speech.We could say that it is ‘purely structural’, but then again it is not, for it is not purelystructural, in the way that a fractal geometric pattern is, say. And it is crucial to the


approach above that any predication has content and is unthinkable without it: apredication at the sentential level gives rise to a unit of structure that can necessar-ily—or ipso facto—be evaluated for truth. A person uttering: ‘John left’, with normalintonation, would be contradicted by someone else replying: ‘That is not true’. Hencehe did assert something as true, even if no lexical concept of truth was used (a pointto which we return in Chapter 9).4 But this means that it will in some sense co-varywith the world: if the world is as the sentence says, then the sentence is ipso facto true.Predication as a grammatical relation therefore comes with content, and indeed withthe most paradigmatic form of content that there is: truth conditional content.Ultimately, any account of predication will have to respect this double constraint:it is structural and relational, and hence not a part of speech or a concept, but it iscontentful, and indeed it has a content that no part of speech has, and no lexical item.

One could, of course, simply abstract from the intrinsic content of grammar—thewhole and vast expansion of the space of meaning that it comes with—and restrictoneself to a ‘formal’ analysis of it. One could talk of grammar solely, say, in terms ofMerge, recursion, uninterpretable features, their elimination under Agree, and local-ity domains. In a similar way, one could analyse a cooking recipe purely formally interms of a computation of symbols embedding others in a hierarchy of steps, perhapsleaving the connection of this analysis to the actual recipe and the ingredients to an‘interface’. Foundational problems in our understanding of semantics may well makesuch a formal treatment of grammar advisable, and they did so in the 1960s, asChomsky (1965) convincingly argued. The increasing importance, however, of theC-I interface in Minimalist grammar leads to more probing questions about itsnature, and the search for a more ‘principled’ explanation of grammar in the senseof Chomsky (2004) leads to the re-emergence of this issue. And as Chomsky (1965)suggested, the formal treatment of grammar at the expense of semantics was nevermeant to be principled or axiomatic: instead, the ‘boundary separating syntax andsemantics (if there is one)’ should ‘remain open until these fields are much betterunderstood’ (Chomsky, 1965: 77, 159).

Ultimately, the formal strategy will only work if the ‘content’ that we locateon the ‘other’ (non-linguistic) side of the interface in question does not itself dependon the ‘form’ that we posit on the linguistic side. It cannot work, if the form

4 A sentence fragment lacking the relation of predication will not be truth bearing in the same sense.A large literature on ‘fragments’ maintains that even sub-sentential units can be evaluated for truth, eitherbecause they contain elided material (Merchant, 2004) or because such material is unneeded (Stainton,2006). Hinzen (2013a) argues that both views can only be maintained by ignoring semantic differencesbetween the fragment and the grammatical structure that would be truth-evaluable. For example, thecontent of ‘Nice shirt!’ is not that of ‘This is a nice shirt’ or ‘You are wearing a nice shirt’, which are bothgrammatically distinct from the fragment in question, and differ in meaning. In particular, they can both beembedded, while the fragment cannot be; and the fragment carries affect, which its propositionalrenderings do not convey. Of course, one can develop notions of meaning that abstract from suchdifferences.


of language is the form of a content that does not exist without language—as ofcourse we argue here. The opposite has been the traditional assumption, wheresemantic content has been taken to be independent of linguistic form—the veryrationale for adding a ‘semantic component’ to grammar that is in charge of contentand generates it via non-grammatical operations such as functional application orpredicate modification (see e.g. Heim and Kratzer, 1998; see also Jackendoff, 2002).Historically, the assumption has been so influential that it is by now firmly institu-tionalized, with philosophers solely focused on ‘content’ to the near-exclusionof syntax (‘form’), while syntacticians are involved with ‘pure form’, leavingsemantics—matters of truth and reference—to the philosophers and logicians.5

Accounting for the content that grammar has in a separate ‘semantic component’seems to be impossible, however, if this content is relational. Suppose we deny this,and we postulate an ontology of ‘properties’ qua entities ‘denoted’ by the relational orpredicative part of a sentence or thought. If there were such entities, then expressionsfunctioning predicatively become ‘names’ of such objects, eliminating the relationalcharacter of predication in the sense above and seemingly solving our problem—allcontent is now intrinsic to the lexical items involved, nothing is relational, andinsofar as meanings are complex and propositional, what puts lexical meaningstogether is nothing in the grammar but composition operations in our semanticcomponent. But, of course, the problem is then not solved, for if one now asks whatthese new ‘objects’—properties—are, the answer is that they are in every respect likeobjects, except in that they do not behave like objects precisely insofar as they behaveas predicates that apply to objects.6

We would then have come full circle: the existence of predicative units in linguisticexpressions led us to postulate a new entity, a property, but in answering the questionwhat kind of ‘object’ this is, the best we could do is to point to the relation ofpredication (or a relation such as ‘instantiation’). Not only is this circular, but thetheoretical advance is purchased at the cost of a well-known paradox known sinceantiquity: If a predicate denotes some kind of object as well, what connects thesubject of the predication to this new object? A new relation is now required, creatingan infinite regress and confirming our initial impression that the objectification ofrelations was a questionable move to begin with.

This is to question a non-linguistic ontology of properties, but this doubt shouldnot be equated with a rejection of ‘realism’ in regards to properties (or traditional so-called ‘universals’). The denial of the existence of properties as referents of predicates

5 Thus treatises in philosophy on the ‘nature and structure of content’ abound (e.g. Fodor, 1990; King,2007), but treatises on ‘form’ are completely absent, illustrating the view that content can or must be treatedindependently of form.

6 The same applies to the attempt to specify the objects in question by saying that one of the objects is‘incomplete’ or ‘unsaturated’ or needs to be ‘applied’ to the other; this is to pinpoint the problemmore thana solution (see further Davidson, 2005).


is not analogous to the rejection of universals or to be equated with ‘nominalism’(which nothing in the present book will support). It is not nominalism to assert, as wejust have, that stipulating an ontology of properties is no advance over understandingpredication. On the contrary: it points to the need to understand grammar insubstantive as opposed to merely formal terms, and to the insight that somethingother than grammar, such as ontology (if regarded as independent of grammar) orsemantics will not solve the problem of predication. Grammar, in short, may itself befoundational, rather than being founded upon something else.

The standard view, of course, is that the most foundational of disciplines aremetaphysics and ontology. Grammar, if motivated at all, would thus only be motiv-ated if founded upon independently given distinctions in these other disciplines.Linguistics also reflects these priorities, for example in its attempt to found part ofspeech distinctions, which we have argued are inherently grammatical, on independ-ent semantic distinctions such as object vs event; or in the rationalist contention thatlinguistic universals, if there are any, must be based on semantics or the universalstructure of thought (Arnauld and Lancelot, 1662; Haspelmath, 2007); or in standardclassifications of inherently grammatical and relational elements such as structural asopposed to ‘inherent’ (= lexical) Case as ‘uninterpretable’ and as to be ‘eliminated’before the interface with the semantic component is reached. Grammar as foundedupon Merge and the need to eliminate such ‘features’ has no inherent motivation orfoundational significance: it solves a problem it has created for itself, through theexistence of purely formal features that need to be eliminated. On this picture thelexicon is inherently motivated, insofar as it interfaces with the semantic componentdirectly. Grammatical representations, on the other hand, have to be ‘cleansed’ beforesuch an interface can be accessed (the problem of grammar, as it were, is grammaritself ).

This architecture makes sense on the assumption of an autonomous syntaxand the independence of thought (C-I systems) from grammar. But it becomesunclear, on this view, why there should be a lexicon–grammar distinction in thefirst place—or why we ever leave the realm of the interpretable, and enter the realm ofthe grammatical. This, of course, might in theory simply be an accident. But on theUn-Cartesian view, grammar yields a formal semantics, and can be given a principledrationale in these terms, explaining why it exists and is distinct from the lexicon. Forthis to work out, grammar must have a content of its own, as we argue here it does.The difference that it makes in relation to the organization of meaning, if there is one,should clearly relate to truth and propositional forms of reference, since these fall onthe grammatical side.

This possibility raises interesting and novel foundational questions. Thus, predica-tion does not seem to have any physical correlates at all. On the linguistic surface, wecan see words functioning as predicates, but we cannot see predication, which is purelyrelational. We can observe the world in its physical structure, but we will not find


predication in it, any more than we will find truth, in the sense of an empirical given oran object of nature. Although the joining of a subject and a predicate presumablyhappens at particular points in time and space when human agents use language, and abrain can clearly perform a predication that involves a grasp of the notion of a truthvalue, no particular part of brain space or brain time is a predication. In line with this,the form of the sentence does not pinpoint any physical correlate of predication.Instead, it presents us with a pattern that is grammatical rather than physical in nature.

But does this pattern really illuminate how, out of it, a truth value emerges? In onesense it doesn’t, except for indicating that the phenomenon does seem to depend on acertain grammatical, i.e. a sentential, configuration, giving it a grammatical signature.But then, is there any other discipline that takes us further? The more we think thephenomenon is grammatical, grammar may well be both the beginning and the endof an answer to the question of the origin and nature of truth, hence be foundationalin a novel fashion. Where a metaphysics arises with grammar, there is no extra-grammatical reality against which we can assess the accuracy of claims aboutgrammar, any more than we can test mathematics through physics. We couldn’tmeaningfully ask, for example, whether relations exist in the world out there (or elsein an abstract, non-physical world). Where relations are grammatical, nothing butgrammar will be the right place to look for them. There will be no independentmetaphysics in which we can ground grammar. We develop this view, thatpredication and hence truth are inherently grammatical, further in the next section,by contrasting it with the approach of semantic compositionality.

3.3 Content from composition?

The basic formula of modern compositional semantics might be put as (7):

(7) Lexical meaning + syntax = propositional meaning.

But doesn’t this express the very message above, or indeed of this book at large,namely that it is grammar that mediates between the lexicon and propositionalmeaning? If so, the framework for addressing these issues is already in placeand we need to look no further. Addressing this objection will help to bring theclaim of this chapter into better focus. The problem, we will now argue, is that howcompositional semantics implements the suggestion formulated in (7) recapitulatesthe original problem, by misidentifying the locus of its solution.

What syntax does on this conception is to assign a part–whole (constituent)structure to an expression. In contemporary syntax, this structure is modelled byMerge, hence through a binary set potentially containing other such sets. Take thesentence (8) and its (vastly simplified) formal generation in (9):


(8) John swims

(9) Merge (John, swims) = {John, swims}

There is nothing in the set {John, swims} that makes it in any way intelligible why themeaning of (8) arises from the independent meanings assigned to ‘John’ and‘swims’—except that we are now told that the meaning of ‘swims’ is such thatwhen combined with the meaning of ‘John’ it yields the meaning of (8). This is notfalse but it is the problem we started with, and compositional semantics is in thissense explanatorily vacuous. There is not necessarily an ontology of ‘properties’ now,of course, but only of ‘semantic values’, but this does not change the basic explana-tory problem. If no independent meaning or ontology of the parts is assumed, on theother hand, and their meanings are taken to be abstracted from the meaning of (8)taken as a whole, the explanatory problem becomes even more obvious: now we aredeprived, in principle, of an explanation of how the meaning of (8) is strictly afunction of its independently meaningful parts (Collins, 2011: ch. 3).

Either way we run into the foundational problem noted above: the distinctionbetween an object and a Fregean ‘concept’, or an object and a property, we argued, isnot an ontological or semantic but a grammatical and relational one. It depends onhow a concept or lexical item grammatically functions, which no concept or word assuch can predict. We have to wait for grammar to rule the matter one way orthe other. There is therefore no semantic value that ‘horse’ as such has and that wecould insert into the compositional computation of grammatical content. And whenit is decided which of these things the word does stand for, this cannot be explainednon-relationally by going back to ontology or semantics and positing someontological or semantic entity that it stands for, in order to then explain whatmeaning results.

This explanatory problem, which compositional semantics faces when added to aformal syntax as an independent component, is general. Zimmermann (2012) givesthe following general account of the practice of compositionality in linguisticsemantics. Given a linguistic expression C, its syntactic construction type ˜ isidentified, of which two immediate constituents A and B are parts (possibly afterchanging C’s surface appearance into what is taken to be its ‘logical form’). With thatconstruction type a function ˆ is then uniquely associated that assigns the semanticvalue of C to the pair consisting of the semantic values of its immediate parts. One ofthese values will usually be regarded as unproblematic—as when ‘John’ is simplyassigned John as its semantic value, an object (a problem, if object-referenceis grammatically configured: see Chapter 4). The other value is then defined to bethe mapping of this value to the value of the whole. In the case of (8), ˆ will assigna meaning to ‘swims’ defined to be the very meaning that maps John to the meaningof (8). But if this function is viewed as a set, say—the set of those objects that aremapped by the function to True if they swim—the definition of the set requires an


understanding of the very predicate in question, depriving the move of independentexplanatory value (cf. Davidson, 2005).

It is true, then, on both the present and the standard compositional view, thatgrammar mediates between lexicon/concepts and propositional meaning. But ascompositional semantics spells out this intuition, the idea becomes dependent on anotion of ‘syntax’ that precisely deprives it of playing a constitutive role in the genesisof propositional meaning, with the consequence that the explication of how propos-itional meanings are generated compositionally is explanatorily vacuous, and formal-ontological distinctions are misidentified as lexical-semantic ones.

Consider, in this regard, again the semantic difference between (10) and (11). Asdescribed in Chapter 2, taking inspiration from the Modists, this is a difference in theperspective with which we refer to an object, not in what it is that we refer to (theexternal significatum):

(10) John laughs

(11) John’s laugh

The difference between (10) and (11) is not lexical, in the sense that it cannot beexplained by what content the lexeme laugh contributes to the expression, since thatroot is identically present in both. The function of the lexicon, on the account ofChapter 2, is to collect perceptual features of environmental stimuli into equivalenceclasses: but in terms of perception, nothing needs to change when we move betweenusing (10) and (11) on a given occasion of language use. So the difference betweenthem is not lexical. One could always make it lexical, by ‘composing’ the lexemelaugh with an added lexical ‘action-feature’ in (10) and an ‘object-feature’ to (11).But this seems non-explanatory, especially as the process leading to the duality in(10)–(11) is productive, and we would have to distribute such new ‘lexical features’ toan endless set of items in the substantive lexicon, missing the systematicity of theprocess and that it rather seems to depend on how a given lexeme is grammaticalizedon an occasion, in the course of a given syntactic derivation.

Similarly, we observe a difference between the clause Superman left, when it is usedin isolation to make an assertion of truth, as in (12), and when it occurs embedded, asin (13), in which case no assertion of truth is made about it by the speaker:

(12) Superman left

(13) Lois believes Superman left.

Instead, (12) as occurring in (13) is interpreted intensionally, namely as referring, interms of intensional semantics, to a function from possible worlds to truth values,rather than to a truth in the actual world. This semantic difference again does notseem to be due to the words involved, nor to how this lexical material is ‘composed’:the string of words in (12) and of the same clause as occurring in (13) at least seems to


be exactly the same. It follows that the difference in meaning just noted must eitherbe due to differences in hidden lexical material (a covert functional head, say: cf. deCuba, 2007), or else a difference in grammatical meaning in our sense, reflecting thecontent of grammar, which is what we propose here.7 The grammar of ‘Supermanleft’ clearly is different in the two cases: for the clause is a grammatical argument in(13), but not in (12). The challenge is to give an explanatory account of this grammat-ical difference that can yield the intensionality effect. We sketch such an account inSection 3.5 (see further Hinzen, Sheehan, and Reichard, 2013).

The claim, then, is that grammar and the lexicon contribute to meaningin different ways, inducing different kinds of effects. Intensionality falls on thegrammatical side: it is not an effect of the lexicon, nor can it be explained bycomposing the contents of lexical items—which would explain why it has causedpuzzlement and consternation in over 100 years of compositional semantics. Thesame is true for reference as well (as we would expect, if the claim applies tointensional interpretations, which in the terms of Chapter 4 is one weak way inwhich clauses can refer). Thus, consider that no (substantive) lexical item is as suchreferential. As noted, a common noun such as ‘man’ cannot be used to refer to aparticular object, such as a particular man, unless it is uttered together with an act ofpointing or a demonstrative, in which case the object-reference is contributed by thegesture or the deictic element, not the content word, which rather contributes theNP-restriction:

(14) [Pointing:] man

(15) this man

Where it is clear enough which man is meant, ‘this’ in (15) can be reduced to the weakerform ‘the’, which lacks the locative/deictic element contained in ‘this’ or ‘that’, andreferentiality to an individual object will then still be maintained. Referentiality in thiscase, too, is an aspect of the phrase as a whole, and the act of (either stronger or weaker)deixis (or grammatical pointing) that it encodes within its grammatical context.Reference thus comes from grammar, not the lexical item or its substantive content,which doesn’t refer, but merely supplies concepts that become part of an identifyingdescription. Reference to particular objects, as in the paradigmatic use of (15), is thusnot due to composing the referents of lexical items: ‘man’, as such, lacks such reference(taken in isolation, it doesn’t tell us even whether it will be used as a noun or a verb);and the word ‘this’ has no substantive lexical content to begin with, and equally lacksobject-specific reference when used in isolation (as when uttered out of the blue whenentering a room, with no identifying description).

7 We argue extensively against the former approach in Sheehan and Hinzen (2011), and return to suchevidence in Chapter 4, Section 4.3, where we pursue the second approach in more detail.


Grammar provides what ‘man’ and ‘this’, each taken in isolation, lack: reference toobjects, based on a description. It thus doesn’t add to the contents of lexical items, butto their grammatical semantics: how they can be used to refer. Grammar maps lexicalconcepts/contents, which as such lack reference, to objects of reference. Even where itcombines two content-words, say table and top, so as to obtain table-top, we seereference decided in some initial way: whatever a person uses this compound to referto, it will be a top (of a table), not a table (with a top). This crucial difference isnothing that is specified in either ‘top’ or ‘table’: it comes from grammar (namely,headedness). Even the grammatical operation of modification is thus not symmetric,and it is certainly not free of grammatical meaning. That meaning, however, addsnothing to the lexical features or content of ‘table’ or ‘top’. Reference is not morelexical content, it is grammar.

Even a nominal compound, though, still lacks individual-specific reference: table-top, as such, cannot refer to any particular table-top. Modification is not enough. Thecompound must enter the grammatical template illustrated in (15), and combine witha lexically meaningless item, such as ‘the’, rather than any other content word. Thisremains true for kill Bill, where again two contentful lexical items seem to becombined directly, as in compounds, and again without the mediation of a lexicallymeaningless word, but where the grammar now generates an argument instead of amodifier. Here, however, Bill stands in for the determiner in the nominal projection,and this is from where its object-referentiality derives (see Chapter 4). This alsoillustrates that the referential effect generated from adding ‘the’ is not due towhatever residual lexical content ‘the’ might have, for this putative content is absentin the case of Bill, when it stands in for the determiner.

As a lexical item, ‘man’ also does not refer to a particular set of men which israther what ‘these men’ in (16) refers to:

(16) I don’t like these men.

Clearly, we cannot take the less complex item ‘man’ to denote something that agrammatically more complex item denotes, namely ‘these men’, when the latterinherently contains the former as a proper part. If ‘these’ is dropped, ‘men’ comesto stand on its own; but then it still does not pick out a set of men, for which thedeterminer ‘the’ or ‘these’ would have to be added. Instead it refers generically toanything qualifying as a man as in (17–18):

(17) I don’t like men.

(18) Men are brutes.

In (19), in turn, ‘men’ is quantificationally interpreted (meaning whether you haveseen some men):

(19) Have you seen men?


We see, then, that in (14–19), formally different entities, all constrained by the sameidentifying description, are being referred to: a single given man, a set of men,arbitrary instances of the kind man, and an indefinite number of such instances.The meaning of the lexical item ‘men’ cannot account for any of these facts aboutreference, which depend on how this item functions grammatically: whether it isinflected for Number, the complement of a determiner, the determiner is overt orcovert, and the noun is in a referential or predicative position.

It follows that reference, too, like intensionality, is an instance of grammaticalsemantics, and that combining the lexical contents of words does not account forthese differences in reference. The difference between a property and an object,which arises in the mapping of a lexical content, which as such provides an identify-ing description, to an object of reference, is not a lexical difference, any more thanthe difference between an object and an action is in (10–11). The difference is thecontribution of grammar. Content does not only come from the lexicon, but thegrammar, too, though it is one of a very different nature in the latter case. This is thesecond problem we see with semantic compositionality: assuming a meaninglesssyntax, it has all content coming from the lexicon. But the lexicon as such neverentails reference. It only entails what we have called classification in Chapter 2. Andjust as parts of speech distinctions reflect the functioning of words in grammar, someitems in the lexicon, mostly small (‘the’, ‘a’, ‘that’, etc.) reflect grammar as well, and itsinherent task: regulating reference. But these items do not account for reference,which depends on whole phrases and how these function in relation to others.

The same applies to even the putatively most ‘directly’ object-referring lexicalitems, namely proper names, pronouns, indexicals, and clitics, as anticipated inSection 2.2. (20) illustrates that proper names can function as predicates:

(20) Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleonthan the decentralized United States?8

The same is easily possible even for personal pronouns when they bear Accusativecase as in (21), or for 3rd-person pronouns, which can marginally take a determiner:

(21) I am me. ‘I am the person I am.’

(22) He is a she.

In short, forced in the role of predicate by grammar, commonly referential elementssuch as proper names and pronouns resort to whatever little descriptive content theyhave, leaving it to the interpreter to figure out which salient property precisely ‘beingme’, or a pronoun of feminine Gender, evokes. The same is even true, though now

8 N. Ferguson, Civilization, Penguin: 2011 (157), speculating about better prospects for democracy inNorth America than in France in the late 1800s.


much more marginally, for demonstratives. Thus we can just about interpret (23),where a person might be commenting on what is going on in the here and now (orperhaps a Hegelian philosopher is creating abstractions from acts of deixis):

(23) the this and the that

And we get (24), which might be said by a patient who lost his deictic sense throughbrain damage but then recovered:

(24) There was no this and no that.

Clitics, too, can stand for predicative nouns, as long as they are not specified forgrammatical Person, such as in the Italian (25) (from Longobardi, 2008):

(25) a. Gianni è monarchico e anticlericale; se anche Maria lo/*la/*li/*le fosse . . .Gianni is monarchical and anticlerical; if also Maria CL(3SgM)/*CL(otherforms)-were . . .

b. Se Gianni fosse te o anche solo se Maria lo/*ti fosse . . .If Gianni were you or even just if Maria CL(3SgM)/*CL(2Sg)-were . . .

Literally every lexical item, then, including deictic elements or traditional ‘indexicals’,can find itself in the role of a predicate. The same applies to the more grammaticalelements such as Tense, which are arguably referential and deictic elements as well,and which are also inflectional and not proper lexical items to start with.

The overall conclusion must be that the lexicon has no control over the forms ofreference. Rather, the process of reference begins when lexically common nouns,which are always endowed with a descriptive content, become the complement ofgrammatical elements without descriptive content, creating a unit of grammar thatcan be referential depending on its grammatical position and the closed-class itemsinvolved. With some nominals—demonstratives, pronouns, clitics—the descriptivecontent is next to nil but not zero, and hence it can be exploited when the grammar issuch that descriptive readings are forced. In such cases these items become comple-ments of a determiner. Where they are referentially used, the determiner mustremain absent.

The compositionalmodel is thus based on a problematic idea: that the basic primitiveof semantics is word meaning, and that word meaning in turn consists in reference toexternal objects. In the case of such reference, the idea is, nothing really is to beexplained—this kind of semantics, as it were, comes for free, and can be assigned tolexical items directly. Words are simply names for things, and names are labels.9

Confronted with the question of where sentence meanings come from, which do not

9 Thus, Frege (1892) effectively defined the class of ‘proper names’ in purely semantic terms, comprisingeverything that has reference to a ‘definite object’.


seem to be objects like tables and chairs, this lexicalist bias, in the absence of anynotion of grammatical meaning, then makes a prediction: sentence meaning mustsomehow arise from word meanings, by ‘composing’ the latter. Since the basenotion of meaning is that of ‘standing for’ or externally referring, sentences willnow be taken to also ‘stand for’ or refer to external objects—just to objects of adifferent kind: a Russellian compound, say, thought of as a ‘chunk of the world’,consisting of the referents of the words involved, one mapped to a property, theother to an object, say, which are both making up the compound. Meaning, then,is totally non-linguistic: words are simply symbols, and sentences are symbols ofother kinds. Their meanings are external objects. A puzzle with the pervasiveintensionality of reference in natural language now ensues, which has defined thephilosophy of language for more than 100 years.

But if we are right, the alleged external meanings simply recapitulate grammaticaldistinctions, misinterpreting them lexically. Compositional semantics, given its lex-ical bias, bypasses grammar, failing to recognize the categorically different kind ofmeaning it generates. This different kind of meaning has nothing to do with externalobjects, as non-linguistically described. Indeed, if the lexicalist model worked, thenall meaning is already there, just as the world itself is already there, before we ‘label’its objects. All that language contributes is a system of signs for referring to it. Thepoint of language, however, is infinity: we can refer to ever new objects, whatever thefancy may be that strikes us. One wouldn’t suppose that, before such a fancy strikes,all of these possible objects of reference already pre-exist our reference to them.The range of different types of external objects posited, moreover, needs to beexplained: semantics does not come for free, and while the types in question defineour metaphysics, metaphysics does not seem to explain their existence. If theformal ontology is not identifiable irrespective of grammatical function, the explan-ation may well be grammatical. If this is the case, grammar will ipso facto not merelybe a formal system, which as such only ‘interfaces’ with a substantive or interpretivesystem.

3.4 Content from the interface?

That a particular domain of inquiry be studied formally is obviously desirable from ascientific point of view, if that domain lends itself to a formal analysis at all—indeed itis a condition for scientific inquiry. But any such decision is independent of thedomain’s particular ontology, and it implies nothing about what this ontology is: theformal analysis of a domain says nothing about the kind of entities it contains. Theformal study of grammar, too, is therefore not the same thing as the study of form (ifthis is taken to be ontologically distinct from ‘content’). In a similar way, the formalstudy of patterns of planetary motion implies nothing about whether planets are


‘formal’ objects or not. Grammar can be a fully material domain of inquiry, much likeplanetary motion, even though it exhibits formal patterns that can be studied as such,as in the case of planetary motion. ‘Form’ and ‘content’ are then not names for thingsthat exist out there, that can be studied as such, and that are separate from oneanother as domains of inquiry. Everything, rather, can be studied in terms of both itsform and its content (insofar as it has formal properties): that is a matter of choice(and reflection), not of ontology.

This contention raises some potential problems about the study of what, inframeworks such as Minimalism, is taken to be a ‘real biological object’: namely,the ‘computational system’ of language. That a particular domain is studied formallyor computationally does not mean that there is a ‘computational system’ that is beingstudied—if this means that our object of inquiry is a purely formal system consistingof arbitrary manipulations of symbols in abstraction from semantic content. Ourobject of inquiry, rather, in this biolinguistic domain, is grammar. The petals of thesunflower exhibit a Fibonacci pattern. But it is not ultimately this pattern, but theflower—through the pattern—that biology studies. Grammar, too, has a form as wellas a content. That content is, we will ultimately argue in Chapter 9, the world—namely, as it appears to us when a grammatical pattern is laid upon it.

The Minimalist Program has brought the attempt to describe grammar in abstrac-tion from its content to a peak, thereby sharpening the question we are asking. It alsoinstantiates but also radicalizes the long-standing attempt to eliminate stipulations inthe formalization of grammar. The PSGs of the 1950s showed how to characterize, ina descriptively adequate fashion, the order and projection properties of contiguousrelations in grammar. Non-contiguous relations were taken care of by the transform-ational component. The latter was later unified with a PSG with a recursive base,which was then in turn simplified by X-bar theory, which stated the laws of phrasestructure in non-category specific terms. Transformations were restricted in theirdescriptive power through general conditions on transformations. Each of these stepsimplied a radical reduction in the options of variation that can exist in the syntacticsystem of language as so described, and it already exemplifies what only later came tobe called a ‘minimalist inquiry’.

At the end of this process, Minimalism stripped PSG down to its bare bones: BarePhrase Structure (BPS), viewed as built by the simplest conceivable computationaloperation, now in charge of both contiguous and non-contiguous relations: Merge.The grammatical relations it creates are sisterhood—two syntactic objects are mergedinto the same set—and containment—a set generated by Merge contains another setgenerated by Merge. None of these come with any grammatically specific content.Nor does the operation Merge itself, which is insensitive to any grammaticallyspecific material such as part of speech distinctions or grammatical relations in thesense above. Even if the Minimalist claim that this system gives a minimal account ofboth contiguous and non-contiguous relations in grammar is true, therefore,


grammar has no content on this description that goes beyond the statement ofdiscrete infinity and the analysis of the latter through Merge.10

This is why the content has to come from elsewhere on this account: narrowsyntax, which is an abstraction from content, ‘interfaces’ with the semantic compon-ent, the ‘conceptual-intentional’ (C-I) systems. This embedding in the rest of ourcognitive architecture is what gives it a linguistic character, in other words,an interface, which divides form and content; content, perhaps in the form of acompositional semantics in the sense discussed above, is added to the Merge-basedsystem viewed as something that is independent as an object of scientific inquiry.And perhaps, the thought is, the language faculty is ‘perfectly designed’ in lightof constraints imposed by this interface, at least the semantic one, since it appears totake priority over the other, the sensory-motor one (‘interface asymmetry’: Chomsky,2008).

The constraints imposed by the interfaces on the semantic side however are barelyinvestigated and have tended to be of the most generic kind, like the principle of FullInterpretation. This principle maintains that every element of a syntactic representa-tion arriving at the interface must be interpreted by the C-I systems. Since thesesystems know nothing about grammar, however, any meaning generated by gram-mar must be unreadable by these systems and hence cannot exist. The absence of anotion of grammatical meaning in this framework is thus not a contingent aspect ofit, but built into its architecture. If grammar is uninterpretable, its rationale can onlybe to eliminate uninterpretable (‘formal’) features contained in it before points ofaccess to the interface, which is regarded as the basic principle driving its dynamics(Gallego, 2012; Richards, 2012; Chomsky, 2007a; 2008). But since there is no point tothese uninterpretable features in the first place, there is no rationale, really, togrammar at all.

Results in comparative cognition have not, on our view, come to lend support toan architecture where a grammar, although minimal in formal terms, is arbitrary andunprincipled in substantive terms, and interfaces with a semantic component, whichis non-minimal in formal terms but principled in substantive ones.11 This predica-ment is what we predict if even positing ‘concepts’, let alone propositions, on thenon-linguistic side of the interface, is subject to severe doubts, if ‘concepts’ means

10 That language is ‘discretely infinite’ is a property it shares with myriad other systems in nature thatcan be modelled in this fashion, including arithmetic, music, phyllotaxis, and DNA (see e.g. Katz andPesetsky, 2009; Mukherji, 2009: ch. 6; Gimona, 2006; Searls, 2002). Merge, which amounts to discreteinfinity, therefore, gives us a minimalist analysis of what we knew before, that human language is recursive.

11 Chomsky (2008: 141) in particular suggests that ‘C-I incorporates a dual semantics, with generalizedargument structure as one component, the other one being discourse-related and scopal properties.Language seeks to satisfy the duality in the optimal way ( . . . )’. No evidence for this hypothesis is provided,and prospects for finding evidence that such a semantics—in essence, all of thought as it is manifest in thesemantics of human languages—is present in non-linguistic systems of thought appears slim.


anything like the meanings of human words. Even the most optimistic accounts of‘animal thoughts’ acknowledge that a gap with the kind of thought expressed inlanguage remains: a chimpanzee, or a zebra finch, do not think like us. There is nocommon metric by which we can compare non-linguistic thought with linguisticthought in any systematic fashion, however, so as to assess how much of the latterthere is in the former. No one has studied whether non-human animals can processthe contents of verb phrases, say, but not sentences; or of non-finite clauses, but notfinite ones (which would mean to use a linguistic metric, given the absence of a non-linguistic one). For all we can tell, there appears to be no phrasal organization ofmeaning at all, which also is arguably not found in the communications of the‘language-trained’ apes (Tomasello, 2008). Nor is there evidence for a semantics ofthis nature in animal thought rather than communication (Fitch, 2005).

This is again not to deny that the formal-ontological notion of an ‘object’ ispartially given in perception—and again not to affirm that, thereby, a creature withsuch perception has thoughts about objects involving the concept of ‘object’. Con-sider in this regard the processing of a voice, an auditory object that is the perceptualcorrelate of some acoustical pattern that reaches our ears. This pattern is cognitivelyanalysed and different perceptual categories are imposed on it, which might involvethe recognition of the voice as human, or as that of a particular person (a source),in which case certain structural invariants would be used for categorization corres-ponding to characteristics of the speaker’s vocal tract. It might also involve therecognition of a vowel as associated with a particular pattern of change that can beproduced by different possible sources and representing an invariance across differ-ent auditory events and sources. What comes to be perceived in each of these cases isan auditory object involving an extraction of abstract properties from a givenauditory input. These are meaningful for us and required for the perception of the‘same’ voice at different times and in different states of vocal health, or of the samevowel or melody produced by different persons at different times. It will alsotypically involve sensory integration, as when the perception of a voice is integratedwith the visual processing of a face. The emergence of a unified auditory object,from low-level temporal and spectral (frequency) analyses, is eventually helpedby the attribution of ‘meaning’ in the sense of triggering a particular concept ofwhat is being perceived.12 Perceptual objects in this sense, however, even as analysedby meaningful categories, never involve a relation of reference, since none isrequired, given how the representations generated in this domain are rooted ipsofacto in the sensory context. Moreover, before we apply the notion of object to

12 Stages before and after attribution of meaning appear to be neuro-anatomically distinct (Griffiths andWarren, 2004).


perception naively, we should be aware that the very notion of ‘perceptual object’ isalso quite problematic, with some frameworks explicitly rejecting this ontology.13

We will continue to assume, therefore, that perceptually experiencing the world asstructured into objects falling into various more abstract classes is very different froman ability to deliberately refer to such objects symbolically. As we suggested inChapter 2, the reason that we can refer to objects to which we are not exposed in‘online’ perception is that we have concepts—the meaningful categories that we applyto perceptual objects—which as such characterize possible objects of reference. Soacts of reference are anchored in concepts, and such acts can succeed even when theyare based on little more than that, as when I refer generically to kings of France:nothing, in this case, anchors the act of reference except the descriptive content of thephrase kings of France (and how it functions grammatically). Reference can be lessgeneric and more specific than that, yet some residue of descriptive content is nevercompletely absent, as noted even for the case of pronouns and indexicals above. Thisappears to be the crucial difference to functional reference in animal alarm calls,which do not tap into abstract conceptual resources in addition to perceptualclassifications. No concept is needed.

When an amodal concept evolves from a modality-specific or multi-modal per-cept, the concept is not ‘indexed’ to the context of immediate sensory-motor pro-cessing anymore. The connection thus has to be reinstated (cf. p. 47 above). Butperception cannot do this, since grammar, when accessing concepts and grammati-calizing them, can establish acts of reference that cannot be linked to any percept,even in principle. Grammar, therefore, needs to contain elements and proceduresthat re-indexicalize the novel contents that it generates. This is a sensible rationale forthe existence of traditionally so-called ‘indexical’ expressions in grammar, such aspronouns and demonstratives. It also rationalizes the grammatical processes thatlicense these items in appropriate positions where they take on interpretable gram-matical functions (for example movement into subject position to become the subjectof a predication in the present sense, i.e. a truth-value bearing expression), whichinvolves Case or Person relations. Much of the machinery of grammar, in short,serves to implement the re-indexicalization that is required in acts of reference basedon concepts as distinct from percepts.

The transition to grammar is thus the transition from sensory exposure to theworld and conceptualization to reference to this world, itself an indication ofthought. Our thoughts can now be wrong. That again is an indication of thought,as opposed to dealing with the world perceptually and practically. This possibility offalsehood, however, only arises at the end of the grammatical process: it is not an

13 In the psychophysical model of Bregman (1990), for example, the fundamental elements of theauditory world are auditory ‘streams’, rather than objects, and the concept of an auditory object is explicitlyrejected. For discussion, see Griffiths and Warren (2004).


option yet at the level of object reference or the nominal phrase, where all suchreference comes with a presupposition of existence, as crucially distinct from asser-tions of existence (as in ‘there exists a king of France’), which of course can be wrong.Acts of reference to objects as existing (‘the king of France’), by contrast, cannot be:no truth value can be assigned to ‘the king of France’. In this sense there is, in the caseof reference to objects in grammar, ‘immunity from error’: error, like falsehood,requires the sentence. Someone who knew that there wasn’t a king of France couldn’tpoint this out to a person who didn’t know it by using a noun phrase.

So questions of existence are not decided or resolved at the level of nominalreference to objects, and no such resolution is a precondition for symbolic referencein grammar. But that Superman, by some non-grammatical (such as physical)criterion, does not exist, is a consideration irrelevant to the Superman aficionadowho is infatuated with his (or her) hero and refers to him, as something existing, bythe name of ‘Superman’. In a less affected mood, he may agree with us that‘Superman does not exist’, which would be contradictory if using this proper nameimplied existence or a claim to existence. Language moulds our sense of reality,creates a world, rather than merely responding to one. ‘Reference to non-existents’ isno anomaly of language, but its hallmark, and no motive for re-interpreting expres-sions as non-referential ones when a presupposition of existence fails.

The absence of the phenomena of both reference and truth in perceptual systemsor animal cognition confirms our stance, assuming the essential absence of substan-tive constraints on grammar as coming from postulated C-I systems, and the absenceof independent predictions from a ‘semantic component’ for what we will findin grammar. Given the emergence, with grammar, of a novel referential-deicticsystem distinct from both perception and classification, the conclusion should bethat there is no system there on the C-I side of the interface, equivalent in semanticpower to a grammar-based system, which could then constrain the grammaticalsystem. In fact, as noted we predict that whatever non-linguistic system exists on theother side of the posited interface, couldn’t even systematically interpret the gener-ations that arrive on the grammatical side (Hinzen, 2006; 2008; 2009). C-I systemsshould look at the deliverances of grammatical derivations with bafflement or stupor,failing to interpret them altogether, much as we would be when confronted withcommunications from aliens in a never-encountered code.

This in turn engenders another conclusion: that the form-content dichotomy mustbe given up. Content has to lie on the side where the form is: the grammatical one.This, of course, will hold exactly insofar as meaning is grammatical. Insofar, that is, asthere is a difference that grammar makes to the organization of meaning. The specificcontent of grammar, we here suggested, lies in grammatical relations, since we knowit does not lie in the atoms of the lexicon. Yet Merge applies to lexical atomsgenerating binary sets, and the members of a set stand in no inherent relations toone another. Lexical items in turn are collections of lexical features, and some of these


(Case, ç-features) will trigger relations of Agree and potentially applications of‘internal Merge’ (IM) on the standard model: the merging of a syntactic objectA contained in another one, B, to that object B. IM creates a discontinuous constitu-ent, and hence grammatical relations, with interpretive consequences as in the case ofoperator-variable dependencies or binding. But there is no theory of grammaticalrelations in grammar so construed, viewed as primitives or fundamental elements ofgrammar. If they exist, they are coded featurally. Feature-based coding does not ofcourse exclude grammatical relations, but by coding these uniformly through featuresand generic operations such as Agree and Merge, a restrictive and principled theoryof grammatical relations and hence of the content of grammar does not come intoview. Since formal semantics, in turn, tends to code relations by assigning them asdenotations of predicative expressions, hence effectively lexically, the very term‘grammatical relation’ lacks a status within the Minimalist framework. It will be atheoretical primitive in the present one, and our basis for reconstructing the recur-sivity of grammar, following Arsenijević and Hinzen (2012), in the rest of this chapter.

This position contrasts with the standard Minimalist position, but is not, on ourview, inconsistent with Minimalism as such. The difference is that recursion asdescribed through Merge is a purely formal universal of human language that doesnot say anything about grammar specifically. It is the culmination of a formaltradition in linguistic theory that abstracts from semantic interpretation and is,given its bare minimality, the peak to which such a perspective can be driven. Thatis the strength of the Merge-based viewpoint—but also, as we will argue, its weakness.For as we may already conclude from the above, Merge leaves us without a handle orsubstantive insight on grammatical relations, or on the content of grammar. Gram-mar is recursive; but its substantive content is not recursion.14

3.5 The phase as the smallest unit of grammatical organization

The above account entails that the smallest unit of grammar is a unit of reference;that any such unit is based on a lexical concept that is as such non-referential buthas a descriptive content that will be the basis of its referential use; and that thepossible forms of reference for a given lexical concept depend on how it isgrammaticalized: what grammatical role it plays and which head takes its lexical

14 Relegating predication, reference, and truth, to ‘semantics’ or C-I, which we have argued againstabove, interestingly unites Minimalist grammar and its rivals. Thus, for Jackendoff (2011), the inertness ofgrammar in relation to the genesis of a propositional semantics is even more pronounced, as is the form–content distinction, with syntax in charge of the former and semantics in charge of the latter. In line withthis, he stresses the existence of relational cognition in non-human primates, as Boeckx (2010) does, whosuggests regarding Merge as completely unconstrained, with relevant constraints on grammar comingfrom the way in which derivations based onMerge hook up with extra-linguistic concepts such as thing orlocation at phase-boundaries. Our scepticism with regard to calling these ‘concepts’ is clear from theabove.


projection as the complement. Putting these observations together, we obtain (26),where the ‘interior’ houses the lexical concept and its lexical projection (e.g. NounPhrase (NP), as in (27)), and the edge houses grammatical elements that govern howit is used to refer (e.g. determiners):

(26) [EDGE [INTERIOR]]

(27) [the [man]]

This unit of grammaticality cannot be reduced further. If there was no edgegoverning reference, we would only have a unit of conceptualization, not reference.If there is an edge but it is ‘weak’, in a sense that we will make precise in Chapter 4, weget a unit of grammatical organization and hence reference, but reference will beestablished via the descriptive content of the lexical material in the interior only, as inI like kings of France, where the referent of the internal argument is no objects inparticular, but objects only insofar as they instantiate the generic description ‘being aking of France’. If we only had an edge, we might have functional reference, not anact of human grammatical reference, which is always based on a lexical concept witha descriptive content used predicatively.

Note that there is no recursion in this unit of grammar: nothing recurs. There is asingle edge and a single interior. In line with this, there is a single referent, establishedat the edge, whatever it might be; and there is a single lexical concept. If anothersubstantive lexical concept is added, it thus has the status of a modifier, which as suchis not required and goes beyond the minimality exhibited in (26):

(28) [DP the [NP good [NP man]]]

As we would predict from this, modifiers exhibit recursivity in a much clearer waythan units of reference: they can be stacked unboundedly (subject to conceptualconstraints, though, as studied in Cinque, 1999):

(29) [the [good old wise [man]]]

Crucially, the recursion, insofar as there is one, is part of the interior, not the edge (butwe return to determiner and clitic doubling below and in Chapter 4). Moreover, noneof it disturbs the essential generalization above: that there will be a single referent at theedge—even if described by multiple predicates—and a single lexical head that the unitin question turns into a referential expression. By not exhibiting recursion, the smallestunit of grammar exactly resembles, as it should, an act of (e.g. index-finger) pointing:no such act is ‘recursive’ either, in the sense that it would ever contain two referents,with one referent embedded in the other. The question thus arises what the status ofrecursion in grammar is, which we address in the next subsection.

(26) resembles the recent notion of a phase as conceptualized in Chomsky (2007aand b; 2008; 2013), and we will thus suggest that the phase is the smallest unit of


grammatical organization. From the non-recursivity of this unit, at any given point ofthe computation, it then follows that there will only ever be a single phase in aderivation, resulting in a ‘single-phase’ architecture. At any one moment in thederivation, that is, only one referent is ever computed. This is true of units such as(31) as well, where ‘that’ is the edge element governing reference and the TP, whichcorresponds to NP in the nominal case (30), is the interior specifying the descriptivecontent of a particular state of affairs:

(30) [the [NP kings of France]]

(31) [that [TP there are kings of France]]

The same template repeats again in (32), where the embedded CP functions as adescriptive predicate by means of which we pick out a referent at the edge of v*, inthis case a mental event of believing:

(32) [v* believes [CP that [TP there are kings of France]]]

We see it one final time in (33):

(33) [CP C [TP Bill T [v* believes [that there are kings of France]]]]

Here C is again the edge—(33) as a whole refers to a truth value—and TP provides thedescriptive content, as in (31). In each of (30–3), there is a single referent and a singleidentifying description, illustrating the presence of the same, single, non-recursivetemplate in (26). No sentence has two subjects or two predicates; no sentence has twotruth-value referring expressions, as illustrated in (33), whose meaning is such that notruth value is assigned to the embedded clause ‘that there are kings of France’. Insteadthere is only one truth value and it is assigned to (33) as a whole. The embeddedclause is therefore not evaluated for reference/truth, in the way it would be if it wasnot embedded as an argument. This is the exact prediction that our template makes,and the intensionality of clauses that are embedded arguments is thereby deduced:for given the constraints of the template, the embedded clause must function as apredicate within the higher phase in which it enters, rather than carrying a truthvalue into the process of semantic composition. Far from being the anomaly thatintensionality has been, causing puzzlement and consternation from a viewpoint ofsemantic compositionality for more than a century, it now follows from the archi-tecture of grammar, being a core aspect of grammatical semantics (Hinzen, Sheehan,and Reichard, 2013).

The referents of the phases are formal-ontologically distinct: if we wished to useontological language, the nominal phase is mapped onto an ‘object’, the verbal to an‘event’, the clause to a ‘proposition’. Crucially, these are asymmetrically ordered withrespect to one another, with propositions always (or architecturally) containingevents as part of their structure, forming their thematic core, and events in turn


containing objects. We can thus think of these three phases as the ‘first’, ‘second’, and‘third’ phases. The non-recursivity of the phasal template entails that none of theseformal-ontologically distinct objects of reference will ever embed another object,within the same phase. Instead, when an event embeds an object, say, as all events do,we expect that the object in question must first be mapped from a predicate, in orderto be licensed to the event. This is what we find: arguments are relations (Bowers,2011). An object-referential expression such as ‘John’ can only function as an objectwithin an event if it is interpreted as bearing a grammatical relation to it, which iswhat the term ‘thematic role’ denotes. The form of a verb–noun embedding istherefore not of the form (34) but (35):

(34) [VP [DP]]

(35) [VP [Ł DP]]

That is, the object is an Agent, Patient, Goal, etc. Crucially, neither of these reflectproperties intrinsic to the referents in question, in which case they would be lexical-semantic, rather than grammatical relations. With theta-roles, therefore, we arefirmly in the domain of grammatical meaning. As Bowers (2011: 8) stresses, ‘Agent’viewed as a theta-role is a grammatical category, not a (lexical-)semantic one. As heexplains, following Emonds (1976), a pseudo-passive as in (37) is possible just in casethe subject in (36) bears the argument-relation of Agent rather than Theme:

(36) The bird/the book flew across the room

(37) The room was flown across by the bird/*the book

The issue here is not animacy, a semantic notion, since even the animacy of thesubject ‘the bird’ does not prevent it from being construed as a Theme-argument in(36), in which case the bird is merely involved as an inert projectile and the pseudo-passive is now also impossible for it. Similarly, a fairy tale context could allow theconstrual of ‘the book’ as an Agent-phrase, showing that nothing in its intrinsiclexical feature specifications rules the construal of a referring expression as exhibitinga particular grammatical semantics. The structural nature of the ambiguity inquestion is illustrated in (38), where ‘John’ can again have the grammatical meaningof either Agent or of Theme:

(38) John appealed to Mary.

In the second case, (38) means that John was attractive to Mary, in which case thepseudo-passive is again impossible:

(39) *Mary was appealed to by John.

Non-grammatical notions such as ‘intentional agency’ do not seem to succeed inexplaining these facts. As Bowers notes, (40), with ‘unintentionally’, only has oneinterpretation:


(40) The room was deliberately/unintentionally flown across by the bird.

It uniquely means that the bird crossed the room intending to fly somewhere else; itdoes not mean that the bird was sent across the room in the manner of an inertprojectile. In other words, the grammar of the argument as an Agent requires constru-ing the world in particular terms, namely with the bird as an intentional agent, nomatter whether lack of intentionality is specified lexically through the adjunct. A worldseen through the lenses of grammatical meaning becomes different indeed.

Crucially, there is no recursion in the theta-domain either: theta-roles, like argu-ment-structure itself, form a strictly finite, and indeed very limited, template. Thegrammar stretches to generating structures of three syntactic arguments, but notmore: all other dependents must be adjuncts. An ‘Agent-of ’ phrase embeds no otherAgent-of phrase recursively, but a Theme-phrase. So the ‘intransitive’ structure in(35) can be transitivized, in which case the additional head v introduces anotherargument, and we get two (necessarily different) theta-roles:

(41) [[Ł2 DP] v [VP [Ł1 DP]]]

We then obtain, formal-ontologically, two events, but crucially not two separate ones,and not two of the same kind: one will be embedded or contained in the other as aproper part: an event of killing Bill, say, will involve an event of ‘making dead’performed by an Agent, which is followed by its causal consequence, the state of theTheme’s being dead. So event embedding comes at the price of the embedded eventbecoming a proper part of the embedding one. The V-phrase that is embedded in thev-phrase is again not referentially independent, but integrated with the higher headvia a grammatical relation, described mereologically as that of ‘part’ (see Section 2.5above). And again, the process is sharply limited: after transitivizing a phrase [Bill[dead]] so as to obtain The bride made Bill dead, which can be spelled out as The bridekilled Bill, we cannot transitivize again, with (44) meaning that Elle made the bridekill Bill:

(42) [Bill [dead]]

(43) The bride made [Bill [dead]] = The bride killed Bill

(44) *Elle killed the bride Bill.

A general principle, then, seems to veto the embedding of the same in the same.Embedding in grammar is constrained by having the embedded element play a rela-tional role, specifically becoming a part in whatever the embedding phrase refers to.15

15 Our claim here goes counter to Ramchand (2008), who argues that argument structure in syntax is‘constructed systematically on the basis of primitive recursive syntactic relationships’ (p. 16), which on herview involve three primitive ingredients in the human conceptualization of event-structure: a causing orinitiating sub-event, a process-denoting sub-event, and a sub-event corresponding to a resulting state.


In this sense, embedding has an inherent content, a grammatical meaning, and is not‘blind’ or ‘formal’. The same is true in clausal embedding, where the embedded clausenecessarily plays the role of a content of a mental event referred to by the matrix verb, orin NP–NP embedding, where the embedded NP plays a role as a Possessed, a Theme, ora location:

(45) John’s mother

(46) The bride’s purse16

(47) The vase on the table

All of these instantiate our template, and they are single referential expressions, with(47) clearly referring to one thing, a vase, which is identified through a descriptorencoding the predicate ‘being on the table’, which is related to the higher DP via thequasi-thematic role of location. This is also clear from Agreement facts:

(48) The vase on the table is/*are broken

What is not possible is a juxtaposition of two referential DPs, without one of theseplaying a role as part in relation to the other:

(49) *John mother

(50) *the bride purse

(51) *the vase the table

This is so unless the two DPs are part of an enumeration, as in (52), where thegrammar computes two referents, and the Agreement facts change:

(52) The vase, the table are/*is broken.

This architecture may explain why the basic pattern is that V embeds N and not theother way around. Suppose that ‘V’ and ‘N’ are lexical ‘features’, which are intrinsic tothe specifications of a lexical item. Then they are atomic and independent, and wepredict nothing about how they will relate. That is, we will have to stipulate how theyrelate: through relations of semantic or categorial ‘selection’. Relatedly, the sameproblem arises if we take a lexical and intrinsicalist view of events and objects: if theseare what is denoted by V and N, respectively, they will again be independent of oneanother, and their relation, if any, will have to be stipulated. On the present model,

Although these components can be combined (‘merged’, on her model), however, and the result hascompositionally determined readings, the combinatorics is strictly templatic rather than unboundedlyrecursive: these primitives only compose in a highly limited and predetermined fashion. Similar remarksapply to the notion of ‘composition’ of the basic elements of argument structure in Hale and Keyser(2002: ch. 1).

16 This of course has another reading, where ‘bride’ is a modifier, hence not independently referential.


the mystery of why V embeds N and not the other way around dissipates and in factbecomes unformulable. The explanation of the generalization is that event-denota-tion is not lexical: it is grammatically derived. Unlike object-reference, which ismono-phasal, event-reference is necessarily bi-phasal. So any object-phase will beembedded in an event-phase, and it is a general constraint on embedding thatembedding-as-argument in grammar creates a part-whole relation between embed-der and embedded. So objects will be parts of events, not the other way around. Putdifferently, V contains N, necessarily, exactly as events contain objects.

In a similar way, T contains v/V as part of its internal architecture; non-finiteT will be part of finite T; and finite T will be a part of C. None of these, then, quitesimply, will be lexical notions. Interpreting them as ‘features’ fails to recognize theirnature as grammatical and derived. Similarly, putative relations of ‘selection’holding between one feature and others are a misleading way of stating what isin effect a grammatical dependency: intuitively, an event has whatever parts it does,but it doesn’t ‘select’ its parts, any more than a human body selects an arm. Nordoes it make sense that within a phasal template, D selects N, or C selectsT. Rather, every referential expression is based on the lexical predicate it is basedon, and the two pairs necessarily form a unit (though the edges can be missing, asdiscussed in more detail in Chapter 4). Where edges are differentiated in a morefine-grained way, as in Rizzi (1997), a selection relation between functional projec-tions again makes no sense, as the relevant hierarchy of projections is hierarchicallyordered.

In line with our stress on the finiteness of the process of creating part-wholerelations in the formal ontology, the process as a whole finds an ultimate limit in theassignment of the truth value, which contains literally everything else as a part andhence cannot itself be a part. More precisely, there is nothing, at the point of reachingthe truth value, that the grammar can do so as to change the formal ontology.Anything that can happen, such as ‘slifting’ (53), assertions of veridicality (54), addingtags (55), or evidentials (56), leaves the formal ontology and the truth value itselfunchanged:

(53) The bride was killed, I believe.

(54) It is true that the bride was killed.

(55) The bride killed Bill, didn’t she?

(56) The bride killed Bill—I saw it.

The essential non-recursivity of grammar as depicted above, and the reinterpretationof the recursivity of grammar in terms of a generation of an ontology structured by apart–whole relation, now predicts that there will be no recursivity in the elementsadded in (53–6) after the truth value is assigned: and indeed, there is no suchrecursivity:


(57) *The bride was killed, I believe I hope.17

(58) It is true that it is true that the bride was killed.18

(59) *The bride killed Bill, didn’t she did she?

And where languages encode evidentiality morphemically, recursive stacking of suchmorphemes is unavailable. Why then is it that the grammatical process should cometo an end with the truth value assigned? Why is there no further ontological categorythat grammaticalizes? We return to this question in Chapter 9.

Let us now come back to the operation Merge and to the standard claim thatgrammar is recursive, with Merge being its one most essential element. One couldpoint out that our phasal template contains a combination of elements, and hencepresupposes something like Merge. Indeed this is the standard justification of Mergeas the basic operation of grammar: where grammar is not said to be based on it, theoperation is somewhere hidden in whatever operations are assumed. Now, we agreeof course that the template contains a combination of elements—but then, saying thisabout our template adds no insight to it. Indeed, one might call it an abstraction fromgrammar, given that the symmetries that Merge builds precisely arise by abstractingfrom the fact that no symmetric structures ever arise when two syntactic objectsmerge. Merge thus throws no light on the observation that symmetric structures ingrammar are banned (Kayne, 1994; Moro, 2000; diSciullo, 2005).

If recursion in grammar is modeled through Merge, moreover, embedding willtypically be interpreted ‘formally’, in line with the standard assumption that there isno grammatical meaning and form and content are distinct. This means thatsemantic effects of embedding as described above, relating to the emergence of aformal ontology structured by part–whole relations, have to come from somethingother than grammar. But where should we go to derive the effects? The lexicon, wehave argued, as much as the putative non-linguistic C-I systems, are the wrong placeto look (even if they were to support some initial stages of the formal-ontologicalhierarchy, before we come to the part that depends on grammar). Nor would it help,we have argued, to go down the standard route of adding a compositional semanticsto a Merge-based syntax. In fact, we now see stronger evidence against this conclu-sion: for if V contains N as a part, necessarily (and similarly for all other categories

17 Intended is the reading where the ‘slifted’ clause ‘The bride was killed’ is asserted, while the assertionis then qualified twice (cf. ‘the bride was killed is what I believe and hope’. It is possible of course to say ‘Thebride was killed, I think I said’, where there is a single such qualification, and ‘I said’ is a predicate of‘I think’.

18 While (58) is not ungrammatical, the second ‘it is true’makes no contribution to meaning, unless thetwo ‘it is true’ phrases depict epistemic assessments of different speakers (in which case recursivity isbroken and the verdict against embedding of the same in the same is adhered to).


that arise in the grammatical process), then the denotational content of V (itsgrammatical meaning) cannot be derived compositionally by first assigning a denota-tion to N: the way N is interpreted partially derives from its embedding in V. Ofcourse, N also has a grammatical meaning on its own. This is whatever grammaticalmeaning is assigned phase-internally in a mono-phasal derivation. But much of itsgrammatical meaning is not assigned internally to its own phase. This is not only truefor the thematic role it plays in relation to an event, but also for, say, its referentialspecificity, which may depend on its entering relations marked morphologically asCases, which are not phase-internal relations. For example, Megerdoomian (2008:79–81) shows that in Eastern Armenian internal arguments with a definite specificinterpretation (such as proper names) need to carry accusative Case, and thatindefinite existential DPs, which may be specific or not, carry the indefinite specificinterpretation only when they carry accusative Case:

(60) Ara-n Siran-in hamp'uyr-um e E ArmenianAra-NOM Siran-ACC kiss-IMPF be-PRES/3SG‘Ara is kissing Siran.’

(61) *Ara-n Siran-in hamp'uyr-um eAra-NOM Siran kiss-IMPF be-PRES/3SG‘Ara is kissing Siran.’

(62) Ara-n ašxat-um e mi hat dzi-an b@RniAra-NOM try-IMPF be- PRES/3SG one CL horse-ACC catch-Subj/3SG‘There is a specific horse such that Aran is trying to catch it.’

If accusative Case is determined at the level of vP, it follows that DPs acquire someaspects of their interpretation only later in the derivation, in the next phase, not at theedge of their own phase. Compositional semantic interpretation by contrast is local.It does not capture the relational content of grammar.

We conclude that although it remains true that a grammatical system of the kindthat we are depicting in this chapter—in essence, a system of reference that sets up aformal-ontological space in which such reference happens—can be modelled for-mally through Merge, this fact adds no grammatical insight and in fact makesapparent generalizations (which go to the heart of what grammar is and does) harderto state. Plainly, a system that is based on the unbounded generation of arbitrarystructures through Merge (‘wild-type Merge’ in the sense of Boeckx, 2008; 2010), hasto be restricted in such a fashion that the grammatical patterns that we actually seecome out. Plainly, we cannot assume that a Merge-based system is more ‘minimal’ ifthe minimality of the description is bought at the cost of outsourcing the complexityelsewhere—especially if it is outsourced to a component that we barely know how tostudy in non-linguistic terms, such as the C-I systems, and that is certainly harder to


study than grammar itself. Moreover, apparently universal restrictions on recursion,as discussed above and below, are not predicted on such a model.19

We close this chapter with a review of apparent restrictions on recursion in humanlanguage, other than those discussed above, and apparent exceptions to them, whicha Merge-based account does not predict. This subsection is largely based on updatingArsenijević and Hinzen (2012).

3.6 The absence of X-within-X in language (with Boban Arsenijević)

The primary focus of attention in linguistics when ‘recursion’ is being debated is notrecursion as a mathematical property, nor hierarchy or Merge as such, nor comput-ability, but the apparent occurrence of ‘self-similar’ structures involving the recur-rence of some syntactic category X in itself.20 In other words, it is recursion in alinguistically meaningful sense. We have above suggested that because embedding isgrammatically meaningful and creates a relation in which the embedder and embed-ded category are always asymmetrically related as part and whole, there is noembedding of the same in the same. Moreover, there strictly is always only a singlereferent per phase, thus deriving the intensionality effects arising when a clauseembeds another. We also noted that Merge as such is silent on whether there issuch a restriction or not. It therefore doesn’t speak to the issue of why or whetherthere is such (non-)recurrence. In this subsection we discuss data on self-similarity inlanguage that fall out from the account of the previous subsection. Why, for example,should it be the case that a sequence in which elements traditionally categorized asC embed other Cs really is a [C- v . . . [C- v . . . [C- v]]] sequence, as seen in (63), oreven a [C- v-D . . . [C- v-D . . . [C- v-D . . . ]]] sequence, as seen in (64):

(63) [CP Allegedly, [TP John will [vP deny [CP that [TP Bill has ever [vP said [CPthat . . . ]]]]]]]

(64) [CP Allegedly, [TP John will [vP deny [DP the very possibility [CP that [TP Bill hasever [vP defended [DP the claim [CP that . . . ]]]]]]]]]

The ‘recursion’ of C in C, that is, is mediated by a rigid, linear, and finite sequenceof non-Cs (linear in the sense that one has to come after the other in a relatively

19 One of the few writers who link recursion to semantics is Fitch (2010), who argues that only if we‘combine intuitions about whether a string is grammatical or not, and whether the units are of the sametype of referent’ (our emphasis) can we approach some sort of empirical test for whether recursion in thesense of self-embedding is really present in language. Fitch suggests we ‘use the correct [semantic]interpretation to probe the underlying rule system’, seeing this as an explication of the Hauser et al.(2002) stance, according to which it is not recursion that is specific to language, but ‘recursion and themapping to the interfaces’. This is the methodological suggestion we implement here.

20 For example, Everett’s claim against recursivity in Pirahã is based on the observation that Pirahã is‘the only language known without embedding (putting one phrase inside another of the same type or lowerlevel, e.g. noun phrases in noun phrases, sentences in sentences, etc.)’. (Everett, 2005: 622)


rigid hierarchical order, before a new C can be inserted).21 This basic observation canbe put by saying: paradigmatic forms of recursion in language such as the above arecyclic. If cycles are phases, what we see is that recursion is mediated by phaseboundaries, turning phases into the units of recursion. Why should recursion becyclic (‘recursion-by-phase’)? An answer to this question on currently standardassumptions is not easy to obtain. On the above approach, on the other hand, thequestion doesn’t even arise. For the basic unit of grammar is the (single) phase, ourbasic template. A bi-phasal structure can thus only recapitulate this template, withthe lower phase figuring in the interior of this structure, hence receiving a predicativeor relational interpretation.

Even cyclic recursion of C-in-C need not be productive beyond a single round.Consider CPs that are specifiers of another CP, as with conditional clauses and other‘high’ modal modifiers:

(65) [CP [CP If John buys apples] Mary can make a pie]

A first thing to note here is that both CPs function very differently: one to make anassertion, the other to restrict its scope. In this sense, this is not a recursive structurein the above sense of self-similarity. In any case, recursion of this form of embeddingis sharply limited. Adding a conditional modifier to the conditional clause yields anungrammatical structure:

(66) *[CP1 [CP2 [CP3 If the shop opens] if John buys apples] Mary can make a pie](intended: ‘If the shop opens, John will buy apples. If he does it, Mary canmake a pie.’—i.e. CP3 is a conditional clause restricting CP2, which in turnrestricts CP1)

This again instantiates a restriction we found above in (45–7), where D-within-Dshows that not even a single such round of ‘recursion’ can happen without materialintervening between the embedding and embedded occurrence of D, and hencewithout its happening cyclically. On the other hand, it might be argued that wefind unbounded recursion in the domain of verbs, in the cases of verbs of severalclosed classes:

(67) a. John [wanted [to start [to cause Bill [to die]]]]b. John [wanted [to want [to want [to want [to want . . . ]]]]]

Does (67a) illustrate verbs directly embedding other verbs, without running throughother, non-verbal categories in between? This would not hold in cartographic views,where aspectual, modal, and other verbs with this type of behaviour are treated asfunctional (or semi-lexical), rather than lexical categories. This implies that they all

21 Haegemann (2009) and Arsenijević (2008) argue that (64) is in fact a universal structure, even wherethe structure appears to be (63).


belong to different categories, and hence that these examples do not exhibit a case ofrecursion of the same in the same. Even for examples like (67b), at least the categoryof the non-finite inflection, call it TP, intervenes between the instances of the modalcategory involved. If there is also vP below each TP, or if TP itself is a cycle, theputative recursion is indirect and mediated by cycle boundaries.

Moving on to the domain of verbs, consider serial verb constructions. But only avery limited number of verbs may appear in one serial verb construction. Moreover,it is of a templatic nature: not by accident, the term used for it includes the notion of a‘construction’. Two different types of serial verb constructions can be recognized onthe background of our discussion so far. One is the type in which the serializationinvolves the interpretation of coordination between the serialized verbs (which ofteninclude restructuring verbs such as aspectuals and modals).

(68) Sira la'o hakru'uk deit. Tetun-Dilithey walk bend.over just‘They walked just bent over.’lit., according to most analyses: ‘They walked and bent over (simultaneously)’[Williams-van Klinken et al. (2001)]

These constructions are similar to the English type He tried and opened the bottle orShe went and read the book. The analysis of this type of serialization is most likely toinvolve a segment of a functional sequence (for the restructuring members of theseries), and/or coordination, thus avoiding a direct embedding of elements of thecategory V in other elements of the same category. There are, however, morecomplex serial verb constructions, with more than one, and potentially infinitelymany, lexical (i.e. non-restructuring) verbal roots. Pawley (2006) proposes a classifi-cation with three ways in which verbal roots can combine into complex verbs. Thefirst is compact serialization, in which verbal roots are mutually causally related,illustrated in (69a). The second is what he calls narrative serialization, in whichdifferent verbs, which may be primitive or complex, form a flat sequence on thetemporal line; an example is given in (69b). The third is what he calls verb-adjunctconstruction, in which although apparently two verbs combine, one of the verbs actsas a modifier, as in (69c); this asymmetry can be verified by testing how the verbsinteract with aspect marking, negation and other functional categories of the verbaldomain.

(69) a. pk sug- Kalamstrike extinguished‘put out (a fire)’

b. . . . kuñp ognap tb d am katp-at okok l-l, . . .kuñp(leaves) some cut get go house-area about put-SS:PRIOR‘ . . . having gathered kuñp leaves and taken to the house and put (them), . . . ’


c. Sawan [guglum ag-ig] k-j<a>p.Sawan snoring say-SS.SIM sleep-PRES.PROG<3SG>‘Sawan is asleep, snoring.’[Pawley (2006: 8–11)]

Compact serialization is clearly templatic: verbs compose under the template oftelicity, or causation. While it is possible that compact serial verbs take part inderiving other compact serial verbs, this has to be mediated by lexicalization, in thesame way as argued for noun compounds below. This is supported by the generaltendency of this type of serialization to lead to lexicalization of the resulting complexverbs, whereby they acquire idiosyncratic meanings. The verb adjunct construction isnot even a proper case of serialization, as it forms asymmetric pairs in which onemember is phrasal. Narrative serialization is close to a flat multiple coordination:series of temporally ordered independent events are realized, crucially without astructural way to mark a closer relation between certain subseries. Pawley himselfnotes that, with respect to the analysis of all three types of serial verb constructions inKalam, ‘there are certain advantages in a construction-based treatment’ (Pawley,2006: 3)—hinting again at the bounded rather than infinitely recursive nature of theirgeneration.

What about the appearance of two projections, both labelled P, within anexpanded functional sequence of a prepositional phrase (PP)? Does this not indicatea form of recursion qua embedding of the same in the same, within a single phase?An instance is the recursion of den Dikken’s (2009) locational and directional PPs:[PPDir . . . [PPLoc . . . ]]. But the arguments from above apply here as well. There arestill only exactly two instances of the PP category here, and moreover, the twoinstances are not really of the same category, as they are sub-specified for the kindof spatial meaning they contribute: one is locational, the other directional. Labellingthem LocP and DirP would in fact be more appropriate—with the category P linkedto the entire domain. A clear case of self-embedding however appears to be (70), inthe domain of nouns:

(70) [N[N[N[NwarN filmN] studioN] committeeN] sessionN]

Perhaps, here there simply is no complex underlying structure (for instance withreduced predicative relatives), there is no functional structure intervening beforeN embeds in N, and there is simply a set of bare nominals that enters a strictlyrecursive structure. The prediction that our model here makes, however, is that inthis case we should get no referential meanings: the form of generation that we see isnot the one that goes with category changes at phase boundaries and concomitantpart–whole relations. And that seems to be correct: the form of embedding that wesee is compounding in the service of generating new quasi-lexical concepts, ratherthan grammatical expressions that can be used to refer. This is why every round of


embedding applies between two elements of the same category, and producesanother entity of the same category, effectively deriving a binary version of thearithmetical successor function with which Chomsky (2008) analogizes recursion/Merge in language. Relatedly, in this case, semantic compositionality applies.

While the case just discussed involves seemingly direct embedding of one lexicalcategory in another, there are also well-known cases of seemingly direct embedding ofone functional (or edge) category in another of the same kind. A case in point isdemonstrative doubling and determiner spreading in Greek (Panagiotidis, 2008: 451):22

(71) Afto to vivlio. Greekthis the book‘This book.’

(72) to vivlio to kokino. Greekthe book the red‘The red book.’

However, note that (73), which doubles the same determiner, is out, as is (74), whichreverses the order of the two determiners in (71):

(73) *to to vivlio

(74) *to afto vivlio

We are looking, then, at the option in Greek of ‘doubling the edge’, with thedemonstrative extending the ‘extended’ projection of the head noun. The moredeictic item is more at the edge, taking the more weakly deictic element as acomplement. This order, which we would expect on the present model, cannot bereversed. The order, in short, must be such that the deictic effect increases as wemove to the edge, and the extended projection has again an essentially fixed, irrevers-ible, and templatic structure, serving to make reference more specific and rule outerror through misidentification. Moreover, a single referent is being computed, andthus for the phenomenon of determiner doubling there is no corresponding phe-nomenon of ‘multiple definiteness’ or ‘reference-doubling’. Overall, then, nothingchanges in the principles we have discussed. That a single referent is being computedis equally true in (71), where again we see that the effect of determiner spreading is tomake a (single) referent available twice, with a second deictic act using a morenarrowed-down description. The intensionality of XPs embedded in other XPs isillustrated here, since ‘the red’ has no independent referent, showing that the two DPsare not on a par. While the Greek edge is certainly extended further, in short, it is stillnot the case that it is recursion of the same in that edge. No different conclusion

22 We thank for Andreas Pantazatos for data and discussion.


emerges from Complementizer doubling in Spanish with ‘way of speaking/asking’verbs, where for example we find (75):

(75) Me preguntó que qué quería. Peninsular SpanishCL ask.3SG that what want.1/3SG‘He/she asked me (*that) what did I/he/she want.’[Demonte and Fernández-Soriano (2009: 30)]

Crucially, the two Complementizers are here of different kinds, one being interroga-tive/wh, the other not, breaking the symmetry. Moreover, such sequences are againnon-recursive, and Brucart (1993) puts one of the Cs in Spec-C, the other in C,showing they are not on a par. Demonte and Fernández-Soriano (2009) place the wh-element in FocP and the declarative que ‘that’ in ForceP.

In summary, a wide range of examples including potential counterexamples to ourargument suggest that within the domain of grammar, there simply is no embeddingof the same within the same, and hence no recursion in the sense of self-embedding,which is what our approach to the phasal template predicts, but a Merge-basedapproach does not. So far, the facts of recursion follow directly from the basic ideathat the grammar builds referents from predicates at phasal edges, and that allstructure-building and interpretation is constrained by the single-cycle constraint.This model predicts that there can be no recursion in the sense of self-similarityinternal to the phase, and nothing like this can happen when phases embed in others,either. This is what the above data show, and the stipulation of an unboundedrecursive operation Merge adds nothing to these insights.

3.7 Conclusions

This chapter has aimed to depict the content of grammar as distinct in kind from thecontent of the lexicon and as a better candidate for a human invariance than anautonomous component of ‘syntax’. An invariance in the latter would be a surprisingfact, and comparative syntax, focusing on such a component, has struggled to obtaina principled account of such variation (see Chapter 5). Although the assumption thatgrammar has no content of its own has never been axiomatic in generative grammar,it has exerted a powerful force on theorizing, with recursion in a purely formal sensemoving to centre stage especially in Minimalism, where much of the explanatoryburden of grammar is shifted to the interfaces. Of these, the semantic one is nowwidely thought to have pride of place. The more forcefully we believe in a fullyequipped system of thought on the non-linguistic side of a semantic ‘interface’, themore a conception of grammar reduced to Merge, Agree, and generic principles suchas computational efficiency will seem warranted and a form-content dichotomyviable. Yet, the relevant comparative data for the existence of the relevant systems ofnon-linguistic thought are not there, and it is unclear how conceptually coherent it is


to even search for them, when the distinctions we need seem to be of an intrinsicallygrammatical nature, as is suggested by the fact that the formal ontology we havediscussed arises by phase, under the constraints of a particular linguistic architecture(and see the next chapter for a more specific grammatical analysis of this formalontology). For content that depends on grammar, the form-content dichotomybecomes conceptually incoherent.

Rather than distinguishing form and content, then, an appropriate researchprogramme is to distinguish content that depends on grammatical form, fromcontent that does not. This is nothing other than the attempt to delineate the notionof grammatical meaning. That the arrival of grammatical organization in the homi-nin brain makes no difference at all to what meanings we can grasp as a species,seems unlikely. Lexical content in particular, obeys fundamentally different prin-ciples than grammar, with lexical units representing pockets of memorized infor-mation about patterns of experience. Human language, by contrast, is a referencesystem: a device for carrying out at will, and comprehending, acts targeting referentsin an infinite space of possible thought that exhibits a formal ontology. We haveargued that the formal classes involved do not exist in a metaphysical realm wherethey can be inspected sub specie aeterni. Rather, they are an aspect of the creativity oflanguage use, in which acts of reference become possible that are not causally orperceptually controlled, but instead controlled internally, by grammar, on an occa-sion of language use. It makes sense, therefore, to regard as the smallest unit ofgrammatical organization the unit of deictic significance or of reference, and toreconstruct the recursivity of grammar on this basis.

If we do so, a number of contingent facts that recursion exhibits in humanlanguage are predicted and find a rationale. Where the content of grammar is shiftedto the interfaces, by contrast, we are left with a formal abstraction of grammar inwhich the universality of semantics is simply assumed, while universals of grammarnow become either empty (reducing e.g. to ‘recursion’ or ‘hierarchy’) or hard to see,since they have been separated from the ways in which they are used, becomingarbitrary. The semantic universals in turn become hard to explain. Again, the key tothis problem is to distinguish those aspects of semantics that find a grammaticalexplanation from those others that do not. To the former, we have argued, belongsthe availability of a reference system, which a Merge-based account of grammartogether with the principle of semantic compositionality cannot, on our view,explain.


4

Deriving the formal ontologyof language

4.1 The grammar of reference

We have argued that any content word acquires its forms of referentiality on anoccasion only as a function of the grammatical relations into which it comes to enter,rather than in virtue of its lexical specifications, which do not predict its referentialfunctioning (with ‘compositionality’ as no solution to this problem, we have sug-gested). That reference is not lexical is shown by the fact alone that any word that canbe used to refer can also be used to predicate, an insight that, as we have illustratedabove, even applies to indexicals and the personal pronouns, which are reckoned themost deictic of devices in language. Reference is in this sense a grammatical categoryfor us, part of what we have called the ‘content’ of grammar, as is its inverse,predicativity. Reference moreover appears as the most basic grammatical category,around which all other grammatical functions revolve, with the grammatical processitself terminating in the assignment of a truth value.

But we haven’t shown yet how exactly reference arises from grammar. None of theabove would be of much interest if, after a word enters the grammatical process, itcould become referential in just any way, or in ways we cannot correlate with itsspecific grammatical behaviour. Instead, however, what we will see in this chapter isthat the grammar narrowly constrains the ways in which words can be used to refer,making available a small number of discrete options in which this can happen,organized in the form of a hierarchy, ranging from purely predicative nominals toquantificational, to referential, to deictic, and finally to personal ones. Higher formsof referentiality in this sequence entail lower ones, and none are lexical. Again,nothing in semantics per se predicts either of the constraints in question or theirhierarchical organization.

We will describe these options and how they arise, as induced by a simpleprinciple: the gradual movement of lexical material to the ‘edge’ of the phase. Inthis sense, we say that reference is induced ‘topologically’. The term ‘topology’indicates the possible transformations (or deformations) of a given geometrical

object, while leaving its basic identity intact (invariant under the transformations inquestion). In the case of grammatical reference, the geometrical object is the phase.Its internal composition and the ways in which this composition can change induce,we shall see, distinctions that we can then describe formal-ontologically, and that wefind formalized in one way or another in virtually any formal semantic theory ofnatural language, like the distinction between a proposition and a property, or anevent and a truth value. We will conclude that the grammar of human languageorganizes a formal ontology of this kind, which as such provides a framework ofthought: a system in which thought can arise. This topological approach to referencebuilds on and reformulates pioneering work of Longobardi (1994; 2005), which wehere expand and implement in a way that directly connects with the phasal approachwe have taken in Chapter 3.

How the grammatically available forms of reference for a given word are induced isalso independent of its so-called ‘lexical category’, i.e. its part-of-speech status (inparticular, whether it is a noun or a verb). Noun-headed structures are surelydifferent from verb-headed ones—for example in that the former are necessarilycontained in the latter, and only the latter are truth-evaluable. However, this is not aconsequence of a lexical ‘N-feature’ or some lexically specified ‘reference feature’, butof the grammatical fact that the nominal phase is normally the first in the grammat-ical process and the clausal one is the last. Moreover, as we shall see, the way in whichdifferent kinds of referentiality are induced grammatically for both kinds of lexicalheads is the same. Reference is a consequence of the phasal topology, not thecategorical label ‘Noun’, which we have characterized in Chapter 2 as a morpholex-ical manifestation of grammatical relations in which a particular lexical item tends tostand.

In a similar way, the traditional term ‘adjective’ encodes words primarily func-tioning predicatively, being confined to the ‘interior’ of the phase; and ‘verb’ is atraditional term denoting words that can enter thematic, aspectual, and propositionalrelations. A consequence of the present approach, thus, is that no other category thanthe one basic category of referentiality (and its inverse, predicativity) is in factneeded: the so-called ‘lexical’ categories, N(oun), V(erb), and A(djective) can all bereduced to language-specific morpholexical markings of universally available under-lying grammatical relations needed to establish forms of reference.

Speaking of formally distinct types of referents such as ‘objects’ or ‘propositions’ isto use the traditional philosophical and ontological terms, and talk of ‘reference to’such ‘entities’ has traditionally been taken to induce ‘ontological commitments’ toentities of these various formal types. Given the present grammatical approach, thesituation is different: the burden of this chapter is to illustrate how acts of referenceinvolving the formal ontology in question are governed by narrowly grammaticalprinciples. They therefore induce ontological commitments only within a formalframe given by grammar. Once this system is in place, existence of entities falling


under the formal types in question can be discussed, and existence—say, of the Eiffeltower, or Bolt’s winning in the Olympics—is not then a question of grammar anymore. The system of formal categories itself, however, into which these existents fit, isnot independent of grammar.

The logic of the chapter is to firstly embed Longobardi’s (2005) TopologicalMapping Theory (TMT) into our phasal architecture in Section 4.2, and then toexpand it to the referential possibilities that are configured grammatically in thedomain of clauses, showing that the principles for establishing forms of reference arethe exact same ones there, following Sheehan and Hinzen (2011), in Section 4.3. Wethen propose a further expansion to the domain of pronouns and clitics, whichwe here, based on Martín and Hinzen (2012), argue in Section 4.4 to go strictlybeyond the ontology that we see in the domain of 3rd-person object referencetackled in the previous section. In line with our approach above, also the forms ofreference exhibited by indexicals crucially cannot be understood or explained (non-grammatically) semantically. In fact, with the personal pronouns, the referentialpotential of grammar comes to a peak, and the same topological mapping principlesare exploited here again. In this way, the chapter traces the genesis of referentialityfrom its weakest form—purely predicative and non-scope taking nominals—all theway to its strongest form—the referentiality of the 1st-person pronoun ‘I’. Since thesemantics of the personal pronouns connects very directly to foundational issues inthe philosophy of mind and epistemology, notably the existence of ‘selves’ as objectsof reference, the extension of the TMT into this domain goes a long way towardsestablishing the goal of this book at large: to demonstrate the epistemologicalsignificance of grammar.1

4.2 The Topological Mapping Theory (TMT)

If the grammar didn’t operate on a given lexical concept, the concept would neverbecome referential. It could be activated by sensory exposure to a certain object; butthe whole point about the emergence of lexical items is that they can be activated inthe absence of a sensory trigger. Yet, in this case, they would be useless if nomechanism was available that turned them into referential expressions. This mech-anism, we have suggested, is grammar. But it is a matter of observation that in anyhuman language, the grammar can make a given lexical concept referential indifferent ways and to different degrees. Thus, take the lexical concept ‘man’. In (1),this concept is grammaticalized in such a way that no more than an abstraction,manhood, is involved, while a natural interpretation of (2) is that John is a cannibal,liking man-meat (cf. John likes beef ):

1 We are deeply grateful to Pino Longobardi for inspiring this project and for continued conversationson it.

4. Deriving the formal ontology of language 119

(1) a. John is man enough to solve this problem.b. John is more man than boy.

(2) John likes man.

In (3), in turn, singular reference is to a particular person under the name of ‘John’,but ‘man’ comes to denote no more than a property ascribed to this individual, andthe indefinite ‘a’ has no ‘specific’ reading:

(3) John is a man.

This is different in the non-copular construction in (4), where ‘a man’ is an argumentrather than a predicate, succeeds in taking scope, and denotes a particular individualclassified as a man, though the speaker may not be familiar with him and no specificman needs to be referred to:

(4) John likes a man.

If we add marking for grammatical Number instead of the indefinite article, as in (5)below, ‘man’ comes to denote a class of individual men, though no particularindividual men are being referred to, making the expression generic:

(5) John likes men.

In (6a), the generic interpretation remains available, but a predicative one nowbecomes additionally available, where John is man-hunting, as it were. While thenominal is specified for Number in the morphology in this case, this morphology isnot interpreted (thus, (6a) may still be true when John finds that one man is enough).If we add a numeral as in (6b), a generic interpretation, according to which John islooking for groups consisting of three men each in general, remains available, andreference is still not to specific men, in the way it is when we add ‘the’ or ‘these’ to thenumeral, but rather to an arbitrary set of three men:

(6) a. John is looking for men.b. John is looking for three men.

As we replace the weak determiner ‘a’ in (3)–(4) with ‘the’, which is ‘strong’ in theterms of Zamparelli (2000: ch. 2), it again may be that merely the property of ‘beingthe man’ is denoted, as in (7):

(7) John is the man.2

2 There is an idiomatic reading here, ‘John is cool’, which is not intended.


This predicative reading becomes impossible in the non-copular constructions in (8),where the nominal occurs in an argument-position (object or subject), showing that‘the’ imposes stronger constraints on referentiality:

(8) a. John likes the man/the men/the three men.b. The man/men/three men arrived.

That ‘the man’ truly is still predicative in (7) is demonstrated by pronominalizationand cliticization patterns. Thus, to the question ‘who is the man?’, it is natural toanswer in English using the neuter pronoun: ‘it’s John’, but not: ‘he’s John’ (seeMikkelsen, 2005). In a language like Catalan, too, a DP of this nature is cliticized bythe neuter clitic ‘ho’, which is impossible in referential contexts, a point to which wereturn in Section 4.4:

(9) Cliticization of non-referential nominals:a. En Pere és el Porter Cat

The Peter is the Porter‘Peter is the porter’

b. En Pere ho ésThe Peter neu is‘Peter is (the porter)’

If ‘man’ appears without any definite article, but still in a referential position such asthat of subject as in (10), predicative or generic readings are also completely impos-sible, and the only possible reading is an evolutionary one (as in ‘man arrived 150kyears ago’), where ‘man’ denotes a kind (and there is a more bizarre one according towhich man-meat arrived—after the beef, say, at a cannibal party):

(10) Man arrived.

Where ‘the’ in the copular construction in (7) is strengthened to ‘this’, the predicativereading is out in this position as well, and the speaker will necessarily make deicticreference to a particular individual in the context:

(11) John is this man.

How can we make sense of this bewildering variety of ways in which a given,completely standard nominal such as ‘man’ can be used to refer? We will list fourbasic conclusions from the above few examples. First, the very same lexical nominal(‘content word’), as it enters the grammatical process, can end up referring in verydifferent ways, where each of these ways is characterized, not by any change in thelexical concept involved, but a change in the formal ontology of the referent. Inparticular, this referent can formally be:


(i) an abstraction (1)(ii) an arbitrary amount of a kind (2)(iii) an arbitrary number of individual instances of a kind (6a)(iv) a set of sets with a particular cardinality each (6b)(v) a kind (5, 10)(vi) a property (3, 7)(vii) a particular individual instance of a kind potentially unknown to the speaker (4)(viii) a particular individual instance of a kind known to the speaker (8, 11)(ix) a particular set within the set of sets with a particular cardinality containing

instances of a kind (8).

The second observational fact is that which of these options is chosen co-varieswith grammatical factors, such as whether a determiner is present, how strong thedeterminer is, and which grammatical position in the sentence the nominal is in. Bycontrast, there are no semantic or other non-grammatical factors that govern thesevarious uses. The third observational fact is that in terms of referentiality, some ofthem are ‘stronger’ than others, with reference to abstractions, non-individuatedsubstances, and properties being weak. The fourth observation is that as referencegets stronger, we also see grammar recruiting more resources in addition to thenominal (NP) projection itself, such as grammatical Number, a numeral attached tothe nominal, a determiner attached to the nominal in addition to a potential numeral,a deictic element as present in a demonstrative, and so on, with each new layercontaining the previous expansion as proper parts (cf. Zamparelli, 2000; Pereltsvaig,2006):

(12) DP

D�

D NumP

NumP�

NumP NP

three

the

men

...

These observations raise an immediate question about proper names, which,although they normally occur without a determiner in languages like English, havethe semantics of individually specific referential DPs, and hence are strongly refer-ential. Moreover, how can proper names be paradigmatic arguments, if argumentsrequire a determiner position (Stowell, 1989; Szabolsci, 1994)? The exact same


question arises for pronouns, demonstratives, and clitics, all of which normally occurwithout a determiner, but of course standardly have individually specific referentialuses, and for kind-referring nominals, as in (10). The first to have tackled thisimportant puzzle systematically seems to have been Longobardi (1994; 2001; 2005),and we believe that the significance of these results is even deeper in the context of anapproach to the phase as a unit of deictic reference in grammar. In essence, theproposal is that the forms of reference that exist in grammar can be read offtopologically from how the phase is internally organized and transformed. Howthis happens is, as anticipated in the overview above, moreover independent of‘lexical category’ in the traditional sense of, say, Baker (2003), opening up the wayto a purely grammatical rather than lexical account of reference.

Longobardi’s (2005: 9) account of object reference states the following:

Topological Mapping Theory (TMT): Object reference if and only if N-to-Dmovement.

Longobardi argues that, in Italian, object-reference of proper names can occur in twoways. Either the proper name surfaces after nominal modifiers such as possessors, inwhich case there is also an article in D (13a), forming a CHAIN with the nominal; orthere is no article, in which case the TMT applies and the name must move to D (bysubstitution) overtly, explaining why it now precedes what would normally be aprenominal modifier in (13b).

(13) a. [DP Il mio [NP Gianni ]] . . . (expletive-associate CHAIN)the my Gianni

b. [DP Gianni mio [NP tGianni ]] . . . (overt movement chain)

c. *[DP D mio [NP Gianni ]] . . . (no PF-visible chain)

As Longobardi (2005: 26–7) shows, ‘il’ in (13a) functions differently from the definitearticle and can differ inmorphology from the latter in other languages such as Catalan.For English, the principle of N-to-D movement when a determiner is absent remainsvalid in the case of object-reference, yet now the movement is obligatorily covert. Thisexplains why (14a) is grammatical and is object-referential, why (14b), in which themovement is overt, is ungrammatical, and why (14c) derives a descriptive reading:

(14) a. [DP D old [NP John ]] came in (covert movement)

b. *[DP John old [NP John ]] came in (overt movement)

c. #[DP The old [NP John ]] came in

These data are the inverse of the Italian ones. D must remain phonologically empty forobject reference in English to occur, so that it can be targeted by covert N-substitution,making it inconsistent with a descriptive reading. In terms of the organization of thephase as described in the previous chapter, repeated in (15):


(15) [edge [interior]]

this means that (i) the edge needs to be projected for object-reference to occur, (ii)the nominal head of the lexical projection NP in the ‘interior’ has to be copied to theedge, thereby emptying the interior of lexical content. This ‘movement to the edge’involves no lexical change: the exact same lexical item is involved whether or not themovement takes place. Yet, if it does, reference becomes objectual; if it doesn’t, andfunctional material is projected in the edge, such as grammatical number or adeterminer and a restriction, then object reference disappears, as in (16–19), provingagain that this particular ontology is not lexical but grammatical:

(16) The Gianni I fell in love with in Rome isn’t the one you know.

(17) I have many Giannis in my class this year.

(18) Ci sono due Gianni nelle mia classe. Italthere are two Giannis in.the my class‘There are two Giannis in my class.’

(19) Conosco tre Marieknow.1s three Marys‘I know three Marys.’

The same data show that names need not be of ‘type <e>’, any more than pronounsor clitics do.

This would in turn explain an empirical fact about proper names, which hasenthralled philosophers since the landmark set by Kripke (1972): in their most typicaluses, the descriptive properties that we associate with the referent of a particularname need not co-determine the identity of the referent as picked out by its propername. Thus, for example, if we think of Goedel under the description ‘the discovererof the Incompleteness Theorems’, then Goedel, if referred to as ‘Goedel’, remains theexact same individual, even if it turns out that it was Schmidt who discovered thetheorems and Goedel stole them. The explanation for this crucial fact is that if wehave no more to play with than the single phase with its basic bipartite structure, andthe nominal head of the lexical projection in the interior of the phase is copied to theedge, then there is nothing in N that could still enter into the determination of theidentity of the referent: there is no nominal restriction in this position anymore. Infact, we predict that not even the fact that Mary is called ‘Mary’ needs to enter. Inother words, we predict that if Mary is referred to as ‘Mary’, and ‘Mary’ is in the edge,the referent will be what it is even if it turns out that the person in question is notcalled ‘Mary’. In Kripkean terms, the reference is thus predicted to be ‘rigidified’. If,say, Mary turns out to really be called Billy, or she is called Mary but is in fact not awoman, then the identity of the referent will not change. Rigidity, in this sense, is agrammatical phenomenon.


In turn, if the name ‘Mary’ stays in N, we predict that an interpretation will resultthat exploits whatever little descriptive information a nominal head that is a propername entails: namely, that the person is called ‘Mary’. ‘Mary’ in (19), say, therefore,denotes ‘being called “Mary” ’. Such readings for proper names get easier, the more agiven name triggers descriptive associations (as when the person denoted by thename is famous). These associations then allow us to form a new predicate on thespot, which will then be lexicalized through the relevant name that stays in N.

One could, obviously, if one wanted, spell out the rigidity of proper names in theirobject-referential uses as ‘constancy of reference across all possible worlds in whichthe referent exists’, yet this won’t change the basic claim above: that the relevantcausal mechanism that gives rise to rigidity and the special referential properties ofproper names is solely grammatical. Constancy across possible worlds expresses agrammatical fact in (naturalistically controversial) metaphysical terms.

Despite these benefits, Longobardi’s topological hypothesis faces a serious prob-lem. This is because Longobardi (1994) explicitly analyses DPs of the form [the [NP]]as ‘quantificational’, i.e. as having the basic Russellian (1905) semantics in (20b,c),where ‘∃:’ denotes the second-order property ‘there is a unique x’:

(20) a. the man

b. the x (man x)

c. ∃:x (man x)

The problem with this proposal is that, as has been widely discussed since Donnellan(1966), all definite descriptions such as (20a) can have referential uses. This is not truefor indefinite descriptions, as we see when comparing (21) with (22) and (23):

(21) I like a man

(22) I like the man

(23) The man is insane.

In (21), ‘a man’ is a scope-taking nominal, which entails that it allows both forreadings in which there is a particular man that I like, and in which no definiteman is referenced, and reference is merely to an x such that x is a man. Although, inthe first case, a specific individual is contextually involved, it is not being referred toin any direct way (which can be the very point of such an utterance, as when awoman happens to talk to the actual man she likes, but wants to hide it). Suchreference, on the other hand, does take place in both (22) and (23), where the non-specific or attributive reading becomes unavailable in (23) and is only marginallypossible in (22). For example, in a context where the choice is between a man and awoman (say during a dance), you go for the former, although you have no idea whohe might be. (22) can then also trigger a generic reading, according to which youalways go for the man, especially if there is intonational stress on ‘man’. The


attributive reading re-appears, on the other hand, when we make the descriptivecontent of the NP richer, as in (24), uttered when standing near the scene of ahorrendous murder crime:

(24) The man who did this is insane.

On the basis of these data one could argue, contrary to a long-standing tradition, thatthe referential use of definite descriptions is in fact the primary one, while the‘attributive’ one is secondary: for the latter is available only where some propertydescribing a certain referent is sufficiently salient, as in (24), or where a nominal is inan predicative position, as in (25a), or where it co-varies with the value assigned to avariable (25b):

(25) a. I am the man.b. In any ordinary household, when the woman cooks, the man does the

dishes.

Sometimes, the very same definite description can occur twice in a sentence, one timeinterpreted referentially, the other predicatively, depending on its grammatical position:

(26) I wished her husband wasn’t her husband.

(26), from Lycan (2008), is coherent as an assertion only if, in the first occurrence, thedescription ‘being her husband’ is used to pick out a particular referent, and if thisdescription is not a condition on the identity of the referent. For, in this case, thespeaker can coherently use the occurrence of the same definite description in thepredicative position to point out that it would be nicer if the individual referred to inthe subject position was free of the descriptive property in question. This optiondisappears again, where either the descriptive property is too involved and thedescriptive reading is forced in both positions (*I wished the man who committedthis horrible crime wasn’t the man who committed this terrible crime), or the propertyis not properly ascribed, as in epithets (cf. *I wished the idiot wasn’t the idiot).

In sum, indefinite descriptions can, apart from being predicative, be specific, butthey cannot yet be object-referential. Definite descriptions can be object-referential,but can remain predicative or quantificational as well, if relevant conditions obtain. Ifthey do, the descriptive content of the nominal that is the complement of the definitedeterminer enters into reference-fixation, but still not the identity of the referent(a person picked out as a husband need not, in every possible world, be a husband).While we observe a scale of increased referentiality in the transition from indefinite todefinite descriptions, it would thus be wrong to conclude that definite descriptions, inand of themselves, have a fixed semantics: for their referential properties depend bothon the NP-restriction and their grammatical and non-grammatical context, exactly asin the case of proper names. The question whether ‘definite descriptions’ are referen-tial or attributive therefore cannot be answered: it is meaningless. For it is a question


about a phrase; but the question concerns how that phrase functions, which is amatter of the grammatical relations in which it occurs.

While definite descriptions, unlike indefinite ones, are primarily referential, butcan have predicative uses, complex demonstratives start to resist descriptive orpredicative uses, explaining why (27) has a completely different meaning from (26):

(27) I wished her husband wasn’t this husband.

Nonetheless, as has been noted in King (2001) and Elbourne (2008), even complexdemonstratives still have non-referential uses under certain restricted conditions.Consider the narrative context in (28) and the bound-variable context in (29):

(28) So I am in this bar, and there is this guy who tells me about his wife . . .

(29) Whenever Mary makes a knot in her handkerchief, this knot is forgotten whenit would be most important.

The speaker in (28) is not exactly pointing to any particular individual, aswhenwemeeta person on the street and the same speaker tells me: ‘I met this guy in the bar’.3 Note,however, that none of the occurrences of ‘this’ in (28–9) is consistent with intonationalstress on ‘this’; and in none of them, the NP-complement of the demonstrativedeterminer can be dropped or be replaced by a deictic pronoun like ‘him’, showingthat the NP-restriction is the primary reference-fixer in these cases. Where the deter-miner is stressed in a complex demonstrative, as in (30), or where the NP-complementis dropped, descriptive/predicative and bound-variable readings disappear:

(30) I met this guy in a bar.

(31) I met him in a bar.

These data suggest that we also cannot speak of a uniform Russellian semantics fordefinite descriptions and proper names (and perhaps encompassing demonstratives),or of a dual or ‘ambiguous’ semantics.4 In all the cases we have considered—barenominals, names, definite determiners, demonstratives, and pronouns—referentialityis scalar: it can be purely predicative, quantificational/scope-taking, referential, ordeictic, depending on the grammatical context. These options are ordered hierarchic-ally on a scale, and none is lexically determined. Moreover, there is a clear topologicalmapping principle for each of these four options. Thus, in the first case, purelypredicative nominals, no edge is projected, as in (32), which is equivalent to (33):

(32) I am hunting unicorns.

(33) I am unicorn-hunting.

3 In line with this, complex demonstratives of the former type appear in the existential construction‘There is this guy I know’.

4 Here we are indebted to conversations with Tom Hughes.


For this reason, referentiality is determined purely via the descriptive content of thenominal. Since no object is being referred to, (32) and (33) can be true even if there areno unicorns: there is no existence presupposition, the intended reading is merelygeneric, and both expressions are non-specific regarding Number, although Numberis morphologically present in (32). If, in turn, an edge is projected for a nominalargument, as arguably in (34) (which is equivalent to ‘I am eating some lamb’), but itis left empty, the nominal retains obligatory narrow scope, no individual ontology isprojected, and no individual-specific readings are possible. Yet an existence presup-position now arises: (34) cannot be true if there is no lamb:

(34) I am eating [x [lamb]].

If the edge is projected and filled, but it is weak, as in (35), the nominal can take bothnarrow and wide scope, making the sentence false in the latter case, if there are nounicorns:

(35) a. I am hunting [a [unicorn]].

b. I saw [NUM [unicorn-s]]

If the edge is projected and filled, and it gets stronger, scope is necessarily wide,making the sentence always false:

(36) I am hunting [the [unicorn]]

This becomes even clearer where the edge gets even stronger, through the addition ofa deictic element, assuming with Leu (2008) that ‘this’ morphologically decomposesinto the definite determiner and a deictic element (‘the’+‘here’):

(37) I am hunting [this [unicorn]]

And if (38) was ever asserted, and there are no unicorns, we would have to concludethat the referent was identified under the wrong description:

(38) This unicorn is dead.

Finally, where the edge becomes so strong that the NP-complement and the descrip-tive content encoded in it can be dropped, a maximally referential and minimallydescriptive form of referentiality is reached:

(39) This is dead.

(40) It/he is dead.

In summary, the hierarchy of nominal reference in question is that depicted in (41),where ‘<’means ‘is referentially weaker than’ or (equivalently) ‘is more dependent onthe lexical content of the descriptive predicate’:

(41) (*the) *(NP) < *(a) *(NP) < *(the) *(NP) < *(this) (NP) < *(he) (*NP)


Proper names represent a case exactly intermediate between stage 3 and 4 of theprogression in (41): there is no lexical determiner, yet the nominal vacates the interiorto occupy the edge. The general principle that increased referentiality corresponds tothe phase becoming more ‘edge-heavy’ is thus vindicated for this case, too, along withthe fact that increased referentiality correlates with increased grammatical resources.The same follows from any approach to pronouns on which these are inserteddirectly in the edge, as opposed to moving there from N (see Longobardi, 2008,and below, Section 4.4). The same follows for the case of rigid reference to kinds.Thus, consider that in (42) and (43), the (a) options simply cannot mean what the (b)options do:

(42) a. Man comes from Africa.

b. The man comes from Africa.

(43) a. Men are brutal.

b. The men are brutal.

In other words, reference to kinds is inconsistent with the definite article, except incases such as the generic one in (44), where English allows an expletive articledeprived of its usual referential meaning:

(44) The whale is a mammal.

Again this follows if, in (42), ‘man’ is base-generated in the phase-interior, and thenmoves to the edge—except if the expletive option is available, as in (44), which kicksin with ‘whale’, where the lack of an article would normally trigger mass-referentialreadings (cf. ‘I ate whale’). The availability of this expletive article appears to besubject to an essentially arbitrary cross-linguistic variation, as we would expect froma lexical idiosyncrasy. Thus, either sentence in (45) is ungrammatical in English:

(45) a. *The man is a mammal.

b. *Whale comes from Africa.

And while we can say (46) in German, where ‘die Callas’ functions virtually as aproper name and ‘die’ ceases to function as a normal definite or demonstrativearticle, ‘der’ in (47) retains a deictic dimension, pointing to the singer called ‘Dom-ingo’ (who is not quite as famous as La Callas):

(46) Die Callas ist grossartig.‘the Callas is great’

(47) Der Domingo ist grossartig.‘the Domingo is great’


Where the lexical determiner is not recycled for the expletive option, obligatorilycovert N-to-D movement explains why kind-denoting NPs must be bare, as in (42)above or (48) below, whereas in Italian, where for lexically idiosyncratic reasons anexpletive determiner is more generally available, kind-denoting NPs cannot be bare:

(48) (*the) apples are/milk is good for you (* with a kind reading)

(49) a. I love (*the) good wine.

b. Amo *(il) buon vino Italove.1s the good wine‘I love good wine’ [based on Longobardi (1994: 631)]

While the bare NP in (49a) can receive a kind reading, its Italian equivalent in (49b)cannot. In Italian, bare NPs receive only an existential reading, which corresponds toa DP configuration in which the null determiner binds a variable restricted by NP. Inthe present context, this confirms a general and very important point: the form ofreferentiality that is topologically derived within the nominal phase has nothing to dowith the lexical status of proper names, or the semantic fact that names are given toindividual persons/objects. The kinds rigidly referred to in (42), (48), or (49) are notindividual persons or objects. Yet the principle, by which ‘object-reference’ is estab-lished in these cases, according to the TMT, is exactly the same as in the case of lexicalproper names. The point is simply that, since the lexical common noun involved inthese cases is not lexically attached to any particular individual, the ‘object-reference’in question comes out as reference to a (natural) kind. A kind, therefore, as referredto in this fashion, is nothing other than the objectual correlate that the grammar cancompute for a lexical common noun.

As we shall now see in the next section, this insight is in fact broader: for in the caseof clauses, the grammar can generate a clausal analogue of ‘object-referential’ expres-sions as well. But due to the verb-based nature of clauses, the ‘objects’ in question willcome out as quite different in nature: namely, as what we call (talking in semanticmode) truth values or facts. This would confirm once more that what we are targetinghere—the nature and origin of language-specific forms of reference—is strictlyindependent of lexical category. We turn to this issue in the next section, which isbased on Sheehan and Hinzen (2011) (henceforth, Shee&H).

4.3 Extending the TMT

Shee&H propose (50):

(50) The Extended TMT: Object-reference in clauses is derived by V-to-Cmovement.


If so, what really matters for object-reference is again not any lexical labels or featuressuch as ‘N’ or ‘D’, but simply the naked topology of the phase, in which there is abasic bi-partite division into a predicative core (the interior) and a referentialperiphery (the edge), irrespective of lexical category specifications:

(51) [referential edge [predicative interior]]

The ‘interior’ provides for the descriptive content of a lexical concept that, in thecourse of the grammatical structure-building process, is converted into an expressionthat is made referential in one of the grammatically available ways. In (52), this basictemplate is instantiated in two grammatically equivalent ways:

(52) a. [referential the [predicative kings of France]]

b. [referential that [predicative there are kings of France]]

Just as the NP provides a descriptive condition for the identity of the referent mappedfrom ‘the’ at the edge of (52a), TP provides such a description for the referent mappedfrom ‘that’ at the edge of (52b). This makes a direct prediction: if ‘that’ in the edge ofthe clause regulates the reference of clauses, there should again be two extremes: aweakest case, in which the edge is not projected at all; a stronger case in which it isprojected, but remains empty; and a yet stronger case, in which it must be filled—either, we expect, through a clausal equivalent of the Italian ‘expletive’ definite article,or through T-to-C movement. Shee&H present a broad range of data in support ofthis prediction. For clauses, the strongest form of reference that is available isreference to a truth value: there is nothing more fundamental or extensional thantruth. Truer than true, nothing is, and the truth of a sentence, if it obtains, holds nomatter what: in particular, all referential terms in it can be replaced by co-extensionalones salva veritate. Since nothing is ever asserted to be false, moreover,5 this truth-value is always truth. Reference to the truth in this sense is achieved only at the root,i.e. in matrix clauses. In that case, we see that the Complementizer is obligatorilyabsent in a language like English (53), exactly as the determiner in the case of object(as well as kind) reference (54):

(53) (*That) John left.

(54) (*The) John

As noted in Shee&H (2011: 27), this absence cannot be due to a general ban onComplementizers in matrix assertions, since V2 languages provide clear evidencethat matrix clauses can be CPs. Rather, (53) would be explained on more principledgrounds if (53) patterned with (54) in that, in English, the head in the interior of the

5 ‘It is false that John left’ asserts, of course, that it is true that it is false that John left, i.e. that John didn’tleave.


phase (V/T) must move to the edge (C) covertly in the case of truth-reference, amovement that any overt Complementizer would block. In line with this hypothesis,we observe that if a non-expletive Complementizer is overt in Catalan as in (55), or inFrench, as in (56), readings are derived in which no truth value is asserted (bothexamples have subjunctive morphology usually found in embedded clauses):6

(55) Que sempre hagi de fer el dinar jo CatalanThat always have.3SG.SUBJ of do.INF lunch I.NOM‘That I have to always do lunch!’

(56) Que Jean soit malade de la tuberculose en 2003! FrenchThat Jean be.SUBJ ill of the tuberculosis in 2003

‘For Jean to be sick with tuberculosis in 2003!’ [Schlenker (2005: 10)]

We expect these clauses not to be truth denoting, unless an expletive Complementizeris lexically available that forms the clausal equivalent of the ‘expletive’ definite articlein Italian nominals, as in Gascon (57):

(57) *(Que) soi Gascon Gasconthat be.1S Gascon‘I am Gascon’ [Campos (1992)]

‘Que’ in this language appears to be precisely restricted to finite matrix clauses inwhich a truth is asserted. V-initial and V2 languages provide other evidence, to whichwe return shortly, that V-to-C movement indeed can take place overtly as well intruth-denoting clauses, paralleling the Italian nominal case. This derives, via thephasal model, an old Fregean intuition: that (assertoric) sentences are proper names,just derived ones. They, too, are object-denoting, with truth as the traditional namefor the ‘object’ denoted.

The weakest form of reference available for a finite clause is where the clause ismerely a proposition: a possible truth. That is, the speaker takes no attitude towardsthe truth-value of the clause. We predict that in this case, the edge can be empty, as itindeed can be in English:

(58) I believe/say/suppose (that) John left.

The further prediction is that where clauses lack a CP layer altogether, such as clausesoccurring as complements of raising, exceptional case-marking (ECM), and restruc-turing verbs, they fail to gain independent referential status. No properly bi-phasalstructure is generated, allowing Case to be assigned from beyond the clause boundaryin ECM (see further Chapter 6).

6 For a range of other examples from other non-V2 languages, including Spanish, Catalan, Romanian,and Portuguese, see Shee&H (2011: 29–31).


Finally, just as definite descriptions have always oscillated in philosophers’ intu-itions in regards to whether they are referential or quantificational, we obtain anintermediate case in the clausal instance too. Clauses differ from nominals in that thelatter are normally embedded as arguments. They can be vocatives, of course, butnonetheless, a nominal such as ‘the man’ cannot normally stand on its own, as a self-standing utterance. Clauses, however, can be embedded as arguments as much asthey can be unembedded. A clause that has been evaluated for truth by the speakerand occurs as an argument is factive (fact-referring). We predict from the above that,in this case, the edge must be filled. Vindicating this prediction is complicated by anumber of factors, and in particular the heterogeneity in the class of factive verbs. AsShee&H argue, however, on the basis of a typology of such clauses, the purest case offactive verbs is that of the so-called ‘emotive factives’. In this case, the complementi-zer is obligatory, as predicted, exactly as the determiner is obligatory in the case ofdefinite but not indefinite DPs:

(59) I regret/resent/ignore/neglect *(that) John left

Factives, thus, are the clausal analogue of definite descriptions: these, as illustratedabove, can be referential; but they necessarily have a predicative core (NP-comple-ment), which enters the act of reference. In a similar way, factive clauses can beviewed as referential expressions, but they nonetheless never rigidly refer to truthvalues, as only matrix clauses do: the speaker asserting (59) does not assert that Johnleft.7 Rather, the embedded clause is still a grammatical predicate, like all otherarguments are, when they are embedded in higher phases. Thus, in kill Bill, Bill is apredicate (the Theme) of an object, an event, which is derived at the edge of v.Similarly, in (59), that John left is a description of a content identifying a particularmental event that is referenced by the matrix verb.

Expectedly, factive clauses also constitute an intermediate case with regards to inten-sionality effects: if Lois Lane resents that Superman left, she need not resent that ClarkKent left, even if these two are, on some intuitions, the same fact. But if Superman left,then Clark Kent left, showing that reference is rigid and maximally extensional in thematrix case. Factive clauses are as truth-denoting as things can get, in human language, inan argument position, given the constraint argued for in Chapter 3 that only wholesentences can denote truth-values. Factive clauses share other properties in commonwith definite DPs, such as a presupposition of existence. This presupposition cannot becancelled:

(60) John cares/is glad that the world is flat, *but it isn’t.

(61) Jeanne d’Arc talked to the king of France, *but he didn’t exist.

7 This is to share with Melvold (1991) and Haegeman and Ürögdi (2010) the intuition that referentiality,not factivity per se, is the crucial explanatory notion underlying the phenomena traditionally discussedunder the heading of ‘factivity’.


This proposal must crucially not be confused with an older one, according to whichfactive CPs are in fact nominals. According to this proposal, C is a nominal head inthese instances, and the clauses in question contain a silent ‘fact’-nominal (Kiparskyand Kiparsky, 1970). This suggestion is natural where factive clauses are (rightly)diagnosed as referential, but referentiality is (wrongly) diagnosed as a consequence oflexical category (‘nominal’), which we have argued in Chapter 2 is a confusion oflexical and grammatical semantics. As we have seen, there is nothing necessarilyreferential about nominals. Moreover, what speaks against the older proposal is thatthe distribution of factive clauses is not the same as that of definite DPs, as alsodiscussed in Picallo (2002), Ambridge and Goldberg (2008), Haegeman and Ürögdi(2010), and Betti (2011). Consider, for example, (62) and (63):

(62) I am surprised (*at)/aware (*of ) that you feel that way.

(63) I am surprised *(at)/aware *(of ) that.

Moreover, factive clauses behave differently regarding extraction: they are only weakislands, whereas complex NPs are strong islands. We return to extraction below.

Let us summarize, then, the ‘Extended TMT’ as proposed in Shee&H, whichassociates a threefold formal ontology with the clause:

(64) The Extended Topological Mapping Theory: Object-reference iff C is substi-tuted by V/T.

This entails that, in the absence of such movement—or a relevant PF-visible(Phonetic Form-visible) CHAIN—clausal reference will be to a mere proposition:an object that can be possibly true and possible false, but is not evaluated yet. Wherethere is movement to the edge (or CHAIN-formation), this, by contrast, yieldsreference to a truth (a derived proper name), or fact (subordinate case). Again, thehypothesis is that this movement can happen overtly or covertly depending onarbitrary externalization factors, as in the nominal case: in the clausal case, themovement is covert in English but overt in V2 languages, yielding in both cases arigid interpretation in which the descriptive condition expressed by TP does not fixthe identity of the referent (even if it helps to determine or identify it).

This proposal meshes well with the well-established fact that in V2 languages suchas German, Dutch, Icelandic, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Old French, and Kash-miri the V/T-to-C chain is required to be established overtly in matrix truth-denotingclauses (cf. Den Besten, 1981; Vikner, 1995; Diesing, 1990 on Yiddish; Bhatt and Yoon,1999, on Kashmiri; and Holmberg, 2010, for an overview). The fact that this involvesmovement of V/T into the C-domain is suggested by the position of adverbials/negation (65b), and the fact that the presence of another XP in preverbal positionlicenses subject-verb inversion (65c):


(65) a. laRkan por akhbaar Kashmiriboy.ERG read.PAST newspaper

b. az por laRkan akhbaartoday read.PAST boy.ERG newspaper

c. akhbaar por laRkan aznewspaper read.PAST boy.ERG today [Bhatt and Yoon (1999: 48)]

While a number of influential approaches to V2 (Weerman, 1988; Truckenbrodt,2006; Julien, 2010), have already taken this movement to be semantically motivated,Shee&H go beyond previous accounts of V2 by providing not only a plausiblesemantic correlate for the head-movement involved, but also by assimilating it tohead-movement in the nominal domain, with parallel semantic implications: con-stant reference irrespective of descriptive conditions.

As noted earlier, the analysis of truth-evaluated clauses in subordinatedpositions—intermediate between truth-reference in the matrix case and propos-ition-reference in the subordinate case—faces a number of empirical problems dueto the heterogeneity of the domain of factive clauses. Common to all of these types ofclauses, however, is that no truth is literally asserted in these subordinate positions:the proposition encoded in the subordinate clause is not asserted as true by thespeaker, though it may be asserted by the matrix subject and is presupposed as trueby the speaker; but equally, that no mere proposition is denoted either, in the sense ofsomething that can still be either true or false, i.e. has not been evaluated yet by thespeaker. But the class of factives is usefully split into a narrower one compromisingthe so-called ‘emotive factives’ (e.g. regret, resent, mind, care) (Melvold, 1991), whichexemplify the phenomenon in the purest terms, and a broader class of ‘semi-factives’,which can lose their factivity in some contexts (Karttunen, 1971), and include thesometimes so-called ‘cognitive semi-factives’ (e.g. know, discover, find out, forget)and the ‘communication semi-factives’ (e.g. disclose, divulge, confess, reveal). AsShee&H show, careful attention to syntactic differences in the behaviour of thecomplements of true factives, semi-factives, and non-factives shows that true factivityis a distinct syntactic type. The emotive factive verbs are distinctive precisely inselecting a single type of complement, the ‘definite CP’ representing fact-reference.

An interesting phenomenon that helps to tease factive and semi-factive subordin-ate clauses apart is ‘slifting’, in the sense of Ross (1973). Consider (66) vs (67):8

(66) the class is cancelled, he said/affirmed/revealed/I assume/believe/discovered/found out.

(67) *The class is cancelled, he regrets/resents/cares.

8 Note that (66), with ‘that’, is possible if read as a topicalization structure.


While subordinated (cf. Grimshaw, 2010), ‘slifted’ clauses form a kind of intermediatecase, carrying some assertoric force indexed to the speaker, which is why the speakercannot felicitously cancel the assertion involved:

(68) The class is cancelled, he said/affirmed/revealed, #but it’s not.

In other words, slifted clauses are (at least partially) asserted (hence truth-denoting)clauses, and it is revealing that the most paradigmatic factive verbs (i.e. the ‘emotive’ones) are impossible in this case (cf. (67)). This confirms a crucial commitment of theabove mapping hypothesis for clauses: factive clauses are fact denoting, not truth-denoting; their truth is presupposed or referred to, but not asserted. At the same time,slifting allows us to tease factives and semi-factives apart, since the latter are possiblein this instance (cf. (66)). The complementizer must be dropped in instances ofslifting, as it often can be with semi-factives, unlike factives:

(69) He discovered/knew/realized the man had left.

(70) ?*He resented/cared the man had left.

Again, this is predicted by the present approach, since the Complementizer should beobligatory only in the true factive case. If, by contrast, in the case of an assertion oftruth, V moves to C, this movement would in turn explain why, in the instance ofslifting, an empty C-position turns out not to be subject to Empty Category Principle(ECP) effects, which, in traditional terms, would ban the occurrence of phases withan empty edge from occurring in ‘ungoverned’ positions. As we have seen, Englishbare common nouns, unlike Italian ones, can circumvent this problem, as (71)illustrates:

(71) Apples are good for you.

This possibility follows if covert N-to-D movement takes place in these instances,voiding the ECP effect and yielding the rigid-referential reading that, in Italian,requires the expletive determiner to be overtly present. Why, then, can a sliftedclause occur in preverbal position, as in (66), when preverbal CP-subjects usuallyrequire an overt Complementizer, which however is banned in (66)? Again,this would naturally follow if, due to the assertive nature of the clauses in question,V-to-C has taken place, voiding the ECP effect in this instance as well, and yieldingtruth-denoting readings.

Slifting, in being restricted to asserted clauses, further illustrates that if a clausebecomes truth-referring (rather than fact-referring), it cannot be extracted from,illustrating a more widely attested difficulty for phases with stronger forms ofreferentiality to be ‘penetrable’ from the outside:

(72) *What kind of car Fred would buy was Mary saying? [Grimshaw, (2010: 6)]


Embedded assertive clauses are widely agreed to be strong islands for extraction(Holmberg, 2010).9 By contrast, fact-referring embedded clauses are generallyassumed to only be weak islands, allowing object extraction (to a degree) but notadjunct extraction, as illustrated in (73–4):

(73) ?What car do you mind that Fred bought?

(74) *When do you mind that he arrived?

Proposition-referring clauses (indefinites), in turn, the most weakly referential case,are most generous in what extractions they allow:

(75) When do you believe that he arrived?

These facts are natural under the phasal model. As has long been recognized,referentiality is a crucial factor constraining extraction. In nominals, specific definitesare hardest to extract from. If referentiality is computed in the phase—and there isnowhere else it could be computed—and greater referentiality correlates with a moreexpanded or edge-heavy phase, then it is natural to expect that the heavier the edgeand the more expanded the phase, the harder sub-extraction would be. Hence, in theclausal case, we expect that assertoric or truth-referring clauses are hardest to extractfrom, and proposition-referring indefinites should be easiest to extract from.10

A second way of teasing semi-factives and factives apart is via embedded rootphenomena, which, in the terms of Bentzen et al. (2007: 14), are governed by the‘Assertion Hypothesis’: ‘the more asserted (the less presupposed) the complement is,the more compatible it is with V2 (and other root phenomena)’. Consider in this lightembedded V2 in (76):

(76) a. Han sa/innså at I universitetstida hadde han Norwegianhe said/realized that in university-time.the had hevært veldig ambisiøs.been very ambitious‘He said/discovered that, in his university days, he had been veryambitious.’

9 But not in German, according to Vikner (1995), which is a mystery.10 Nonetheless, the parallel is not perfect, as indefinite DPs are still well known to be weak islands,

rather than non-islands (Chomsky, 1977), as Shee&H (p. 45) note. We still have no better explanation thanthat, although referentiality is a purely grammatical category and is established topologically, it will beharder to establish object-referentiality, the more grammatical complexity is built. Clauses are intrinsicallymore complex than nominals, and it might be that, cognitively, computing an objectual correlate from aproposition—a truth value or fact—is intrinsically more complex than computing one from a property,allowing sub-extraction even where it ceases to be possible in nominals.


b. *Han angret på/benektet at i universitetstidahe regretted on/denied that in university-time.thehadde han vært veldig ambisiøs.had he been very ambitious. [Bentzen (2010: 169)]

Again these data follow if verb-movement to the edge yields assertive (truth refer-ring) clauses, whereas the factive complement clause of ‘regret’ in (76b) is factreferential and hence excludes embedded V2, which rather correlates with assertivity.The semi-factive ‘realize’ is compatible with V2, but not the true factive ‘regret’. Thesame is found in regards to gerundive complements. Emotive factive predicates likenon-assertive predicates take these (77), whereas assertive predicates including semi-factives do not (78):

(77) I resent/regret/avoid/deny [PRO being wrong].

(78) *I assume/disclose/know/suppose/say [PRO being right].

This simplifies the data considerably (see Shee&H, pp. 36–7), yet the crucial pointremains that gerundive complements are never assertive: to assert a truth, a gerund-ive complement, which can never form a matrix clause, is insufficient, whereas it isquite sufficient to refer to a fact (such as ‘me being wrong’). Thus, in (77–8), we findfactives and semi-factives parting company accordingly.

A third observation is that true factives cannot form the ‘Main Point of Utterance’(MPU), in the sense of Simons (2007), whereas the complements of semi-factive andnon-factive verbs can. In (79), corner brackets indicate possible answers to thequestion posed:

(79) Q. What’s up with Mary?A1. I think/guess/know [she’s not feeling well].A2. #[I care/mind that she’s not feeling well].A3. It’s possible/likely [she’s not feeling well].

Why can the complements of true factives not form the MPU? This follows if, forsomething to be the MPU, it has to be asserted. If ‘asserted’ means truth-referring,and true factives are fact-referring, it follows that true factive complements cannotform the MPU.

Slifting, embedded V2, sub-extraction, gerundive complements, and MPU allexemplify the distinctive behaviour of clauses that become referential in subordinatepositions, corresponding to rigidly object-referring nominals in the nominal case,even if, in the case of clauses, reference to truth is ultimately only found in matrixpositions.

We again conclude that referentiality is a grammatical category, not a lexical one,and it arises from progression from the phase interior to the phase edge, with anumber of identical strategies available in both the nominal and clausal domain for


how a number of formal-ontologically distinct referents can arise as the grammaticalcomputation proceeds. Reference begins where ‘lexical projections’ start to have anedge in which various functional projections regulate how the words are made torefer. Where this edge is projected insufficiently far (e.g. there is no determiner), weretain a predicative reading. Where the edge starts to fill, quantificational andreferential readings are derived. Where it is filled, but not extended far enough—e.g. a deictic element is missing in the nominal case—readings will oscillate betweenreferential and predicative, depending on a number of grammatical factors.11 Theculmination of the process is where the descriptive core of the phase is emptied andonly the edge remains. This gives us ‘rigid’ readings.

We can, as we have, express this progression in the traditional intuitive ontology ofmetaphysics or semantics—speaking about a progression from ‘properties’ to‘objects’ to ‘events’ to ‘propositions’ to ‘facts’ to ‘truth-values’, instead. Yet, it appearsthat nothing would be gained from this move, and reinterpreting what is essentially agrammatical process in metaphysical terms seems to deprive us of the actual explana-tory principles involved. Ignoring these principles can be harmless in theoreticalendeavours, and the metaphysical one in particular, but it is harmful the momentthat we seek to understand how the narrow range of formal-ontological distinctions,which unfailingly accompanies the building of grammatical structures, arises. If wewant to naturalize the ontology of semantics, metaphysics is no way out.

4.4 Extending the Extended TMT (with Txuss Martín)

But we are not in fact at the end of the hierarchy of reference yet. All we have talkedabout so far is the formal ontology of 3rd-person object reference. The grammar, as weshall see in this section, crucially goes beyond this ontology. This is immediatelysurprising from a traditional nominalist point of view, where language is an arbitraryrepresentational system: if it is, how could there be something beyond object refer-ence? Isn’t a world consisting of objects all there is? As we will show, it isn’t, andnothing other than grammar takes us beyond what we have got so far.

4.4.1 From 3rd-person object reference to pronouns

The new realm we have to enter is traditionally characterized under the label of‘indexicality’. When it became clear, in the 1970s, that proper names have a special,‘direct’ form of referentiality (Kripke, 1972), which the semantics of definite descrip-tions cannot emulate, the real challenge was still waiting in the wings: how dodemonstratives such as ‘this’ or the personal pronouns refer? Do they really refer

11 Consistent with this approach, it has recently been argued that Classifier-NP constructions inMandarin, Swahili, or Nguni are not referential (Ndayiragije, 2011; Wu and Bodomo, 2009), contrary toclaims by Cheng and Sybesma (1999) according to which Cl substitutes for D in these languages.


in no different way than proper names do—by ‘directly referring’ to their referents?Are they object-referential in the same way as proper names, the only differencebeing that context is needed to figure out what their respective objects are, on anoccasion of language use? What, however, could the semantics of indexicals be, if itdoes not reduce to some sort of direct, though perhaps contextually mediated,relation between word and object, which we already see in the case of proper names?

Since demonstratives and pronouns are grammatically quite distinct from othernominals, our approach in this book makes us expect that their semantics will bedifferent as well, and that it falls under the rubric of grammatical not lexicalsemantics. So the distinction between indexicals and proper names, in particular,should be a semantically and epistemologically significant distinction. Moreover, thesemantic differences in question should cohere with our nominal mapping topologyso far. If 3rd-person object-reference (as found in proper names) is not the key to thesemantics of deictic pronouns and demonstratives, this should show in the topologyof pronominals. A natural expectation is that the further extended the nominal edgeis, and the higher an element is merged or moved up in the left periphery of thenominal phase, the less descriptive content will play a role, making the language-world connection even tighter. We pursue this intuition in the rest of this chapter andfocus particularly on clitics.

The search for a distinctive character in the semantics of indexicals makes us recallthe phenomenon of ‘essential indexicality’ (Perry, 1993; Lewis, 1983), discussed byphilosophers for some decades. As the name says, it consists in the suggestion thatthere is something ‘essential’—or irreplaceable—about indexicals in their mostordinary uses. To take a classical example, for Perry’s (1993) famous amnesiac RudolfLingens, who is lost in the Stanford library and does not know who he is, thesentences (80) and (81) do not mean the same thing:

(80) Lingens is at Stanford

(81) I am at Stanford.

Lingens, having read a biography of Lingens while in the library, knows that (80) istrue. But he does not therefore know (81). Nor does he know (82):

(82) This is the Stanford library.

Similarly, if I look at myself in the mirror, without realizing it is me, then (83) couldbe mildly amusing, while (84) would not be, and might instead represent a genuinediscovery (Kaplan, 1977):

(83) His/that guy’s pants are on fire.

(84) My pants are on fire.


Indexicals such as deictic pronouns or demonstratives, then, seem to make a dis-tinctive difference to the meaning of a sentence, and they couldn’t be replaced bydefinite descriptions or proper names. If so, this would rationalize the important factthat such devices apparently exist in all human languages. The rationale would bethat they could not be eliminated without semantic loss. If they cannot be eliminatedwithout semantic loss, it would be more than a slight pragmatic inconvenience if welacked these devices. Rather, if we resorted to names and descriptions instead, theorganization of meaning would change. But in fact, it is indeed rather unclear in whatway eliminating indexicals would really be a pragmatic inconvenience: although it istrue that proper names are not always known or remembered, a logically possiblehuman language could be such that ‘temporary’ proper names would be used in thiscase, like ‘dude/bloke’, or ‘dude1’, ‘dude2’, etc. It is thus doubtful that the rationale forindexicals is pragmatic. We also see pronouns and clitics to be particularly sensitiveto grammatical formatives such as Case and Person-features, which again suggeststhey are an inherent part of the grammatical system, rather than forming a curiousset of lexical items that only make a pragmatic difference.

While essential indexicality provides a nice rationale for the existence of indexicals,however, it needs to be explained. Why, or in virtue of what, does it obtain? Again,even if the phenomenon in question is properly characterized as a semantic ratherthan pragmatic one, semantics as such makes no predictions for why it should exist.The core meaning of ‘semantic’ is that it denotes relations to the world: content.However, in terms of relations to the world, nothing changes when we comparepronouns with any other nominals: there is a word/phrase, on the one side of thesemantic relation, and an object/thing, on the other, in both cases. A person is thesame external object, whether I refer to it as ‘you’, as ‘the reader of this book’, or byusing her proper name. In the latter two cases, different lexical concepts are involved,but this has no impact on what object it is semantically or externally. This is aproblem for the view of indexicals as ‘semantically underspecified’ or ‘context-dependent’ expressions. This view suggests that underspecification and context-dependence could be eliminable by simply always having relevant proper names oruniquely identifying descriptions ready to hand: that is, by simply fully specifying thereference. Ensuring this would be merely pragmatic inconvenience. If indexicality issemantically essential, therefore, the underspecification or context-dependence viewdoes not seem to be correct.

It also does not seem to help with explanation if, as in Heim and Kratzer (1998),pronouns are formalized as indices, which do nothing other than encode (non-grammatical) reference and have no semantic content besides. Insofar as pronounshave ç-features (and hence are not like indices, which presumably lack them), thesefeatures are taken to define partial identity functions on the individuals of the domainof quantification, encoding presuppositions for reference (cf. Heim, 2008): if theindividual satisfies the ç-feature in question (e.g. by being male), the individual is


mapped onto itself; otherwise the function is undefined, and reference fails. This is totreat ç-features as not different in principle from any other nominal restriction on adeterminer. In line with that, a long tradition maintains that 3rd-person pronounssuch as ‘he’ project phrases such as (85) that are essentially similar to DPs, containinga D-head taking an NP-restriction, with an additional restriction provided byç-features (cf. Elbourne, 2005, 2008; Roelofson, 2008; Johnson, 2011):

(85) DP

DP

Dhe {Person,

Number, Gender}

NP

This structure again makes us expect no semantic difference between such pronounsand definite descriptions, as on the semantic underspecification view above.

The solution to this dilemma in the present context is obvious: if there is a semanticdifference, but semantics as such does not predict it and standard semantic models donot deliver one, the difference must be one of grammatical semantics: howmeaningfulstructures function in grammar, viewed as a reference system.12 Indeed, the mostobvious empirical difference between pairs like (80–1) is a grammatical one, to do withgrammatical Person: while proper names are always grammatically 3rd Person, ‘I’ is1st Person. This same difference is found in (83)–(84). In (82), on the other hand, themost obvious difference is the presence of a (proximal) deictic element in ‘this’ that isabsent in ‘the Stanford library’. But the problem is that, traditionally, the semantics ofreference seems to abstract from the notion of grammatical Person and from thedeictic element in demonstratives. For example, in Kaplan’s (1989a, b) classicalapproach to ‘directly referential expressions’, these are singular terms whose onlysemantic contribution to the proposition expressed is said to be the object referred to.This object is a referent. Distinctions of grammatical Person or in how it is beingreferred to make no difference to it or to the propositional content that it determines.The same is true where a 1st- or 2nd-person feature is said to be a ‘presupposition’ onreference (Heim, 2008): again, this doesn’t change the object qua external object ofreference, if the presupposition is satisfied. The same is true again where demonstra-tives and pronouns are identified with definite descriptions. Thus, Elbourne (2008)

12 Indeed, note that strictly speaking, the semantic term ‘indexical’, if viewed as denoting a particularclass of words, is itself a conceptual error. The term ‘indexicality’ indicates a way in which a given wordgrammatically functions. Indexicals viewed as words do not need to function in this fashion (given forexample predicative or bound uses that they also allow).


suggests that a complex demonstrative such as this cat expresses an ‘individualconcept’. Such an entity is presumably not marked for grammatical Person: it is anabstract semantic or model-theoretic entity. This individual concept is then analysedas containing an ‘index’, i, and a relational concept, R: [[[that i] R] cat]. But the indexis said to be, say, Felix himself, if Felix is the cat referred to it (Elbourne, 2008: 433).It is irrelevant to this referent, qua referent, that it is the referent of a deictic actinvolving a demonstrative. If language didn’t exist, it would be the exact samereferent that it is.

There is, then, an obvious grammatical difference between our example sentencesabove, but it does not connect in any natural way with standard accounts ofpronominal or deictic reference in the semantic literature. But can it be plausiblethat language makes no difference to what we can refer to? Might its structures not beconstitutive for some of the kinds of objects we refer to, so that these would not existwithout grammar as a device for referring to them? Might reference to ‘selves’—our‘Egos’—be a case in point? Selves, in this case, would inherently be linguistic objects:without being language users and mastering grammar, we would not have (or be)selves (though we could have or be animal selves). Can it be accidental to theexistence of rational selves that they are language users and need to master thesystem of grammatical Person?13 Zahavi (2006: 27–9) stresses that self-awarenessinvolved in conscious states cannot be construed along ‘subject-object’ lines, yetagain, it appears to be exactly the grammar of self-reference that tells us how this isthe case: the grammar of 3rd-person object reference (‘the/my self ’, ‘my body/brain’)is fundamentally different from that of 1st-person reference (‘I’; see e.g. Bianchi,2006). We would worry about an English-speaking child who never referred to itselfin the grammatical 1st person. A real possibility, then, arises on the horizon: that theformal ontology of grammatical reference, which begins with predicative forms ofreference, ends with deictic and personal such forms, which are constitutive for thesemantics involved.

Summing up the situation, the existence of indexicals as a class of expressionsposes an explanatory puzzle: (i) it seems to relate to the organization of meaningrather than being merely pragmatic; (ii) clear grammatical differences accompany theelements of this class; yet, (iii), these grammatical differences must be meaningfullyrelated to the apparent semantic differences, ideally explaining them in a principled

13 While the idea that rational selves are, inherently, language-users, seems reasonable enough, the roleof language for the existence of what philosophical discussions refer to as ‘the self ’ is barely considered incurrent discussions of the notion of ‘self ’, which are striking in their near-complete omission of anyconsideration of the significance of language or a linguistic perspective (Sass and Parnas, 2003; Chung et al.,2007; Kircher and David, 2003; Zahavi, 2006; Lowe, 2008). The self is said to be the referent of the 1st-person pronoun, but there is virtually no reflection of the fact that this is, in fact, a grammatical category,defined through its contrast with the grammatical 2nd and 3rd Person. Clearly, ‘first’, ‘second’, etc. have nonon-grammatical meanings here. We return to this issue in Section 8.5.


fashion. In the rest of this chapter we will therefore cast a fresh look at the grammarand meaning of Person and deixis. As we shall see in the next sub-section, thepersonal pronouns are, in fact, referential in a distinctly different and stronger waythan 3rd-person pronouns. In Subsection 4.4.3, we argue that this difference is not anon-grammatical semantic (e.g. lexical) one. In Subsection 4.4.4, we show, through adetailed study of Romance object clitics, that it also involves an increase in grammat-ical complexity relative to all other nominals, involving an expansion of the nominalleft edge, as well as, crucially, Case. Case and ç-features encode a relational seman-tics, as mirrored morphologically in Agreement relations. This is not reflected instandard semantic approaches to pronouns, in the sense that there is absolutelynothing relational about deictic pronouns, since there is nothing relational about aword referring directly to an object. Nor does the standard presuppositional seman-tics of ç-features make any predictions for such relations. In line with such asemantics, even standard Minimalist syntax takes Case and ç-features as paradig-matically ‘uninterpretable’. But they are only uninterpretable if we take ‘semantics’ inthe traditional core sense of dealing with relations between words and things. Theyare not, if we take seriously what Agreement patterns in language tell us: that Caseand Person features express relations between event-participants and speech-partici-pants (Sigurðsson, 2004). The semantics of Person and Case is a grammaticalsemantics, not a lexical one.

4.4.2 Reference and Person

Let us adopt the traditional view that 3rd-person nominals are in fact no-personnominals (Benveniste, 1966). In other words, these are nominals that have not yetentered the Person system in grammar. What, then, does grammatical Person add,when it comes into play? Let us recall our above hierarchy of increasing referentialityas the phasal edge becomes more ‘heavy’, repeated here as (86):

(86) (*the) *(NP) < *(a) *(NP) < *(the) *(NP) < *(this) (NP) < *(he) (*NP)

Pronouns specified for Person (the ‘personal pronouns’) clearly behave like 3rd-person pronouns at the top of this scale, insofar as they, too, do not require a nominalrestriction (87a–c), unlike the definite determiner, and indeed cannot co-occur withone. Only plural personal person pronouns behave differently in this respect (87d),but as has long since been argued, at least the so-called 1st-person plural is not really a1st Person:14

14 Thus, ‘we’ certainly does not refer to multiple ‘I’s (1st Persons), something that seems inherentlycontradictory. Cf. Benveniste (1966), or Boas (1911: 39): a ‘true first person plural is impossible, becausethere can never be more than one self ’. It could be that an analogous observation holds for the 2nd Personplural.


(87) a. *he man

b. *I boy

c. *you boy

d. we linguists

However, while 3rd-person pronouns take a relative modifier (and acquire a purelyquantificational rather than referential reading in this case), the personal pronouns don’t:

(88) a. He who enters this room will be shot.

b. *I who enter(s) this room will be shot.

Moreover, while it is a paradigmatic property of 3rd-person pronouns that, inappropriate contexts, they can act as bound variables, this is not true for personalpronouns, which resist binding. That they can nonetheless allow it, is often assertedon the basis of examples such as (89), where ‘my’ is said to have a bound reading tothe effect that nobody else around here can take care of his or her own children.Another example is (90), which is said to have a bound reading to the effect that noone else would admit that he is wrong:

(89) I’m the only one around here who can take care of my children. (Kratzer, 2009)

(90) I’m the only one around here who will admit that I could be wrong. (Partee, 1989)

What we notice here, however, is that, on the intended reading of (89), if it isfelicitous at all, ‘my’, can be exchanged for the 3rd-person pronoun ‘her’, withoutany change in meaning. Similarly, in (90), the second occurrence of ‘I’ could simplybe exchanged for ‘he’. This logically entails that pronouns, where they seem to bebound, fail to be personal pronouns except morphologically. Even morphology itselfpoints us to this conclusion. Thus, Kratzer notes that, in English, in order for avariable reading to be available at all in a dependent clause, the agreement morph-ology of its subject must reflect that of the clause it depends on. Thus, in (91), wherethis is not the case, the bound reading disappears:

(91) I am the only one around here who is willing to admit that I am wrong.

In German, due to its different agreement morphology, bound variable readings ofstructures in a translation of (90) are unavailable in the first place (Heim, 2005):

(92) Ich bin hier die einzige, die zuzugeben bereit ist, dass ich unrecht habe.I am here the only one who to admit ready is that I wrong am‘I am the only one here who is willing to admit that I am wrong.’

Just as in (87d) above, bound variables become available again when we switch from1st person singular to 1st person plural, which again is expected if the 1st Person pluralis not really a 1st Person:


(93) Wir sind hier die einzigen, die zuzugeben bereit sind, dass wir unrecht haben.We are here the only ones who to admit ready are that we wrong are

But for one of us (the German one), no bound variable reading really emerges eitherin this case: the second ‘we’ only has a ‘collective’ interpretation. Consider in thisregard also the ‘partial binding’ example in (94), from Rullmann (2004):

(94) Only you prepared a handout for our first appointment.

If we imagine Kratzer using (94) to address a former student of hers at a reunion,there is a reading that she could paraphrase as: ‘you were the only x such that xprepared a handout for the first conversation of x and me’ (Kratzer, 2009: 190). Here,while the plural our indeed has a bound variable interpretation, its 1st-person featureobviously cannot come from an agreement chain originating with you, and itsinterpretation is not that of a variable. In other words, insofar as we can dissociatethe Number and the Person feature of bound plural (so-called) 1st-person pronouns,the Person features are not bound in these instances, as shown by the fact that there isno antecedent in (94) with appropriate features that could act as a binder.

The same observation can be made in relation to Romance clitics and theircapacity to express bound readings:

(95) Bound readings of Catalan and Spanish clitics:a. *Un / el parisenci compra plaça de parking Cat

a the parisian buy.3s spot of parkingsi ell#i/j proi/j té cotxeif he pro have.3s carINTENDED: ‘A Parisian buys a parking spot if he has a car’

b. *[Cada uno de nosotros]i dijo que mei gusta Speach one of we said.3s that cl.1s like.1sINTENDED: ‘Each of us said: “I liked” ’

c. [Cada uno de nosotros]i dijo que lei gusta Speach one of we said.3s that cl.3s like.1s‘Each of us said he liked it’

d. *?[Cada uno de nosotros]i dijimos que nosi gustaeach one of we said.1p that cl.1p like.1sINTENDED: ‘Each of us said he liked it’ (6¼ ‘Each of us said WE like it’)

e. Nosotrosi dijimos que nosi gustaWe said.1p that cl.1p like.1sINTENDED: ‘We said we like it’

In (95a), from Picallo (2007), the bound reading can only be provided by the nullpronoun. (95b) shows once more that the 1st-person singular pronoun resists


binding, while in (95c), the 1st-person features of the pronoun in the antecedent areinterpreted there, while the bound pronoun is a 3rd-person clitic. In (95d), the 1st-person features of the plural clitic resist binding again: there is no different interpret-ation for each assignment of a value to the variable bound by the quantifier. Althoughthere is a real quantifier in subject position and we might expect a bound reading, wedo not obtain one: the sentence is ungrammatical, or at least very marked. (95e), inturn, is grammatical, but the 1st-person plural clitic is not bound, because it referscollectively to the whole plurality ‘nosotros’: ‘we’.

The generalization we extract from these data is that singular personal pronouns,unlike 3rd-person pronouns, do not allow an antecedent: they cannot be bound.Insofar as, marginally, it appears as if they can be bound in some languages, theirperson-features are not interpreted, turning the pronoun effectively into a 3rd-person(= non-person) one. Insofar as Person-features are interpreted, they require referen-tial readings. This is, as we have seen, not so for the other pronouns, nor fordemonstratives, proper names, or definite descriptions: none of these require refer-ential readings. This gives us the beginnings of a crucial semantic difference in thepersonal pronouns, which we would like to relate meaningfully to their grammar.

Let us first consider evidence apparently pointing in the opposite direction,however. In some languages such as Dutch, the personal pronouns, unlike the non-personal ones, can be freely locally bound in environments where the Binding Theory(Condition B) should rule out such binding:

(96) Ik/Jij voelde me/je wegglijden Dutch‘I/You felt myself/yourself slide away’

They also seem to allow the ‘sloppy’ reading of (97), rendered explicitly in (98):

(97) Wij voelden ons wegglijden en jullie ookWe felt ourselves slide away and you too

(98) We felt ourselves slide away and you felt yourselves slide away too

Does this show that, contrary to what we just claimed, personal pronouns can havebound readings? Reuland (2011: 160) claims just that (cf. also Adger, 2011). In the caseof (97), Reuland’s conclusion immediately follows, if indeed, as he claims, (99) is thecorrect formalization of the sloppy reading in (98):

(99) Wij (ºx (x voelden (x wegglijden))) & jullie (ºx (x voelden (x wegglijden)))

There is a completely featureless, ‘bare’ variable involved in the structure of (97), then,which is interpreted as 1st Person in the first conjunct and as 2nd Person in the second.It is not clear, however, how this can be, if the putative ‘bound’ personal pronounshave any feature-specifications, and hence are truly personal pronouns. It is also notclear what the grammatical formative, in (96) or (97), is that might be the equivalent


of this ‘variable’, which is a logical notion, not a grammatical one: (99) is a logicalformula. That this bare variable would be 1st Person in the first conjunct and2nd Person in the second would suggest that the two pronouns need to have thePerson features of their respective clausal antecedents, where these features are beinginterpreted. This, however, would seem to be a fact about feature sharing betweentwo pronouns, not necessarily variable binding: sharing a feature entails no gram-matical dependency. In that case, there is no variable binding of the pronouns ineither (96) or (97). The idea would be that the two pairs of pronouns in (96) share aPerson feature value, but there is no binding. This would make sense of the gram-matical semantics of (96). The person grammaticalized as feeling the sliding and theperson grammaticalized as doing the sliding are distinct in terms of their relationalinterpretation as event participants, and playing the role of the person doing thespeaking is something different again. A Person feature is shared, yes, but it is notclear why this entails binding, or should entail it. (96) may thus not be properlydescribed as a case of ‘co-reference’ or ‘identity’, as is suggested by the traditionalnotational device of co-indexation. Identity may be better approximated grammat-ically through the Control-relation, as in ‘I like going to the movies’, or in (100),where grammatically, the subject of ‘like’ and ‘see’ are the same:

(100) I like seeing me in the mirror.

But there is crucially no identity between ‘I’ and ‘me’, in this example, which playfundamentally different roles in order for such a sentence to be coherent at all. Again,potentially, an instance of feature-sharing without feature-binding.

Personal pronouns, we conclude, truly resist binding. The cases that have comeclose are ones in which the person features are those of an antecedent, where they areinterpreted. Where there is no antecedent, as e.g. in the partial binding case (94), thevariable readings disappear. If there is an antecedent, this is not a case of binding, orthere are no person features, except morphologically. Direct referentiality, if so, is anintrinsic aspect of the semantics of the personal pronouns. The same conclusion issuggested by the fact that where a predicative nominal is cliticized in Romance,the clitics involved are not specified for Person, as mentioned in the previous chapter(cf. p. 94 above, and Longobardi, 2008); and by the fact that while all 3rd-personpronominals allow predicative readings, the situation is different for personal pro-nouns, a point to which we return in the next subsection.

Our hierarchy of referentiality in (86) therefore must be expanded by a new layer,thereby coming to a new peak. This layer corresponds to the most referential/deicticform of denotation we have encountered so far. In line with this and our topologicalmapping principle, we shall see shortly (Section 4.4.4) that the personal pronouns arealso grammatically the most complex in terms of the topology of the phase. Thisagain confirms, for the domain of pronominals, the intrinsic connection that we haveclaimed exists between grammar and referentiality. It would also explain essential


indexicality: if the relevant indexicals are grammatically the most complex, and theirgrammar is meaningful, it is expected that they cannot be replaced by anything that isstrictly less complex grammatically, without semantic loss. Before we show this, andin order to motivate such a novel approach to the essential indexical, we will considera more standard semantic take on the essential indexical and argue that it fails—as itmust, if indeed essential indexicality is part of grammatical rather than lexicalsemantics.

4.4.3 Semantic approaches to the essential indexical

Suppose it is a lexical semantic fact about the word ‘I’ that it is to be evaluated inregards to both a ‘world’ w and a more fine-grained part of it, a ‘context’, c, whichmodels the speech situation and in particular contains a function ca that returns theagent of the context (see e.g. Schlenker, 2011). The semantic value of ‘I’ is thus (101):

(101) 〚I〛c, w = ca

On this basis, the following semantic explanation can be offered for Lingens’ predica-ment in (80)–(81), repeated here as (102)–(103):

(102) Lingens is at Stanford

(103) I am at Stanford.

These are now said to be true in exactly the same possible worlds, which means thatthey have, in this sense, the same content. Lingens believes the proposition expressedby the former because this proposition is true in all worlds compatible with whatLingens believes. However, the proposition expressed by the latter contains thesemantic value in (101), and hence has to be evaluated in regards to a context aswell. Since Lingens does not know that the agent of the context is Lingens, he doesnot believe (103). In line with this, he also does not believe (104):

(104) I am Lingens.

This explanation is lexicalist in the sense that it is taken to be a fact about the lexicalitem ‘I’ that it has the context-sensitive semantic value in (101). Note again that thedifference in grammatical Person that distinguishes (102) and (103), as noted above,does not enter into this explanation. If we are right, then, this semantics cannot becorrect. And in fact, we will now see that several doubts arise about it.

Firstly, arguably the semantic explanation just given simply shifts the explanatoryproblem. For the next question is now: why do indexicals have to be evaluated inrelation to the ‘context’, in a way that other referential expressions do not? Codingthis fact through the appropriate semantic value (assuming it is appropriate) iscoding (or formalizing) the fact to be explained, not the explanation. Consider the


analogous case of proper names. These, arguably, have special semantic properties incomparison to definite descriptions. Surely this is not simply a brute (perhapsconventional) fact about proper names as a particular class of symbols, but asks forsome deeper explanation. Again, we cannot obviously say that the explanation is thatnames are constant in their reference across all possible worlds, for this is the specialsemantics to be explained.

Secondly, the semantic notion of ‘context’ used in the semantic explanation aboveseems to be non-explanatory: we argue now that it ultimately cannot be characterizednon-circularly, i.e. without reference to the indexical elements in question. Consideragain that the knowledge that Lingens is said to lack on the above account is thatLingens is the agent of the context:

(105) ºc ºw [ca = Lingens]

Suppose, however, that Lingens’ amnesia involves a further mental disorder: while heis able to make extensive observations of the context he is in, about who acts in it,who speaks, and so on, he nonetheless fails to recognize (106):

(106) I am the agent of the context.

Evidently, most of us do not have this mental disorder, in much the same way thatmost of us are not amnesic. Some schizophrenics, however, do: they hear voicesspeaking (auditory linguistic hallucinations), but may fail to recognize which voice istheir own, i.e. who it is that is speaking. The fact that we lack this disorder shows thatthe ability to recognize (106) as correct is, if it obtains, a non-trivial fact about mentalhealth. The point then is that an object known or referred to under a 3rd-Persondefinite description such as ‘the agent of the context’ or ‘the speaker’ need not beknown under the 1st-Person perspective encoded in the word ‘I’, any more than thereferent of ‘I’ and the referent of ‘Lingens’ in (104) need to be recognized as the same,even if they extensionally are. It follows that evaluating (104) in relation to an external‘context’, in addition to a ‘possible world’, is simply not going to do the workrequired. The context, viewed non-linguistically, does not contain the informationneeded to recognize (103) as true. The information needed to recognize it as true isnot that Lingens is the agent of the context. Rather, it is (104). What is needed is notthe semantics of context, but the right grammar. It is both a necessary and a sufficientcondition for an agent to recognize that a certain proper name or description holds ofhimself that he, when assessing whether they hold, refers to himself under a 1st-Person perspective. Reference to oneself under any other perspective is a sign ofmental ill-health, as the case of schizophrenia suggests, where the use of pronouns,which unlike nouns in English are systematically marked for Person, is distinctivelydisturbed (cf. Watson et al., 2012). Going to a context will reveal much about Lingensand much about agents and speakers, but no Self. The referent of the word ‘I’ is not tobe found in the context. The 1st-Person pronoun is the irreducible access to this


object, and there is no other road to it. The personal pronouns thus are ‘essential’ in astronger sense than the above semantic model assumes, and they are more essentiallygrammatical than contextual.

This directly connects with our third doubt, anticipated in the beginning of thisSection 4.4. It relates to the very notion of a ‘context-sensitive expression’. Is it reallytrue that an essential indexical refers like a proper name does, just in a more context-dependent fashion? Consider that, since a name such as ‘John’ occurs rather fre-quently, there can always be confusion as to who it applies to: any given context mighthave several Johns in it that could be being referred to. Moreover, the person referredto might be Bill, but he was referred to as ‘John’. Things get worse for common nouns.If somebody comes into a room and says ‘man’ (the exclamation meaning ‘damn’ isnot intended here), we have no idea what or who this refers to. Similarly, in anycontext, there could be misunderstanding and confusion in regards to what the phrase‘the book on the table’ refers to. There might be more than one book or table, it mightbe unclear what qualifies as a book, or something might be mistaken for a book andyet be referred to under this description. The exact opposite is true of the personalpronouns and deictic expressions, where the relevant problems simply do not arise:where the word ‘you’ is used in the place of ‘John’, there is simply no issue of havingused the wrong name; or having referenced the wrong person. If a person says ‘I’rather than ‘man’, we immediately knowwhat (orwho) he refers to, and there can be nomistake. Clearly, this is due to the fact that no descriptive lexical content is involved—not even information about gender, which the 1st- and 2nd-Person pronouns seem tolack in most of the world’s languages, and which in the 3rd-Person case could still leadto referencing a person mistakenly as ‘she’ when in fact it is a ‘him’.

Since the referent of ‘I’ or ‘you’ is (essentially) not described, no description canfail to apply either.15 The referent of ‘I’ is crucially not the same as that of ‘my body’(or perhaps ‘my brain’), which picks out a 3rd-Person referent that anyone other thanme can refer to as well. A speaker can be mistaken in calling something ‘my body’,but not in calling himself ‘I’. That a descriptive predicate is involved in the one casebut not the other explains why my body can change, but we do not take this to entaila change in me. Analogous comments are appropriate for the indexical ‘this’. There-fore, where these are used, there is never a question about who or what in the contextthese words refer to, and in which there can be no non-trivial criterion for the use ofthese words, in the sense that we have to check that the criterion applies before usingthem.16 Nor can the 1st-Person entity referred to as ‘I’ change, for it could only change

15 For a contemporary discussion of this old philosophical point, which we here reduce to a grammat-ical truth, see e.g. Lowe (2008). Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.632) expressed it by saying:‘Das Subjekt gehört nicht zurWelt, sondern es ist eine Grenze derWelt.’ (‘The subject doesn’t belong to theworld, it is a boundary of the world.’)

16 I don’t first have to check that I am called ‘John’, that I am human, that I am in my usual mood, etc.,in order to know what ‘I’ refers to. Neither ‘I’ nor ‘this’ abbreviates a description. This is almost but perhaps


if its properties changed; but if no identifying properties are involved in picking it out,none can change either. Even in the case of proper names, let alone definite descrip-tions, by contrast, there always can be a question of who or what is being referenced:we have to consult the context in order to figure out the referent. In this sense, context-sensitivity arises as soon as—and the more that—a lexical description is involved (ifonly through the choice of a name), and it systematically disappearswhen the descrip-tion is eliminated and reference becomes grammatically more constrained.

A fourth and final doubt about the semantic account above is the general fact that,as pointed out throughout this chapter, referentiality is simply never a lexical fact. Inevery single kind of nominal, referentiality (and attaining specific forms of it)depends on the grammatical relations in which these expressions enter and thetopology of their phases. This casts a general doubt on any lexical-semantic explan-ation of essential indexicality, especially because the generalization just rehearsed isequally true for pronouns, which can all occur in predicative and quantified positionsas well, as noted:

(107) a. That’s him.

b. He is a she.

c. I am not a better person: I am me.17

d. I am not myself today.

e. These are the we inside of me.18

f. Sono io. Itabe.1s I‘It’s me’ [Moro (1997)]

(107c) is of particular interest. Here the 1st-Person pronoun ‘me’ occurs in a predica-tive position, and the reading is descriptive (‘I am the person I am, no other (better)person’). But it is crucial to the description ‘the person I am’, which as a whole is ofcourse 3rd-personal, that the 1st-Person feature occurs within it, and that it is purelydeictic rather than descriptive. Thus the sentence ‘I am him’, where the 1st-Personfeature is not repeated in the predicate, is unsuited to make the claim that is made in(107c). The same applies to the slightly different ‘I am this guy’, which again has a

not quite true for ‘you’, which one might argue depends on the notion ‘not me’. If this dependence isasymmetric, ‘I’ does not in turn depend on the notion ‘not you/him’. The absence of criterial propertiesincludes that of existence: while a speaker using ‘I’ in a referential position presupposes his own existence(as with any other referential expression), he does not assert it. This is why prime minister Ahmed Shafikcould respond to a question of his whereabouts during a critical period in the Egyptian revolution: ‘I didn’texist then, it was when I was wiped out.’ (The New York Review of Books LIX: 13 (2012), 25).

17 Hugh Grant, playing a TV producer, speaking to his (soon former) girlfriend in American Dreamz.18 Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor on the different ‘personalities’ processed in the two brain hemispheres:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html, accessed April 2013.


http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

different meaning. Neither is the 1st-Person feature in the predicate equivalent inmeaning to the 3rd-Person phrase ‘the speaker’, which is a 3rd-Person referent, too.Note also that while the 1st-Person feature can occur within a 3rd-Person expression,as in (108), this is not true the other way around:

(108) [3rd [1st my] body]

(109) *[1st [3rd my body’s] me]

This shows an asymmetry between my body and me: I have a body; but my bodydoesn’t have me. Within grammatical semantics, the referent of the 1st-Personpronoun is not anything near a 3rd-Person referent. In fact, it is no ‘object’ at all,as has been noted in criticisms of Descartes’s substance ontology of the self for threecenturies. The philosophical terms ‘the I’, or ‘the Self ’ are therefore misleading andunsuited, as they are 3rd-Person referents encoding reference to an object. The sameconclusion follows on Buehler’s (1934) account of the ‘origo’ as it functions withinthe grammar viewed as a reference system: like the point O in a coordinate system, itis the point from which all object reference originates and relative to which it isdetermined, while not itself being an object of reference at all.

We conclude from these four considerations that no lexical-semantic value and nosemantics of ‘context’ will be the key to the problem of the essential indexical: thatproblem is not one of lexical meaning but of grammatical semantics. Next, and in linewith this observation, we will show that the grammar of these expressions is indeedspecial, and exceeds all other nominals we have encountered so far in grammaticalcomplexity. Moreover, in line with the general approach of this chapter, what we willsee is an expanded phasal edge, and a complete independence from lexical semanticmeaning as mediating the act of reference.

4.4.4 The hierarchy of reference revealed through Romance object clitics

We will now provide evidence that an extended topology applies to indexicals. Abovethe edge filled by a determiner or by N-to-D movement in the case of referentialnominals, indexicals involve a deictic layer, allowing the NP-complement to be absent:the edges of the DPs they head are by this point ‘heavy’ enough to stand on their own,supporting a referential function that does not depend on the presence of any lexicallayer with a substantive descriptive content – not even one that has been moved to D,as in the case of proper names, which provides a clue for why indexicals go beyondproper names. Like demonstratives, the personal pronouns engage this deictic layer aswell, and they, too, can crucially occur without an NP-restriction, which we argue,against Elbourne (2008), to be lacking completely by this point in the referentialhierarchy, rather than merely being deleted in morphophonology but present gram-matically or semantically. Unlike demonstratives, however, the personal pronounsalso go beyond this deictic layer by engaging the system of grammatical Person—necessarily so, as we have argued above. Where this happens, D-to-D movement


within the extended edge of the phase that includes the deictic layer can be observed.We show this increase in grammatical complexity in the nominal phasal edge, withconsequences for the need to license the relevant nominals sententially, through aclose analysis of Romance object clitics. We will see that some of these clitics havepurely predicative interpretations, other (accusative clitics) can be referential, yetothers (dative clitics) must be referential and have personal interpretations. In linewith this progression towards referentiality within the clitic system, we see anincrease in the internal complexity of the clitics concerned—exactly as we mustassume if our model of reference as an aspect of grammatical meaning is correct.

Our analysis will be consistent with rich typologies developed for different types ofpronouns that have already demonstrated that these do not form a unified lexicalclass (Roca, 1992; 1996; Cardinaletti and Starke, 1999; Déchaine and Wiltschko, 2002;Ormazábal and Romero, 2010; or Martín, 2012; among others). It will also beconsistent with the broad topological approach of Longobardi (2008), who alreadynoted that pronouns are ‘edge-elements’ par excellence. In fact, Italian and Englishcease to differ in regards to the obligatory placement of pronouns in D:

(110) Noi ricchi/*I ricchi noi stiamo trascurando certi problemi ItaWe rich/*the rich/*Rich we are neglecting certain issuesI poveri imitano noi ricchi/*i ricchi noiThe poor imitate us rich/*the rich us/*rich usNoi due/*I due noi . . .We two/*The two we/*Two we . . .

As Longobardi also notes, this remains so even in languages without an overt articleas in Serbo-Croatian (Progovac, 1998) or Polish (Rutkowski, 2002), where nouns andproper names pattern alike, but pronouns do not. He suggests that while commonand proper nouns are found optionally at the left edge of the phase and move there,pronouns are found obligatorily and may be inserted there, a fact that Longobardilinks with the fact that personal pronouns, unlike nouns, are specified for Person.Person, in other words, is checked ‘high’ in the nominal phase, with consequences forcross-phasal licensing relations that involve personal pronouns. Gender, by contrast,is checked ‘low’, and it tends to be absent when Person is present.

Correlatively with pronouns being paradigmatic edge elements, they have, asnoted, very little descriptive or lexical content, which they shed in favor of strongerreferential import. That import is at its peak with the 1st-Person pronoun ‘I’, probablythe closest candidate to what Russell called a ‘logically proper name’:19 it cannot failin its reference and is not mediated by any description whatsoever, as discussed

19 At least when it occurs in the nominative, as opposed to accusative as in ‘I am me’, where ‘me’ has apredicative reading, as discussed.


above. In line with that, the personal pronouns make the highest demands ongrammatical structure, occupying a higher position than 3rd-Person pronouns(Shlonsky, 2000; Poletto, 2000; Bianchi, 2006) and engaging the upper layers in theC-field associated with logophoric features, as argued in Sigurðsson (2004).

This hierarchical relation between the personal and non-personal pronouns ismoreover an asymmetric one, in the sense that any personal-pronominal referent canalso be referred to in the 3rd Person (‘he’, ‘John’, ‘that person’, ‘the object havinggenetic code XYZ’), whereas the reverse is not true: 3rd-Person objects of referenceneed not even be language-users. This illustrates that as we progress into the Personsystem, reference becomes more language-dependent, making increasing demands ongrammar. Along with the lack of dependence on the descriptive content of substan-tive lexical items, dependence on the non-linguistic context decreases. In none of thepronouns we will discuss are their referential properties a function of their lexicalspecifications. Instead, they are a function of their topology and where in thehierarchical structure of the clause they are located (cf. Diesing, 1992; Mahajan,1992; de Hoop, 1996; Reinhart, 1997; Winter, 2000; Zamparelli, 2000; Bartos, 2001;Borer, 2005; Danon, 2006; or Pereltsvaig, 2006; among others). We will start withpurely predicative clitics, move on two grammatically more complex accusative ones,of which we distinguish two types, one with more referential import than the other,then to the still more complex dative clitics, and then the personal pronouns.

4.4.4.1 Predicative clitics Bare nominals in languages like Catalan or Spanish arestandardly considered predicative, lacking referentiality, definiteness, and exhibitinglowest scope (Picallo, 2007; Dechaine and Wiltschko, 2002):

(111) Bare predicative nominals in Catalan and Spanisha. El president necessita escorta Cat

The president needs bodyguard‘The presidents needs bodyguards’

b. En Pere sempre porta jaquetaThe Peter always wears jacket‘Peter always wear a jacket’

c. Hay sillas para todos Spthere-is chairs for everybody‘There are chairs for everybody’

They are also banned from argumental positions, such as those of subjects, indirectobjects (dative), or ECM environments, as seen in (112a–c). Plural bare nominals dooccur in direct object position, though (see (112d)), which reveals differences betweenaccusative and dative nominals, to which we will return below:


(112) Restrictions on predicative nominals:a. *Amigo de María telefoneó Sp

friend of Mary telephoned.3sINTENDED: ‘A friend of Mary telephoned’

b. *(Le) dan libros a niñodat.3p give.3p books to childINTENDED: ‘They give books to a child’

c. *Considero libros aburridosconsider.1s books boringINTENDED: ‘I consider (some) books (to be) boring’

d. Vi estudiantes en el barsaw.1s students in the bar‘I saw students at the bar’

Now, the clitic that resumes the Catalan nominals in (111a–b) is the so-called partitive‘en’ (113a–b), which in these contexts is used predicatively, and thus has the sameproperties as its phrasal counterpart: it lacks referentiality, cannot express definite-ness, and has lowest scope. In Catalan no other clitic can do this job. Since Spanishlacks a counterpart of the partitive clitic, it either uses nothing at all in this case, orelse resorts to recycling some other clitic, as we see in (113c) (see Longa, Lorenzo andRigau, 1998, on the recycling strategy):

(113) Cliticization of predicative nominalsa. El president en/ *la necessita Cat

The president part acc.3fs need.3s‘The president needs it’ (a set of bodyguards)

b. En Pere sempre en/ *la portaThe Peter always part acc.3fs wear.3s‘Peter always wears it’

c. �/ Las hay para todos SpThe acc.3fs there-is para everybody‘There is one for everybody’

Our claim was that pronouns are not specified for reference lexically. Rather, theirinterpretation with respect to our scale—as either predicative, quantificational,referential, or deictic—is determined grammatically. Clitics interpreted predicativelyshould be least in grammatical complexity. That is indeed the case with partitive ‘en’,which doesn’t have any ç-features whatsoever.20 For Spanish, the recycling strategy

20 Arguably the ‘e’ in ‘en’ (and many other Catalan and Romance clitic pronouns) is purely epenthetic,i.e. needed for syllabification.


selects either no clitic or a very underspecified one. Another predicative clitic is theCatalan neuter clitic ‘ho’.21 ‘Ho’ is a proform for predicates in general, whetherclausal, adjectival, or nominal:

(114) a. El cotxe sembla bo Catthe car seems good‘The car seems good’

b. El cotxe ho semblathe car neut seems‘The car seems (good)’

c. En Pere es un idiotathe Peter is a idiot‘Peter is an idiot’

d. En Pere ho/ *el ésthe Peter neut acc.3m is‘Peter is (an idiot)’

Interestingly, as we saw above, even definite descriptions can be pronominalized bymeans of ‘ho’, when they are in predicative position (cf. (9), repeated below as (115)),something that can now be taken as independent confirmation of our claim thatthose DPs do indeed act as predicates in these contexts, rather than as arguments:

(115) Cliticizing predicative nominals:a. En Pere és el porter Cat

The Peter is the Porter‘Peter is the porter’

b. En Pere ho/ *el ÉsThe Peter neut acc.3m Is‘John is (the porter)’

21 Catalan ‘ho’ is special in that it doesn’t have clear counterparts in other major Romance languages,where the neuter clitic is normally homophonous with the accusative masculine singular clitic, (‘lo’ inSpanish). That this clitic is not accusative, however, is shown by its lack of gender agreement (on the role ofaccusative in the build-up of referential meaning in clitics, see below):

(i) a. La chica parece simpática Spanishthe girl looks nice.fem

‘The girl looks nice’

b. La chica lo / *la parecethe girl neut / acc.3sf looks‘The girl looks so’


Embedded CPs, which always function as predicates, also cliticize through the neuterclitic, unlike what happens to argumental noun phrases (116b vs 116d):

(116) Cliticizing clauses:a. No entenc el tema Cat

neg understand.1s the topic‘I don’t understand the topic’

b. No el/ *ho entenc22

neg acc.3sm neut understand‘I don't understand it’

c. No Entenc el que vols dirneg understand.1s the that want.2s to-say‘I don’t understand what you mean’

d. No *el/ ho entencneg acc.3sm neut understand‘I don’t understand it’

Clausal complements, then, unlike referential DP complements, do not get pronom-inalized by means of accusative clitics, but rather only by means of the neuter clitic,which we take to lack both morphological Case and ç-features. The lack of Case isparticularly interesting, as the presence of Case has been independently linked to anincrease of referentiality along our scale, which we will also see evidence for below(for precedents of this claim see Enç 1991; de Hoop, 1996; Torrego, 1998; Cardinalettiand Starke, 1999; Danon, 2006; Lidz, 2006; among others; see also Section 6.5).Accusative case, however, comes in two forms, which gives further structure to ourprogression.

4.4.4.2 Accusative clitics, weak and strong Accusative clitics are different to the restof the Romance pronominal system. Morphologically, they are virtually identical todefinite determiners (Postal, 1966, and subsequent literature), and like them, andunlike the rest of the clitic paradigm of most of Romance, they have Gender features.Syntactically, they participate in a number of irregularities like opacity, deletability,ordering variation, or the so-called Person Case Constraint (Perlmutter, 1971;Kayne, 1975; Bonet, 1991, 1995, 2008; Anagnostopoulou, 2005; Adger and Harbour2007; Ormazábal and Romero 2007; among many others; see Martín, 2012 for areview). With respect to their interpretation, the idea that accusative clitics arelinked to referential specificity is quite widespread (cf. Suñer, 1988; Uriagereka,1995; Roca, 1992, 1996; Sportiche, 1996; Fernández-Soriano, 1993; or Ormazábal

22 To avoid further complication, we skip over the phonological reduction processes of clitics, as theydon’t have any effect whatsoever on the argument we’re making. For instance, in (116b) we should have: ‘Nol’entenc’ rather than ‘No el entenc’.


and Romero, 2010). Suñer (1988) suggested that accusative clitics are inherentlymarked for specificity. On this view, accusatives cannot refer to negative phrases(117a), nonspecific indefinites (117b–c), or interrogative elements (117d):

(117) Accusative clitics and specificity:a. *[A ningún bedel]i loi veo trabajando Sp

to no janitor acc.3ms see.1s workingintended: ‘I see no janitor working’

b. *[Algún escritor famoso]i no loi he vistoSome writer famous neg acc.3m have.1s seen‘I haven’t seen a famous writer’ (non-specific interpretation)

c. [A un famoso escritor]i no loi he vistoto a famous writer neg acc.3m have.1s seen‘I haven’t seen a famous writer’ (specific interpretation)

d. *¿A quii eli veus? Catto who acc.3m see.2sintended: ‘Who do you see?’

In addition, as discussed by Suñer (1988), in the dialects of Spanish where accusativedoubling is allowed, there is a specificity restriction on the phrases that can bedoubled:

(118) Specificity constraint in accusative doubling:a. Lai vimos a Mafaldai Rioplatense Sp

acc.3sf see.1p to Mafalda‘We saw Mafalda’

b. Lai vimos a la chicaiacc.3sf see.1p to the girl‘We saw the girl’

c. *Lai vimos a alguna chicaiacc.3sf see.1p to some girl‘We saw some girl’ (non-specific interpretation)

However, the link of accusative pronouns to specificity holds only to a degree: itcannot be regarded as intrinsic to them as lexical items, in line with our generalgrammatical approach to reference. In fact, the so-called direct object nominals canhave referential, quantificational, or predicative interpretations. Consider (119):

(119) Non-referential accusative nominals:a. Todos buscan a una secretaria Sp

All.pl look-for to a secretary‘There is a secretary everybody is looking for’ (referential)


b. Todos buscan una secretariaAll.pl look-for a secretary‘They all look for a secretary’ (quantificational)

c. Todos buscan secretariaAll.pl look-for secretary‘They all are secretary-hunting’ (predicate modifier)

The same applies to the pronominal version of these sentences, as Clitic Left-Dislocation paraphrases suggest:

(120) Non-referential accusative pronominals:a. *(A) una secretariai todos lai buscan Sp

to a secretary all.pl acc.3sf look-for‘There’s a secretary everybody is looking for’ (referential)

b. (*A) una secretariai todos lai buscanto a secretary all.pl acc.3sf look-for‘They all look for a secretary (quantificational)

c. (*A) secretariai todos (*lai) buscanto secretary all.pl acc.3sf look-for‘They all are secretary-hunting’ (predicate modifier)

This is even clearer in languages with a richer clitic paradigm, like Catalan, where theaccusative clitics get the referential nominals, and the partitives get the predicativeones (with quantificational cases somewhere in between):

(121) Partitive vs. accusative clitics:a. (De) dones en veiem (tres) cada dia Cat

of women part see.1p three each day‘We see (three) women every day’ (non-referential readings)

b. Tres dones en / ?(les) veiem cada diaThree women part acc.3pf see.1p each day‘We see three women every day’ (quantificational reading)

c. *(A) tres dones *en / *(les) veiem cada diato three women part acc.3pf see.1p each day‘We see (three) women every day’ (referential reading ONLY)

Additional evidence for different interpretations of the accusative clitics, with differ-ent referential import, comes from backward anaphora. Neither quantificational(123b) nor predicative interpretations (123c) of the accusative clitic support these:


(122) Differential availability of backward anaphora:a. Lai vi ayer, a Maríai Sp

acc.3fs saw.1s yesterday to Mary‘I saw Mary yesterday’

b. *Lai he visto, (a) [la madre de cada estudiante]iacc.3f have.1s seen to the mother of each studentINTENDED: ‘I’ve seen the mother of each student’

c. *Como lai he arreglado, podemos conservaras acc.3fs have.1s fixed can.1p to-preserveel vino en barricaithe wine in caskINTEND: ‘As I’ve already fixed iti, we can keep the wine in caski’

There is evidence, then, that while there is a clear link between accusativity andspecificity, the accusative clitic can receive different interpretations in differentgrammatical contexts, some with more referential import than others. Moreover,there is a progression, in terms of referential import, from the predicative, neuter,and partitive to the accusative clitics. While, unfortunately, the difference betweenthe two types of accusative clitics, which differ in their referential import, is notmorphologically marked in the pronominal systems of the languages we haveconsidered, extra grammatical marking for more strongly referential direct objectsis visible in a subset of Spanish or Catalan nominals (Differential Object Marking).Also, we can see some other languages where accusative case is linked to differentinterpretations, including Turkish (Enç, 1991), Kannada (Lidz, 2006), and Hebrew(Danon, 2006).

4.4.4.3 Dative clitics The progression continues with dative clitics, which we nowargue are structurally more complex than either predicative or accusative clitics andcontain the latter as parts of their structure. They are, we argue, like the strongaccusative clitics above in including a deictic layer, but they also show strongerbehaviour, aligning them with the personal clitics, with which they are known topattern in a number of domains.23 In line with Martín (2012), we specifically suggestthat dative clitics are internally complex, built out of the accusative clitic plus alocative (deictic) element, and involve D-to-D movement in the phasal edge. Thedeictic layer is also shared with the personal pronouns.

Ever since Kayne’s (1975) seminal work, it had been uncritically assumed thatclitics form a unified class morphologically, syntactically, and semantically. This ledto debates on, for example, the generation site of those elements. According to the

23 In fact, Martín (2012) suggests that the personal clitics (1st and 2nd Person) are in fact dative,regardless of their apparent syntactic function.


Movement Hypothesis, clitics are generated in argument positions within VP andsubsequently move up toward the inflectional layer of the sentence (cf. Kayne, 1975,1991, 1994). In contrast, the Base-generation Hypothesis argues that clitics are exter-nally merged in inflectional positions (Borer, 1984; Suñer 1988; Fernández-Soriano1993; among others). In recent years, however, an intermediate hypothesis has beendefended since Roca, 1992, 1996, or Sportiche, 1996, among others. On this view,which we assume here, accusative clitics are base-generated within VP and movesubsequently to inflectional positions, with consequences for both their interpret-ation and their morphosyntactic properties, different to the rest of the paradigm(Gender features, regular number; see Martín 2012 for review). Datives and personalclitics, however, are directly base-generated in inflectional positions, and hence, inour terms, in an edge position. This hypothesis immediately explains why cliticdoubling is a phenomenon mostly related to the personal and dative clitics.24 Italso suggests a natural topological explanation of the following crucial fact concern-ing their semantics. Dative phrases cannot host bare nominals, a constraint similar tothe ones we saw in subject positions in (112), repeated here as (123c):25

(123) Dative cliticization of bare nominals:a. *Lei di un libro a niñoi Sp

dat.3s gave.1s a book to childINTENDED: ‘I gave a book to a child’

b. *Lesi di libros a niñosidat.3p gave.1s books to childrenINTENDED: ‘I gave books to children’

c. *Amigo de María telefoneófriend of Mary telephoned.3sINTENDED: ‘A friend of Mary telephoned’

If the dative clitic (present because of dative doubling) is dropped, the sentence’sgrammaticality improves, at least in the case of the bare plural (124b), especially if thedirect object libros ‘books’ is also a bare plural:

(124) Bare plurals:a. *Di libros a niñoi Sp

gave.1s books to childINTENDED: ‘I gave books to a child’

24 Accusative doubling is absent in most of Romance, except for a few dialects of Latin AmericanSpanish, while dative (or personal) doubling is present in many Romance languages, and all the Spanishdialects.

25 Most examples in this section are from Spanish, because of the clearer status of clitic doubling in thislanguage.


b. ?Di libros a niñosigave.1s books to childrenINTENDED: ‘I gave books to children’

It seems, therefore, that the presence of the dative clitic, which is the only obligatoryelement in the dative doubling construction, imposes extra demands on the referen-tial interpretation of the dative phrase. To explain that, and following Strozer (1976),Masullo (1992), Demonte (1995), or Cuervo (2003), Martín (2012) suggests that thepresence or absence of the clitic in fact corresponds to two different constructions,with only the real dative construction requiring clitic doubling. Without the clitic wehave a pure prepositional phrase, with rather different properties. For instance, in theprepositional case, if a dative clitic is present it can’t be co-referential with thenominal complement of the preposition:26

(125) Datives and prepositions:a. Pablo *(lei) puso azúcar a el caféi Sp

Paul dat.3s put.3s sugar to the coffee

b. Pablo (lei) puso azúcar en el café*iPaul dat.3s put.3s sugar to the coffeeBOTH: ‘Pablo put sugar in the coffee’

a. Pablo *(lei) cocinó una tarta a Andreai SpPaul dat.3s baked.3s a cake to Andrea

b. Pablo (lei) cocinó una tarta para Andrea*iPaul dat.3s baked.3s a cake for coffeeBOTH: ‘Pablo baked a cake for Andrea’

It again seems that the dative clitic imposes requirements on the referential inter-pretation of the dative phrase it co-refers with, which can’t be predicative. Accordingto Roca (1996), there is a difference in the kind of phrases that can be doubledby accusative and dative clitics, with accusative, but not dative, being restricted byspecificity considerations. Dative clitics, but not accusative ones, can be doubledby negative phrases (126a), nonspecific indefinites (126b), or interrogative elements(126c):

(126) Constraints on Dative doubling:a. No lei doy nada a nadiei Sp

neg dat.3s give.1s nothing to nobody‘I give nothing to nobody’

26 This indeed entails that the particle ‘a’ that appears in the dative construction is not a real preposition,but rather a case marker, as argued by Masullo (1992).


b. A un escritori nunca lei doy nadato a writer never dat.3s give.1s nothing‘I never give anything to writers’

c. ¿A quiéni lei das dinero?to who dat.3s give.2s money‘To whom do you give money?’

In (126a), where the meaning of the sentence is not predicative but quantificational,the dative clitic is fully optional: No (le) debo nada a nadie, (Le) doy un libro a trespersonas. When the phrase is maximally referential, as in rigid reference, the cliticbecomes obligatory: No *(le) debo nada a ella / a María. Most interestingly, inpredicative interpretations the clitic is totally out, as we saw above: (*Les) doy librosa niños. So the presence of the dative clitic is strongly linked to referential (pro-)nominals, and less so to predicative ones. It is also interesting that the quantifica-tional ones are not so bad without the clitic, forming an intermediate case. Withrespect to (126b), this sentence doesn’t have a non-specific (cardinal) reading, that isto say, it never has the reading (or it is rather marginal) where I never giveassignments to just one writer (I only give assignments to sets of more than onewriter). This sentence just has strong readings, either specific (there’s a particularwriter I never give any assignment to, because he’s always late in turning them in), orgeneric (I never give anything to anybody belonging in the class of writers).27 This iswhat we expect if the presence of the dative clitic correlates with strong readings.Finally, with respect to (126c), the same quantificational considerations we raisedwith respect to (126a) apply, and the clitic is again optional, although maybe not asoptional as in the (126a) quantificational reading. We do not have at this point a fullaccount for the apparently bigger optionality of the clitic in these weak quantifica-tional contexts.

Why do we need doubling information about the dative argument of the verb, i.e.the clitic plus the full phrase, and why is accusative doubling cross-linguistically lesswidespread? What we see is that in quantificational interpretations (bound variable),the dative pronoun is at least not as obligatory as in the referential cases. Prima facie,these data are consistent with the claim that dative clitic doubling or standing-in fornoun phrases is a window into (or expresses) a purely grammatical property of thesephrases, irrespective of the lexical content of the noun phrases concerned: theirreferentiality, which we saw is not yet stably found at the level of the accusative.If the dative structurally contains the accusative (as argued in Martín 2012), what wesee is a progression towards referentiality starting from a lexical core and ending witha clitic whose content is now essentially exhausted by the referentiality of the phrase itdoubles, without which it can now appear.

27 Generic or kind reference patterns with strong readings, according to Longobardi (1994, 2005).


4.4.4.4 Additional a-marking in strong accusative and dative nominals Before wemove on to the personal pronouns proper, let us dwell on the existence of extra[a]-marking of strong accusative and dative phrases, indicating an increase ingrammatical complexity correlating with an increase in referentiality, as predictedon the present model. In Spanish, that extra element [a] is either a (locative ordirectional) preposition, or an accusative or dative case marker. We do not go intothe details of this here, as it would take us too far afield. The presence of [a] is notdirectly (or lexically) linked to a specific Case, rather the link depends on thegrammatical context. All dative 3rd-Person phrases, as well as a specific subset of3rd-Person accusative phrases, get [a]-marking. Notice, however, that all the personalclitics, with no exception, also get the [a]-marking in case of doubling:

(127) [a]-marking with personal clitics:a. Me vieron *(a) mi Sp

cl.1s see.3p to me‘They saw me’

b. Me dijeron eso *(a) micl.1s said.3p that to me‘They said that to me’

c. Te vieron *(a) ticl.2s see.3p to you‘They saw you’

d. Te dijeron eso *(a) ticl.2s said.3p that to you‘They said that to you’

Personal pronouns thus behave like the 3rd-Person dative clitics, and unlike theaccusative clitics, in requiring the presence of [a]-marking, in line with the link weclaim between an increase in referentiality and extra grammatical structure.28 Inter-estingly, the presence of [a]-marking with 3rd-Person pronouns is also obligatory(128a), but in that case the interpretation of the 3rd-Person pronoun can only bereferential, and it cannot be a bound variable (128b):

(128) [a]-marking with referential 3rd-Person pronouns:a. Le vieron *(a) Él Sp

cl.3s see.3p to He‘They saw him’

28 Notice that in the full phrase with a-marking (‘a mi’, ‘a ti’), the 1st and 2nd pronouns change formwith respect to their clitic form (‘me’ and ‘te’). The presence of the extra ‘I’might be related to the presenceof the deictic feature as well, which we are about to posit in all personal and dative clitics. We leave theinvestigation of this topic for future work.


b. *[A cada hombre]i lei dijeron eso *(a) élito each man cl.3s said.3p that to heINTENDED: ‘They told that to each man’

To make sense of this pattern of [a]-marking, Martín (2012) adopts the arguments inJayaseelan and Hariprasad (J&H) (2001), according to whom it holds universally thatreferring nominal expressions, as opposed to non-referring ones, contain placedeixis. As a consequence, J&H postulate a DeixP in the extended nominal expressionwhose presence is crucial to the semantics of reference, because it provides a deicticindex to the nominal that allows a referential interpretation, as either a strongaccusative (*acc) or a personal clitic including 3rd-Person dative clitics.29, 30 The[a] element has clitic counterparts in some Romance languages, like Catalan ‘hi’,French ‘y’, Italian ‘ci’, Paduan ‘ghe’, etc. Although these elements have usually beenconsidered locatives, this is a simplification, as argued in Kayne (2008). That elementis used in clearly non-locative contexts (129a, b), and this suggests that the locativeuses are but particular cases of a more general meaning, which we consider deictic inthe sense of Kayne, and which are in complementary distribution (129c, d):

(129) [a] as deixisa. Jean y pense Fr

John cl thinks‘John thinks of it’

b. Gianni ci pensa ItJohn cl thinks‘John thinks of it’

c. Jean pense à Marie ! Jean (*a) y pense FrJohn thinks to Mary John to cl thinks‘John thinks of Mary / John thinks of her’

d. Il va à Paris ! Il (*a) y vaHe goes to Paris He to cl goes‘John goes to Paris / John goes there’

This complementary distribution seems to suggest that [a] and [y] are contextualallomorphs of the same underlying element. In Martín (2012), it is suggested thatboth elements are the realization J&H call ‘DeixP’, an element which makes thoseelements closer to essential indexicals, rather than merely referential in the sense that

29 The distinction between strong *acc and weak acc is inspired by the proposals in Enç (1991), Torrego(1998), Danon (2006), or Lidz (2006), among others, according to which accusative case morphology isoptional in many languages with inanimate objects, and when it is present it indicates a specific (i.e.referential) reading.

30 See den Dikken (2010) for independent arguments in favour of the incorporation of a DeixP in theextended projection of nominals.


3rd-Person nominals, including proper names, are. That deictic element is then partof the structure of both datives and strong accusatives, as depicted in (130). Underthis tree we see examples of dative clitics in some Romance languages, with capitalletters indicating silent elements:

(130)

DP ⇒

⇒

⇒

⇒

The hierarchical structure of dative clitics

dative clitic(deictic)

strong accusative(referential)

weak accusative(quantificational)

partitive(predicative)

D

D NP

DX

DX

a. CATALAN: [l(s)]

[l][l]-e

DD

D

D [-ui as a deictic in French][-e indicates a epenthetic vowel]D

L(s)

[li(s)]

[i][ge][bi][ui]

b. PADUAN:c. SARDINIAN:d. FRENCH:e. SPANISH:

DP31

DxP

The tree depicts four hierarchically ordered layers, in which grammatically complexclitics contain as subparts grammatically simpler ones, with the dative clitics, forexample, amounting to the structure [D + deix] (Martín, 2012, following Kayne,2008; Caha, 2009). This layered hierarchy is mirrored in the morphological structureand syntactic behaviour of clitics, as shown in (a)–(e), and it entails the fourinterpretive classes we have distinguished in (pro-)nominals as a consequence.Thus, as noted, partitive clitics are entirely devoid of extended structure. They arepro-forms for empty noun phrases, and can only be interpreted predicatively, as theyoccupy the core of the nominal phase. Climbing up the phase, we find weakaccusative clitics next. These clitics project a D layer that endows them with Genderand Number features, corresponding to the ‘lower’ region of D viewed as a ‘field’ offunctional projections, with Person in the highest position. Such features allow weakreferentiality properties (cardinal interpretations), like for example getting narrowscope or bound readings. Then there is the deictic layer, and the referential inter-pretation of the clitic becomes stronger, while at the same time retaining its Genderfeatures. D stays in place, and this allows Gender features, but at the same time, D isbound by the deictic head, which imposes a referential (3rd-Person) reading.

31 The lower DP may very well correspond to the projection NumP argued for since at least Ritter(1991). We are solving this merely terminological issue by calling it DP, in order to emphasize the fact thatthe elements that can occupy that position (numerals, quantifiers, (in)definite determiners) are alldeterminer-like, but nothing we say depends on this particular choice.


Dative clitics enter the realm of personal clitics, as they are dependent for inter-pretation on the system of participants in the discourse. Because of that, they add anadditional D layer on top of the deictic head. That head, which is overtly visible inCatalan (130a) or Sardinian (130c), gives them their deictic interpretation, which isexactly the same as what we see in personal clitics, as we will see below. Because thedative can be lexicalized by any part of the complex dative phrase in (130), with allother parts remaining silent, it is quite expected that the dative can have the overtform of an accusative (standard Catalan 3rd-Person plural dative: els), the form of alocative (Paduan ghe), the form of a locative plus an accusative (Sardinian [bi+lis]),or the form of a dative plus a locative (Catalan [els+hi]).

That extra D layer—an extension of the phase edge—provides these clitics with anumber of morphological and syntactic properties: (i) Dative clitics don’t get Genderfeatures (in virtually all of Romance), as they are blocked by the Person features,exactly as happens with the personal clitics, which also lack Gender. In the nextsection, we argue that Gender and Person features are in complementary distribu-tion. (ii) The [D + deix] configuration accounts for the intriguing morphologicalform of dative clitics in some Romance languages, like for instance the Catalan ‘elshi’, with ‘hi’ a locative/deictic clitic. It also accounts for the formal syncretism ofdative and locative clitics in Northern Italian languages such as Paduan (130b). (iii)The fact that dative clitics include accusatives also gives a principled explanation tomany syntactic puzzles of these clitics, including opacity in clitic clusters, or thefamous Person Case Constraint. For full details, we refer the reader to Martín (2012).

The crucial point for our purposes here is that the structure in (130) suggests theavailability of D-to-D movement, where the [l]-head merged in the lower D crossesover the deictic layer to reach into the higher regions of D. This, we suggest, isresponsible for the extension of the referential hierarchy proposed in Longobardi(1994, 2005) and Shee&H (2011) to deictic and ultimately personal interpretations.The personal pronouns, to which we turn in the next section, thus conform to astructure of an extended left edge.

4.4.4.5 Personal clitics The above proposal entails that 1st- and 2nd-Person cliticsshould always come with a deictic layer, and include a higher D-head containing thislayer, thereby going beyond the structural complexity of proper names. As weclaimed in the previous section, the 3rd-Person dative pronouns include a deicticlayer, which is visible in languages like Catalan or Sardinian. As we shall see below,that layer is also visible in the Latin personal pronouns. Personal clitics, including asthey do the deictic layer but also activating the Person layer, thus have more structurethan any other referential (pro-) nominals, and may be directly merged in the higherD-layer, unlike the head of dative clitics, which may only move there from the lowerD-head. Interesting in itself is the fact that Latin lacks 3rd-Person pronouns, forwhich there are demonstratives instead, illustrating again the split we have noted here


between merely object-referential (3rd or no Person) expressions and those carryingperson-reference in discourse:

(131) Latin personal pronouns:

1st

ego

me-

mihi tibi

tui

te-

me- te-

tuNOMINATIVE

ACCUSATIVE

GENITIVE

DATIVE

ABLATIVE

2nd

mei- -

Of particular relevance for our case in point here are the dative pronouns. It is clear,given the other pronouns in the paradigm, that [m] and [t] are 1st- and 2nd-Personmorphemes, respectively. As a result, the dative pronouns seem to be composed ofthose Person features plus something else, i.e. [m + ihi] and [t + ibi] respectively. Thequestion then is: What is the semantic import of [ihi] and [ibi]?

Starting with the latter, Latin ‘ibi’ is a distal locative adverb equivalent to English‘there’. The proximal equivalent of ‘ibi’ is ‘hic’, often translated to English as here(Panhuis, 2006). So the 2nd-Person pronoun ‘tibi’ seems to have the structure [t +ibi], i.e. [2nd Person + locative]. We would expect then that the 1st-Person pronounhad the same structure, i.e. Person feature [m] + locative [ihi]. Now, in itself, [ihi]does not correspond to any locative element in Latin. The closest element we can findis the above-mentioned 1st-Person demonstrative or adverb ‘hic’. So let us assumethat [ihi] contains a reduced version of the proximal element. It would make sense ifthe 1st-Person pronoun contains a proximal deictic like ‘hic’, just like the 2nd-Personcontains the distal deictic ‘ibi’. This is close, but we still have the problem of the 1st‘I’ in ‘ihi’. To examine it, let us go back to the 2nd-Person dative ‘tibi’.

We just saw that ‘tibi’ seems to have the structure [t + ibi], i.e. [2nd Person +locative], and that ‘ibi’ is a distal locative element. Now, interestingly, ‘ibi’ is part ofthe following paradigm:

(132) The paradigm of ‘ibi’demonstrative interrogative relative indefinite

ibi ubi ubi alicubithere where? where somewhere


So it is apparent that ‘ibi’ and ‘ubi’ have a relationship in Latin similar to that ofEnglish there and where (where this a referential element, and wh- is an interroga-tive element, something also visible in that and what, or then and when, with that,then, and there all being deictic). That is to say, the class of words in (132) suggeststhat ‘ibi’ could be considered bimorphemic, forming a minimal pair with theinterrogative and relative pronoun ‘ubi’. The latter, in turn, should be bimorphemictoo, and this prediction seems to hold: [u-] is an interrogative particle in Latin(equivalent to English wh-), present in other interrogative words like ‘unde’:‘whence?’ or ‘from where?’ (opposed to ‘inde’: ‘thence’ or ‘from there’), ‘utrō’: ‘whichway?’, or ‘utrōbī’: ‘in which place?’. That [u-] is also part of the qu- element of manyother interrogative words in Latin, like ‘quis’: ‘who’, or ‘quid’: ‘what’, where quis thebase for many of the interrogative words of Romance languages.

Therefore, it seems that we can decompose ‘ubi’ into [u + bi], i.e. [interrogative +place] with the meaning ‘what place’, or ‘where’. But then, analogously, ‘ibi’ shouldalso be decomposable and have the structure [i + bi]. As we have just said, [-bi] islikely to mean ‘place’, something confirmed by two facts: (i) Firstly, by the fact that‘utrō’means ‘which way?’ in Latin, but ‘utrōbī’means ‘in which place?’ So ‘utrōbī’ canclearly be analysed as [utrō + bī], where [bī] means ‘place’. (ii) Secondly, by the factthat ‘bi’ does mean ‘place’ in Sardinian:

(133) Place deixis in Sardinian:Bi nke nd' at issitu tres Sardplace loc part at exited.3p three‘There came three of them out of there’[from Jones (1993)]

The question that remains, then, is that initial ‘i’ of ‘ibi’ (and ‘-ihi’). Interestingly, ‘i’ is(at least part of ) the so-called locative pronouns of some Romance languages (Frenchy, Catalan hi, Italian ci). However, since, as we have seen, these elements are deictic ina more general sense rather than merely locative, let us assume that ‘i’ is really that, adeictic.32 So [i + bi] would have the structure [deictic + place].

As a result of all this, then, the structure of ‘tibi’ is [t + i + bi], that is to say [2ndPerson + deictic + place]. Analogously, the structure of mihi should be [m + i + hi],i.e. [1st Person + deictic + (proximal) place]. Both of them have the structure in (134),which as the reader will note is essentially the same as we saw in (130) above (again,capital letters mean silent or moved elements):

32 Additional evidence in support of ‘i’ as a deictic element, is that according to Leu (2008), ademonstrative like ‘this’ has the underlying structure [the + here], with ‘here’ a clear deictic element.A similar structure seems to occur with the Latin distal demonstrative ‘ille’ (that), which could also bedecomposed in parallel to the English case as [i + lle], with ‘i’ a deictic, and ‘lle’ as the element that laterbecame the definite article (which Latin lacked) in most Romance languages.


(134) The structure of tibi:DP

DPi-bii (deictic)

NPBIi

D

t(Person)

DxP

Compare in this regard also the Spanish and Catalan 3rd-Person strong pronouns.We give the paradigm and the argumentation for Catalan, but the case of Spanish isessentially similar:

(135) Catalan 3rd-Person strong pronounsnumber gender strong acc

singular masc ell elfem ella la

plural masc ells elsfem elles les

These pronouns are interesting because they also have more grammatical structurethan their accusative clitic counterparts, and this yields interesting differences bothmorphosyntactically and semantically, exactly along the lines we are suggesting inthis section (see also Cardinaletti and Starke, 1999). In particular, the fact that theyhave more structure explains why these pronouns don’t undergo processes ofphonological reduction and are stressed, unlike their clitic counterparts. Thus,compare the accusative clitics (or definite determiners) in (136a) and (136d), withtheir strong pronoun counterparts in (136b) and (136e). In line with our account, thedative clitic in (136c) patterns with the strong pronouns:

(136) a. L’/ *El ha corregut Catacc.3sm acc.3m have.3s run.part‘He has run it (e.g. the marathon)’

b. Ell ha corregutHe have.3s run.part‘He has run’

c. Li/ *L ha dit la veritatdat.3s dat.3s have.3s told the truth‘He has told him the truth’

d. Per + el (cotxe) = Pel (cotxe)For + the (car) = For-the (car)


e. Per + ell = Per ell (but not *pell)For + he = For him

This follows if strong pronouns conform to the structure we have suggested for dativeclitics and the Latin pronouns:

(137) DP

DP

NP

DxP

DX(deictic)

(e)-l(no gender)

l(a)(s)

(NOTE: The ‘(e)’ in the higher instance of ‘el’ is merely epenthetic).

This extra structure provides strong pronouns with their special kind of grammaticalsemantics, explaining why strong and personal pronouns cannot be bound, as notedearlier in relation to (95): a bound pronoun, apparently, must have an empty or (weakenough) edge. This further also relates to another important aspect of personal clitics:their lack of Gender.33

4.4.5 Summary

In this section we have gone along with the traditional philosophical diagnosis of‘essential indexicality’ and asked about the nature and explanation of this curiousphenomenon, which is apparently irreducible in language and of foundationalsignificance for a number of important problems in the philosophy of mind includ-ing how we think about the nature of the self. We have suggested that, rather than asemantic phenomenon that consists in some special relation between a particularclass of words and the non-linguistic ‘context’, the phenomenon is not a lexical ornon-grammatically semantic one at all. The phenomenon, rather, belongs to theexpanded domain of grammatical semantics. As a consequence of this, the relevant

33 In Harley and Ritter (2002), Picallo (2007), Boeckx (2011), and Martín (2012), among others, it issuggested that grammatical Gender and Person are in complementary distribution, and hence may becontextual realizations of the same underlying morpheme (which Boeckx, 2011 suggests might be little n).Thus, in most of the languages of the world (with a few exceptions notably within the Semitic family), 1st-and 2nd-Person pronouns have Person but not Gender features. Like Benveniste (1966) and subsequentliterature we have considered the 3rd Person not to be a real person, that is to say, a participant in thediscourse (cf. Harley and Ritter, 2002). If Person and Gender are in complementary distribution, Genderseems to occupy the place of the deictic feature in the non-deictic pronouns. The pronouns that do haveGender are all 3rd Person, and all are either referential or quantificational. Predicative pronouns (like ‘en’,‘ho’, ‘lo’), do not even have Gender. This clearly suggests that Gender is lowest in the grammatical genesisof a referential expression, and that the path to reference mediated by the Person system, which is at thepeak of the grammatical process, leads via deixis.


notion of context cannot be identified in non-linguistic terms. Decisive, moreover,are not these linguistic items themselves, qua lexical items, but the grammar of theiruses. Not only do the so-called ‘indexicals’ not form a natural (lexical) class, but theirreferential properties can systematically differ depending on their grammar on anoccasion of language use. Nor is the class of so-called ‘pronouns’ homogenous. Ittranspires against the background of a general ‘topological’mapping from the phasaldynamics of grammar to the forms of reference that there is, in fact, a hierarchy ofreferentiality. It ranges from purely predicative to quantificational forms of referenceinvolving scope, to rigid forms of 3rd-Person object-reference, and from there all theway to deictic and personal forms of reference that, at the end of the scale, we onlyfind in the domain of the personal pronouns and the object clitics that pattern withthem (dative clitics).

Our account rationalizes the existence of pronouns in all human languages, whichwas our initial question: these, we can now conclude, express forms of grammaticalreference and a relational semantics that no nominal can emulate and that isunmediated by lexical content. Indexicality is essential, because (i) it is grammatical,and (ii) because its grammar is such that other forms of reference as found in propernames, definite descriptions, or 3rd-Person accusative pronouns, are strictly lesscomplex than the grammar of pronominals in their essentially indexical uses.A corollary of our account above is the apparent interpretability of Case, to whichwe return in Chapter 6.

4.5 Conclusions

As ‘concepts’ are formed from perceptual features of the environment, and conceptsbecome lexemes, meaning gets encapsulated in units that live a life independent ofenvironmental stimulation. It thus has to be related back to the environment, so as tobe useful in directing one’s thought to it. Concepts/words thus have to be madereferential again or be reconnected to the environment, which is not the case forperceptual features. Grammar is the mechanism that, within the single phase,converts concepts/words into referential expressions. As lexical content enters thephase, and moves towards the edge, referentiality increases and becomes increasinglyindependent of descriptive content that the concepts/words, qua lexical items,encode.

The exact form in which a given concept/word is made referential depends on anumber of options, all of which are essentially grammatical in nature, and morespecifically, topological: it co-varies strictly with such factors as whether an edge isprojected, the edge is light or heavy, whether the content of the interior becomes thecontent of the edge, or whether the edge is expanded by extra layers. With any ofthese options, which become available as the topology does, rather than beingpredictable from or depending on ‘lexical category’, a formal ontology emerges:


reference is never to ‘bare’ referents, but based on a concept, and to entities ofdifferent formal types. We conclude, on the basis of the evidence provided, thatmetaphysical or semantic intuitions about what formal types these are, which arealmost universally taken to be non-grammatical in nature by metaphysicians andsemanticists, are in fact grammatical in disguise: no other, non-grammatical theory isavailable that explains, in a systematic and naturalistic fashion, why these typesemerge, and no others; why they co-vary with grammatical complexity in suchnarrow ways; or how the types systematically relate to one another.

We have now reached the core claim of this book, and provided a substantial partof its evidential base: for, if the above empirical claims about how the grammarconfigures referential expressions in the nominal, pronominal, and clausal domains,are correct, then the epistemological significance of grammar is evident.


5

Cross-linguistic variation

5.1 The apparent problem of linguistic variation

One crucial challenge facing any universal grammar project is the obvious problem ofcross-linguistic diversity.1 While it is uncontroversial that all humans, pathologiesaside, share an ability to acquire human languages and that these same humansplausibly also share a system of reference of the kind proposed in Chapter 4, what ismuch more controversial is whether the linguistic systems they use for this purposecan be claimed to be grammatically non-distinct in any meaningful sense. In short, asignificant challenge facing the Un-Cartesian view is not that grammatical semanticsmight fail to be universal, but rather that it might fail to be grammatically specified.Cross-linguistic variation may support such a conclusion and so it has to be scrutin-ized, a task to which we turn in this chapter.

Chapters 1–4 have proposed that core principles of grammar effectively organize aparticular form of meaning—grammatical meaning—which, we argue, is an evolu-tionary novelty that does not appear to be available without grammar. But linguisticvariation is standardly taken to affect grammar as well: grammar, indeed, is what hasbeen the primary focus of the field of comparative syntax in the Principles andParameters (P&P) tradition. Those who reject the Chomskyan UG approach often doso on the basis that it cannot accommodate the full range of linguistic diversity (seeEvans and Levinson, 2009; Levinson and Evans, 2010; and the replies to Evans andLevinson, 2009). Rejecting any notion of universal grammar then comes at a price: aradical thought–language divide, in the light of a mode of thought that clearly isuniversal. Thus, for example, Everett (2005) claims that the Pirahã language lacks theputative universal of recursion. To avoid the claim that Pirahã speakers cannotembed one thought in another, he is forced to conclude that recursion, while absentin Pirahã ‘language’, is present in Pirahã ‘thought’. More generally, the uniformity ofthought is preserved in discussions of cross-linguistic variation, and is indeed thebasis for mapping out such variation, a notion that is only meaningful against a

1 This chapter is focused on cross-linguistic variation without (essential) variation in the linguisticgenotype. We will call variation of the latter kind ‘biolinguistic variation’, following Boeckx (2011) anddiscuss it at length in Chapter 8.

standard specifying what is constant. This constancy is also not questioned wherethought is said to be ‘relative’ to language to some extent (Majid et al., 2004), for suchrelativity primarily affects the lexical-conceptual resources on which thought isbased, not the formal ontology or grammatical semantics as discussed here.

If, as has been proposed in the preceding chapters, this divide is given up, andgrammar inherently constructs the semantics of a specific kind of thought, thenvariation across languages becomes highly relevant, for two distinct reasons. Firstly,superficial (non-grammatical) variation may serve to obfuscate more abstract gram-matical patterns, rendering the structure of grammatical semantics opaque (see forexample the covert/overt movement distinction discussed in Chapter 4, which whenviewed in abstraction reveals an underlying uniformity). For this reason a signifi-cantly constrained and explanatory model of the mapping from grammar to surfaceforms is crucial to the Un-Cartesian enterprise. Only with the service of such a modelcan language-specific forms provide evidence for the grammatical basis ofsemantics.2

The second reason concerns the potential existence of ‘syntactic parameters’ of thetraditional Government and Binding (GB) kind. From a Cartesian perspective suchvariation is ultimately unproblematic, though it is rejected in some recent Minimalistwork on independent grounds (cf. Boeckx, 2001; 2012). In such a perspective, syntaxis an autonomous system that simply translates a pre-existing system of propos-itional thought into a linguistic format in arbitrary and variable ways.3 Syntacticdifferences between languages, while requiring explanation in the context of UGas defined in this tradition, will have no effect on the structure of thought. From anUn-Cartesian perspective, however, grammatical variation, if it exists, raises someinteresting challenges: we would not expect the organizational principles giving riseto grammatical semantics to be parameterized. Indeed, the basic deictic function oflanguage appears not to vary across populations. On the strongest sense of thehypothesis, then, the prediction is that there should be no grammatical variation atall, without semantic variation.

Let us consider a concrete, if hypothetical, example of how it might not be true thatgrammar, insofar as it configures its own distinct kind of grammatical semantics, isuniversal in the species. Ontologists in some population might posit a formal-ontological category crucial to the content of thought as intuited and formallyanalysed by their best logicians, which they call a ‘pact’. It is claimed to be universallyavailable in human thought and defined to be systematically related to the familiar

2 Abstract grammatical patterns cannot merely be assumed to exist in spite of this surface variation, asthis would make the Un-Cartesian approach essentially Cartesian (positing an abstract semantic repre-sentation which is only arbitrarily related to the surface patterns attested in actual natural languages).

3 Though in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995 onwards) this system is taken to be highlyminimal, a point to which we return below.


category of a ‘fact’, in the following way. Facts are commonly conceptualized aspropositions that are established as true: a fact is a given proposition converted intoa truth. Now suppose that facts could also be converted into something else—something even more fundamental, just as a fact is something ontologically morefundamental than a mere proposition, which as such can still be both true and false.This then is what a pact would be: a fact converted into something that guarantees itsfactivity somehow, or makes it a fact, just as a fact is what makes a true propositiontrue. So we have ‘truth-makers’ (= facts) and ‘fact-makers’ (= pacts). A humanpopulation with professional ontologists in it that posit pacts would refute theUn-Cartesian perspective, exactly insofar as there would be no basis in grammarfor the ontological distinction in question.

But no ontologist has ever posited pacts, to our knowledge. Basically, humanthought seems not to reach that far, meeting its limit in facts/truths. If there iscontroversy about the truth of proposition P, we can assert that ‘it is a fact that P’. Butif this is challenged again, what can we do but re-establish the fact or otherwise giveup on the view that it is one? So ontologists pose truth-makers, which are facts, butno fact-makers. Why should this be? Our answer should be obvious by now: pactswould exceed the reach of grammar. The limits of grammar are the limits of thought.We will revisit this curious conclusion in Chapter 9.

The arguments for universality, however, cannot come purely from the apparentlack of variation at the semantic level. It must also be shown that this universality hasa grammatical basis. Thus, in another hypothetical population, thought might notexceed grammar, but could fail to co-vary with it. There might be a way of classifyingobjects of thought or of reference, independently of what grammatical categories andrelations are used in linguistic acts of reference to such objects, and without anycorrespondence between grammatical patterns and the ontology. Or, as noted above,the topological mapping principles that we have outlined in the previous chaptermight be reversed, in the sense that more projected nominals are consistently lessextensional; grammatical predicates are mapped to objects and grammatical subjectsto properties; sentences are mapped to objects and lexical items to truth values; andso on. Surely, in this case, we would conclude from such variation that anothersystemmust organize meanings into properties, objects, facts and so on, which wouldthen allow grammar to vary: for that other system would account for what isconstant, while grammar is merely a language-specific idiosyncrasy or tool, with noepistemic effects. Yet again, we know of no such patterns or reversals. They not onlyappear contingently absent, moreover, but conceptually impossible to the extent thatthere simply is no way to conceptualize a metaphysical notion such as ‘property’,without bringing in, directly or indirectly, the grammatical notion of a ‘predicate’.

All that said, such considerations still do not address the basic fact of linguisticdiversity, much of which has previously been analysed as grammatical variation.It must be shown, therefore, on some independent basis, that much of this variation

5. Cross-linguistic variation 177

is not in fact grammatical. The present chapter focuses on this task, providing anexplicit diagnostic for ‘grammatical variation’ and reconsidering three of the classicparameters of the GB tradition in its light. It is argued that at least the parametersconsidered here do not constitute points of major grammatical variation. Indeed,it will be argued that parameters such as the head-parameter and the null subjectparameter are best located in the post-syntactic component dealing with morpho-phonological ‘externalization’, in the sense of Berwick and Chomsky, 2011 (or ‘PF’ inthe sense of Chomsky, 1995). As for the ‘alignment parameter’, things are morecomplex, but again no grammatical macro-parameter is involved.

The structure of the remainder of this chapter is as follows. Section 5.2 begins bydefining what is meant by grammatical variation and how this is distinct fromlinguistic variation in a broader sense. Section 5.3 considers what should be con-sidered part of grammar and suggests a means to diagnose instances of genuinegrammatical variation. Section 5.4 considers word order variation in the light of theUn-Cartesian hypothesis and argues that the order of head-complement pairs is bestlocated in the PF-component. Section 5.5 turns to the null subject parameter andargues that it too should be located in the domain of externalization. Section 5.6 turnsto the various instantiations of the ‘Alignment parameter’ separating ergative fromaccusative languages and argues that there do appear to be minor grammaticaldifferences between (some) ergative and accusative systems. Rather than stemmingfrom a parameterization of thematic structure (Marantz, 1984; Levin, 1983; Dowty,1991) or Agree (Bobaljik, 1992; 1993), however, these are better modelled via aninterconnected series of morphological and syntactic micro-parameters. Moreover,as these micro-parameters appear to have micro-semantic effects, they may not posea serious problem for the Un-Cartesian position. Section 5.7 concludes.

5.2 Linguistic variation vs. grammatical variation

Languages clearly differ from each other at the lexical, phonetic, phonological, andmorphological level as well as in terms of word order and the (overt) realizationof arguments. As Ramchand and Svenonius (2008: 220) note, the unassailable fact ofthis surface-linguistic variation coupled with the assumption that all humans sharethe same basic system of thought provides two options regarding the connectionbetween syntactic representations and the C-I interface that is assumed in standardMinimalist syntax:

[E]ither the mapping from syntax to C-I is trivial, in which case all syntaxes have to be thesame (and highly abstract) at the interface, or else the mapping from syntax to C-I is nontrivial,in which case two languages might express ‘the same thought’ while feeding off differentsyntax/semantic representations.


Ramchand and Svenonius advocate the second of these possibilities and their choiceis consistent with the standard Cartesian approach to variation. Traditionally, Prin-ciples and Parameters Theory (P&P) accounts for variation by way of ‘parameters’.On the Government and Binding understanding of parameters, they are effectivelythe underspecified principles of a richly specified UG, which are filled in on the basisof experience (Chomsky, 1981). In their ideal macro-parametric incarnation, a singleparameter gives rise to a number of seemingly unrelated surface effects (Rizzi, 1982;Baker, 1996). Such a model, if correct, implies that all linguistic variation is effectivelybuilt into UG. Meanwhile, however, macro-parameters have become controversialeven within the generative tradition itself (cf. Newmeyer, 2005: 77–103). What hasgenerally replaced them in the Minimalist Program is micro-parameters, low-levelparameters whose effects can be local and independent.4 As such, Minimalist param-eters are merely taken to denote differences in the formal specification of functionallexical items, making them effectively lexical (cf. the ‘Borer–Chomsky conjecture’).

As Boeckx (2011) points out, this change of perspective is no accident. TheMinimalist take on syntax makes it hard to see how the basic operations of syntax,abstract and minimal as they are, could be parameterized at all. Agree, for example,does not become a different operation depending on which feature acts as a probe, ordepending on whether a feature is grammaticalized in one language but not another;and similarly for Merge. The same applies to classical Minimalist ‘third factor’conditions like ‘Shortest Move’ or ‘Attract closest’, which again it seems to makelittle sense to assume to be operative in one language but not another (Boeckx, 2011).In positing a computational system ‘perfected’ in line with the Strong MinimalistThesis, Chomsky has raised the degree of abstraction in linguistic descriptions,thereby potentially overcoming the problem of identifying neutral cross-linguisticdescriptors. This problem arises in any universal grammar approach that usestheoretical terms used in the description of particular languages in order to makeUniversalist claims. But if the genetic core of language that remains after abstractingcross-linguistic variation is just (internal and external) Merge/recursion, it appearsthat no language could seemingly lack this core. Hence the problem of language-neutral descriptors is overcome. At the same time, this solution comes at the pricethat no genetic linguistic core in fact remains: nothing is said about languagespecifically, if we assert that it is generable by Merge or is recursive (or is recursiveand exhibits principles of computational efficiency leading to ‘phases’). Moreover,and crucially for our purposes, taken to its logical conclusion, the study of UG willnow be divorced from the study of cross-linguistic variation: it primarily constrainsthe Language of Thought, following deductively from the Strong Minimalist Thesis,with language variation demoted to a matter of the accidents of ‘externalization’

4 See Biberauer (2008) for an in depth discussion of macro- and micro-parameters and Roberts (2012)and Section 5.6 below for an attempt to resolve the tension between micro- and macro-parameters.


(Chomsky, 2010: 61). In this way, Chomsky has effectively come to pursue theopposite course from GB theory: rather than building variation into UG, it is nowexcluded from it, in an effort to maximize the effects of non-language-specific factorssuch as third factor principles or effects of acquisition.

The view implied by the Un-Cartesian view is basically the first view above, that is,the one that Ramchand and Svenonius reject: the mapping between syntax and theC-I interface is direct, in fact there is no C-I ‘interface’ at all. When grammar hasestablished its relational structure, we do not have to go to another component so asto determine the semantics there, using independent principles. It is the mappingbetween syntax and PF, in this model, which must, then, be indirect, in order tocapture the fact that languages differ from each other. The implications of such aview are very strong, and thus worth exploring for methodological reasons alone. It isimportant to be clear, moreover, what it does not imply. Firstly, languages clearlydiffer with respect to their lexical inventories. Which lexical items are available in agiven language is partly determined by cultural practices. Thus many languagesfamously lack a term for the relative spatial terms ‘left/right’ because they use anabsolute (North/South based) spatial reference system (Majid et al., 2004).5 It is alsopartly due to historical accident. Thus French lacks a word for ‘shallow’ and mustexpress this concept via periphrasis peu profond ‘little deep’ (cf. Kayne, 2006).Likewise, Brown (2011) notes that while most languages have distinct lexical itemsfor finger and hand, many do not and this appears to be an areal feature of parts ofAustralia and North America. Differences of this kind are purely lexical and whilethey necessarily affect the exact thoughts that can be expressed in a given language(simply because the thoughts in question will contain different concepts), they seemto have no obvious impact on the grammatical semantics available in a givenlanguage as characterized here. In this much, the claim must be that any humanlanguage can create the same kinds of thoughts, and not the exact same set ofthoughts. Lexical variation, then, is non-negotiable.

What about variation in the functional lexicon? Ramchand and Svenonius notethat some languages have a first person plural inclusive/exclusive distinction whereasothers do not. This difference also is essentially lexical in character, akin, for example,to the different division of the colour spectrum in different languages (Berlin andKay, 1969). The difference is that the features 1st and 2nd Person are independentlyrequired in English, and arguably universally. English simply lacks this particularlexical distinction and the lexical item we can realise either the features 1st + 2ndPerson or 1st + 3rd Person, leading to a semantic ambiguity that does not affect, say,Quechua. This difference does not appear to affect the grammatical semantics of

5 The causality could, of course, go in the other direction, but the point stands that this kind of variationis purely lexical and does not seem to affect grammatical semantics.


these two languages either, though, again, it may affect the precise thoughts that canbe (unambiguously) expressed.

Perhaps more challenging is the fact that some languages have complex noun classsystems which appear to participate in grammatical relations, and which are impov-erished or simply lacking in other languages (cf. Contini-Morava, 1997, on Swahili).These are arguably more complex versions of the gender classes in some Indo-European languages, membership of which differs from language to language insemantically arbitrary ways.6 Yet again, this appears to be essentially a lexicaldifference between languages, with minor effects on the exact thoughts expressed(though cf. Kayne, 2006). Thus, psycholinguistic experiments have revealed thatgender class membership in many Indo-European languages has minor effects onconceptual semantics. Sera, Berge, and Castillo (1994) report that speakers of Spanishunconsciously attribute masculine/feminine properties to inanimate objects based ontheir grammatical gender. The implication is again that languages can create thesame kinds of thoughts, but that lexical differences between languages may affect theparticular thoughts that they can express.

In sum, the linguistic variation discussed thus far is thus not grammatical in naturebut rather lexical. In the next section, we turn to the difficult task of diagnosinggrammatical variation.

5.3 Diagnosing grammatical variation

Chapters 1–4 mention core aspects of grammar, all feeding into grammatical seman-tics: the phase, the predicate/argument distinction, modification, part-whole rela-tions between grammatical categories, reference. But this is clearly non-exhaustive.Something else which presumably falls within the remit of ‘grammar’ is the so-calledfunctional sequence, which determines the universal hierarchical order of functionalprojections in the nominal and clausal peripheries. While still controversial, this ideahas gained currency in recent years following much work by Cinque (1999, 2005,2010) and others in the cartographic tradition. Cinque (1999) argues, for example,that adverbs in all languages are externally merged subject to the universal functionalsequence in (1), which also determines scope:

(1) [Moodspeech-act frankly [Moodevaluative fortunately [Moodevidential allegedly[Modepistemic probably [Tpast once [Tfuture then [Mod irrealis perhaps [Modnecessitynecessarily [Modpossibility possibly [Asphabitual usually [Asprepetetive again [Aspfre-quentative(I) often [Modvolitional intentionally [Aspcelerative(I) quickly [Tanterior

already [Asp terminative no longer [Asp continuative still [Asp perfect(?) always [Asp

6 Though classes 1 and 2 are very often made up largely of +human nouns, as Jenneke van der Walreminds us.


retrospective just [Asp proximative soon [Aspdurative briefly [Aspgeneric/progressive char-acteristically [Aspprospective almost [Aspsg.completive(I) completely [Asppl.completive

tutto [Voice well [Aspcelerative(II) fast/early [Asprepetetive(II) again [Aspfrequentative(II) often [Aspsg.completive(II) completely ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

The evidence for (1) comes from certain regularities and gaps in the surface orderingof adverbs and verbal suffixes across languages. On Cinque’s view, these surfaceorders, which differ in certain constrained ways, essentially disguise the universalbase-generated structure.7 One can tentatively conclude, then, that there is nogrammatical variation in the base generation of functional heads. Cartographichierarchies provide a fine structure to the more basic phasal structure [C-T . . . [v-V . . . [D-N]]] that we adopt elsewhere in this book.

Another potential component of grammatical semantics is thematic structure.While the strongest version of Baker’s (1988) Universal Theta Assignment Hypoth-esis (UTAH) is difficult to maintain, the relative version of it pursued by Dowty(1991), Baker (1997) and Platzack (2011) appears to be empirically supported as well asconceptually elegant. The crucial idea behind these proposals is that the thematic rolethat a given DP receives depends upon the position in which it enters the derivationand that the way this is determined is cross-linguistically constant.8 According toBaker (1996, 1997), for example ‘themes’ universally originate lower than ‘agents’ asreflected by universal facts about anaphor binding and incorporation. If thematicstructure is a component of grammar, and indeed grammatical semantics, as we haveassumed here (see also Bowers, 2011), then the prediction is that it will not be subjectto parametric variation. We return to this issue in section 5.6 in relation to ergativity.

Beyond thematic structure, there is reference and predication. Is there variationregarding the principle of ‘movement towards the edge’ as characterized inChapter 4? As we noted, what most obviously varies in the languages we haveconsidered is how this movement is realized, for example through lexical insertionof a determiner where it is available, or through head-movement, where suchmovement can be overt or covert. This kind of variation does not affect the basicgrammar of reference we have posited, and the variation in question is most naturallydescribed as lexical and morphophonological. A ‘semantic parameter’ for hownominals are mapped to a pre-given set of assumed semantic ‘types’ was posited byChierchia (1998), but Longobardi (2001), consistent with our proposal in Chapter 4,has disputed the need for any such parameter. Operator-variable interpretations, too,

7 While Cinque (1999, 2005) proposes that the differences in surface order across languages result fromsubsequent differences in movement operations, Abels and Neeleman (2012) have shown that the samefacts can be modeled by parameterizing the way in which such structures are linearized. We return to thisissue below.

8 In fact, even those approaches which permit movement into theta-positions, retain the idea that theta-role assignment is configurationally determined (cf. Hornstein, 1999; Sheehan, 2012).


are part of the dynamics that create particular kinds of (in this case, bound)interpretations for nominals, and are thus part of grammatical semantics in oursense. Internal Merge arguably provides a minimalist account of the dependenciesinvolved. Again, such movement can be overt and covert, as is well known. Inasmuchas overt and covert movements pattern alike, they can be considered merely asalternative realizations of the same grammatical structure.

If Case is part of grammatical semantics, variation in Case-assignment, too, wouldbe relevant as a potential aspect of syntactic variation affecting meaning. Case,however, is widely taken not to affect semantic interpretation. In Chapter 6 we willargue that Case and Agree are morphological features and relations, respectively,which reflect grammatical relations that are crucial to grammatical semantics, whilenot being themselves a part of grammar as distinct from morphophonology. Wetherefore expect no variation in regards to the relations that the relevant features/relations reflect—licensing relations, in the terms of Chapter 6—but there would beno problem with variation in regards to different language-specific resources (e.g.Case-inventories) in which these relations are reflected. We revisit this conclusion atlength in Chapter 6, but return to potentially the best candidate for a syntacticparameter, the existence of both accusative and ergative alignments, below.

One crucial question from an Un-Cartesian perspective, then, is whether thesegrammatical operations/properties are subject to parameterization across languages.There are still at least two distinct ways of interpreting this question, however. On theone hand, there is a question whether the same operations exist in all languages, andare not themselves subject to parameterization. On the other hand, the issue iswhether actual applications of these operations remain constant across languages,where the semantic representation remains constant, so that all languages use thesame applications of Agree and wh-movement, for example to construct equivalentquestions. Again, the second, stronger version of this conjecture is much morecontroversial than the first.

Let us assume, in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, that these basicoperations of syntax in the Minimalist sense are not subject to parametric variation(though cf. Baker, 2010). The question remains, however, whether there are othergrammatical parameters that might constitute a problem for the Un-Cartesianhypothesis. There are many points of variation that in the GB era were analysed asgrammatical parameters. While these points of variation often concern aspects oflanguage that appear to have nothing to do with the kinds of issues we have beendiscussing thus far (for example, word order, the realization of arguments, or Case), itwould nonetheless be relevant for the Un-Cartesian view if they could be shown toconstitute genuine instances of grammatical variation. The selection of what is part of‘grammar’ cannot be made purely on the basis of what is clearly connected togrammatical semantics, as this would render the Un-Cartesian position unfalsifiable.


In order to test the hypothesis that grammar is invariant, we therefore need anindependent diagnostic such as (2):

(2) If a parameter P feeds/bleeds some grammatical operation, then P must begrammatical.

That is, if a point of variation interacts systematically with one of the operationswhich we have identified as core components of grammar (e.g. certain instances ofhead-movement, wh-movement, phases), then said point of variation must be gram-matical. Conversely, as long as there is no evidence that a given parameter feeds/bleeds any narrow grammatical operation, it remains possible that said parameter isnon-grammatical in nature (though not necessarily so). Let us then, in the remainingsections, revisit in more detail some of the classic ‘syntactic parameters’ of the GB erain the light of the claim in (2). We note that with the possible exception of thealignment parameter discussed in Section 5.6, these parameters do seem to concernmatters of externalization: for example, the order in which morphemes are pro-nounced, or whether arguments are pronounced at all. Nonetheless, it is perfectlypossible that syntax could itself encode such aspects of linguistic organization. It willbe argued below, however, that these classical ‘syntactic parameters’ are best inter-preted as different externalization options in a given morphological channel. In thatsense, they are not properly characterized as syntactic parameters. As things stand,then, ‘syntactic variation’ is not the seemingly obvious fact that it has been taken to be(though other aspects of variation may, of course, prove more problematic than thoseconsidered here).

5.4 Revisiting the head parameter

One of the core parameters of the GB era is the ‘head-parameter’, a version of whichis given in (3):

(3) X precedes/follows its complement.

This states a basic parameterisation in the X-bar template (a core component of UGin the GB sense). Simply put, languages like English set the parameter in (3) to‘precedes’, whereas languages like Japanese set it to ‘follows’, yielding head-initiality/finality respectively:

(4) [John has [read [the letter]]] [T [V [O]]]

(5) [John-ga [[tegami-o] yon]-da] [[[O]V]T] JapaneseJohn-SUBJ letter-OBJ read-PAST‘John read the letter.’


Such an approach to word order variation was attractive for several reasons. Firstly, itappeared to provide an explanatory account of the tendency towards ‘harmony’ innatural languages, whereby the various head-complements have a tendency to beordered alike within a given language. Given the general nature of the X-bartemplate, the default prediction is that all head-complement pairs will patternalike. Indeed, Dryer’s (1992) large-scale survey found the following head-complementpairs tended to pattern with the order of verb and object across languages:9

(6) Head-complement correlation pairs (taken from Dryer, 1992: Table 39, 108)

(i) verb-object(ii) adposition-DP(iii) copula verb-predicate(iv) want-VP(v) auxiliary verb-VP(vi) negative auxiliary-VP(vii) complementizer-S(entence)(viii) article-noun(ix) plural word-noun(x) noun-genitive(xi) adjective-standard of comparison(xii) verb-PP(xiii) adverbial subordinator-S(entence)

The parameter in (3) also had the apparent advantage of reducing the differencesbetween Japanese and English to a difference in order, whilst maintaining constanttheir constituent structure. This version of the head parameter was syntactic, then, inthat it involved a manipulation of the core phrasal template. In the context of BarePhrase Structure (Chomsky, 1995), on the other hand, a syntactic parameter of thiskind is impossible to formulate. According to the definition in Chomsky (1995),Merge yields an unordered set, in terms of which the notions precede/follow aremeaningless. While it has been proposed that Merge should actually yield orderedpairs (Zwart, 2009), the mainstream view is now that the order between head andcomplement should be imposed only at the mapping to PF.

One influential proposal in this vein has been to reinterpret Kayne’s (1994)influential Antisymmetry hypothesis as a linearization mechanism (cf. Chomsky,1995; Moro, 2000). Kayne (1994) proposed a formalization of the connection betweenlinear order and hierarchical structure:

9 This is not to say, however, that complete harmony across all head-complement pairs is the norm. Seethe papers in Biberauer and Sheehan (forthcoming) for discussion of disharmonic word orders.


(7) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA, Kayne, 1994: 6)[For a given phrase marker P, where d is the non-terminal to terminal dominancerelation, T the set of terminals andA the set of ordered pairs <Xj, Yj> such that foreach j, Xj asymmetrically c-commands Yj], d(A) is a linear ordering of T.

(8) Informal implication of the LCACategories higher in a given syntactic structure will precede those lower in saidstructure.

The LCA in (7) basically makes it impossible that Japanese and English share thesame constituent structure and implies, rather, that the hierarchical relations betweencategories must be reversed in Japanese as compared with English. The basiccorollary of Kayne’s approach is thus the need to encode all word order variationin the syntactic component. If the LCA-based view of word order is correct, in short,the existence of head-final languages like Japanese provides immediate support forthe existence of syntactic variation (cf. Kayne, 1998; 2004; Cinque, 1999; 2005;Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts, 2008, forthcoming, for a decidedly syntacticview of word order, as compared with the PF-approaches in Richards, 2004; 2008;Abels and Neeleman, 2012; Sheehan, forthcoming a, b). The advantage of thisproposal is that variation reduces to parametric differences in the application ofinternal Merge (movement) across languages.

The Un-Cartesian position, like the recent Minimalist one of Berwick andChomsky (2011), however, naturally favours the idea that word order variation isdetermined by more superficial PF-parameters, possibly relative to individual cat-egories (e.g. head-parameter, spec-parameter, pronounce head/foot, etc.). It is worthconsidering, then, to what extent the head-parameter passes our diagnostic in (2),repeated here as (9):

(9) If a parameter P feeds/bleeds some grammatical operation then P must begrammatical.

To what extent, then, does head-complement order feed/bleed head-movement, wh-movement or Agree, or have an impact on the phasal architecture of a givenlanguage? This is a question of some scope and all we can offer here is an impression-istic view of the cross-linguistic picture. It has been argued that head-final languageslike German lack V-to-T-movement (cf. the evidence in Vikner, 2005), and this hassometimes been taken as evidence that head-movement to a phrase-final head isbanned. Note, in this regard, that head-movement to C is possible in German,as discussed in Chapter 4, but that CP is a head-initial phrase in German. Kayne(1994) further observes that there do not seem to be any verb-penultimate languages,suggesting that head-movement to the right is universally banned. However, giventhat, in most cases, head movement in a head-final language will be string vacuous, it


is difficult to rule out its existence across the board (cf. also Richards, 2008, for criticaldiscussion). This is doubly the case because, as Sheehan (forthcoming c) shows,adverbs cannot generally intervene in head-final sequences. The matter thus remainsunresolved and we leave it to future investigation.

Kayne (1994) further noted that very many head-final languages seem to lack wh-movement and provided an elegant account of this based on the single specifiercondition. In simple terms, if spec CP is already occupied by a TP complement thenthis blocks wh-movement. A combination of the features of the World Atlas ofLanguage Structures shows, however, that this initial impression may not hold up toa broader cross-linguistic sample. Disregarding those languages listed as having ‘nodominant order’ on WALS, we get the following results for OV and VO languages:

Although the vast majority of OV languages for which there is data lack wh-movement, there are nonetheless 76 OV languages which have wh-movement.Strictly speaking, though, what is relevant to Kayne’s (1994) proposal is whetherthe head whose specifier would host a wh-phrase is phrase-final, as it is well knownthat many OV languages have a phrase-initial complementizer layer (Biberauer,Holmberg, and Roberts, 2008). At a rough approximation, we might consider thishead to be that which surfaces as a question particle in polar questions. If this is thecase then we can also test for instances of Q-final languages with wh-movement.Disregarding those languages which either lack question particles or in which thequestion particle is neither final nor initial, we get the following results:

TABLE 1. Order of verb and object (Dryer 2011a) and position of interrogativephrases (Dryer 2011b)

Initial interrogativephrase (264)

Not initial interrogativephrase (614)

Mixed (23)

VO (705) 156 253 15

OV (713) 76 317 6

TABLE 2. Position of polar question particle (Dryer, 2011c) and position ofinterrogative phrases (Dryer, 2011b)

Initial interrogativephrase (264)

Not initial interrogativephrase (614)

Mixed (23)

Initial Q-particle (130) 65 35 4

Final Q-particle (313) 31 215 6


Here again we see a strong skewing away from wh-movement in Q-final languages,but there are nonetheless 31 Q-final languages which permit wh-movement. Assum-ing that at least some of these are genuine counterexamples, it would appear thathead-complement order does not bleed wh-movement, contrary to Kayne’s originalhypothesis, though there is an undeniable preference for OV and Q-final languagesto be wh-in-situ. The fact that this tendency is not absolute is perhaps not surprisinggiven the fact that Kayne’s original explanation of the effect faces certain technicalproblems.10

Finally, in support of the claim that head-finality results from syntactic movement,Kayne (1994) observes that while many postpositions display agreement morphology,prepositions generally do not. He attributes this to the fact that Agree takes place inspec-head configurations, and postpositions involve leftwards movement of a DP tothe specifier of P. Once again, however, this generalization may not hold up toempirical scrutiny on a broader sample. According to the data on WALS (Bakker2011; Dryer 2011d), the instances of person agreement on prepositions and postpos-itions are broadly comparable. Disregarding those languages with no dominant orderof adposition and noun, we get the following results:

Table 3 shows that the agreement patterns for prepositions and postpositions arebroadly similar so there is no evidence that head-complement order feeds/bleedsAgree in this context.11

Finally, can head-complement order affect the phasal architecture of a givenlanguage? One contrast which is potentially relevant to this issue is the fact thathead-final languages such as Japanese appear to permit subextraction from specifiers,unlike head-initial languages like English (cf. Lasnik and Saito, 1992). To the extent

TABLE 3. Adposition-noun order (Dryer, 2011d) and person marking onadpositions (Bakker, 2011)

No adpositions(63)

No personmarking (209)

Person markingwith pronounsonly (83)

Person markingwith pronounsand nouns (23)

Postpositions (577) 12 95 35 13

Prepositions (512) 9 76 32 9

10 The most obvious being that subsequent LCA-based approaches to word order have either retainedthe single specifier condition and rejected the possibility of local comp-to-spec movement (cf. Kayne, 1998;Aboh, 2004; Cinque, 2005) or rejected the single specifier condition (Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts,forthcoming).

11 Note also that Kayne’s proposed analysis relies crucially on spec-head agreement, which is alsodifficult to state in Minimalist terms.


that islandhood is connected to phasehood, this could be taken to indicate that thetwo types of languages differ with respect to whether specifiers are necessarily phasesor not. Sheehan (forthcoming a) provides a PF-account of this difference, however,whereby specifiers are phases in both cases and the difference stems from therequirement of PF to impose an unambiguous order of terminals. In this case,then, there may be a PF-explanation for an apparent interaction between wordorder and a syntactic operation.

As such, this initial cursory investigation suggests that the head-parameter doesnot immediately qualify as a syntactic parameter.12 Head-complement order doesnot feed/bleed other narrow syntactic operations, and as such, while a salient andimportant property of language, it may not be syntactically encoded (either in theX-bar template or as a movement operation). It is worth considering, then, whetherPF approaches to word order can account for the wealth of empirical evidence citedin favour of the LCA (cf. Abels and Neeleman, 2012, for related discussion). Kayne(2009) mentions the following (cf. also Kayne, 1994; 2004):

a. Specifiers surface to the left, not the right;13

b. There are no V-penultimate or clitic-penultimate languages, but there are V2and clitic-second languages;

c. AuxV and VAux differ in that VAux order typically requires adjacencybetween V and Aux; and

d. There are AuxOVX languages (e.g. many Mande languages), but there seemto be no XVOAux languages.

As Biberauer and Sheehan (2012) note, most such asymmetries basically reduce to (a)or the Final-over-Final Constraint, a descriptive constraint over disharmonic head-complement orders:

(10) The Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC—Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts2008; 2009; forthcoming):14

If Æ is a head-initial phrase and � is a phrase immediately dominating Æ, then �

must be head-initial. If Æ is a head-final phrase, and � is a phrase immediatelydominating Æ, then � can be head-initial or head-final.

12 There are other interesting connections between word order and apparent parameters of variationwhich also deserve further consideration, such as the apparent lack of verb-medial ergative languages(Mahajan, 1994) and the fact that virtually all object-initial languages are ergative (Levin, 1983; Manning,1996). Roberts (2010) takes the first of these gaps as evidence that the head-parameter is encoded viamovement in the narrow syntax.

13 It has been suggested that Sign Languages may constitute an exception to this generalization(cf. Cecchetto, Geraci, and Zucchi, 2006, but see Abner, 2010 for counter-arguments).

14 The version of FOFC given here is the first version offered by BHR and it subsequently undergoesrevisions, to accommodate apparent counterexamples. I abstract away from such complications here but cf.Biberauer, Holmberg, Roberts, and Sheehan (in progress) for a broad empirical assessment of theconstraint.


FOFC amounts to the observation that of the four potential combinations of pairs ofhead-complement dyads, (11a)–(11c) are fairly well attested, whereas (11d) is eitherunattested or exceedingly rare (cf. Bazalgette, Roberts, Sheehan, and van der Wal,2012 for statistical evidence):

(11) Harmonic and disharmonic combinations:

(a) β�

αP β

αγP

αPβ

(b) β�

α γP

αPβ

(c) β�

αγP

αP β

(d) ∗ β�

α γP

The evidence for an asymmetry of this kind is discussed in the above papers as well asBiberauer, Newton, and Sheehan (2009), Biberauer, Sheehan, and Newton (2010),Sheehan (forthcoming b), and Biberauer, Holmberg, Roberts, and Sheehan (inprogress). One example, discussed by Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts (2008) isthe lack of V-O-Aux surface orders which holds in all synchronic and diachronicvarieties of Germanic, as well as Finnish and Basque, languages which permit allother possible permutations of V, O and Aux:

(12) Lack of *V-O-Aux

a. O-V-Aux German and dialects of German, Dutch and its dialects, Afri-kaans; Old English, Old Norse;

b. O-Aux-V or so-called verb-raising/VR structures: Swiss German dialects,Dutch and its dialects, Afrikaans; Old English, Old Norse;

c. Aux-O-V or so-called verb-projection raising/VPR structures whichinvolves a head-initial TP and a head-final VP: Swiss German dialects,Dutch dialects, spoken Afrikaans; Middle Dutch, Old High German, OldEnglish, Old Norse;

d. V-Aux-O required for CP-complements in German, Dutch, Afrikaans andtheir dialects; possible with PP-complements in Dutch and Afrikaans and,to a lesser extent, German; possible with DPs in Old English and Old Norse;

e. Aux-V-O English, Mainland Scandinavian, Icelandic; Old Englishf. *V-O-Aux unattested.15 [summary based on BHR (2007: 97)]

The same gap appears to surface in other syntactic contexts: *[C-TP]-V, *[Pol-TP]-C,*[Asp-V]-T, *[V-O] . . . C, suggesting that this is a general word order restriction.

15 A-bar VP-fronting gives rise to a superficial exception to this otherwise robust gap:

(i) I asked him to pay the bill, and pay the bill he did.

Given that these structures involve non-local A-bar movement of VP (past the subject) they fall outside theconstraint as described in (10) because VP is not dominated by AuxP in its derived position (cf. Biberauer,Holmberg, and Roberts, 2008).


Work by Kayne, Cinque, and collectively by Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts hasshown that it is possible to provide an analysis of these asymmetries in an LCA-based model by restricting the application of movement operations. Proposals whichattempt to relocate word order variation in the PF-component face the challenge ofproviding an alternative explanation for such asymmetries.16 As FOFC is the onlyasymmetry concerning head-complement order, rather than specifier-phrase order, acrucial question is whether it can be captured in a PF-approach to the head-parameter.

In previous work, one of us (Sheehan) has argued that all of the asymmetriesdiscussed by Kayne (2009) actually reduce to one:

(13) If no order is determined between two categories A and B by other means, thenA precedes B if A asymmetrically c-commands B.

In a sense, (13) can be considered a very weak version of the LCA, which stems fromprocessing pressures. Crucially, though, (13) retains the explanatory power of theLCA without forcing PF-motivated movements into the syntax. As long as there is asystematic syntax-PF connection, the kinds of asymmetries discussed by Kayne(1994, 2004) and Biberauer, Holmberg, and Roberts (forthcoming) can also beexplained as PF effects.17 Let us assume that while phrase structure is uniform acrosslanguages, heads are specified in language specific ways to either precedep or followF

the head which they select. The first stage of linearization orders heads based on thisvery local information. Head-head orderings are efficient in that they do not over-specify linear order (they are maximally local). They are inefficient, however, in thatthey often underspecify linear order (where word order is disharmonic, rather thanconsistently head-initial/head-final). In such cases asymmetric c-command is used toresolve the under-specification.

(14) Revised LCA:

(i) If a category A c-selects (and c-commands) a category B, then A precedes/follows B at PF.

(ii) If no order is specified between A and B by the sum of all precedencepairs defined by (i), then A precedes B at PF if A asymmetricallyc-commands B.18

16 That is assuming that these asymmetries have a formal rather than a diachronic or functionalexplanation. Cf. Sheehan forthcoming b and Bazalgette, Roberts, Sheehan, and van der Wal (2012) fordiscussion of one potential functional approach to FOFC and some of the problems it faces.

17 More generally, it is presumably always the case that linearization is always parasitic on narrowsyntactic relations and/or constituent structure, given the well-known fact that transformations are alwaysstructure-sensitive.

18 One question is why (ii) is not parameterized in the same way that (i) is. Biberauer, Roberts, andSheehan (2013) propose that for parsing reasons, (ii) is a no-choice parameter, always set to precedence.


This revised LCA explains the Final-over-Final Constraint as a PF effect. The basicexplanation of FOFC works as follows. With harmonic combinations (specifiersomitted), the sum of local head-parameters yields a single unambiguous linearorder because of transitivity:

(15) AuxP

Aux>V, V>O

=Aux>V>O

AuxP VP

VP O

(16) AuxF

V>Aux, O>V

=O>V>Aux

AuxF VF

VF O

Crucially, note that (16) has a harmonic head-final order without the need formovement, and with the same c-command relations as the head-initial order in(15). The revised LCA is not violated in such cases because c-command is notinvoked: the local ordering of heads taken transitively, yields an unambiguousordering of all categories. Now consider the disharmonic combinations:

Disharmonic combination 1—initial-over-final (with linear order represented forexposition purposes only):

(17) Aux P

Aux PAux>V, O>V

VF

VFO

Here, the sum of locally determined PF-parameters leaves the order of terminalsunderspecified: no order is specified between Aux and V. By (14ii), Aux asymmetric-ally c-commands O, and so must precede it giving the linear order Aux >O>V. This‘inverse FOFC’ order is therefore expected to be possible in the languages of theworld, as appears to be the case.

Now consider the other disharmonic (FOFC-violating) final-over-initial order:

(18) AuxF

AuxF

V>Aux, V>OVP

VP O


This time it is known that both Aux and O must follow V because of the headparameters in (18), but again no order is specified between Aux and O themselves. By(14), Aux again asymmetrically c-commands O, and so must precede it. This gives theunambiguous linear order V>Aux>O rather than the FOFC-violating order*V>O>Aux. Note that V-Aux-O is an attested word order (cf. (12) above).19 The crucialidea behind this account of FOFC is that there is no syntactic ban on the FOFC structureper se, it is just that a [[head-complement]-head] structure will never be linearized insuch a way as to give rise to the FOFC surface order.

In this section, we have considered whether head-complement order should besyntactically encoded or not. In the absence of evidence that head-complement orderinteracts with syntactic operations, we have tentatively concluded that the headparameter is a PF matter. We have further argued that a PF head parameter canaccount for the word order asymmetries and gaps which are often take as evidence forthe claim that word order is syntactically encoded (cf. Richards, 2004; 2008 for furtherexamples of this).20 In the following section, we consider another classic GB parameterin a similar way.

5.5 Revisiting the null subject parameter

Another of the classic GB parameters is the ‘Null Subject Parameter’, which regulatesthe (non)-pronunciation of subject pronouns (Chomsky 1981: 240; Rizzi 1982: 117).Thus English contrasts with Italian in that subject pronouns must generally beovertly realized in finite clauses in the former but not the latter:

(19) Canto spesso Italiansing.1SG often‘I sing often.’

(20) *(I) sing often.

This point of variation is of particular interest as it has been argued that a largenumber of seemingly unrelated properties correlate with the non-pronunciation ofsubject pronouns. This has been taken as evidence that the realization of subjects isnot merely a PF affair but rather the result of a syntactic parameter with complexsurface effects.

19 Note that the revised version of the LCA provides an explanatory account of FOFC as a PF-effect,even where phrasal movement is concerned (cf. Sheehan, 2010b, forthcoming a).

20 Clearly linearization is much more complex than this simple picture, however. Verb initial orderscannot be derived simply via a head-parameter, for example, and would rather have to involve realiza-tional/PF-parameterization of the kind discussed in Chapter 4. We leave a full investigation of these issuesto future work.


Neeleman and Szendrői (2007) offer an explicitly PF-only analysis of radical pro-drop in languages like Chinese and Japanese, which often lack agreement morph-ology on the verb and unlike Italian, permit the omission of any pronominalargument of a verb or noun:

(21) a. siken-ni otita. Japaneseexam-DAT failed‘pro failed the exam.’

b. Bill-ga settokusuru.Bill-NOM persuades‘Bill persuades pro.’

c. [mimi-ga] nagai. [Japanese, from Neeleman and Szendrői (2007: 672–3)]ear-NOM long‘pro’s ears are long.’

In their terms, these languages permit any argument to be dropped because of amorphological zero spell-out rule (which applies subject to pragmatic principles).

(22) [KP +p, �a] , zero [Neeleman and Szendrői (2007: 682)]

Indirect evidence for such a rule comes from the observation that only languages withagglutinating nominal morphology appear to permit radical pro-drop of the Japanesekind. In Neeleman and Szendrői’s terms this is because in languages with fusionalmorphology, the application of (22) is blocked by the elsewhere principle (Kiparsky,1973). In languages with agglutinating morphology, on the other hand, (22) appliesfreely as it spells out an entire KP and other morphological rules target properconstituent subsets of KP (i.e. K and DP). In fusional languages, however, morespecific morphological rules for KPs block the application of the zero spell-out rule.

If this analysis is along the right lines, then, radical pro-drop may not be the resultof a syntactic parameterization, but rather of a fairly superficial morphological effect:the rule in (22). This raises the question of the status of (22). It is clearly morpho-logical rather than syntactic but is it a language-specific rule induced on the basis ofdata or a universal principle which is only visible in non-fusional languages? Neele-man and Szendrői discuss the possibility that (22) is a universal morphologicalrule but dismiss this idea in favour of the proposal that it is simply acquired as arule. The pervasive nature of (22) in unrelated languages could be due to 3rd factorpressures, however, whereby non-pronunciation is preferred over pronunciation.The frequent occurrence of (22) only in languages with agglutinating morphologyyields the appearance of systematic parametric variation but if Neeleman andSzendrői are right this is simply an effect of the elsewhere principle. So in realityall we have is a third factor constraint (the Elsewhere Principle) which conditionsmorphological variation in a principled manner. That said, it remains to be seen, as in


the case of word order, how the radical pro-drop parameter interacts with coreprocesses in grammar and their interpretive effects. To the best of our knowledge,no such interaction has been reported and so we tentatively conclude that radicalpro-drop relates only to externalization.

This raises the question of the status of null subjects in languages like Spanish andItalian, which do not permit generalized argument drop.21 Neeleman and Szendrői(2005, 2007) explicitly claim that agreement-licensed null subjects instantiate apartially separate phenomenon, whereby zero spell-out of fusional pronouns isdependent on the presence of agreement morphology. This is in keeping with workby Holmberg (2005), Sheehan (2006), and Roberts (2010) who all argue that nullpronominals in many null subject languages (NSLs—Finnish, Spanish, Italian, Euro-pean Portuguese) are deleted pronouns. Combining Neeleman and Szendrői (2005)and Müller (2005), we can write this nullness into the morphological (externaliza-tion) component of the relevant languages:22

(23) a. [KP +p, �a, çi] , zero / T[çi]

b. T[çi] wherever T fails to be subject to a morphological impoverishmentoperation that leads to a neutralization of ç-features.23

Once again, according to (23), the availability of null subjects in L is dependent onlyupon morphological properties of L, this time the lack of impoverishment of T. As towhy so many languages with rich subject agreement permit null subjects, this couldagain be due to the fact that third factor economy pressures favour a rule such as (23)to exist in languages with non-impoverished phi-features on T.

If this approach is along the right lines and the null subject parameter is alsoeffectively a PF (morphological) parameter, then the prediction, again, is that it willnot be encoded in syntax or feed/bleed syntactic operations. In this regard it has beennoted that many NSLs appear to require verb-movement into the inflectionaldomain. Barbosa (1995) and Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) go as far as toclaim that it is verb movement in these languages that satisfies the subject require-ment. There are reasons to disfavour such a view, however, and to prefer a viewwhereby null subjects are independent of verb movement. One such reason is thatthere are non-NSLs with head-movement (e.g. French: Pollock, 1989) and so head-movement appears to be independent of a positive setting of the null subject

21 For reasons of space we do not discuss semi- and partial pro-drop languages, which require finergrained distinctions (cf. Biberauer, Holmberg, Roberts, and Sheehan 2010).

22 As Neeleman and Szendrői (2005) note, here the elsewhere condition will not block (23) in a languagewith fusional nominal morphology.

23 Cf. Müller (2005) for a discussion of impoverishment in relation to a number of languages. Heassumes that impoverishment takes place presyntactically, because he takes pro to be licensed narrowsyntactically. If null pronouns are simply deleted then impoverishment can be post-syntactic, as is morestandardly assumed in Distributed Morphology.


parameter. Schifano (2012) finds a strong correlation between the position in whichthe verb is spelled-out morphophonologically and the tense/mood/aspect distinc-tions displayed on the verb, suggesting that verb movement within the inflectionaldomain is morphological in nature (though this is not her conclusion).

Other apparent interactions appear to exist between subject pro-drop and bothAgree and wh-movement. A closer inspection of the facts reveals that the connectionis to rich agreement morphology, however, rather than the operation Agree per se.Non-NSLs like English and French also have agreement with the subject but lack nullsubjects. The connection between morphological richness and subject pro-drop iscaptured by (23). The connection to wh-movement is more complex. Rizzi (1982)noted that NSLs like Italian differ from some non-NSLs like English with respect towh-extraction of subjects. Whereas English and French display that-trace effects,Italian (like Spanish and Portuguese) does not:

(24) Chi credi che partirà? Italianwho think.2s that leave.FUT.3s‘Who do you think will leave?’

(25) Who do you think (*that) will leave?

(26) Qui est-ce que tu crois qui/*que partira? Frenchwho is-this that you believe who/that leave.FUT.3s‘Who do you think will leave?’

At first sight then, this appears to be an instance of the null subject parameterinteracting with a syntactic operation. The availability of subject extraction in NSLsacross a complementizer is attributed by Rizzi (1982) to the fact that (i) NSLs alsopermit post-verbal subjects and (ii) wh-extraction from the post-verbal position isunconstrained, unlike wh-extraction from the preverbal subject position:

(27) Ha telefonato Gianni Italianhas telephoned Gianni‘Gianni rang’.

The problem with this account is that it is not clear what actually prevents subjectextraction across a that-type complementizer in English and French. Pesetsky andTorrego (2001) and Rizzi and Shlonsky (2007) propose syntactic analyses of theeffect, but Kandybowicz (2006) argues that a PF account is superior. The first reasonfor this is that, as Kandybowicz (2006: 221) notes, even some dialects of English arereported to lack the that-trace effect (cf. Sobin, 1987). Moreover, prosodic factorsseem to mitigate the effect, notably the presence of an adverb (Kandybowicz, 2006:221, citing Bresnan, 1977: 194, Barss and Déprez, 1986, and Culicover, 1993):

(28) Who do you think that after years and years of cheating death __ finally died?


Moreover, a nuclear pitch on or contraction of the auxiliary following the comple-mentizer also yields a grammatical result for many speakers (Kandybowicz, 2006: 221):

(29) A: I didn’t think that John would survive.B: Well then, who did you think that __ WOULD?

(30) ?Who do you suppose that’ll leave early?

Given these facts, it seems unlikely that the that-trace effect is a syntactic effectafter all (cf. Kandybowicz, 2006 for a PF-analysis). Of course, there are otherdifferences between NSLs and non-NSLs which require explanation, notably differ-ences in the scope of indefinite subjects and the availability of free inversion(cf. Sheehan, 2010a, for an analysis of inversion in NSLs compatible with a PFaccount). Pending a full investigation of such effects, we tentatively conclude thatthe null subject parameter is better modelled as a PF-parameter built into themorphological component of language.

5.6 Revisiting the alignment parameter

Thus far we have considered two of the parameters of the GB era and tentativelyconcluded that they may not be syntactic parameters. This is perhaps not surprisinggiven that both points of variation concern manifestly morphophonological proper-ties of language: word order and the overt/covert realization of pronouns. In thissection we consider a parameter which appears, at the outset, to be more morpho-syntactic in nature, and argue that the result is slightly different (a more foundationaldiscussion of Case must wait until the next chapter).

Some languages display accusative alignment in that the subjects of intransitiveand transitive clauses pattern alike with respect to Case and/or agreement:

(31) She is kissing her

(32) She is eating

Other languages, however, display ergative alignment in that the object of a transitiveand the subject of an intransitive pattern alike with respect to Case and/or agreementand the transitive subject patterns differently:24

(33) Angute-m qusngiq ner-aa. Yup’ikman-ERG reindeer.ABS eat-TR.3s/3s‘The man is eating (the) reindeer.’

24 Given space restrictions, we will not address the problem of split-ergativity here, despite its obviousrelevance. The reason for this is that recent research suggests that it may be illusory. Coon and Preminger(2012), building on work by Laka (2006) suggest that where subjects in imperfective aspects fail to receiveERG it is because they are not actually transitive subjects. See Sheehan (2013) for a discussion of other kindsof splits in this context.


(34) Qusngiq ner' -uq.reindeer.ABS eat-INTR.3s‘The reindeer is eating.’ [Yup’ik, Eskimo-Aleut, Bobaljik (1993: 3)]

Early approaches to ergativity took it to result from a thematic parameter. ThusMarantz (1984) and Levin (1983) pursued the idea that thematic roles in syntacticallyergative languages are assigned in different configurations than in accusative lan-guages (cf. also Dowty, 1991). Updating the machinery slightly, this would give thefollowing:

(35) Accusative: [vP agent v [VP V theme]]

(36) Syntactically ergative: [vP theme v [VP V agent]]

Since thematic structure is part of grammatical semantics on the present account, thisis precisely the kind of variation that is problematic for the Un-Cartesian hypothesis.It is interesting to note, therefore, that this thematic view of syntactic ergativity hasnow almost universally been rejected, with the consensus being rather that thedifferences between ergative and accusative systems concern only differences inCase/Agreement rather than thematic structure. The reason for this is that thereare certain syntactic operations which are sensitive to thematic structure and thesefunction the same way in both ergative and accusative systems (e.g. incorporation,idiom formation, anaphor binding: Dixon, 1994).

Subsequent approaches to alignment, on the other hand, posit non-thematic butnonetheless syntactic parameters in order to capture the basic ergative/accusativecontrast. Thus, Bobaljik (1992, 1993) proposed the Obligatory Case Parameter, whichregulates which Agree relation is obligatory in intransitive clauses in a given lan-guage. In accusative languages, the relevant head is ‘AgrS’, in ergative systems it is‘AgrO’ (in a model where Agree relations are encoded as functional heads):

(37) accusative trans: [AgrSP Agent AgrS [AgrOP Theme AgrO [vP . . . ]]]accusative intrans [AgrSP Theme/Agent AgrS [vP . . . ]]

(38) ergative trans: [AgrSP Agent AgrS [AgrOP Theme AgrO [vP . . . ]]]ergative intrans [AgrOP Theme/Agent AgrO [vP . . . ]]

Because in ergative languages the AgrO head is always present/active, accusative Caseis always assigned and so the subjects of intransitive predicates get the same Case asthe objects of transitives. In accusative languages, AgrS is always present/active andso the subject of an intransitive receives the same Case as the subject of a transitivepredicate. While this approach does not involve the parameterisation of thematicstructure, it nonetheless involves the parameterisation of basic Agree relations. Onceagain, though, this kind of approach faces certain empirical problems. The predictionof (37)–(38) is that Ergative Case (ERG) should pattern like Nominative Case(NOM), whereas the Absolutive Case (ABS) on Themes/Agents in intransitive


clauses in ergative languages should pattern with Accusative Case (ACC). We knowof no language where this prediction holds, however (cf. Manning, 1996, Aldridge,2008, for discussion). Rather, ergative languages seem to pattern in one of two ways:

Pattern 1 languages appear to have an accusative syntax with surface ergativemorphology, whereas Pattern 2 languages appear to have an ABS which functionslike NOM. No language of which we are aware has the properties predicted by(37)–(38). Any account of ergativity needs to capture these two distinct patterns,and the Obligatory Case Parameter does not appear to be able to do so.

Note, nonetheless, that Pattern 2 strongly suggests that ergativity is not only amorphological phenomenon. Further indication of this comes from the fact thatapparently all Pattern 2 languages as well as some Pattern 1 languages display afurther syntactic effect of ergativity: the ban on wh-extraction of ERG DPs:

(39) *Maktxel max-ach y-il-a’?who ASP-ABS2 ERG3-see-TVintended: ‘Who saw you?’ [Q’anjob’al, Mayan, Coon et al. (2011)]

(40) *angutii [ti aallaat tigu-sima-sa-a]man.ABS gun.ABS take-perf-rel.tr-3s‘the man who took the gun’

[West Greenlandic, Eskimo-Aleut, Manning (1996: 84)]

This very pervasive effect appears to suggest that alignment cannot simply be amatter of morphology, rather there must be a syntactic difference between accusativeand what we will term ‘syntactically ergative systems’. This is different from the that-trace effect observed in accusative systems as it affects only transitive subjects anddoes not appear to be mitigated by prosodic factors. In fact syntactically ergativelanguages use a valency-changing strategy to alter the Case of the Agent in order thatit can be extracted, usually an Antipassive:

(41) yabu [bural-ŋa-ŋu ŋuma-gu] banaga-nyumother.ABS see-ANTIPASS-REL father-DAT return-NONFUT‘Mother, who saw father, was returning.’ [Dyirbal, Dixon (1994: 170)]

All of this shows that ergativity is not a uniform phenomenon; languages differ as tohow ergative their syntax is. Some languages seem to be only morphologicallyergative, as has often been noted in the literature (cf. Anderson, 1976), others displaya basically accusative syntax but show the restriction on the extraction of ERG DPs.Finally, a small number of languages appear to have a high ABS, equivalent to NOM

Pattern 1: ERG and SABS pattern like NOM, OABS patterns like ACC (e.g. Basque,West Greenlandic—Anderson, 1976; Manning, 1996)

Pattern 2: ERG patterns like an inherent Case and ABS patterns like NOM (e.g.Dyirbal, Mayan High ABS languages—Dixon, 1994; Coon et al., 2011)


in an accusative language and also display the ban on wh-extraction of ERG DPs.This kind of variation is what we would expect if Case is partially a reflection ofsyntax, but also of the ‘translation’ of syntax into partially independent, morpho-phonological terms (Sigurðsson, 2012). We return to this view in Chapter 6.

One way to capture these (and other) patterns is via an interconnected set of‘micro-parameters’, following the format in Roberts (2012) (see Sheehan, 2013):

(42) Alignment parameter hierarchy:

Basic alignment parameter: Does transitive ‘v’assign theta-related ERG to its specifier in L?

Syntactic ergativity parameter:Does VERG bear an EPP feature in L?

High/low ABS parameter:Does VERG assign structural Case in L?

Split-S parameter: Do all ‘v’ s in L assign ERG?N

Accusative(Russian...)

Morphologically Split-S(Chol, Basque)

Morphologicallyergative(Walpiri)

Low ABS(West Greenlandic, Tagalog)

High ABS(Dyirbal, Q’anjob’ al)

Y

N Y

NY

NY

The two parameters at the top of this parameter hierarchy are morphological innature and concern the language-specific marking of a universal theta-relation. Thelower two parameters are, however, ‘syntactic’, in the sense that they concern (i) thepresence/absence of a movement trigger associated with the head in question, and (ii)whether this head enters into a grammatical relation with a lower DP marked byAgree. It is, on this account, the presence of the Extended Projection Princicple (EPP)(the movement trigger) which gives rise to the ban on ERG DPs, as the presence ofthe ABS DP in spec vP acts as an intervener (cf. Aldridge, 2004; 2008; Coon et al.,2011). It is in those cases where this v head fails to assign a structural Case that ABS isequivalent to NOM (Legate, 2008).

Is the existence of syntactically ergative languages problematic for the Un-Cartesian hypothesis? This depends on whether there is any evidence that the twosyntactic parameters in (42) have semantic import. Interestingly, in the case of theEPP feature, such evidence does exist. It has been noted in a number of unrelatedergative languages displaying the ban on wh-extraction of ERG DPs, that the DPwhich receives ABS must be obligatorily definite/specific:


(43) B-in-ili ng babae ang isda.TR.PERF-buy ERG woman ABS fish‘The woman bought the/*a fish.’ [Tagalog, Austronesian, Aldridge (2008: 984)]

This follows if movement of the ABS DP past the ERG DP forces a wide scopereading on the former (cf. Aldridge, 2004; 2008 for discussion). It is not clear, atpresent, how general this pattern is, though it is also attested in West Greenlandic (cf.Manning, 1996). If it holds more generally, then this small syntactic differencebetween accusative and (syntactically) ergative systems also has a minor semanticimpact, as the Un-Cartesian hypothesis would predict.

In sum, this brief consideration of ergativity has argued, in line with much recentwork, that there is no deep thematic parameter or parameterization of Agree rela-tions. There do appear to be fairly low-level syntactic differences between (some)ergative and accusative systems. This does not undermine the Un-Cartesianapproach, however, inasmuch as these minor syntactic differences appear to correlatewith minor semantic differences.

5.7 Conclusions

This chapter has considered linguistic variation and whether it affects grammar asdescribed here. Grammatical semantics is rather uncontroversially universal; nor dothe principles of reference and predication as described here form natural dimen-sions of expected variation, since the grammatical semantics in question is arguablyconceptually non-distinct from the grammatical patterns in which it arises. Cross-linguistic variation could suggest that an alternative, non-grammatical system is whataccounts for the formal ontology of semantics, but this does not seem to be the case—that is, the syntactic variation most scrutinized in the generative tradition is not ofthat kind. Indeed, it turns out that many classic GB syntactic parameters might wellplausibly be reformulated as PF-parameters affecting only ‘externalization’ (morpho-logical operations, vocabulary insertion, linearization). In particular, this may well bethe case with the head parameter and the null subject parameter. In the case ofalignment, we have seen evidence of a syntactic parameterization based on the factthat ERG DPs cannot be wh-extracted or relativized in a diverse range of ergativelanguages. Following Sheehan (2013), there may be a ‘hierarchy of micro-parameters’to explain the attested classes of ergative languages and one-way implications.Crucially, the syntactic parameters in said hierarchy actually appear to have somesemantic import, in which case a change in grammar does entail a change inmeaning, as the Un-Cartesian view would predict.


6

The rationality of Case

6.1 The apparent irrationality of Case

The interpretation of Chomsky’s (2007a) ‘radical’ conception of the semantic inter-face explored here as the Un-Cartesian hypothesis maintains that there effectively isno such interface: there is a grammatical and a non-grammatical (lexical, perceptual)way of organizing semantic information, but there is no autonomous semantic orsyntactic component. We therefore do not expect autonomous syntactic principles oroperations. With this in mind, this chapter turns directly to a property of naturallanguage that is often taken to provide some of the strongest evidence for syntacticautonomy, described under the traditional descriptive category of ‘Case’: in manylanguages, argument-nominals (DPs) are marked morphologically as being ‘accusa-tive’, ‘nominative’, ‘dative’, and so on. But what on earth, we might wonder, does themorphological case-marking in the English word him add to its meaning, namely aparticular person we refer to? What does it add to the word Peter, if we assume thatsuch nominals, though not morphologically case-marked, can be ‘abstractly’ markedfor it? In these questions, however, we see standard assumptions about meaning atwork, which we have questioned here: meaning is based on the word, words refer tothings in the world. Case marking, then, seems like an irrelevant flourish. It is, weconclude, something merely ‘syntactic’. Since a notion of grammatical meaning ismissing, we further conclude that it is an arbitrary constraint, a ‘filter’ imposed bygrammar as an autonomous system on nominals in argument positions—though wemight concede that, occasionally and perhaps not very systematically, Case markingrelates to thematic roles, or to event-semantics. Case, then, is (largely) irrational. Itmakes no deeper sense.

In line with this conclusion, we probably cannot find a single Introduction to thePhilosophy of Language that even discusses the phenomenon in question. To illus-trate the situation insofar as linguistics is concerned, Svenonius (2007: 20) notes that‘attempts to [ . . . ] reduce structural cases to semantically based feature systems [ . . . ]go back hundreds of years and have invariably failed’. Pesetsky and Torrego (2011: 52)state that the principles of Case assignment ‘look quite specific to syntax andmorphology, with little apparent connection to external cognitive systems’. This

partially echoes the claim by Chomsky (2000b: 127) that ‘[s]omething like Ł-theory isa property of any language-like system, whereas [Case] checking theory is specific tohuman language . . . ’. If so, in a Minimalist frame, where interface explanations are aprime rationalization of narrow syntactic elements and operations, Case raisesparticularly severe problems of rationalization: why does it exist? In Chomsky’s(2000b; 2001) Agree-based framework, Case is the ‘uninterpretable feature’ parexcellence, to be deleted in syntactic representations before ‘transfer’ to the semanticinterface (i.e. semantic interpretation) takes place. It is said to be ‘motivated . . . bylegibility conditions’, in the sense that Case exists in order to render DPs active asgoals in the narrow syntax, but this proposal fails to give Case any rationale inde-pendent of the autonomous narrow syntax, and it faces other problems, which wediscuss below.

We think that the Un-Cartesian programme provides a perfect opportunity torethink Case. In this chapter, we will contend that Case is utterly rational: itmorphologically reflects the grammatical process of licensing a referential nominalto the heads of two higher phases, v and C, of which the nominal becomes a part. Thecorrelate of this is that the nominal will receive relational interpretations: its refer-ence is now resolved in relation to the referents of the higher phases, becoming aparticipant in the events and propositions they denote as speech acts take place.This process does not happen with adjuncts, or with clauses. What Cases mark,therefore, are the cross-phasal grammatical relations arising in the build-up ofreferential meaning and the inherent formal ontology that the latter has in grammar.The Cases and the formal ontology of semantics, therefore, are correlative. Withoutthe one, the other wouldn’t exist. Case is rational in this sense. It would be irrationalonly if grammar was. But it isn’t, as we have argued here. The idea that Case isuninterpretable arises against a lexical, non-relational, and non-grammatical con-ception of meaning.

Nothing in this account entails that morphological Case marking must exist in alanguage. ACC, NOM, etc. are morphological features, which as such cannot be thesame as the grammatical relations they morphologically manifest. The latter areimproperly described as Cases, we will argue, for how these relations map onto themorphological features in question is a many-to-many, and both intra- and cross-linguistically highly variable affair. A feature such as ‘ACC’, therefore, doesn’t have asingle grammatical meaning—though important tendencies can be seen, as seemsalready clear from Section 4.4 above. In line with this, we make a terminologicaldecision: Since, in any case ACC, NOM, etc. are morphological features and we thinkthat the grammatical relations that such features manifest are not properly said to be‘Cases’ for the reason just given, we reserve the term ‘Case’ for the basic, andunquestionably morphological phenomenon we are concerned with here. This isalso in line with our general practice in this book to write terms such as ‘Person’with a capital when we mean the technical grammatical category rather than the

6. The rationality of Case 203

common noun or a potential semantic category. In short, Case as the term is usedhere is a morphological phenomenon that translates syntactic patterns into morpho-logical terms.

Before proceeding, we stress what this chapter is about, and what it is not about.The chapter is about the interpretation, and the possible rationalization of a phe-nomenon in light of its currently known empirical features. It is not presenting a newtheory of Case, or expanding the empirical coverage of given theories. So it is, if youlike, a philosophy of Case. We will proceed as follows. In Section 6.1, we articulate theabove proposal in more detail, putting it squarely on the table. Section 6.2 tracks theevolution of the notion of the Case Filter in generative grammar and the notion of‘abstract Case’, concluding that no such autonomous constraint exists as part ofgrammar viewed as distinct from morphophonology, and that it is only problematic-ally assumed even within more standard assumptions in the Minimalist framework.Section 6.3 argues that, fundamentally, the issue is not ‘abstract Case’ but the need tolicense referential expressions against the referents of higher phases into which theyenter, which includes a crucial connection between Case and Tense. Finally, inSection 6.4, we discuss evidence that has been taken to suggest a rather directconnection between Case features such as ACC and semantics, and more specificallythe mereological structure of events. We argue against the idea that ACC has such adirect semantic rationale. Its rationale, rather, lies in grammar and how the latterorganizes referentiality and the formal ontology of meaning. The sensitivity of Caseassignment to the formal-ontological state-event distinction suggests a similar con-clusion. Overall, we conclude that the challenge of Case to the rationality of gram-mar, if grammar is rethought on Un-Cartesian lines, disappears.1

6.2 What do the Cases mean?

In Chapter 4, we have mainly considered how the phasal architecture serves toconstruct units of referentiality within both the clausal and nominal domains. Butas described in Chapter 3, such phasal units also compose in a specific way,

1 This does not mean that there are no other challenges. Indeed, there are plenty, and the Un-Cartesianprogramme will need to address them one by one. An obvious other challenge is islands, which are virtuallyroutinely taken to be irrational, on the grounds that a sentence like ‘*Who did Susan ask why Sam waswaiting for __?’ expresses a perfectly well-formed thought, namely: which person was such that Susanasked Sam why he, Sam, was waiting for him/her. But all that this observation seems to amount to is thatthoughts need to be expressed by the sentences by which they are indeed expressed—the second one, in thisinstance. Why, that is, should we have the expectation that a given sentence could express what anothersentence expresses? As for why sentences like the first are ungrammatical, this needs to follow from howadjuncts are structuralized relative to arguments, and which grammatical relations can be establishedacross which phasal boundaries. Since phases and the adjunct-argument distinction are interpretable ingrammatical semantics, it is not clear why islands, if and to the extent that they are an epiphenomenon ofthis phasal dynamics, should not arise.


generating a dialectic of reference and predication that ends with the assignment ofthe truth value. In the course of this dialectic, a complex formal ontology arises byphase, which crucially has a part-whole structure to it: thus, as reference to individ-uals is made, these will necessarily contain substances as part of their constitution;objects of reference that are formally events, in turn, will necessarily contain objects(event participants); causative events will contain states; propositions will containevents; and propositions will be parts of speech acts. Since CP necessarily containsvP, which necessarily contains DP, we may think, in line with Chapter 3, of DP as the‘first phase’, of vP as the ‘second’, and CP as the ‘third’. As a DP transgresses its firstphase boundary and enters the second and third phases, until it is licensed as asentential argument, cross-phasal dependencies form. These correlate with the rela-tional interpretations that all referential argument-nominals have. To illustrate theseinterpretations, consider (1):

(1) I read.

Here the personal, nominative DP is simultaneously a speech act participant (thelogophoric agent), the grammatical subject of a predication that is part of theproposition that I read (whose truth is claimed in this speech act), and an eventparticipant (the agent of the reading). That is, the grammatical argument ‘I’ expressesa set of cross-phasal relations into which it has entered. These relations are establishedbetween the nominal and the heads of the higher phases, with v and Voice being ofparticular importance. Thus, construction types with different such heads, such asthe active/passive, the causative, the unaccusative, and the anticausative construc-tions, differ in their argument structure, which in turn shows up in differences inCase-assignment. For example, when we start from the transitive construction in (2),then the ‘passive’ Voice in (3a) and the unaccusatives construction in (3b) changesCase-assignment leading to ACC-to-NOM conversion:

(2) We [voice-v killed himACC]

(3) a. HeNOM [voice-v was killed].

b. HeNOM [voice-v died]

As is clear from these examples, the Voice-v complex affects Case-assignment: differentsuch heads instruct the morphology in different ways. What, then, do such markers as‘NOM’ and ‘ACC’ in (2) and (3) mean? They indicate that the DP has undergonerelational licensing with respect to the higher phase(s) of which it has become a part, theinterpretive correlate of which is that they have become parts of referential expressionswith a different formal ontology. The Cases, where they are present morphologically in alanguage, therefore mark the cross-phasal relational structure of grammar, which isinterpretable in grammatical semantics. DP denotations need to become interpretedrelationally in addition to referentially, as event- and speech act participants.


Chomsky (2001: 6) suggests that in regular accusative systems, ACC is assigned inthe domain headed by the phasal head v, when that head is in a technical sense‘complete’ or ‘non-deficient’ (= ‘v*’), while NOM demarcates the next phase, where itis assigned a value under Agreement by the Tense head (T), again when this head isrelevantly ‘complete’. If so, the Cases are immediately rationalized, as long as thesephases themselves are interpretable, which they of course are in the present frame-work. These ‘structural’ Cases, that is, will demarcate phasal domains—more pre-cisely, those phasal domains incorporating another phase with a different formalontology, as when an event-denoting phase contains an object-denoting one (thisqualification would explain why D as such is not a Case domain). Thus formulated,however, the rationalization of Case still assumes, with much GB and Minimalistwork, that ‘NOM’ and ‘ACC’ are names of entities that figure in ‘narrow syntax’ andUG, corresponding to ‘syntactic features’ that require ‘checking’ under ‘Agree’ in thecourse of the syntactic derivation. We will argue against this below, in line withSigurðsson (2012), who also argues (p. 206) that NOM-assignment does not involveT, contrary to the assumptions of a long tradition in generative grammar (Lasnik,2008), but is regulated by a complex of functional heads in the expanded domain of v,including ‘Voice’ and applicative heads. In this approach, NOM is an ‘elsewherecase’, assigned to a nominal in PF whenever syntax has not transferred any specificCase instructions for it within the domain of v (NOM is thus ‘no Case’). ‘High’movement of a nominal into the C-domain is then not ‘for Case’, nor for reasons ofthe Extended Projection Principle (EPP), but for reasons of establishing interpretableç-feature relations, in particular Person. Sigurðsson (2012) also reinterprets Choms-ky’s principle of ‘star-augmentation’ as encoding an instruction for the morphologyto interpret syntax, and expands it to include assignment of Dative and Genitive. Ourproposal will significantly cohere with this proposal and its implication that ‘syntaxdoes not operate with case features’ (Sigurðsson, 2012: 193), which instead arepartially arbitrary and language-specific morphological expressions of a range ofunderlying grammatical relations.

Even if the core Cases do not correspond in a one-to-one fashion to the phasaldomains v and C, however, as Chomsky’s model entails, they would be semanticallyinterpretable in grammatical semantics. For they reflect the cyclic licensing of argu-ments in different domains, which is inherently an aspect of grammatical semantics.This is crucially not because the Cases inherently relate to thematic roles. The latter,too, we have argued, are an aspect of grammatical semantics and an aspect of howarguments are interpreted relationally (and see Bowers, 2011). Thus, in (3) above, thethematic role of the internal argument remains identical as its Case changes, andNOM is marked on both ‘we’ and ‘he’, which carry distinct thematic roles. Ratherthan to thematic roles, the Cases relate to argumenthood, more precisely theargumenthood of canonical DP-arguments, assuming that adjuncts and clausal orPP-arguments are exempt from structural Case-marking, and need not be licensed in


the way that referential nominals need to be. Since adjunction involves a different(grammatical) semantics than argument taking, it follows that Case, if involved inlicensing referential arguments, is interpretable not thematically or as adjuncts are,but as arguments denoting objects viewed as having entered events denoted by theheads of higher phases.

In (3a) and (3b), ‘him’ and ‘he’ both carry Case, as expected from the fact that theyare both arguments. This means, in terms of their grammatical semantics, that thereare not two referents, an event and an object (a kicking and a male person), in theseconstructions, but one referent, an event of kicking, of which the object has becomean inherent part. In other respects, however, the interpretations are different, as againthe grammar predicts: thus, in (3a), the NP is part of the predicate; in (3b), it is thesubject. Subject and predicate are neither thematic notions nor non-grammaticalsemantic ones (but of course both are interpretable as grammatical semantic ones,since in combination they give rise to a truth value). Neither is the notion of‘argument’ a merely thematic or non-grammatically semantic one. In fact, to under-stand the mereological notion of ‘part’ just invoked, which as such is rather vague andmetaphysical, we need to invoke grammatical relations. Thus, when I say (4), thenboth Jim and Dan are, purely semantically speaking, ‘parts’ of the event of seeing thatis being referred to:

(4) I saw Jim with Dan.

However, ‘Jim’, the argument, is a part of it in a different way from Dan. For example,(5) is an entailment of (4), while (6) is not:

(5) I saw Jim.

(6) *I saw with Dan.

This entailment obtains for no semantic reasons, but grammatical ones: the way inwhich Jim, the grammatical argument, is connected to the event of seeing, is differentfrom the way in which Dan is, the adjunct. It is in the nature of adjuncts that they canbe dropped, leaving the reference of the object to which they attach intact. On thesegrammatical grounds, (5) follows from (4).2 Thematic roles are not sufficient tolicense the formal ontology in question, predicting that the relations marked by themorphological Cases, where these exist in a language, take us further into the realm ofgrammatical meaning than thematic relations do, which adjuncts can carry as well.Equipped with thematic roles alone, there wouldn’t need to be propositions, orsubjects in a language, and there couldn’t be. There might be ‘arguments’ in a purely

2 This is the essence of the argument presented in Reichard and Hinzen (2011) according to whichDavidson (1967) is wrong that positing a (non-linguistic) semantic ontology of ‘events’ as objects explainswhy the entailment obtains. This semantic ontology is explanatorily inert. The actual explanation is purelygrammatical, as seen in the text, where no reference to any extra-linguistic objects is made.


logico-semantic sense, but not in a grammatical one. There could be a completelanguage with thematic roles that only had a capacity to conjoin predicates, combin-ing adjuncts with adjuncts only, without ever yielding propositional information ortruth values.3 Such a language would not need Case. But it wouldn’t encode propos-itional information either.

We will technically assume, with much linguistic literature (Kratzer, 1996; Pylk-känen, 2008; Sigurðsson, 2012), that different arguments are licensed in the extendededge of the verbal domain (second phase) by different kinds of functional heads:specifically, external arguments/subjects are licensed by (e.g. active or passive) Voice,direct objects by v-type heads, and indirect objects by an ‘applicative’ head (Appl).So as we go beyond the first phase and enter the second, (definite) nominals arebrought into matching relations with at least these three distinct kinds of head:

(7) [Voice . . . NP3 . . . [Appl . . . NP2 . . . [v-V . . . NP1]]]

There is no a priori reason why we should expect that such relations would show upin the morphology. Thus it is not surprising that in many languages (100 of 261languages in total studied by Iggesen, 2008), there is no morphological reflex of suchrelations in Case assignment. That there can be such a reflex is equally unsurprising,however. Where it exists, it will make perfect sense that the relevant markers willshow up in two places, like on a noun and a verb, given that grammar is relational andthat such markers are interpreted in terms of grammatical relations. This then hasnothing to do with any such marker being ‘uninterpretable’. The relations in questionare as such fully interpretable in terms of (speech-)event licensing.

There is not only no grammatical or communicative requirement for overtlymarking the relational structure of grammar in morphology, i.e. for Cases, but weexpect the problem of mapping grammatical relations to a sensory-motor surface tobe solved in many languages in many different ways. That is, a one-to-one correlationbetween morphological Case-markers and the underlying relations they manifest isnot expected and would come as a surprise. Nor does such a correlation seemavailable either cross-linguistically or even within a single language, as Sigurðsson(2012) stresses (and see further on in this section). That said, morphology doesinterpret syntax in the instance of Case, as when a particular Case interprets the(non-thematic) grammatical relations between a direct object and an event-denotingverbal head. We have also noted evidence from Romance object clitics and differentialCase marking in Chapter 4 that ACC-marking rather systematically correlates withthe dimension of grammar that we have identified as referentiality.4 Also interesting

3 Truth values are an optional ingredient in the Neo-Davidsonian ‘minimal semantics’ of naturalsemantics, based on the operation of adjunction and thematic roles, sketched in Pietroski (2011).

4 Differential subject marking also exists. It is not clear how similar it is to differential object marking,but interestingly it is sensitive to the Person/no Person distinction in Dyirbal (Dixon, 1994).


in this regard are languages that make Case distinctions amongst pronouns but notfull DPs (e.g. English, French, Italian, Spanish: Asbury, 2008); and relatedly, Casemarking can show up on determiners but not nouns, as in German. Both of thesefacts make sense: pronouns, which are closely related to determiners, embody formsof grammatical reference in a purer form than content nominals. Hence the lan-guages in question again illustrate a correlation between grammar, Case-marking,and reference. In Section 6.4, we will discuss further evidence from event semanticsbelow that a morphological category such as ACC can, at least in some languages (e.g.Finnish, German, and English), track aspects of event reference quite consistently (cf.van Hout, 1996; 2004, Kratzer, 2004; Borer, 2005; Travis, 2010). There can be littledoubt, then, that, to a significant extent, Case morphology tracks grammar and thegenesis of referential meaning in it: it reflects the licensing of referential argumentsinterpreted as relations to events, including speech events.5 We come back to this inSections 6.4 and 6.5.

Despite the fact that such markers track grammatical relations, it remains true, atthe same time, that any singlemorphological Case-marker such as ACC can express agreat number of different underlying relations. For example, ACC in Icelandic,Sigurðsson (2012: 199) lists, can mark: ‘some subjects; most direct objects; someindirect (‘first’) objects ( . . . ); regular ECM subjects; most ECM predicative NPs;subjects in some experiencer ECM complements; some raised NPs; complements ofcertain prepositions; some dislocated NPs; certain adverbial NPs’. In turn, differentCase-markers can indicate the presence of the exact same syntactic relation. Thus inlanguages with ‘inherent’ cases (dative, genitive, instrumental, ablative, partitive,comitative, etc.), these inherent Cases can all be used to mark the relation betweenthe verb and the direct object, as in hundreds of ordinary verbs in Icelandic(Thráinsson, 2007: 208f.). Moreover, two closely related languages such as Germanand Icelandic can map the equivalent syntactic relation onto different Cases, evenwith semantically equivalent predicates:

(8) a. Hún kastaði steininum/*steininn. Icelandicshe threw stone.the.DAT/stone.the.ACC

b. Sie hat den Stein/*dem Stein geworfen. Germanshe has the.ACC stone/the.DAT stone thrown‘She threw the stone.’

5 According to Caha (2009), also, the morphological syncretisms which languages display in theirmorphological Case marking paradigms are not arbitrary, but are rather subject to universal principles.This raises challenges for the claim that morphological Case marking is independent of syntax. McFadden(2012) claims that only the ‘inherent’ Cases behave as Caha claims. We leave a full exploration of this ideato one side here.


(9) a. Hún stýrði skipinu/*skipið. Icelandicshe steered ship.the.DAT/ship.the.ACC

b. Sie hat das Schiff/*dem Schiff gesteuert. Germanshe has the.ACC ship /the.DAT ship steered‘She steered the ship.’ [Sigurðsson (2012: 10–11)]

Even in the same language, two verbs very close in meaning can surface with objectsmarked with different morphological Case markers (cf. German gratulieren (DAT)and beglückwünschen (ACC), both meaning ‘congratulate’, McFadden, 2004: 96).The following Icelandic example from Andrews (1982) is another famous example:

(10) a. Mig velgir við setningafræði Icelandicme.ACC am.nauseated by syntax

b. Mér býður við setningafræðime.DAT am.nauseated by syntax‘I am nauseated by syntax.’

The possibility of sociolinguistically determined variability in Case assignment is alsoattested (see Sigurðsson, 2009: 23, for an Icelandic example). This is arguably also theexplanation for the fact that morphological markers of Case can clearly vary overtime (cf. Allen, 1995, on the loss of dative subjects in the history of English). A greatmultiplicity of factors, then, can influence how Case morphology will end upinterpreting grammatical relations: Case-assignment, which proves to be sensitive(to varying degrees) to (i) lexical idiosyncrasies, (ii) the DP in question’s thematicrole, (iii) sociolinguistic factors, (iv) the syntactic position/dependencies of said DP,and (v) the presence and status of other DPs in its local domain (cf. Marantz, 1991;Baker, 2010). The same bewildering multiplicity shows up in Case inventoriesthemselves. According to Calabrese (1996: 86), not counting vocative, Kabardianhas only two morphological Cases (NOM/ACC), Modern Greek has three (NOM/ACC/GEN), Ancient Greek had an additional morphological case (DAT), Latin andOld High German both had (different) five-way distinctions, Turkish and the Slaviclanguages have six morphological cases, and Central Armenian has seven. Manylanguages lack morphological Case altogether as noted (e.g. Mandarin, Thai) (Igge-sen, 2008; 2011). Some languages assign such markers based on loosely semanticcriteria (possibly subtypes of thematic-roles), but these patterns are not semanticallybased in any universal sense (McFadden, 2004).

This ‘Case chaos’ makes it seemingly impossible to regard a morphologicalcategory such as ‘ACC’ as a ‘syntactic’ category or a category of UG, rather than adescriptive category for how different languages reflect syntax in language-specificand variable ways. It also raises questions for the proposal that there should besomething like ‘abstract ACC’ (or perhaps ‘abstract ERG’), a term that amounts tocarrying a morphological category into syntax, except that in this case, no such


morphological category is present. Consider (11), where ACC-marking tracks thesyntactic dependency between the internal argument and the active verb:

(11) I saw him/*he.

In (12), there is no such ACC-marking:

(12) I saw Peter.

We would not be inclined to conclude from this that the syntactic dependencybetween the verb and the object is therefore a different one (11) and (12). But thisexample is not therefore evidence for the presence of an ‘abstract ACC-feature’ in thesyntax underlying (12). It just shows us that a given syntactic dependency need not bemorphologically marked in the same way in the pronominal and nominal case.A dependency is not a marker. A marker is a marker of a dependency. In otherlanguages, it is only marked on the verb, or on both the verb and the DP (Baker,1988). We will discuss the notion of ‘abstract’ or ‘structural’ Case in the next sectionin more detail.

For now we summarize the proposal. Case is rational, for morphological Casemarkers, if and where they exist in a language, are a manifestation of the relationalityof grammar and cross-phasal dependencies that are essential to the relational inter-pretation of NPs as arguments relative to the denotations of higher heads. Thedistribution of such markers moreover provides us with an independent pointer towhat we regard as the essence of grammar, namely reference. The moment wedeprive grammar of meaning intrinsic to it, and locate meaning at the level of thecontent of thought, the problem of the rationality of Case appears: for Case has nomeaning that can be spelled out in terms of lexical-semantic features or else theta-roles. But it is this absence of a systematic notion of grammatical meaning thatcreates this problem. The problem disappears, when such a notion is adopted. In thissense, the irrationality of Case is based on the idea of an autonomous, non-semanticsyntax, rather than independent evidence for it. It is as if, where a rationalization ofCase has been sought, the only candidates for meaning associated with it were eitherlexical or (at best) thematic. Where Case turns out to be assigned non-thematically,and to have no lexical meaning, the conclusion is that it is uninterpretable. But theblind spot in this argument is the notion of grammatical meaning. In fact, theexistence of Case provides us with an independent pointer to its existence: forwithout this crucial dimension of natural language, Case wouldn’t exist.

6.3 Vergnaud’s conjecture and ‘abstract Case’

As noted, there appear to be mismatches between Case assignment and thematicroles as well as between Case assignment and grammatical functions. Thus, subjects


that are nominatives can be Themes or Agents (13–14), and in certain contexts,apparent subjects can also be accusatives (15):

(13) He arrived NOM = subject and theme

(14) He was kicked by John NOM = subject and patient

(15) I believe [him to have killed her]. ACC = agent and subject

These mismatches have been taken as evidence that such markers are a purely‘formal’ aspect of grammar with no semantic import—reflecting an apparentlyarbitrary constraint imposed on grammaticality, independent of semantic interpret-ation. Somehow, the idea is, Case is connected to the licensing of DPs in anautonomous syntactic component. Curious in itself in this argument, however, isthat it is DPs that would require such licensing. DPs are nominals with a potential forreferentiality, unlike predicative nominals, which may require no structural Case-marking at all. It is natural to suggest, therefore, that what is formally licensed is notsome autonomous phrasal type, but an expression that carries out a particularreferential function. In the same way, it can hardly be an accident that the ‘excep-tional’ accusatives in (15) show up in cases where the subject in question is part of aclause that is referentially weak in terms of our hierarchy, lacking Finiteness andhence deictic anchoring in the speech context. One could suspect from this alone thatreferentiality will have to be at least a part of what rationalizes Case, as we will indeedconclude.

Evidence that (overt) DPs, unlike other phrases, need to be especially licensedcomes from observations that DPs appear to be banned in certain syntactic positions,while clausal arguments can surface in some such positions (with minor compli-cations such as extraposition in (17a)):

(16) a. *It seems [John to be right].

b. *I have a feeling [my nephew]

c. *John is proud [his son]

(17) a. It seems [ti to be right [that John is invited]i]

b. I have a feeling [that my nephew is in danger]

c. John is proud [that his son won]

However, these data again appear to follow without further ado under the naturalassumption that DP is the paradigmatically referential category, whereas clausescannot refer to objects (at least not objects like tables and people). In other words,referential arguments make particular demands on the grammar, which needs toincorporate them as predicates of the referents of higher heads that take them asarguments, as per the theory developed in Chapter 3. This is also what we saw with


objects clitics in Chapter 4: demands on the relational interpretation of stronglyreferential nominals are higher than in the case of more weakly referential orpredicative nominals, or embedded clauses, which are always predicates anyhowwhen integrating into a higher phase (with qualifications for the factive case). Thegrammar meets these demands by harnessing increasingly complex machinery, as wesaw when moving from neutral or predicative clitics to ACC-marked ones, which canbe weak or strong, and then to Datives, which we argued contain the accusatives. Thesame happens in languages with richer morphological Case paradigms, where theembedded referential DPs in examples like (16b–c) require a ‘thematic’ or ‘inherent’Case such as Genitive (Chomsky, 1986) to be licensed. Otherwise, as in English, apreposition has to be introduced. In the progression towards referentiality, clausesare close to their maximal projection when the C-T system is activated and Tensebecomes finite. Such domains are islands for Case-assignment, and if Case is notassigned within them, the derivation collapses. (15), then, repeated here as (18), is theflip-side of this fact:

(18) I v believe [TP him to have killed her].

Where the clause is less projected and Finiteness is lacking, the phase boundaryremains penetrable from the outside, and an exceptional Case, assigned by v fromwithin the next phase, shows up (for non-finite clauses that are tensed, seeSection 6.4). Where, on the other hand, the embedded clause is projected furtherand includes a C-layer, such marking is impossible:6

(19) a. I v hope [CP C (*John) to be at the door]

(20) b. John tries [CP C (*Mary) to like French toast]

What is ‘licensed’, then, is the referentiality of the DP within the phase of which itbecomes a part; and the difference in referentiality in the embedded phases shows uprationally in a difference in Case-assignment. What morphological Case markersmark is not, then, ‘abstract Case’ in narrow syntax, but cross-phasal dependenciesthat we knew independently exist, to do with the establishment of a formal ontologywithin a dialectic of reference and predication that proceeds phase-by-phase. (16)–(18) again provide evidence that Case interprets grammar, in our sense; but they arenot evidence for anything like ‘syntactic’ or ‘abstract’ Case. A Case marker, which is amorphological feature, manifests underlying syntactic relations, which are not fea-tures. Talking of ‘Case-relations in syntax’ is thus to read language-specific morph-ology into syntax—with the potentially disastrous consequence that we now have to

6 This is what is technically formalized in Minimalist syntax as C having ç-feature specifications that‘intervene’ with ECM across a CP ‘barrier’ (Nunes, 2010). This amounts to saying that ECM is a result of aninsufficiently projected second phase.


make sense of how a bewildering variety of Cases, as noted in the previous section,map onto the posited ‘Case-relations’ in syntax.

Vergnaud’s (1977) classic idea was that, whether a language has Case morphologyor not, there is an abstract universal mechanism which serves to license DPs thatoccur in certain syntactic positions. In Vergnaud’s original formulation, taken up byChomsky (1981), the ‘Case Filter’ was taken to apply only to overt DPs:

(21) Case Filter: *NP if NP has phonetic content and has no Case [Chomsky(1981: 49)]

This seemed to explain—without any reference to what we are calling grammaticalsemantics—why overt subjects in non-finite clauses in English have ‘governed’(objective) Case, rather than nominative (subject) Case (Vergnaud, 1977: 22). Forexample, him in a sentence like (18) above, or in It is illegal for him to leave, fails toreceive NOM-Case within its own clause and so is only licit if it receives Case from anexternal governing preposition or verb. Covert nominals were exonerated from thisrequirement in order to allow for the special behaviour of PRO, the covert subject ofnon-finite control clauses, whose distribution was regulated via the PRO-Theorem(Chomsky, 1981), and which was taken to not only lack but resist Case.7 Yet again, nosuch theorem may be required, if we assume that controlled PRO in non-tensedembedded clauses is never independently referential (the point of being ‘controlled’by another DP), implying that the higher demands on the grammar imposed byreferential arguments, mentioned above, will not arise.

The Case Filter as expressed in (20) posits a universal constraint within syntaxthat regulates the appearance of overt DPs in certain positions, irrespective ofwhether they are marked morphologically for Case or not. It is a constraint on DP-licensing in narrow syntax, interpreted as linked to the morphological Cases, exceptthat these are taken to be possibly invisible. It raises clear problems for rationaliza-tion. In GB theory, it was at one point stipulated to hold in order to render NP chains‘visible’ for theta-role assignment (Chomsky, 1986), but this rationale ceases to beexplanatory outside the context of GB theory as chains are no longer taken to exist,and there is no obvious reason why theta role assignment should be parasitic on Case:indeed, Case goes beyond theta-assignment, as noted, reflecting grammatical pro-cesses that do not exist in the theta-system. This would be predicted if there is acorrelation between Case and the formal ontology of semantics, for thematic rolesdo not require any formal ontology in this sense. PPs and CPs can receive theta-roles, without receiving Case, showing that the dimension that the Cases mark is adifferent one. Nor is argumenthood per se the point, for PPs and CPs can be

7 Subsequent research raised problems for this claim. See e.g. Chomsky and Lasnik’s (1993) claim thatPRO requires a special ‘Null Case’, assigned by non-finite T, criticized by Hornstein (1999), who assumesthat a DP needs to move as many times as necessary to get Case, thus reviving the Case-filter.


arguments, too. The reason that DPs need Case, but not PPs or CPs, must lie in thespecial form of referentiality that we find in the DP domain.

Vergnaud’s conjecture that there is ‘abstract’ (‘syntactic’) Case would be veryplausible, if indeed the behaviour of referential nominals in languages with poorCase morphology such as English was as if morphological Cases were—invisibly—present, and if, more generally, nominals in a language predictably occurred inpositions where such markers, if they existed, would predict them to occur. Thus,as Lasnik (2008: 18) succinctly states Vergnaud’s conjecture:

Vergnaud’s now very familiar basic idea was that even languages like English with very littlecase morphology pattern with richly inflected languages in providing characteristic positionsin which NPs with particular cases occur.

The problem with this idea, as Sigurðsson (2012: 191) notes, is that much research hasbroken the correlation between morphological Cases and ‘characteristic positions’.Icelandic in particular exemplifies a language with ‘rich inflection’, in which there isno direct correlation between ‘particular cases’ and ‘characteristic positions in whichNPs ( . . . ) occur’ (Zaenen, Maling, and Thráinsson, 1985; Yip, Maling, and Jackendoff1987; Sigurðsson, 1989; Marantz, 1991). As Sigurðsson concludes, ‘overt NP-place-ment is largely independent of the morphological marking of NPs’ and ‘A-licensing isunrelated to morphological case’ (and cannot be accounted for either through someformal substitute, such as the EPP [extended projection principle], either, as Marantz(1991) claimed). The relation between morphological Case markers and grammaticaldependencies is rather indirect, reflecting the multiplicity of possible solutions to theproblem of mapping underlying relations to features on a sensory-motor surface.With this indirectness goes the naturalness of the idea that syntax might havemorphological features in it, except that they are abstract. Yes, a grammaticaldependency between v and a c-commanded DP can exist independently of thematicrelations (this may be true even in the majority of ergative languages: cf. Section 5.5,and Legate, 2008; 2011). But while this is evidence that DPs enter licensing relationsbeyond thematic roles, and that Case morphology is not arbitrary, it is no evidencefor an ‘abstract Case feature’ in narrow syntax.

In a Minimalist context, the Case filter has been re-thought. While maintaining theexistence of abstract Case features operative in narrow syntax, Chomsky (2000b)notes a shift from the Case filter as traditionally stated to an Agree-based systembased on the need to check ç-features:

With this shift of perspective, structural Case is demoted in significance. The Case Filter stillfunctions indirectly in the manner of Vergnaud’s original proposal, to determine the distribu-tion of noun phrases. But what matters primarily are the probes, including ç-features of T, v.That reverses much of the recent history of inquiry into these topics and also brings out moreclearly the question of why Case exists at all [ . . . ] [U]ninterpetable features activate the goal ofa probe, allowing it to implement some operation (Agree or Move). (Chomsky, 2000b: 127)


The new perspective in question is implemented in the context of the MinimalistProgram via the obligatory presence of ‘uninterpretable Case features’ on D. Suchfeatures, being uninterpretable, must then be ‘deleted’ in the course of the syntacticderivation to avoid a crash upon transfer to the semantic interface. Agree is thenarrow syntactic dependency that is established in order to value/delete uninterpret-able features of this kind, under c-command. However, the direct connectionbetween NP-licensing and Case morphology is broken. Rather, what triggers move-ment of NPs into particular positions is the need to check uninterpretable ç-features(Person, Number, Gender) on C-T and v, respectively. Case and ç-feature agreementare taken to be two sides of the same coin, deleted in a single application of Agree(cf. Leland and Kornfilt, 1981; Pesetsky and Torrego, 2001; 2004; Müller, 2009;Zeijlstra, 2012; for critique). So there are no ‘Case-positions’, a result prefigured bythe earlier one that Case is not assigned in particular dedicated structural positionsvia Spec-Head agreement, by the special heads AGR-O and AGR-S, as still assumedin Chomsky (1995: ch. 3) but not Chomsky (1995: ch. 4), where such heads are said tobe non-existent. Rather, DP-licensing is governed by the two major probes, v and T,whose feature specifications are assumed to require matching with those of a suitablelocal DP in their respective domains.

But Case-features, like ç-features, are only ‘uninterpretable’ if we ignore therelational nature of grammar. A ç-feature on a verb will come out as uninterpretableon the verb, if the verb or predicate is looked at in isolation, or non-relationally. Butthis is to think lexically, and that meaning created in the grammatical process wouldbe word-based. Grammatical meaning is not, being purely relational. As illustrated in(1), repeated below as (21), the 1st Person morphologically marked on the pronoun isa morphological feature, which marks a syntactic relation of identity, holdingbetween a reader (the agent of the event of reading denoted by the vP) and thespeaker:

(22) I read.

It is therefore rational and expected that in many languages with richer Agreementmorphology than English, features such as these will show up in two places, on theverb and the noun. Thus there is no ‘uninterpretable feature’ in syntax here, andnothing needs to ‘checked’ before an ‘interface’ is reached. Everything is as it shouldbe, and no cleansing of syntax is required.

The relation ‘Agree’, viewed as a primary syntactic relation, is problematic, then,too: what ‘agrees’ are two morphological features. Such Agreement reflects a syntacticrelation, but this does not mean that, in syntax, two ‘features’ exist that are related viaAgree. The features exist in morphology, the relation in grammar. Agree is problem-atic on other, conceptual grounds: usually taken to be a purely formal aspect ofgrammar, it is designed precisely to eliminate uninterpretable features. So it lacks anindependent rationale. Its rationale is to eliminate what has no rationale. It also yields


no account of grammar: for there will then only be one single, generic grammaticalrelation, Agree, viewed as a cover term for whatever specific grammatical relationsthere might be, depending on which features have to be matched. Linguistic specifi-city will come from lexical feature specifications only. In this regard, Agree is adescriptive term only. What we need is a principled account of what grammaticalrelations exist, viewed as primitive elements of grammar.8 On this perspective,Chomsky’s rationale for Case features in syntax, that they render a goal ‘active’when it needs to ‘agree’ with a given probe, disappears: there is no such need.

While we disagree with the standard Minimalist model of Case as an uninterpret-able feature, the step from this model to ours is nonetheless not far, if we interpret thephasal dynamics that is described in Minimalism in our present terms. We assume,with Chomsky, that where a star-augmented v is involved, it will license both therelation of the verb with its direct object and the external argument, as per Burzio’s(1981; 1986) generalization and Chomsky’s interpretation of it in Chomsky (1995: ch. 4),giving rise to a complex event containing another as a part.9 With star deletion, ACCfails to be assigned by v, leading to unaccusativity; and in the same way, T can occurdeficiently when deprived of C, in which case DPs are not licensed in their internaldomains either, leading to the ECM phenomenon or raising. As for ‘high’movementof arguments into C, when the rationale cannot be the existence of uninterpretableCase-features in syntax, we follow Sigurðsson (2012) in the suggestion that the needto compute values of ç-features is an independent rationale for such movement:NPs need to be evaluated, not only as event participants, but also as to whetherthey are Persons, and if so, whether they are one of the speech event participants. Thisprocess involves the high left periphery of the C-phase. Only in this way, a propos-itional claim will arise, and hence such high movement is rationalized as well.There are Person, Number, and Gender relations marked morphologically byç-features, then, but no ‘abstract Nominative Case’ that as such provides problemsfor rationalization.

It is thus only a small step from the current Minimalist take on Case expressedin Chomsky’s quote above, to the present more ‘radical’ model, where the assump-tion of ‘purely formal noise’ in syntax that is ‘up for deletion’ before the tribunal ofthe semantic interface is given up: the relevant notion of ‘semantic’ here is notgrammatical, by definition and on architectural grounds. Where a grammaticalnotion of meaning is employed, the focus is on the irreducibly relational structureof grammar, not the feature specifications of particular lexical items. As noted, we donot further our understanding of such relations by positing only one such relation,the generic relation Agree, as holding between whatever features we might lexically

8 This point was raised by Alex Drummond in conversation.9 See Pesetsky and Torrego (2011: 58) for further evidence based on Wurmbrand (2001) that it is not the

lexical verb but v that is involved in the ACC dependency.


find. This, effectively, would deprive us of a theory of grammar, or of what thegrammar does. For all the work would be done by the lexicon. Our viewpoint istherefore different: morphological Cases, where they exist in a language, reflectunderlying grammatical relations that are universal and responsible for part-wholerelations between the referents of three phases that are ordered in part-wholerelations.10 In the next subsection, we reinforce this conclusion, (i) by providingfurther arguments against its interpretation as implying a ‘Case-filter’, and (ii) byreinforcing an apparent correlation between Case, reference and Tense.

6.4 The Case filter, reference, and Tense

There is a crucial difference between ç-features and Case-features on our account:the former reflect a core process of grammar that is at the heart of grammaticalsemantics, while Case morphology only indirectly relates to (various) grammaticalrelations, interpreted both in terms of licensing and the formal ontology of semantics.Case assignment in morphology reflects the result of an externalization process thatis, like the marking of the Agree relation itself, variable and multi-factorial: whether itis marked (externalized) on DP as ACC (dependent-marking) or the verbal head, asç-feature agreement (head-marking) or both or neither appears to be a purely amorphological matter with all possible combinations attested in the languages of theworld (cf. Bickel, 2011 for a recent study of so-called ‘head’ and ‘dependent’marking).11 In Chomsky’s (2000b; 2001) system, too, there is a crucial asymmetrybetween ç-features found on verbal heads and those located on D. Firstly, defectiveT/v heads can lack ç-features (and hence lose the ability to ‘assign Case’), so there is asense in which these ç-features are not a necessary property of verbal heads. Sec-ondly, as Preminger (2011) argues at length, Agree is actually a fallible operation.Even where T/v bear ç-features, this simply means that Agree must take place ifpossible. In the absence of any visible/active goal to agree with, Preminger argues, theç-features on T/v simply receive a default value. Case features, as they are generallythought of, appear to be different, however. If the Case Filter holds, then theimplication is that DPs must always form grammatical dependencies with somehead in the verbal projection. Where no such dependency can be established, thederivation will crash, making Case the only feature which is a true ‘derivational time-bomb’ (cf. Preminger, 2011). This makes sense if the grammatical dependencies

10 This echoes a conclusion we earlier reached in Chapter 2 regarding the parts of speech: these, too,reflect grammar, which provides their rationale; but they are not grammar, and remain language-specific.The rationale for Case, though language-specific, lies in the relationality of grammar, too.

11 Latin has both Case (‘dependent-marking’) and agreement morphology (‘head-marking’, in the senseof Nichols, 1986). Dyirbal has Case but no agreement morphology, Swahili has agreement morphologywithout Case and Mandarin has neither.


marked by Case are an integral part of grammar, but morphological Agreement isnot. It also confirms that Case features and ç-features are not on a par.

Moreover, within Chomsky’s own system evidence exists that the rationale of Casecannot be to license Agree. It is now well documented that ‘inactive’ DPs lackingunvalued Case features can act as defective interveners, suggesting that a kind ofAgree can take place even where a goal is inactive. Thus, an experiencer contained ina PP blocks raising because it intervenes in the Agree relation between matrix T andthe embedded subject (cf. McGuinness, 1998; Hartman, 2011):12

(23) Gianni sembra (??a Piero) fare il suo dovere ItalianGianni seems.3SG to Piero do.INF the his dutyLit. ‘Gianni doesn’t seem to himself to do his duty.’ (adapted from McGuiness,1998: 92)

(24) Jean semble (??à Marie) avoir du talent FrenchJean seems.3SG to Marie have.INF some talent‘Jean seems to Mary to have talent.’ (adapted from McGuiness, 1998: 90)

(25) a. Cholesterol is important (*to Mary) to avoid.b. John was claimed (*to Bill) to have stolen the art.c. The hurricane threatened (*me) to destroy my house.

[Hartman, 2011]

This, combined with the above fact that T/v’s ç-features can receive a default value,suggests that a system with uninterpretable ç-features could actually function with-out ‘abstract Case’. Again, therefore, the need to Agree does not justify the existenceof Case, in conformity with our account above.

Other doubts against the universality of the Case Filter within standard syntacticassumptions have come in two forms. On the one hand, it has been suggested that theCase Filter ought to be ‘parameterized’ to hold only in some languages (cf. Diercks,2012, for a recent proposal of this kind in relation to some Bantu languages, butHalpert, 2012, for counterarguments). Secondly, a number of people have recentlyargued against the existence of the Case Filter in any language. On one version of thisview, Case becomes akin to all other ‘uninterpretable features’: Case assignment isallowed to fail. If so, Case features do not appear to be different from other syntacticfeatures that are fallible in Preminger’s (2011) sense. Licensing relations between DPsand v and C, however, insofar as they give rise to the formal ontology of semantics,seem to be universal. If so, it makes sense to distinguish Case assignment from therelations in question, which seem to have an independent status. The radical alternative

12 Hartman (2011) offers a potential explanation as to why the English translations of the first twoexamples are grammatical. He suggests that the constraint nonetheless holds universally, as suggested bythe fact that other raising verbs are elsewhere subject to the constraint (e.g. (34c)).


would be that such licensing relations are radically different across languages, givingrise to varying formal ontologies as a result. Marantz (1991), McFadden (2001; 2004;2012), and Landau (2006) have all attempted to ‘reduce’ ‘abstract’ Case to morpho-logical Case.13 But as Marantz acknowledges, there is still no explanation for thedistribution of PRO in this attempt. In recognition of this fact, Marantz is left withwhat he calls ‘the residue of structural Case’, which he formulates as a stipulation:14 anNP argument is PRO iff not governed at S-structure by a lexical item or [+ tense] INFL.

These perennial impasses in the theory of PRO and the Case Filter may beaddressable in a more principled way if we start from the basic idea that grammargoverns referentiality, and referential arguments need to be licensed as such, whichcannot happen in phases that contain them if these phases are insufficiently pro-jected. This is a constraint that naturally would not apply to PRO, insofar as it lacksreferentiality of its own, as noted in the previous section. Licensing of overt referen-tial DPs, by contrast, will be naturally obligatory. Moreover, DPs enter severallicensing relations cyclically, so as to give rise to the formal ontology of language,with v-DP relations encoding event licensing and C/T-DP relations capturing speechevent licensing. In this architecture, everything is interpretable, there is no ‘abstractCase’, and issues about motivating apparently arbitrary ‘formal constraints’ do notarise. If the Case filter held, on the other hand, there would be no reason to expectthat it was a ‘PF’- or externalization requirement holding of overt DPs only. It is thusinteresting to see that the claim that PRO lacks Case has come to be seen asempirically problematic.15 There are languages such as Russian, Icelandic, andAncient Greek suggesting through Case concord that the subject position of a non-finite clause can in fact be licensed by the head of the clause. Consider the followingdata from Russian, from Landau (2008):

(26) Ivan pokljalsja druzjam [PRODAT sdelat' eto sam/samomu zavtra].Ivan.NOM vowed friends to.do it himself.NOM/DAT tomorrow‘Ivan vowed to his friends to do it alone tomorrow.’NOM OK—73%; DAT OK—45%

(27) Ona poprosila ego [PRODAT ne ezdit' tuda odnogo/odnomu zavtra].she.NOM asked him.ACC not to.go there alone.ACC/DAT tomorrow‘She asked him not to go there alone tomorrow.’ACC OK—60%; DAT OK—90% Russian, [Landau (2008: 888–90)]

13 Landau proposes a more elaborate control calculus, whereby clauses are specified as [+/� T] and[+/�Agr] and only clauses which are [+Agr] [+T] can host referential subjects, whichmay ormay not be overt.

14 McFadden also admits in his conclusion that he has no viable alternative explanation for thedistribution of PRO and the distribution of for in non-finite clauses.

15 It could be claimed that PF needs to know which form of a given DP to pronounce, but this does notseem to be a deep explanation of the existence of ‘abstract Case’. It sheds no light, for example on whymultiple case forms exist in the first place (where they indeed do).


The fact that the embedded modifier in both examples can optionally get DATmarking strongly suggests that PRO in Russian has Case and that this Case mightbe licensed by a dependency with non-finite T. However, as Landau shows at length,‘Case independence’ of this kind is limited to tensed infinitival contexts, namelycontexts where an embedded clause can be modified by a temporal adverb whichindicates a different temporal anchoring from the matrix clause. Finiteness thereforedoes not come as a binary contrast: there are finitely tensed clauses, and there arenon-finite ones, but these can be tensed or not. Only where they are tensed is PRO‘Case-licensed’ within the non-finite clause. This again coheres with our above sugges-tion that referentiality is a notion crucially involved in data usually described asillustrating purely formal ‘Case licensing’. The progression towards referentiality positedin the phasal model of Chapter 3 proceeds from non-finite clauses to finite ones. PRO islicensed in the former indicating a correlation between referentiality, finiteness, andmorphological Case. Through the intermediate case of tensed non-finite clauses, inwhich PRO turns out to be Case-bearing as well, the picture now differentiates further,and is reinforced. The difference between the two types of non-finite clauses is illus-trated in the following English examples:

(28) a. *Yesterday Johni managed/began [[�T] PROi to solve the problemtomorrow].

b. Yesterday Johni proposed/preferred [[+T] PROi to solve the problemtomorrow].

Verbs likemanage/begin and other implicative, aspectual, andmodal predicates selecttenseless infinitival complements, whereas propose/prefer and other factive, propos-itional, desiderative, interrogative verbs (at least) optionally select for tensed infinitivalcomplements. Interestingly, even in languages like English, which lack Case concord,there is some evidence that tensed infinitivals differ from tenseless infinitivals in thelicensing of PRO. This evidence comes from the existence of partial control. Example(29a) shows that predicates such as meet/kiss/part company require a plural subject:

(29) a. *John met/kissed/parted company early this morning.

b. %Johni proposed/preferred [PROi+ to meet/kiss/part company].

c. *Johni managed/began [PROi+ to meet/kiss/part company].

(29b) shows that when such verbs occur in tensed infinitival contexts, such verbs arelegitimate even where their controller is singular. (29c) shows that this is not the casewhere these verbs occur in an untensed infinitival clause. A tensed infinitival clause,in other words, being more referential, licenses its own subject, which in these cases isonly partially controlled by the antecedent. Sheehan (2012, building on Raposo, 1989;Sitaridou, 2007; Sheehan and Parafita Couto, 2011, on European Portuguese; andRabelo, 2004; 2010; Modesto, 2007; 2010, on Brazilian Portuguese) shows that the


distribution of inflected infinitives in European Portuguese in Control contexts is alsosensitive to the tensed/untensed distinction: inflected infinitivals as in (30–32) areonly possible in tensed non-restructuring environments:

(30) O professor obrigou os alunosi [a PROi ler(em) o livro]. ep

the teacher obliged the students to read.INF.3PL the book‘The teacher obliged the students to read the book.’

(31) proi prometemos à Ana [PROi comprar(%mos)=lhe um livro]promised.1PL to.the Ana buy.INF.1PL=her a book‘We promised Ana to buy her a book.’ [Sitaridou (2007: 195)]

(32) %O Pedroi pensa [PROi+ reunir(em)=se amanhã].the Pedro thinks.3SG meet.INF.3PL=SE.3 tomorrowLit. ‘Pedro thinks to meet tomorrow.’

It has been independently established that the inflected infinitive can establish thekind of dependency marked morphologically normally by NOM, hence the fact thatovert subjects are possible where inflected infinitives surface as adjuncts, subjects, oras the complements of factive/epistemic verbs:

(33) pro escrevi a carta [para (eles) perceberem]. ep

wrote.1SG the letter for them understand.INF.3PL‘I wrote the letter in order for them to understand.’

(34) Será difícil [eles aprovar*(em) a proposta].be.FUT.3SG difficult they approve.INF.3PL the proposal‘It will be difficult for them to approve-Agr the proposal.’

[Raposo (1987: 86)]

Moreover, raising is possible only from uninflected infinitival clauses (Raposo, 1989:297; Quicoli, 1996: 59):

(35) Os meninos parecem [ti ter(*em) razão]the boys seem.PRES.3PL have.INF.3PL reason ep

As predicted, partial control in European Portuguese is also limited to tensed infini-tival contexts and true instances of partial control require inflection (cf. Sheehan,2012, on instances of ‘fake’ partial control). Taken together, the data from partialcontrol, Case independence and inflected infinitival control all suggest that tensedinfinitival clauses differ from untensed infinitival clauses in that the former but notthe latter license PRO (cf. Cinque, 2006; van Urk, 2010; Grano, 2012, for the sameconclusion based on various subsets of the data). The Case and Agreement data frommorphologically rich languages such as Portuguese, Russian and Icelandic furthersuggest that PRO enters the kind of dependencies morphologically marked through


Cases, something which Landau (2000; 2004; 2006; 2008) has argued for at length.These facts make it impossible to attribute all instances of Control to movement,which was one of the crucial functions of the Case filter discussed in the previoussection, therefore again weakening its empirical support. The explanatory factors, wesuggest again, are different, crucially relating to Tense instead. Only tensed T, ittranspires more clearly now, can assign Case.

Why is Tense relevant? Tense is essential to the referential anchoring of objects,events, and propositions. Whenever a clause is tensed, in that it has its own temporalreference, it is to that degree referentially complete and independent, and it needsand can take a subject: its phase can in this sense ‘close’. Again this is not evidence,however, for a NOM-feature in syntax; nor is it evidence that it is such a feature thatlicenses PRO in the tensed case. It is rather evidence that as a phase completes andreferentiality is established, argument DPs need to enter licensing relations with theheads that denote entities of which they become parts. Earlier we have assigned ‘high’or NOM-case with ç-features in the high left field of C, where argument DPs that arepersons are checked for their status as speech participants. Such checking requiresfinite Tense: for without it, there is no proposition, and there is no speech event.Plausibly, the connection we see in the data between the licensing of subjects andfiniteness, or Tense in the embedded case, is arguably an aspect of ç-feature checkingas well, or a presupposition for it.

6.5 Event mereology and Case

Part-whole relations are ubiquitous in language. On the account of the DP we havedefended in Chapter 4, the predicates that define the referential potential of predica-tive nominals form necessarily a part of quantificational nominals, which in turn arenecessarily parts of referential ones. Thus, any object of reference qualifying as theman with the Martini would also qualify as a man with a Martini. Similarly, if I referto John, using the proper name referentially, then my object of reference is necessarilya man called ‘John’, where the name is used predicatively. In turn, if somethingqualifies as a man with a Martini, then it will also qualify as an instance of man ormanhood. Analogously in the verbal case: I can refer to something as an event or astate: Mary’s getting ill, for example, or Mary’s being ill. Again, in this case, Marycannot get ill without eventually coming to be ill. In both cases, whether event orstate, there will be the same property involved as a part: the one encoded in theadjective ill. In both the nominal and the verbal case, these part-whole relationsarise as the grammatical complexity increases. The grammar and the mereology thusco-vary. Mereology, however, cannot have an independent status in the presentframework, and it is not a primitive descriptor—any more than we claim othersemantic notions are, such as ‘event’ and ‘object’. We cannot, therefore, rationalize


the existence of any particular Case on the basis of some independently assumedsystem of mereology that is part of our metalanguage. It would also not fit ourproposal in this chapter so far that there is some direct semantic connection betweena Case such as ACC and some semantic primitive, such as telicity.

Indeed, as we will argue in this section, although a morphological Case such asACC often does correlate with particular mereological properties of events, the latterarise from other primitives involved in the process of licensing arguments to events,notably the referentiality of the nominal arguments, but also encyclopaedic (non-grammatical) knowledge. As such, the often-claimed connection between accusativeCase and telicity arises as a confluence of various factors, it is not direct, and Casecannot be rationalized directly in (non-grammatical) semantic terms, in line with ourproposal so far.

A connection between Case-marking and event mereology has been long-noted inthe semantic literature. In a comprehensive recent discussion, Travis (2010) argues atlength that (inner) ASP(ect) is closely involved in ACC. She bases this claim on awealth of evidence from unrelated languages suggesting that morphological Case issensitive to the inner aspect of events. We can interpret this claim in different ways,however. One way is that we assume that there is such a thing as ‘inner aspect’ viewedas a semantic phenomenon, and then argue that there is a morphological Casereflecting or representing it. But in the present context, we cannot allow ourselvesthis starting point. This is because we seek to explain the formal ontology ofsemantics rather than taking our semantic intuitions for granted and then formaliz-ing them in one or the other semantic metalanguage. Grammar, we contend, doesn’tmerely ‘represent’ the independently given aspectual semantics of certain verbs. Sowe need to scrutinize the claim in question in another way: whether there issomething about the grammar of the constructions in question that explains theirinterpretive properties. If so, these are part of grammatical semantics (and if not,not). This applies to telicity and boundedness in particular.

The most famous case study comes from Finnish, a morphologically rich lan-guage in which morphological Cases clearly seem sensitive to aspects of semanticsthat can be described mereologically (Kiparsky, 1998). In Finnish, two object Casesare permitted: Accusative (ACC) and Partitive (PART). Interestingly, the choicebetween these two does not seem to be idiosyncratic or lexically determined, but isargued to be due to either (i) the inner aspect of the predicate or (ii) the status of theDP-object in relation to the animacy hierarchy. Kratzer (2004) argues that (i) and (ii)should be considered separately, and we focus here only on the aspectual distinctions.It seems that the alternation between PART and ACC on objects is directly deter-mined by the mereological properties of the predicate/DP. As Kiparksy (1998: 1)notes, ‘in its aspectual function, partitive case is assigned to the objects of verbs whichdenote an unbounded event’:


(36) a. Ammu-i-n karhu-a / kah-ta karhu-a/ karhu-j-a Finnishshoot-PAST-1Sg bear-PART / two-PART bear-PART/bear-Pl-PART‘I shot at the (a) bear / at (the) two bears / at (the) bears.’ (activity)

b. Ammu-i-n karhu-n / kaksi karhu-a / karhu-tshoot–PAST-1Sg bear-ACC/ two.ACC bear-PART/ bear-Pl.ACC‘I shot the (a) bear / two bears / the bears.’ (accomplishment)

[Finnish, Kiparsky (1998: 3)]

Predicates which are inherently unbounded almost always assign PART to theircomplements (e.g. states, intensional, motion/contact (touch)). As noted above,this is part of a more general typological trend (Travis, 2010: 136, citing Noonan,1992). This has been taken as good reason to believe that ACC may be directlyinvolved in the calculation of event semantics.16 However, prima facie the differencebetween (36a) and (36b) is actually one to do with reference: a specific single bear orseveral specific bears are said to be shot and killed in the latter. As a result, a specificevent is being referenced, involving one or more specific bears, all of which end upshot (and possibly dead), reflecting a state in which the event in question pans out. Inthe former case, no specific event or state is referenced, and any bear involved mayhave escaped unscathed. What the data suggest, then, is that ACC-marking in thiscase reflects a shift in reference: an object is licensed to an event in both cases, as partof the v-DP dependency we have discussed, and this dependency is reflected in Caseassignment in both cases. But the progression from PART to ACC suggests anincrease in referentiality, in a similar way as we found in event participants denotedby clitics in Chapter 4. One can describe this difference in a mereological languageand involve the semantic term ‘telicity’, but this does not appear to be a relevantprimitive of the description. Indeed it is not clear at all that telicity is a notionentering into grammatical semantics as an independent primitive. It is true thatperceiving reality under the above part-whole ontology reflects what we have called,in Chapter 1, a grammatical ‘perspective’ on reality, rather than an independent, non-linguistic feature of the external world; but this does not entail the claim that telicityis a primitive of grammatical semantics.

Keeping this in mind, let us consider the old claim that certain direct objectsserve the function of ‘measuring out events’ in the sense of Tenny (1992; 1994). Thusthe activity verb ‘read’ is atelic in its intransitive function, ruling out (37a), but it canbe telic if it surfaces with the right kind of direct object ‘measure’ (37b):

(37) a. *John read in an hour

b. John read the book in an hour.

16 Kiparsky (1998: 1) argues that Finnish instantiates a ‘semantically conditioned structural [C]ase’.


This has led to the question of what determines the class of ‘measures’. While Dowty(1991) argued that only DPs which bear a certain thematic role (incremental theme)can function as measures, more recently Borer (2005) argues that such a position isuntenable for reasons we return to shortly. Instead, she proposes that it is DPsbearing ACC that function as measures (cf. Borer, 2005: 49), again making Caseinterpretable in seemingly directly semantic terms. Kratzer (2004) similarly proposes,building on work by Ramchand (1997) and Kiparsky (1998), that accusative Casein many languages depends crucially on the presence of a semantic ‘telicity operator’(cf. also van Hout, 2004). Finally, Travis (2010) provides a comprehensive overview ofthe ways in which inner aspect (telicity) and Case interact, again implying that it isCase which serves to turn a DP into a measure.

In none of these approaches, however, is it explicitly stated that the narrowsyntactic dependency between v (or some other functional head in the extendedverbal projection) and a c-commanded DP is itself interpretable. For Kratzer, forexample, Accusative Case is rethought as an uninterpretable [uTelic] feature, whichis deleted/valued by an interpretable ‘telicity head’. The telic interpretation, in suchcases, comes from the presence of an interpretable telic operator/feature and notfrom the dependency itself.17 In Borer’s terms, conversely, it is the (derived) positionof a DP in spec-AspQ which serves to turn it into a measure. It is not clear, then, towhat extent we can really speak about interpretable Case-features in theseapproaches, and it is not clear whether they really rationalize Case.

What, if any, is the status of the semantic notion of ‘measure’ in grammar? Let usrecall, to begin with, that there are close semantic parallels between homogeneous/heterogeneous DPs and vPs. Thus, as Bach (1986) notes, DPs and vPs react similarlyto certain kinds of modification:

(38) A lot of mud/*dog was in evidence.18

(39) John slept/*found a unicorn a lot last night. [adapted from Bach (1986: 6)]

These examples show that mud, a mass noun, like sleep, an atelic verb, can bemodified by the quantifier a lot, whereas the count noun dog and the telic VP finda unicorn cannot. Facts such as these have been taken to suggest a primitive

17 Although the paper in which Kratzer discusses this idea is entitled ‘Telicity and the meaning ofobjective case’, that is, a strong sense remains in which accusative Case and indeed the grammaticaldependency it necessitates is still itself uninterpretable, in line with the standard Chomskyan position. Thesame is true for Pesetsky and Torrego’s (2001; 2004) idea that ACC is a relational property of grammar,established in the course of the derivation, rather than present at the level of the numeration. For theseauthors, the narrow syntactic Agree relations forced by Case (a uT feature on nominals) are purelysyntactic in nature, as they are for Chomsky (2000b; 2001). For us, ACC should properly be thought of,not as an uninterpretable feature, but rather as the grammatical dependency between v and a local DPinterpretable in terms of the formal ontology of semantics.

18 It is of course possible to coerce a mass reading of dog, but this is irrelevant to the observation thatonly unbounded nominals and vPs can be modified by ‘a lot’.


mereological basis jointly underlying the mass-count and telic-atelic distinctions.Yet, again, what is the theoretical and explanatory status of these mereologicalnotions? For us, facts like the above suggest that when we come to the level ofmasses/substances and unbounded activities, respectively, grammatical complexityhas not progressed enough to license a formal ontology of objects/bounded events.As Hinzen and Uriagereka (2006) show, grammatical complexity of masses/activitiesis systematically lower than that of objects/events, in parallel ways. The moment apart-whole structure arises from this, as when a single object like an event entails astate as a proper part, the denotation ceases to be ‘homogeneous’, in semantic terms.However, the process of forming the part-whole structure just described, whilemereologically describable, is purely grammatically driven. It depends on the leftedges of relevant phasal projections, rather than the contents of lexical items andtheir lexical semantic properties. There does not appear to be a particular connectionwith Case, in this instance.

Following Zwarts (2005: 751), the relevant notions of homogeneity/heterogeneityare commonly taken to be cumulativity rather than divisibility, based on his obser-vation that mass nouns, which are canonically homogeneous, may be non-divisiblebut must be cumulative (e.g. furniture):

(40) X is homogeneous iff:(i) there are p, q ∈ X such that p + q exist(ii) for all p, q ∈ X, if p + q exists, then p + q ∈ X

As Zwarts notes, this definition has the advantage of applying equally well todifferent lexical categories (he himself focuses on adpositions). Thus lexical massnouns and bare plurals are homogeneous in that milk + milk ∈milk and cars + cars∈ cars, as are activity verbs (run + run ∈ run). As has long been noted, however, thedenotation of a verb as telic or non-telic depends on its grammatical context (cf.Verkuyl, 1972; Jackendoff, 1996; Tenny, 1992; 1994). Thus, unergative ‘activity’ vPs aregenerally taken to be homogeneous (atelic):

(41) Mary ran for an hour/#in an hour.

But where they surface with what Tenny calls a ‘terminus’, the natural readingbecomes heterogeneous/atelic:

(42) Mary ran [PP to the shops] #for an hour/in an hour.19

19 Heather Burnett (personal comment) notes that there is a reading under which ‘for an hour’ is finehere, namely a reading whereby John spent one hour at the shops. This reading is irrelevant to the point athand.


The natural explanation for this fact is the PP involved, which functions as anargument (see e.g. Folli and Ramchand, 2005), especially if we notice that the atelicreading re-appears when we change the preposition:20

(43) Mary ran towards the shops for an hour/#in an hour.

At the same time, neither (42) with ‘for’ nor (43) with ‘in’ seems to be strictlyungrammatical: while we may break our heads over what kind of event a personuttering such expressions might be referring to, contexts can be fathomed in whicheither reading would be grammatical, no matter how unexpected the utterance maybe: for example, in the case of (42), one in which Mary ran to different shops for onehour in total, or, if ‘shop’ is in the singular, to the same shop repeatedly, also for anhour, or to the same shop only one time, but then in an effort that led to success inprecisely one hour, while others might have achieved this in much less time. In (43),in turn, the task may have been vaguely set for Mary to run in the direction of theshops; and comparatively to others, she did it in an hour (maybe it took her long toget started). This suggests that the data in question are not part of grammaticalsemantics, or are so only insofar as different lexical items trigger different readingswith different degrees of statistical prevalence. The trigger for the shift described insemantic terms as one in ‘telicity’, thus appears to be multi-factorial: it is in part lexical,residing in the lexical semantics of the preposition and the verb, in part semanticallycompositional (given the additional PP-constituent involved), and in part contextual.

Again, these facts donotparticularly relate toCase. ThePPs inquestion are standardlytaken to differ from DPs in that they do not require Case, and as such there is noadditional grammatical dependency between the PP and the verb involved. Folli andRamchand (2005: 14) moreover discuss complex PPs that are adjuncts rather thanarguments, but can still trigger telicity. The same conclusion seems appropriate whereparticles are involved: The presence of a telic particle gives rise to a telic event, irrespect-ive of Case:

(44) John ate up an apple #for a minute/in a minute.

On the other hand, with the following classes of transitive verbs, it appears that themereological status of the event as homogeneous/heterogeneous does depend par-tially on the status of the direct object argument in English:

(45) Verbs of consumption/creation (‘incremental theme’ verbs: Dowty, 1991).a. Mary ate apples for an hour/#in an hour.

b. Mary ate the apple for an hour/in an hour.

c. Mary painted pictures for an hour/#in an hour.

d. Mary painted the picture for an hour/in an hour.

20 Where to the shops is heterogeneous in path-based terms, whereas towards the shops is not.


Again, however, there are readings where in an hour is permitted in (45a): inparticular, one in which there were separate events, in each of which an apple waseaten up, always in an hour; and another, more natural one, in which the apple-eatingtook an hour, while the eating of the oranges took longer (maybe because they had tobe peeled). While it is true, then, that the different direct objects preferentially triggertelic or atelic readings of the activity involved, this effect is not strict, and moreover,Case cannot be the relevant factor in explaining when telic readings are preferentiallytriggered. Nor are telic readings unavailable, where such verbs surface without anovert internal argument:

(46) Mary ate/painted for an hour/in an hour.

Confronted with the PP ‘in an hour’, the interpretive system will simply concludethat Mary ate something or other, her meal say, in an hour. Similarly, with verbs ofdirected motion, a referential internal argument such as ‘the trolley’ makes referenceto a bounded event possible (even if dispreferred) (47b), but the same effect can, at astretch, be obtained when a tacit internal argument is taken to be present in (47a):

(47) a. Mary pushed for an hour/??in an hour.b. Mary pushed the trolley for an hour/?in an hour.

It is true that the cases with ‘in’ are odd on a telic reading, and the a-example surelymore so than the b-example, but Borer (2005: 128) provides other examples which arefully felicitous, at least if the button in (48) is hard to push, suggesting that it is in partencyclopaedic world knowledge that makes these examples preferentially atelic:

(48) Kim pushed the button for ten minutes/in ten minutes.

In short, it appears as if the same grammatical dependency between v and an internalDP-argument, marked in many languages as ACC, can be involved, and yet telicitymay be both absent or present, being the overall effect of a number of differentfactors, as suggested above. Borer (2005: 49), citing Rosen (1999), nonetheless arguesthat Case determines whether a DP is a measure (rather than thematic consider-ations). One piece of evidence cited is the fact that arguments contained in SmallClauses which receive accusative Case under ECM can also serve as measures,yielding telic readings:

(49) Terry ran [us ragged] in an hour/?for an hour.

Here the DP us is not thematically dependent on the main verb but does receive ACCunder ECM. Borer takes this as evidence that measures are those DPs which receiveACC, i.e. DPs which enter into an Agree-based dependency with v—against theabove conclusion that such a dependency leaves telicity open. However, the primarypoint for her here is that Case in the sense of this dependency is independent ofthematic roles. Moreover, Rosen’s claim that (49) is necessarily telic does not seem to


be quite correct. Rather, (49) is ambiguous. The conative alternation in (50) has alsobeen taken as support for Borer’s position:

(50) a. John shot the bear #for an hour/in an hour

b. John shot at the bear for an hour/#in an hour

The idea is that elimination of the ACC-relation via the introduction of a PP layerserves to make an ambiguous event atelic, again suggesting that Case is crucial toevent mereology (cf. also Travis, 2010). However, as suggested above, this couldequally well be explained by describing the difference between the two aboveexamples as one of reference: embedding the referential DP ‘the bear’ in a prepositiontakes away its referential force, as per the account of embedding in Chapter 3.

A stronger reason perhaps to believe that ACC directly contributes to eventsemantics comes from the behaviour of unaccusative verbs. These fall basically intotwo classes: change of state verbs and verbs of motion. The former class appears to beambiguous between telic and atelic meanings (though this is context-sensitive), whilethe latter seem to be inherently telic. In both cases, crucially, the lexical mereology ofthe internal argument fails to affect the mereology of the event. Consider first changeof state verbs: for example, cool, melt, or dissolve. In the absence of any telic adverbial,these are always ambiguous, as Hay, Kennedy, and Levin (1999) note:21

(51) a. The soup cooled for ten minutes/in ten minutes.

b. Some soup cooled in ten minutes/for ten minutes.

Leaving the source of this ambiguity aside for the moment, note that under standardassumptions, the unique argument of an unaccusative verb is a theme and so the factsin (51) are highly unexpected where incremental themes are taken to necessarilybound events. Apparently, it is not thematic structure, after all, which determineswhether a given DP can function as the ‘measure’ of an event. Of course it is possibleto simply stipulate that these derived subjects are not incremental Themes but rather‘patients’, but then the diagnostics which show them to pattern with other underlyingThemes are somewhat undermined (cf. Burzio, 1986). Moreover, and crucially, wherethese verbs surface in a causative alternation and assign ACC, they behave like verbsof consumption:

21 Jackendoff (1996) claims, on the contrary, that unaccusative verbs display the same alternations asverbs of consumption, giving the following examples:

(i) A pile of dirt accumulated in/*for an hour.(ii) Dirt accumulated for/*in an hour.

But we disagree with these judgments: (i) is perfectly consistent with an atelic reading and (ii) with a telicreading. These readings become more felicitous where the PP modifiers are more plausible:

(iii) I cleaned my house but dirt accumulated (again) in only a week(iv) ?I sat there watching while a pile of dirt accumulated for an hour.


(52) a. John melted the chocolate for ten minutes/in ten minutes.

b. John melted chocolate for ten minutes/?in ten minutes.

In an account which takes measures to be determined on a thematic basis, these dataare problematic, and the position that Case determines telicity is to that extentsupported: the Themes in (52) involve the dependency marked by ACC, whereasthose in (51) do not. Yet again, that the formal ontology of reference is not deter-mined thematically is something we have already argued; and once we accept thata formal event ontology depends on v-DP relations, we can also be open to thefurther fact that the boundedness of an event can depend on a number of factorsother than Case. Indeed, on the approach where ACC uniformly triggers bounded-ness, the question would remain why telic readings are available in (51) andpreferred in (53):

(53) The delegates entered/arrived/left ?for ten minutes/in ten minutes22

As for the change of state verbs, Borer (2005: ch.2) argues, based on cross-linguisticevidence, that these verbs can function either as unergative or unaccusative verbs (inher terms, the same listeme can be inserted in either type of clausal skeleton). We cansuggest, then, that where these verbs function as unergatives, they receive an atelicreading in line with what we saw above for unergative ‘activities’ like ‘run’ in (41).There is some support for Borer’s view from Italian where verbs like impallidire ‘to gopale’ and ghiacciare ‘to freeze’ behave like unaccusative verbs in that they alwaysselect essere ‘to be’ in the perfect tense (Kayne, 2009). Interestingly, these verbs have astrong tendency to be telic in Italian, by contrast to English.23 But this again leavesopen the question why unaccusative verbs give rise to a telic event.24

Overall, this discussion suggests that we need to abandon the view of both Tenny(1992) and Dowty (1991) who take the relevant distinction between measures andnon-measures to be purely thematic, but also that we cannot assume Case will settlethis semantic matter. It is simply not true that, regardless of its Case, an incrementalTheme will measure out an event, whereas other kinds of internal arguments will not.

22 There is a reading which is felicitous here whereby the length of time which the delegates spent insidewas ten minutes. This reading is irrelevant.

23 As illustrated by the following Italian examples (Norma Schifano, personal comment):

(i) Il lago si è ghiacciato in poche ore/??per qualche giorno. Italianthe lake is frozen in few hours/for some days‘The lake froze in a few hours/??for some days.’

(ii) La signora è impallidita in pochi secondi /??per qualche minuto.The woman is paled in few seconds/for some minutes‘The woman went pale in a few seconds/??for a some minutes.’

24 In the case of verbs of coming and going, the presence of a null locative might be involved, but thesame is not true with change of state verbs.


Alternating ditransitive verbs can be used to make a similar point. Consider first thespray/load alternation, which Borer (2005) again takes as evidence that Case is crucialto event mereology. Consider, for example, (53), based on the discussion in Jackend-off (1996: 309):

(54) a. Bill sprayed paint on the wall ?in/for an hour

b. Bill sprayed the paint on the wall in/for an hour.

c. Bill sprayed the wall with paint in an hour/for an hour.

d. Bill sprayed the wall with the paint in an hour/for an hour.

Here, the argument that (the) paint only serves to measure out the event when itsurfaces as the direct object and receives ACC, rather than where it surfaces inside aPP, simply doesn’t work. Thus there is a v-DP dependency involved in (54a, b) aswell, and the relevant factor is here the referential semantics of the internal argument,not Case. Where the internal argument lacks the definite determiner, as in (54a),reference can only be determined via the descriptive properties of the noun, but westill obtain telic readings such as that it took Bill an hour to spray paint on the wall,while doing the same with chocolate, expectedly, took him much longer. Again, thisreading is unusual, but not ungrammatical, suggesting that, in fact, all of theexamples in (54) are ambiguous. Another problem is that, as Baker (1997) shows,there is independent evidence from incorporation to suggest that thematic structureactually varies in examples (54a–d). Thus, either internal argument can form asynthetic compound with the verb:

(55) a. wall-spraying

b. paint-spraying

Baker argues at length that of the arguments of a verb, only Themes can surface insynthetic compounds, and so the pattern in (55) is support for two distinct basegenerated structures for spray/load verbs.25 As such it is impossible to say herewhether Case or thematic structure is the relevant factor in whatever distinctionswe observe in (54). This situation contrasts sharply with the ditransitive alternation,which, Baker argues, is non-thematic in nature and instead Case-related, as witnessedby the fact that only one of the two internal arguments can ever incorporate:

(56) a. I read books to the children (prepositional dative)

b. I read the children books (double object construction)

(57) a. book-reading

b. *children-reading

25 As Borer (2012) notes, however, adverbs can also form synthetic compounds: pan-frying, hill-walking


These facts suggest that books is the (incremental) Theme in both (56a) and (56b),with the different surface patterns being due to different Case-assignment patterns.The ditransitive alternation therefore provides a potential testing ground in Englishfor whether it is Case or thematic roles which determine whether DPs function asmeasures. If Case was the relevant factor, then we might expect that the Theme booksshould only function as a measure in the prepositional dative (56a). If, conversely,thematic roles are key, then we might expect that the Theme should function as ameasure in both constructions. Baker (1997) argues that it is the second predictionthat holds, which speaks against the idea that telicity is uniquely associated with Case,rather than multi-factorial, as assumed here. Consider the following examples, whereJohn works in a museum and has to read out information to customers as part of hisjob. In both patterns, it is the Theme ‘(the) information’ that leads to preferences inregards to event telicity, with the definite-referential Theme again leading to ambi-guity, as seen previously:

(58) a. John read information to customers for an hour/?in an hour

b. John read customers information for an hour /?in an hour.

c. John read the information to customers for an hour /in an hour.

d. John read customers the information for an hour /in an hour.

(59) a. John read information to the customers for an hour/?in an hour

b. John read the customers information for an hour /?in an hour.

c. John read the information to the customers for an hour /in an hour.

d. John read the customers the information for an hour /in an hour.

These examples, then, on the one hand, are more pertinent than the spray/load databecause there is independent evidence that this is a Case-based alternation.26 On theother hand, the same observations we made earlier in relation to (43) hold again: wedo not consider the PP with ‘in’ to be ungrammatical in (58a, b) and (59a, b), unusualas it may be. Moreover, the crucial factor again appears to be the definite article, notCase. In the ditransitive construction, the Theme receives ACC in both of its variants.The fact that it can only undergo passivisation from the prepositional dative con-struction for most speakers may follow from locality (cf. Haddican and Holmberg,2012, on the connection between scrambling and passivization from double objectconstructions). It is thus quite expected, on the Case-based approach to bounded-ness, that the Theme will function as a measure in both constructions. Nonetheless, itremains mysterious, for the Case-based approach, why the goal, which also receivesACC in the double object construction, should not become a ‘measure’.

26 As Baker (1997) notes, these facts are problematic for approaches which take the ditransitivealternation to be thematic (Harley, 2002; Ramchand, 2008).


In sum, Baker’s data do not support the claim that Case relations provide a way forDP-arguments to measure out events. They also do not refute this position—yet, at amore basic level, as noted, our doubts remain as to what the basic data are, to whatdomain they really belong, and whether it is the domain of grammar. In particular,even with a Theme to which ACC is assigned, what remains is an ambiguity betweentelic and non-telic readings; and as noted, we find telic readings triggered compos-itionally through prepositions in the absence of ACC.

The so-called ‘secundative’ alternations provides a better test still, as according toBaker’s diagnostic, it is a Case-based alternation and only one argument receivesACC in each alternation:

(60) a. The Queen presented the medals to the soldiers.

b. The Queen presented the soldiers with the medals.

(61) a. medal-presenting

b. *soldier-presenting

Now consider contrasts in regards to judgements about the following:

(62) a. The Queen presented soldiers with medals for an hour/?in an hour.

b. The Queen presented the fifth battalion with medals for an hour/in anhour.

c. The Queen presented soldiers with her awards for an hour/?in an hour.

d. The Queen presented the fifth battalion with her awards for an hour/in anhour.

Such contrasts do seem to exist, and they are sensitive to the status of the ACC(recipient) object and not that of the Theme contained in the PP. Now consider thepattern in the prepositional dative construction:

(63) a. The Queen presented medals to soldiers for an hour/?in an hour

b. The Queen presented her awards to soldiers for an hour/in an hour

c. The Queen presented medals to the fifth battalion for an hour/in an hour

d. The Queen presented her awards to the fifth battalion ?for an hour/in anhour

Here, there is sensitivity to the status of the ACC (theme) object. However, the statusof the recipient in the PP also seems to have an effect, making (63c) ambiguousbetween a telic and an atelic reading. The facts thus remain far from clear-cut, and itis not clear where, in the theory of grammar, the notion of ‘measure’ really belongs.Persistent ambiguities, contextuality, and uncertain judgements are indicative for aphenomenon that, unlike the referential ones of grammatical semantics in Chapter 4,cannot be uniquely traced to grammatical factors.


In other cases, a connection between Case and telicity/bounded is broken com-pletely, while nonetheless the Cases track a crucial difference in the formal ontology:whether an event or a state is denoted. Judgements seem more unambiguous in thisinstance, as we would expect. Thus, stative verbs appear to be inherently ‘homoge-neous’ and to remain so regardless of the properties of their internal arguments:

(64) John loved the play/plays/milk for many years/#in many years.

In Tenny’s terms, these internal objects are not ‘measures’ of the event. Theynonetheless appear to get ACC, at least in English: the relevant v-DP dependencylicensing the argument to the event is fully in place. That dependency, as such, then,is again independent of telicity. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note potentiallyrelatively consistent morphological variation in regards to Case-assignment in thisinstance: Japanese stative predicates assign NOM to their complements (Travis, 2010:3, citing Uesaka, 1996: 102; Hirakawa, 1994: 4):

(65) Takeshi-wa Keiko-ni-kimochi-ga/*o waka –ru JapaneseT-Top K-Gen-feelings-Nom/*Acc understand –Imp‘Takeshi understands Keiko’s feelings.’ [Fukuda (2006: 102)]

Perhaps, then, in statives, a different v is involved, which cannot license objects toevents but only to states, which is then reflected in such morphological variation. Infact, in many unrelated languages, stative verbs fail to assign ACC. Consider the casein Irish, from Noonan (1992: 355), also discussed by Travis:

(66) Tá eagla roimh an bpúca ag Ailill Irishis fear before the Puca at Ailill‘Ailill fears the Puca.’

In Irish, stative verbs with two arguments are never realized as transitive. Based ondata of this kind, Noonan argues that stative verbs are inherently unaccusative. Infact, even in English there is suggestive evidence that ACC is not assigned, as passiveformation is somewhat marked (cf. Tenny, 1994):

(67) The tyre is touching the pavement.

(68) ?The pavement is being touched by the tyre.

Where a verb is ambiguous between a stative and an eventive reading, the eventivereading seems to be favoured in the passive (controlling for adjectival passives):

(69) The table was touched by John.

While the case of telicity in events can only inconclusively be traced to Case, then,as discussed, the state-event distinction may well be so traced. The latter, but notlikely the former, belongs to grammatical semantics. That said, the variation in


Case-assignment even in the case of the state-event alternation illustrates our basicpoint: that, while the Cases are the morphological reflex of the relationality ofgrammar, they do not figure in grammar itself, where what figures instead is licensingrelations between objects and various formally distinct objects, such as states, events,and propositions.

In conclusion, the proposal that ACC tracks event mereology is not only empiric-ally problematic, but is conceptually problematic from the Un-Cartesian perspectiveas well, where no such thing as an independent event mereology is assumed (and wewould also want a principled account of ‘Case’ that covers both NOM and ACC).In our terms, such an account is possible if we abandon the intrusion of morpho-logical concepts into syntax, and develop a principled account of grammar viewed asorganized around a number of relations which license referential arguments cyclic-ally relative to different phasal heads, yielding the formal ontology of semantics. Inthis ontology, as noted in the beginning of this section, part-whole relations areubiquitous: they lie at the heart of grammatical semantics in our sense. But mereo-logical notions as employed in the event-semantic literature have no independentstatus, and they have been used to formalize facts that can vary with context andseem to follow from a number of different factors, including lexical semantics, thereferentiality of the internal argument, and semantic compositionality, rather thanfollowing from the grammar directly.

6.6 Conclusions

Something regulates the distribution of overt DPs: their distribution is clearly limited.Referentiality at the level of clauses, verb phrases, and nominals plays a role in thisprocess. The morphological Cases, however, do not. They are language-specificreflexes of grammatical relations that license referential arguments to verbal andclausal heads cyclically, generating a formal ontology of reference alongside. Theexistence of such relations, as well as their potential morphological reflex in lan-guages that have relevant resources, is the most rational fact we can expect in theorganization of grammar: for it amounts to the recognition that grammar, as arelational system, exists. If it does, then the new semantics it gives rise to should beone assigned to the relations it consists in. Relations are interpreted, not features.Case features are marked in morphology on different constituents, where these areboth parts of the same grammatical relation. The relations in question, reflected bymorphological Case features, are uncontroversially interpretable in terms of argu-ments doing more than playing the role of Agents, Goals, or Themes: they are alsoparts of events, which in turn are parts of propositions, which in turn figure in speechevents. Nothing in thematic structure, nor anything in compositional semanticsmapped from lexical items as such, predicts this deeper move into the realm ofgrammatical semantics. Several of the relations in question however can be mapped


onto the same morphological feature, and the same such relation can be mappedonto different such features. Cross-linguistically, some consistencies arise, but overallthey are limited. There is no science of Case then to be expected. But this does notdisturb the prospects of a science of grammar. In that science, it is often the case thatmorphology will provide hints for the relations present. But this should not lead us toposit ‘Case-features in syntax’, interpreted as part of a ‘formal licensing’ mechanismfor arguments. Viewed as features in morphology reflecting grammatical relationsthat are not features, the Cases are interpretable through licensing relations. But theserelations are not ‘formal’. Nor are they easily associated with any such predeterminedsemantic notions as ‘measure’ or ‘telicity’. Instead they lie at the very heart of what wecall grammatical semantics.


7

Language and speciation

7.1 Why linguistics is biology

Just as most working linguists see themselves as concerned with language rather thanthought, discussions of language evolution today largely concern the evolution oflanguage, not the evolution of thought (and much in these discussions concernsthe evolution of communication, i.e. the externalization of language as a communi-cative medium). Discussions of the evolution of language, in turn, are often centred onthe question of the existence of a language-specific mental ‘module’ and its possibleadaptationist or exaptationist evolutionary explanation. So enshrined is the Cartesianassumption that there simply is no field called ‘the evolution of thought’, just and forthe same reason as there is no field called ‘the acquisition of thought’, analogously tothe ‘acquisition of language’—as if there was no such issue, and prelinguistic infantsalways already thought in the ways that beings do who have acquired a language. Thislatter assumption becomes an axiomatic one when such infants, or indeed non-human beings as well, are said to think in a ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT). Assumingsuch a ‘language’, Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988: 28) could still assert as recently astwenty-five years ago: ‘that infraverbal cognition is pretty generally systematic seems,in short, to be about as secure as any empirical premise in this area can be’. Allcognitive organisms, that is, verbal or not, think in much the same way. They aresymbol-users (in their LOT) and their ‘mental representations’ have a systematic andcompositional semantics. But much of this, of course, becomes partially false or evenincoherent, if we are right (Hinzen, 2013b; Burton-Roberts, 2011). More specifically, itbecomes problematic the moment we realize three facts in conjunction:

� The specific symbolic mode of thought that we see manifest in all of the world’slanguages and human cultures did not predate the evolution of language, as faras archaeological evidence from hominin material cultures suggests, as well asevidence from comparative cognition, as reviewed below.

� This mode of thought, too, needs to be explained: it does not come for free.� The organization of the lexicon and the grammar directly yield the species-

specific features of this mode of thought, in particular its propositionality, asargued in Chapters 3 and 4.

These three considerations suggest that the evolution of language is inseparable fromthe evolution of a particular mental phenotype. We will argue that this changes thecase for the biology of language, i.e. the biolinguistic programme as such. Theconnection between universal grammar and species-specificity has always been animportant part of the biolinguistic programme from the outset, as is clear inChomsky (1957; 1959; 1965) and Lenneberg (1967) (and see Bickerton, 1990). But itis only in the last two or so decades that archaeological evidence for this claim hasstrengthened, showing how tight, actually, the connection between language andspeciation is. One could still have assumed, in the 1970s, that language evolved inseveral continents and in several interbreeding hominin species. Not so today, we willargue, where evidence has accumulated that language is a species-defining feature: anew species, emerging in sub-Saharan Africa, defined by language and endowed witha genuinely different mental phenotype, brought language along with it when migrat-ing over much of the rest of the surface of the earth, after its exodus from Africa.

To a significant and surprising extent, then, the evolution of language is theevolution of our species, whose genotype is a linguistic one. Variations in thisgenotype give rise to different linguistic phenotypes, which are in turn kinds ofmind: the mind of an autistic child, a child with Specific Language Impairment, or aschizophrenic adult. A modularist perspective would predict that kinds of mind neednot be kinds of language, and that the two can vary independently. By and large,however, we will not find evidence for this in this and the next chapter. The kind ofvariation in the linguistic phenotype tends to be a mirror of themental phenotype. Thepicture is similar in adults with no variation in the linguistic genotype, namely deaf,language-less adults or adults with acquired language disorders. The relative normalityof the thinking of such individuals is a reflection of their intact linguistic genotypes.

In Section 7.2, we begin by rethinking the biolinguistic programme on this basis,assessing the claim that the topic of UG is the topic of the speciation of modernHomo sapiens and its specific mental phenotype: it is not merely the topic of theevolution of the ‘language module’. Modularity has been the primary target ofcriticisms of the very idea of a biology of language (Tomasello, 2008; Christiansenand Chater, 2008). But these criticisms, we argue, depend on Cartesian assumptionsas much as the modularist perspective itself does, and do not apply to our account. InSection 7.3, we summarize the evidence from the origin of our species that we thinksupports our stance. Section 7.4 concludes. Before starting we want to note that theaccount of grammar we have developed so far, of course, is just meant to be that: anaccount (a philosophy, if you will) of grammar. It is thus made true or wrong by thefacts of human grammar, and it competes against other such accounts. Nonetheless,it also needs to be able to re-assert itself against known facts from evolution andbiology. It should aspire to innovating these fields as well, speaking to the ways inwhich we are searching for the biological foundations of language. Our attempt inthis chapter is to live up to these expectations.

7. Language and speciation 239

7.2 Language evolution in a new key

In classical, twentieth-century terms, ‘Universal Grammar’ (UG) technically describesthe theory of the genetic part of a theory of human language: a theory of aspects oflanguage that are genetically based and specific to language, separate from generalintelligence. Using a Chomskyan metaphor, the language faculty is viewed as the‘language organ’: a subsystem distinctive in its function and with sufficient internalintegrity to study it in partial abstraction from its interactions with a number of othersuch (‘mental’ and ‘bodily’) organs, with which it forms ‘interfaces’. This ‘organolo-gical’ conception is as such general enough to allow for a large range of more specificviews. Only one of them is that of language as a ‘module’ viewed under the prism ofFodorian faculty psychology: as an ‘encapsulated’ system, dedicated and innate,hardwired into the architecture of the mind/brain, separate from both general intelli-gence/cognition and peripheral organs, operating ‘fast’ and autonomously, by its owncomputational principles, impenetrable from outside by general cognition or ‘thecognitive mind’. Nonetheless, much discussion on the evolution of language hastargeted the evolution of the language faculty in this exact modular sense, withclassical language-‘nativists’ (Pinker, 1994; Pinker and Bloom, 1994; Pinker andJackendoff, 2005) giving it a classical adaptationist explanation and minimalistssuggesting an exaptationist one (Uriagereka, 1998; Chomsky, 2005; 2010). ‘Anti-nativists’ deny the need for any such module altogether. Prominent reasons for thisdenial are that linguistic communication evolves as part of a biological adaptation forcollaborative activities and cultural life more generally, which is non-linguisticallyspecific (Tomasello, 2003; 2008); that no such module can have evolved (Christiansenand Chater, 2008); or no such module exists in any interesting sense given theabsence of relevant cross-linguistic universals (Evans and Levinson, 2009).

Although the Fodorian conception does not sit well with the Strong MinimalistThesis, it still accords with the working assumption of many, perhaps most genera-tive linguists, with regards to what they are studying: not thought, but an autono-mous structure that can (or must) be studied independently from general ‘cognition’.Moreover, it is studied formally, or as a computational system, without regard to itssemantic interpretation or content, which is the content of thought on the modularconception: the content of a sentence is that of the thought expressed in the sentence(Fodor, 2001). To be sure, this stance is historically well motivated, since theprinciples of syntax as posited since the 1950s seemingly lacked an independentsemantic motivation, turning syntax into an ‘arbitrary’ (or unmotivated) aspect oflinguistic organization. The ‘principles and parameters’ of linguistic computationas unearthed in the 1980s were—and remain, on standard views—‘functionallyarbitrary’ in the same sense: they are not motivated by independent functionalconsiderations or derivable from principles of learning, general cognitive principles,


or communicative efficiency.1 Evidence for this conclusion classically motivated the‘autonomy’ of syntax and that of linguistics as a discipline separate frompsychologymoregenerally, and it is the reason why philosophy of language textbooks still deal with‘content’ almost exclusively, as if ‘form’, i.e. syntax, did not matter to it. We also see theinfluence of this modular conception where a generative perspective is expanded to otherdomains of cognition, such asmorality, where the ‘moral faculty’ has effectively become a‘module’ as well, viewed analogously to the ‘language module’ (Mikhail, 2007).2

Our account, while consistent with a broadly ‘organological’ conception, is clearlynot consistent with a classical modularist view in either Fodor’s or Pinker’s abovesense, and we have noted how it is different from subsequent minimalist theorizingmotivated by the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT) as well. In Fodor’s own words, themodular view advocates a ‘principled distinction between perception and cognition’(Fodor, 1985: 3), with language falling on the side of perception. The latter is thoughtof as continuous with reflex-like (‘dump’ and ‘fast’) responses to the environment.The account assumes, by contrast to the behaviourist conception of operant condi-tioning, which discarded any internalist determinants of behaviour, that suchresponses are modularized and innate structure in different domains contributes tothe stimulus. The ‘cognitive’ mind, by contrast, is not reflex-like: it is ‘smart’ and‘slow’, comprising ‘higher’ cognitive processes such as thought or reasoning, whichexhibit creativity, domain-generality, and non-encapsulation. So, on this conception,the evolution of the language organ is not and cannot be the evolution of thecognitive mind. Indeed, the mind is said to have its own ‘language’, the LOT(Fodor, 1975), which is distinct from both particular languages and UG.

In this regard our argument has been that the term ‘cognitive’ is empty or at leastdoes not make the relevant distinction: the question is what language (and grammarin particular) adds, and the Un-Cartesian hypothesis is that it changes or re-formatscognition, giving us different kinds of thoughts to think. So the evolution of languagesignificantly is the evolution of (a particular kind of cognitive) mind, and Fodorianmodularity is not for us: the classical adaptationist approach of Pinker and Bloom(1990) or the ‘parallel’ architecture of Jackendoff (2002) cannot be how we approachthe evolution and biology of language here. The benefit of this move is that the mostcommon current criticisms of the UG project simply do not apply to our project. Forwhat precisely unites the three broad criticisms of UG mentioned above is theiropposition to the existence of a Fodorian UG-module—a biologically based, linguis-tically specific, encapsulated, and functionally arbitrary system:3

1 But see Roberts (2012) for an attempt to ground parameters in extra-linguistic ‘third factors’.2 For more recent work questioning the modular perspective in line with the more recent minimalist

perspective, see Kirkby and Mikhail (2013).3 Evans and Levinson’s (2009) criticism of a minimalist, underspecified UG as ‘empty’ clearly also

doesn’t apply to our proposal.


there is no Faculty of Language in the Fodorean sense of Faculty Psychology (no module ormodules wholly specific to language processing), and UG is an unfortunate misnomer, becausethere is nothing essentially grammatical about the capacities an infant uses to acquire language’(Levinson and Evans, 2010: 2742);

It is not that the evolution of some kind of innate syntactic template such as universalgrammar is impossible, it is just that currently there is no evidence for it empirically, no preciseformulation of it theoretically, and no need for it at all ( . . . ). Our conclusion is thus thatalthough many aspects of human linguistic competence have indeed evolved biologically,specific grammatical principles and constructions have not (Tomasello, 2008: 313);

It is implausible that such an [language-specific biological] endowment could evolvethrough adaptation ( . . . ). Instead, we have suggested that some apparently arbitrary aspectsof language structure may arise from the interaction of a range of factors, from generalconstraints on learning, to impacts of semantic and pragmatic factors, and concomitantprocesses of grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. But, intriguingly, it[is] also possible that many apparently arbitrary aspects of language can be explained byrelatively natural cognitive constraints—and hence, that language may be rather less arbitrarythan at first supposed (Christiansen and Chater, 2008: 507).

There is, in short, on all three views, no biology specific to language—no UG rootedin the human genome, no biolinguistics in the original sense of Chomsky (1957) andLenneberg (1967). But is it therefore true that language simply doesn’t matter tobiology? That there is no such thing as biolinguistics altogether?

Central in our argument for the opposite conclusion will be precisely that languageis not a Fodorian module, and that, instead, the evolution of language is the evolutionof a mode of thought defining and demarcating a new species in nature and brain(Dubois et al., 2010; Clowry et al., 2010; Vigneau et al., 2011; Miyata et al., 2012). It istherefore not something that evolved after a new mode of thought was already inplace in one or in several species, in the way that cultural innovations arise inhistorical time, in the absence of a biological change. If so, there is biolinguisticseven if there is no language module, and we expect to find a Cartesian rather thanUn-Cartesian philosophy of grammar in those who deny the existence of biolinguis-tics. And indeed, the Cartesian assumption is very clear in Christiansen and Chater’ssuggestion that core properties of language are explained and predicted by theproperties of thought, assumed to be independently given. They endorse the:

standard assumption is that thought is largely prior to, and independent of, linguistic commu-nication. Accordingly, fundamental properties of language, such as compositionality, function-argument structure, quantification, aspect, and modality, may arise from the structure of thethoughts language is required to express. (Christiansen and Chater, 2008: 501)4

4 Cf. also: ‘The cultural evolution of language does not, of course, take place in a biological or socialvacuum, but rather, is shaped by multiple constraints. One type of constraint derives from the nature of thethoughts that language expresses. For example, whatever the nature of our mental representations, theyapparently afford an infinite range of different thoughts, promoting the likely emergence of composition-ality in language’ (Christiansen and Chater, 2008: 452). But a discretely finite system requires a generative


That thought would exhibit these properties independently of language, and hencelanguage would exhibit them only derivatively (because it expresses thought), is ofcourse exactly the assumption we call Cartesian.5 It is particularly implausible in thiscase, since the aspects of language in question are uncontroversially linguistic onesthat have specific grammatical correlates and cannot, we contend, be defined withoutreference to these. One might formalize them as semantic or logical ones in someavailable formal notation—but this won’t change the fact that they have their basis inthe structure of human language, where they are empirically manifest (Crain andKhlentzos, 2010).

In Tomasello’s case, the Cartesian assumption is enshrined in the dialectic of his(2008) narrative for how linguistic communication evolved. The driving force behindlanguage evolution on this account is the evolution of a new kind of cooperative formof shared intentionality that evolved in hominins but no other primates and engen-ders a novel form of communicative intentions. As these intentions appear, novelgrammatical devices became necessary to meet the demands for communicatingthem. Eventually the devices conventionalize as the arbitrary grammaticality patternsof a particular language, eventually becoming enshrined as the normative commit-ments that a person must shoulder in order to count as a speaker of this language.While, initially, hominins might only have wanted to communicate desires, inparticular, leading to what Tomasello terms a ‘grammar of requests’ also found inthe ‘language-trained’ apes, eventually they would want to communicate to shareinformation, leading to a more complex ‘grammar of informing’, exhibiting a ‘serioussyntax’. Finally, the desire would evolve to share whole narratives involvingsequences of connected events with shared participants, requiring what Tomasello(2008: 294) calls a ‘grammar of sharing’ that comes with a ‘fancy syntax’ (namely theactual syntax of all human languages). ‘The main point’, he summarizes:

is simply that communicative function drives the process, such that all linguistic communitieswho wish to tell narratives and engage in other forms of extended discourse must creategrammatical conventions of the general type described here for getting these things done.(Tomasello, 2008: 286)

The Cartesian implication is that the more complex intentions with their distinctivecontents evolved first, independently of language and grammar, which are merelyarbitrary conventionalizations of them. There simply arose new kinds of thoughtsthat wanted to be expressed; and hence the grammar had to be invented that wouldget them across. Language evolution, therefore, boils down to solving a problem of

system, which is ipso facto given on standard accounts of grammar, and obscure if independent fromgrammar.

5 More generally, constructionist approaches to language acquisition seem to crucially require a richsystem of thought which can then be linked to arbitrary linguistic templates by the child.


externalization (or communication). Grammar has no other epistemological signifi-cance and is not involved in the aetiology of the thoughts themselves—the Cartesianposition.

Again, however, to evolve language in the human sense, we have to evolve themind that is expressed in it, and that mind doesn’t come for free and it evolves overevolutionary time. Intentions, by contrast, do come for free, in the context of ourinquiry: for they, and their recognition by others, are prelinguistically given. Inten-tionality is therefore not the mystery we have to solve here. The mystery we have tosolve is why there are intentions of different, partially species-specific kinds. In thisregard Tomasello agrees, and the biological change that he postulates in the genusHomo is one that leads to intentions that are of a uniquely social and cooperativekind. Intentions, however, also have a content. And here the problem arises: coop-erativity and communicative intentions on their own make insufficient predictionsfor what is being communicated, and hence the kind of mind that we are hereinterested in: a mind that can have contents that we recognize can be true or false,that we can believe even when they are false, or disbelieve when they are true; a mindthat engages in different forms of nominal and clausal reference; and that can graspalgebraic rules holding between values of variables (Marcus, 2001). No social andcooperative mind needs to be productive or systematic;6 or construct theories andreasons from unobservable causes.7 In making the communicative needs and desiresof a mind capable of generating contents of this nature basic to our account ofgrammar, we are presupposing the basic structure of a linguistic mind already.

Even if we posit special, non-linguistic mind-reading (‘theory of mind’) abilities init, the problem remains. A mind can only, in the relevant theoretical sense, ‘read’ thecontents of the mental states of others if it knows what a belief is, and if it cangenerate the same propositions that the other mind thinks or takes an attitudetowards. This requires a grammar of some sort, assuming that propositions aredifferent from lexical atoms, i.e. structured and compositional; while it is logicallyconceivable that this grammar is fundamentally different from that of naturallanguage, it is not clear why we should make this assumption if we know thatmind-reading matures with the maturation of specific aspects of recursive syntax(de Villiers, 2007). Tomasello (2008: 321) calls ‘recursive mindreading’ a ‘skill’, whichis key to the new social-cognitive capacities in question. Yet, we do not see such a

6 Indeed, according to Tomasello’s account of language acquisition, even early linguistic children, whilebeing fundamentally cooperative, do not show signs of such productivity (though see Kowalski and Yang,2012, for a critique of the evidence).

7 As Penn et al. (2008: 121) note, ‘it is very hard to see how a discontinuity in social-cognitive abilitiesalone could explain the profound differences between human and nonhuman animals’ abilities to reasonabout causal relations in the physical world or nonhuman animals’ inability to reason about higher-orderspatial relations’, a point echoed by Carpenter and Tomasello (2000) himself, when he acknowledges thathuman language learners manifest cognitive capacities—such as analogical reasoning and abstract rulelearning—that are both independent from mind-reading abilities and absent in non-human animals.


recursive mind-reading capacity in non-grammatical creatures (Fitch, 2010), orindeed on Tomasello’s own account of the fundamental discontinuity betweenhuman and non-human minds. Moreover, such mind-reading has inherent struc-tural properties—like the occurrence of an (unendorsed or unasserted) propositionas an argument within an asserted one, as in [He believes [I am here]]—which seemsconceptually non-distinct from the hierarchical configurations that standard syntaxposits in the linguistic expressions encoding them.

In short, whatever prelinguistic mind-reading capacities we posit, we would needto be careful not to implicitly characterize them as already exhibiting what we canonly describe as a form of grammatical organization. If the mind-reading is based onperception more than conceptualization, no genuine concept of thought nor propos-itional thoughts about thoughts need to be as involved at all, given distinctionsbetween perception and concepts as involved in propositions that we stressed inChapter 2. Where explicit reasoning about thought takes place and thoughts aboutthoughts are generated, it is hard to imagine them not to exhibit a part-wholeorganization that is recognizably and inherently grammatical, with each thoughtcorresponding to one constituent and one the grammatical argument of the other,and only the matrix constituent evaluated for truth.

(Declarative) pointing, too, like recursive mind-reading, is only found in linguis-tic creatures. It is distinct from imperative pointing, which is there to request ordemand things, and evolves later, by the first birthday, cross-culturally (Butter-worth, 2003). It is not found in autistic children (Tomasello, 2008: 142–3, citingCarpenter, Pennington, and Rogers, 2001; Mundy and Siegman, 2006; Liebal et al.,2008). One kind of declarative pointing can be, in Tomasello’s technical term,‘expressive’—used to share an attitude about a common referent—as when theinfant points to an animal in the distance, say an elephant, expresses emotions,and alternately gazes at the adult. The infant, we might gloss this, wants to share itssheer excitement at the fact that there is an elephant there. Plainly, the elephant isnot requested, and there is nothing that the infant wants for himself: rather, theelephant is viewed as an aspect of the external world—a common referent that isshared and objective. That referent is individuated as falling under a particularconcept, which comes from an equally shared conceptual space of which the infantand adult are both parts, who will thus individuate their experience and react tostimuli in similar ways. This crucially triadic structure is nothing other than the‘triangulation’ that Davidson (2004) argues is the necessary infrastructure of alllanguage, rationality, and thought. Declarative pointing, that is, already manifests apropositional competence in the present sense—that is, a grasp of reference andpredication, as based on a shared concept, which yields an objective state of affairs ifapplying to an object referred to, and can be accompanied by an attitude towards thefact that the state of affairs obtains (the attitude presupposes the proposition/state ofaffairs in question, as what it is directed at). This appears even clearer in the case of


what Tomasello terms ‘informative’ declaratives, which are enacted by the infant toprovide the adult with information about some referent that the adult currentlylacks but needs or wants (for himself, not necessarily for the infant).

Tomasello takes this as evidence for a ‘prelinguistic’ infrastructure of sharedintentionality on which linguistic abilities can then be grafted—no further biologicaladaptation for language is needed. For this to be an argument against an innatelanguage-specific faculty, further evidence is required that what shows itself in infantgestures such as pointing and pantomime is not effectively the language faculty atwork. Infants are linguistic creatures, whose brain exhibits language-specific asym-metries from its earliest developmental stages (Glasel et al., 2011; Dubois et al., 2010),and whose language faculty starts developing in utero. It would be no big surprise,then, if, even before grammar is morphophonologically expressed, the behaviour wefind is that expected of a creature that appropriates the world in grammatical termsand has the kind of brain needed to do so. Strong evidence in favour of our opponenthere would be that we find the gestures in question in non-linguistic beings. But thatis exactly not the case, on Tomasello’s own account. Even the ‘linguistic’ gestures ofhuman-reared and language-trained apes, on his account, do not approximate infantdeclarative pointing and are not propositional in nature (see also Terrace, 2005).

We conclude that infant pointing may be most appropriately understood as thefirst manifestation of what we call the grammatical mind, rather than as a prelin-guistic adaptation on which language can be built. That acts of infant pointingcommunicate pretty much what adult pointing also does, is predicted on this view:an infant at age 11.5months, for example, just like an adult, might point to his glass atthe dinner table, after someone else had poured water into his glass a few minutesearlier (Tomasello, 2008: 114). The infant points to a fact, that the glass is empty,informing the adult of this fact, in the context of another fact, that the infant desiresto drink more. A creature that needs a ‘fancy’ grammar to tell the narratives itinvents, equally is, even more so than a creature that points declaratively or a creaturethat reasons about other minds recursively, already a linguistic creature: its thought is(implicitly assumed to be) grammaticalized already. That we have a creature of thiskind therefore does not explain grammar. At least partially, such a creature isexplained by grammar—an observation that does not in any way diminish the crucialimportance of the evolution of cooperation and shared intentionality for the evolu-tion of communication or the externalization of language.

Evans and Levinson, finally, concur with Tomasello’s focus on the ‘intention-attributing cognitive infrastructure that provides a universal base for languageevolution’ (Evans and Levinson, 2009: 472), yet further construct an argument againstUG as a module from the pervasiveness of cross-linguistic variation at every level oflinguistic organization. Stating variation, however, does not absolve us from the taskof stating what grammar is or does, universal in human populations as it is. Indeed,


any statement about variation in a universal trait is only meaningful against anaccount of what does not vary in this trait. What is commonly taken not to varyacross languages is of course thought, or semantics, a position widely maintained inlinguistic typology: Haspelmath (2010), for example, contends that concepts used forcross-linguistic comparisons must be universally applicable—and ‘conceptual-semantic concepts’ are one kind of concept that fits this bill. Semantics, in short, isone of the anchor points on which cross-linguistic comparisons must be based. Evansand Levinson differ from this consensus in stressing that cross-linguistic variationdoes in fact affect thought or semantics. They explicitly reject the idea that ‘languagesdirectly encode the categories we think in, and moreover that these constitute aninnate, universal “language of thought” or “mentalese” ’ (Evans and Levinson, 2009:435). If and to the extent that languages are not merely the local ‘cloths’ for universalthoughts expressed in them, language will have an epistemological significance andthe position appears at first to reject a Cartesian assumption.

However, a look at the list of the Neo-Whorfian semantic variation that theauthors list shows that none of this variation is variation in what we have hereanalysed as grammatical semantics or the formal ontology of language. The list is(Evans and Levinson, 2009: 435–6): languages may lack words for logical connectivessuch as ‘if ’ or ‘or’; specific colour words such as ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (see also Franklinet al., 2008); words for specific body parts such as ‘leg’; words to mark Tense, Aspect,or numbers; plural markers meaning roughly ‘of unexpected number’, said to befound in Kiowa; words or affixes indicating the sources of evidence as available inKorean or Central Pomo; classifiers specifying an object for whether it is liquid, rope-like, containers, etc., as in Athabaskan languages; words coding intricate kinshiprelations, as in Australian languages; or expressions for ‘left of ’, ‘right of ’, ‘back of ’,‘front of ’; or languages where a term like ‘banana’, in the absence of a classifier, willonly denote a mass or substance. But clearly, all of this is fundamentally lexicalvariation: it so happens that different languages, at the level of their compendia ofwords, choose to encode different concepts. None of this affects what speakers of anyof these languages will find true or false; nor will it deprive them of any sense of whattruth or falsehood are; that truth is distinct from belief; that objects are different fromproperties; or that possibilities are different from facts—though cultural variation invalues and environmental conditions will make them interested in partially differentfacts and these will be expressed in different ways, depending on lexical resourcesavailable (though such resources can always be changed).

It transpires from this discussion that while Evans and Levinson reject theFodorian and Pinkerian commitment to a language-independent LOT and its uni-versal semantics, this is chiefly because the lexical resources of different languagessimply do not map onto the same concepts, and because these concepts are assumedto enter the LOT. There is, in this sense, linguistic relativity. But that very notion—inthat a non-trivial relation can only relate two different things—encodes a Cartesian


assumption: that thought and language are distinct, though the latter can influencethe former. The crucial task, which is a theory of the format of sapiens-specificthought itself, is not addressed (beyond the stress on social-cognitive infrastructurediscussed above); and no distinction is made between effects on the organization ofmeaning arising at a lexical and at a grammatical level. As we have seen above and inprevious chapters, a Cartesian stance is also essentially adopted in the major trad-itional alternative to the adaptationist view of language evolution, namely the earlyand middle Minimalist paradigm, in which a core of language—narrow syntax, or the‘computational system’ of language—rather than primarily reflecting adaptive con-straints, is said to ‘crystallize’ in evolution, snow-flake like, reflecting a minimalgenetic change effectively reducing to the evolution of Merge within the givencognitive infrastructure of the hominin brain, together with generic and physico-chemical factors (Chomsky, 2005; 2010; Hinzen, 2006; Berwick and Chomsky, 2011).

We thus conclude that UG in the generative tradition and today’s major anti-UGparadigms share Cartesian assumptions. The expectation should thus be that thedialectic in regards to the biology of language changes with an Un-Cartesian view. Itis not a ‘modular’ one in the sense above, hence escapes from the primary target oftraditional arguments leveled against UG: this book defends nothing like the func-tionally arbitrary ‘language faculty’ of classical generative linguistics and Fodorianfaculty psychology. Much of our foregoing discussion has been about the wonders ofgrammar and what it does to cognition, reformatting our mind and what it means toknow something. An ‘interface’ with an independent system of thought or a ‘cogni-tive’module is one that we are committed to reject. The ‘language organ’, if this is stillthe right metaphor, is thus also not here one mental ‘organ’ among others that couldbe separately lesioned while leaving others intact (as classical arguments for modu-larity entail). The transformation that we suggest the grammaticalization of themind represents, moreover, does not seem to be based on some novel biologicaladaptation of a non-linguistic nature, if we are right that core aspects of grammarsimply do not have non-grammatical analyses or explanations. But despite thisabsence of non-grammatical explanations of the facts about cognition that we arehere interested in, grammar in our sense is nonetheless not an ‘arbitrary’ system:most, and perhaps all of grammar, if we are right, is rationalizable in terms of how itmediates reference, when pointing gives out.

What we are talking about, then, when we talk about UG or the evolution oflanguage is, effectively, the evolution of our mind and the thinking that takes place init, insofar as that thinking is unique to us. There is such a thing as biolinguisticsbecause (i) there is no non-linguistic biological adaptation that can substitute forlanguage, and (ii) the grammatical organization of language reflects a new mode ofthought defining a new species, because it defines its mind. This is partially consistentwith the original arguments for UG, and in particular the domain-specificity of thebiology of language: it is still the case that general intelligence—in the sense of smart


adaptive behaviour involving inference or ‘reasoning’ (‘thought’ in a generic sense)—is not our topic here. Many non-human animals are fabulously smart, not to mentionhominins other than Homo sapiens. And as Descartes (1637) was the first to note,human beings that have normal language can be extremely stupid, if not outrightincapable of finding their way around life. Whatever explains smartness, in short, oradaptivity, we can ignore it here.8 Nor does it appear as if social-cognitive capacitiescan entirely substitute for linguistic ones, as discussed above.

Moreover, this difference in thought is not a difference within one species, nor is itscattered across species. Instead, it defines one single species. This connectionbetween language and speciation, in itself, is a pointer to a connection betweenlanguage and genetics, and a much stronger one than was available in the 1950s,when much of the evidence for the speciation of modern Homo sapiens was not yetin, as we will discuss below. It is thus expected that those who deny any geneticendowment specific to language will tend to downplay the specificity of modernHomo sapiens as well, and locate the origin of language outside of the context of ourspeciation, some hundreds of thousands of years earlier in hominin evolution (see forexample Levinson and Evans, 2010: 2742, discussed in the next section). Evidenceagainst this early evolution is therefore evidence in favour of a biological change forlanguage. Thought content defining the new species is found expressed in the world’slanguages, in cultural practices such as art and science, and in our, again universal,‘moral nature’. A parsimonious explanation for this evolutionary discontinuity,which draws a line around one species, would want to relate this human invari-ance—(rational) thought—with the major other human-specific invariance—gram-mar—especially if we are right in our take on grammar, for then the latter can beturned into the generative mechanism behind the former. Our reinforcing argumentin this regard has been that grammar, looked at in a new way, exactly provides therelevant forms of rational organization, allowing the grasp of a unique kind ofgrammatical meaning that is unavailable lexically or non-linguistically. Since thegrammaticalization of hominin thought further depends on a genetically basedchange in cortical organization that took place in the genus Homo and reflects theorganization of language, and the de-grammaticalization of the sapiens brain argu-ably correlates with the breakdown of the relevantmode of thought aswell as these formsof cortical organization (Sections 8.4 and 8.5), a plausible case for a biologically specificendowment for language in humans not only remains, but is strengthened—without any‘autonomous’ language-module being invoked.

8 Indeed, whereas art, culture, science, and morality are presumably all adaptive traits, much discussionon ‘progress’ in biology suggests that there is no biological meaning to the assertion that such capacities are,in some absolute sense, ‘more adaptive’ than those of a Neanderthal or chimpanzee or mouse mind.


7.3 The speciation of modern Homo sapiens

The heuristic rejection of the need for special explanatory principles for the case oflanguage as well as our species as such was an important ingredient in the behaviour-ist research programme that predated modern linguistics. As John B. Watson put itin 1913: ‘The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response,recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.’ Skinner (1953), too, suggested,quite reasonably: ‘It would be rash to assert at this point that there is no essentialdifference between human behaviour and the behaviour of lower species; but until anattempt has been made to deal with both in the same terms, it would be equally rashto assert that there is’ (Skinner, 1953: 38). Skinner (1957) precisely is an attempt tointegrate language in such a unitary scheme. Like empiricists before and after him, heregarded human linguistic behaviour as conditioned by the contingencies of experi-ence and the forces of an external environment acting on an organism—like every-thing else. No determinants internal to the organism are called for.

One could put Chomsky’s central (1959) claim against Skinner (1957) as saying thatthis externalist commitment is absurdly radical. It is natural to assume that, apartfrom externalist determinants, internalist ones are called for in the case of language.Put like this, the case against Skinner is consistent with the position that Chomsky(2000a) and Hinzen (2006; 2007) describe as a form of ‘internalism’, as well as thecurrent broad ‘three factors’ framework of Chomsky (2005), which maintainsthat language design is shaped by (i) language-specific innate endowment (= UG),(ii) experience, and (iii) third factor conditions not specific to language or humans orindeed organisms. The claim that (i) is non-empty is equivalent to the claim that,insofar as Skinner’s alternative scheme of explanation is a failure, special explanatoryproblems are posed in the case of language, pointing to organism-internal principlesand an apparently species-specific and human-unique adaptation. This positiondeserves to be qualified as the null hypothesis (for internal determinants cannotobviously be excluded). The criticisms of UG mentioned earlier, which again main-tain the absence of (i) and are in this sense continuous with Skinner’s programme,should thus be regarded as quite radical. They can only be maintained if linguisticbehaviour is continuous, after all, with non-linguistic behaviour, and explainable onsimilar grounds. For no genetic change specific to the evolution of language and thisspecies, is said to be required: nothing is special to language and nothing, therefore,calls for special explanatory principles, exactly as was assumed until the mid-twenti-eth century.

Despite an emphasis on internal factors, discontinuity, and species-specificity, theconnection between language and species is not as explicit in Chomsky (1959; 1965) as wewill argue now it should be today. Moreover, species-specificity could only have meanthuman specificity at that point, as evidence on speciation patterns within the genus


Homo was simply not yet in at this point. Fifty years later, generative grammarhas come to systematically incorporate considerations of language evolution, butthe situation is not very different in regards to the connection between languageand species. UG is certainly not proposed as a theory of speciation. Emphasissince the 1990s to ‘minimize’ the contribution of the first factor may even not beconducive to systematically addressing this connection. The proposal, in particu-lar, that the evolution of language, in its grammatical aspects, will ‘reduce to theemergence of the operation Merge’ (Berwick and Chomsky, 2011), leaves us withno clear clues on the nature of language or what makes it specific, given thegenericity of Merge/recursion. The stress on domain-generality, minimality, andgenericity, and on the prelinguistic richness of the so-called ‘Conceptual-Inten-tional’ systems, thus comes with the danger of leaving us without a grasp of whatthe effects of grammar on cognition actually are. Stress on minimal analysis isuncontentious, of course, wherever we start from some descriptively rich theoryof some domain that we seek to make explanatorily stronger. But the position weend up with may also yield an account of grammar so minimal that we fail torecognize the phenomenon in it with which we started. A formal abstraction maybe created that doesn’t connect to the natural phenomenon any more that westarted from. Picasso’s depiction of the abstract form of a bull still captures itsessence. Depicting the bull as an extension in space would not. Does Merge stillcapture the essence of grammar? Can it explain a reformatting of mind or theemergence of a new mode of thought and a species? Would a ‘minimalist theoryof gravitation’, say, even make sense? However serious we take this concern, ithas remained the case, with the arrival of Minimalism, that UG is still not part ofa general theory of speciation.

As noted, in the 1950s, we should have expected this. This was the high time of theModern Synthesis, which, in exactly the same way as Skinner in his study of animalbehaviour, was near-exclusively focused on external factors in the evolutionaryorigins of organismic form. Although Darwin himself stressed the existence of ‘twolaws’ of evolution—natural selection and the ‘laws of form’ (evolution by naturallaw)—the focus of the Modern Synthesis on natural selection as the main force ofevolutionary change is undeniable (Gould, 2002; Hinzen, 2006: ch. 2). Like empiri-cism, it remains externalist in its core commitments: evolutionary change is condi-tioned by random genetic variation within populations and the changes in genefrequencies caused by environmental forces acting on the variants and affecting theirdifferential reproduction. No independent internal determinants of evolutionarychange coming from the constraints imposed by developmental systems are calledfor. This is precisely the assumption that the ‘Evo-Devo’ research programme set outto address and discard, taking:

the contributions of the generative processes into account, as entrenched properties of theorganism promote particular forms of change rather than others. On this view, natural


selection becomes a constantly operating background condition, but the specificity of itsphenotypic outcome is provided by the developmental systems it operates on. Hence theorganisms themselves represent the determinants of selectable variation and innovation. At thetheoretical level, this shifts a significant portion of the explanatory weight from the externalconditions of selection to the internal generative properties of evolving phenotypes. (Pigliucciand Müller, 2010: 13–14; our emphasis)

Hinzen (2006) proposes to view the theory of UG as an instance of ‘internalist’ or‘generative’ biology in this sense, applied to language: an account of the generativeprinciples that give rise to new behaviours in humans. Yet Hinzen also leaves theconnection with speciation largely out of account, and in a way, Evo-Devo does notmake it a central topic either: it is continuous, in particular, with the stress of the‘rational morphologists’ of the nineteenth century (Gould, 2002) on what they calledthe ‘unity of type’—the existence of abstract structural templates (Baupläne) thatcut across different species operating under different adaptive regimes. In this sense,the reality, or at least the centrality, of species is denied here as much as it is inNeo-Darwinism.

In addition to externalism, the Modern Synthesis was committed to gradualism inevolutionary change, whereby most adaptive genetic variants have slight phenotypiceffects and diversification comes about through speciation viewed as the gradualevolution of reproductive isolation among populations (Futuyma, 1986: 12). Darwinhimself had been gradualist on the topic of speciation, and much of the beauty andsimplicity of his theory rested on the absence of a special mechanism of speciationintroducing discontinuities into the smooth flow of natural selection. In the inexor-able action of natural selection in modifying gene pools,

species lost their individuality as they became no more than arbitrarily defined segments ofsteadily evolving lineages. (Tattersall, 2008: 7)

Speciation thus wasn’t viewed as a discrete genetic event, and the idea of ‘saltation’became a priori suspect, sidelining early champions of such evolutionary change suchas De Vries (1901), Bateson (1894), and Goldschmidt (1940). By the 1970s, on the otherhand, it was clear that this a priori commitment simply did not fit the empiricallygiven pattern of evolutionary change in the fossil record, which is rather one of‘punctuated equilibria’ (Eldredge and Gould, 1972), with long periods of stasisalternating with sudden bursts of change in which new species arise. Rather thanslowly morphing into other species, that is, with a range of intermediate forms,species evolve quite suddenly, in events that Eldredge and Gould speculated mightlast no more than 5,000 to 50,000 years. They then often persist relatively unchangedover long periods of time, until they disappear again and are replaced by other species(J. H. Schwartz, 1999). The genus Homo, in particular, is not a story of gradualfine-tuning in which a major central lineage is increasingly acquiring a human shapeover the eons. It is a history of experimentation with multiple hominin species


originating and partially co-inhabiting the same environments, doing battle in themand going extinct more often than not.

If anything, then, species are for real; they are individuals that exist as such on thebiological scene, being ‘fully individuated entities, playing evolutionary roles that gobeyond simply being intermediates between their ancestors and descendants’ (Tat-tersall, 2008: 17). What individuates a species, therefore, is a question of genuinetheoretical interest, and very much an open one. Reading even current majortextbooks and anthologies in the philosophy of biology (Sterelny and Griffiths,1999; Hull and Ruse, 1998) yields a false impression in this regard, as they virtuallystart from the demise of ‘human nature’, given that humans are a species, and speciesare not real given a Neo-Darwinian perspective, or only as real as the ‘isolationist’ or‘biological’ species concept of Mayr (1942) allows. Against this consensus stands thefact, which we discuss in more detail below, that ‘humans’ are many species, that oursis only one of these, which evolved in a discontinuous fashion, and around whichlanguage draws a line, suggesting that the evolution of language and our species maynot only have been evolutionary ‘events’, but the same event.

In this light, the persistent absence of essentially any systematic discussion oflanguage in the philosophy of biology is noteworthy: as of now, language is heresimply not regarded as part of the solution to the riddle of the speciation of modernHomo sapiens and the genesis of our mind. The focus of discussions has been, andremains, on the individual organism, if not its genes, as the fundamental entities ofevolution. But language is a population-level phenomenon; though processed inindividual brains, it does not exist on an individual level (cf. Stainton, 2011). Factuallyspeaking, there are no private languages. Moreover, language defines a species, ifcurrent thinking on palaeoanthropology is on the right track.

This species is regarded as a single one today: there are no different species ofhumans alive. This is a non-trivial fact, which asks for an explanation: somethingholds this species together, as there appears to be no relevant genetic variation withregards to this species’ basic cognitive traits. As noted it is also, and crucially, nowregarded to be a distinct species from any now extinct precursor hominin, an insightthat did not exist in the late 1950s and 1960s, where Neanderthals were still widelyregarded as simply an early variant of modern humans. These were also the forma-tional years for the major post-behaviorist philosophical framework in thinkingabout the mind, namely functionalism and the ‘computational-representationaltheory of mind’ (Fodor, 1975; Lycan, 2003; Rey, 2003), where ‘multiple realizabil-ity’—and hence the irrelevance of species boundaries—became a defining property ofmentality as such. Chomsky himself, to our knowledge, never endorsed functional-ism in these formational years of ‘cognitive science’, and indeed rejects it in Chomsky(2003) as a complete misunderstanding of the computer analogy and Turing (1950) inparticular. Generative linguistics was nonetheless widely perceived as consistent withit, given its focus on the abstract study of a ‘computational system’ irrespective of its


use as well as its organic basis. The embodiment of linguistic cognition eventuallybecomes a crucial aspect of the Minimalist research programme, in which the studyof the ‘interface’ of language with sensory-motor systems moves to centre stage, andconsiderations of externalization of language in a particular sensory-motor modalityhave sometimes been taken to carry crucial insights in regards to central designfeatures of language (see e.g. Carstairs-McCarthy, 1999). Nonetheless, in practice,linguistic theory has remained focused on the computational study of language, andthe more recent focus on ‘interfaces’ has in fact only led to the formulation of an evenhigher abstraction: ‘narrow syntax’ as reduced to Merge, which retains the nature ofan essentially disembodied and multiply realizable process. The more ‘third factor’conditions become relevant, which relate to abstract organizational principles of aphysico-chemical sort, the less the organism, and the species, will figure in linguisticexplanations.

Let us then re-raise the question of why language and species, as a matter ofempirical and palaeoanthropological fact, do intrinsically relate. As Stringer (2011)recalls, in the 1970s:

the origin of modern humans was hardly recognized as a specific topic worthy of scientificstudy. The standard classification of humans had living people, the Neanderthals, and diverseremains from sites like Broken Hill in Africa and Solo in Java all classified as members of ourspecies. With such different-looking fossil members within Homo sapiens, the origins offeatures like a chin, a small brow ridge and a globular skull were, not surprisingly, lost in amorass of diversity. Moreover, with the predominance of multiregional or Neanderthal-phasemodels, the origins of those features were apparently scattered among many different ancestorsliving right across the Old World, so modern human evolution was not so much an event as atendency ( . . . ). For human behaviour too, there was an emphasis on gradual evolutionarytrends ( . . . ).

It looks very different forty years on—for most scientists, Africa has been established as thecentre for both our physical and our cultural origins. The evolution of ‘modern’ Homo sapienscan be viewed as an important physical and biological event, backed up by fossil and geneticevidence. (Stringer, 2011: 201)

Events need causes. They are the results of these causes. In the case of events that arespeciations, the result involves the eventual establishment of a reproductive barrierwith other groups of organisms, which establishes the species as a biological individ-ual in its own right. Such a barrier can come about through various causes, and thedevelopment of new anatomical features per se, which allow us to recognize asubgroup of a given species, is not the same as a speciation event. This is relevantto the fact that the crucial kind of behavioural innovations that we associate with ourspecies—such as symbolism, personal adornment, elaborate burials and weaponry,and art—are manifest in the archaeological record only some tens of thousands ofyears later than anatomically modern humans appear on the African scene, asmarked by a distinctively shaped brow, chin, and thorax. Fossils with essentially


these distinctively modern human features—despite some remaining residual differ-ences—are found from about 195,000 years ago, which is the dating of the Omo skullfrom Ethiopia.9

Tattersall (2008: 94–5) lists four further fossils: a skull found at the site of Herto,also in Ethiopia, dated at 160,000 years ago; some fragmentary 115,000-year-oldremains from the Klasies River in South Africa; a partial cranium from Singa,Sudan, dated at 100,000 years ago; and an apparently very clear example from theburial site of Jebel Qafzeh in the Levant, dated at 92,000 years ago. In none of thesecases is anatomical modernity accompanied by behavioural modernity, and thearchaeological record associated with any of these types of humans at their respectivesites shows no signs of symbolic behaviour of the sort that we can associate withlanguage. The record of the humans from Jebel Qafzeh, in particular, is said to be‘indistinguishable’ (Tattersall, 2008: 96,103) from that of the Neanderthals co-inhabiting the region at the time.

The fossil evidence for an African origin of modern humans is corroborated byevidence from mitochondrial DNA passed down through females, which is traceableto a single variant in Africa that belonged to a population emerging between 290,000and 140,000 years ago; and Y-chromosome DNA passed down through the male line,which again can be traced to Africa. Emigrants of this African population arrived inEurope between 39,000 and 51,000 years ago, where the ‘human revolution’ wouldplay itself out more fully than it did in Africa, given the absence of ‘any strongevidence for figurative or clearly representational art anywhere before the Europeanmaterial dated at about 40,000 years’ (Stringer, 2011: 209). Evidence for symbolism ispresent in Africa much earlier, as in flat pieces of ochre engraved with geometricdesigns and pierced shells used as beads from Blombos cave in South Africa nearKlasies, dated at around 75,000 years ago (Henshilwood, 2006), and similar shells inNorth Africa that are 82,000 years old (Taforalt, Morocco: Bouzouggar et al., 2007),and in the Near East from about 90,000 years ago (Qafzeh, d’Errico et al., 2009: 34).However, iconographic representations are not actually found in Africa before26,000—28,000 years ago (Apollo 11 site, Namibia: McBrearty and Brooks, 2000).Even personal ornaments disappear from the African scene again after their appear-ance around 80,000 years ago, with no reliably dated findings dated at between70,000 and 40,000 years ago (d’Errico et al., 2009: 34–5). At around the latter of thesetimes, beads re-appear in Africa and the Near East, and appear for the first time inEurope, Asia, and Australia. Clearly, it took well over 100,000 years before the firstanatomically modern humans started to behave as members of our species do today.

Evidence until recently moreover has favoured the assumption that the transitionin Africa from archaic humans (Homo heidelbergensis) that formed the predecessors

9 More fragmentary remains from Guomde, Kenya, are perhaps 250,000 years old (Stringer, 2011: 202).


of both Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens has been a relatively smooth one,taking several hundreds of thousands of years, from about 500,000 years ago. Newevidence, however, suggests that the famous Broken Hill cranium (‘Rhodesian Man’),the first important human fossil ever found in Africa and initially dated at around thesame time, is only between 200,000 and 300,000 years old (Stringer, 2011: 252–3). Itfollows that the transition even to anatomical modernity was, in fact, anything butgradual. Given the datings for the earliest anatomically modern human fossilsmentioned above, there was barely time at all. If no very rapid evolutionary transitiontook place, then it appears that we must assume that a greater variation in humanpopulations existed at the time, with possibly several human species co-existing, andsome interbreeding. We know that there is admixture in modern human DNA ofgenetic material from archaic humans, including Neanderthals and other descend-ants of heidelbergensis (Denisovans), showing that the picture is not as clear-cut asoriginal versions of the ‘Recent African Origin’ (RAO) model suggested. Stringer(2011: 261–3) concludes that even though interbreeding of modernHomo sapiens witharchaic humans did happen (in and out of Africa, but more likely mostly in Africa)during periods of co-existence, and hence our genes come from multiple regions,‘mostly out of Africa’ or ‘predominantly of recent African origin’ remain accuratedescriptions of modern human origins. That is, no ‘large-scale integration’ of differ-ent gene pools took place (Tattersall, 2008: 104).

There is little reason to lump all human fossils of the last 1 million years or sotogether under a single species name, if separate species with long separate evolution-ary histories can be discerned, large-scale physical differences in their anatomy, notto mention their archaeological records, remain, and even in our own species thingstook a long time before we see its essential features. It may be that the pre-eminenceof Africa in the human story is not solely a direct reflection of superior cognitive orbiological endowment of the species inhabiting that continent, but also a matter ofgreater opportunities for morphological and behavioural variation and innovation, asperhaps provided by larger geographical and human population sizes within whichthey could be developed and conserved. Perhaps, biologically and cognitively, theresources we needed were in place by the time anatomically modern humandeveloped, but their fully human expression and behavioural manifestation had toawait a ‘releasing factor’—some cultural rather than biological innovation (Tattersall,2008: 103). As d’Errico et al. (2009) put this concern:

the cognitive prerequisites of modern human behaviour were in place earlier in time amongstboth ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ populations, and we must invoke, among other factors, historicalcontingencies triggered by climate and demographic factors rather than a single speciationevent or mutation to explain the emergence, disappearance, and re-emergence in the archaeo-logical records of symbolic traditions. (d’Errico et al., 2009: 50)


However, although it seems likely that such contingencies did play an important rolein the history of our species after its earliest anatomical beginnings after 200,000years ago, earlier African hominins and Neanderthals were anatomically and behav-iourally very different. Why should they have been cognitively the same, especially iftheir cultures suggest no such thing? Why would, for hundreds of thousands of years,cultural opportunities not have arisen for these humans to exercise their cognitivemodernity and leave some traces of it behind in the archaeological record? In anycase, the following facts remain:

� The first flickering of behaviourally modern humanity involving creative sym-bolic thought, scattered as it is initially, is not seen anywhere earlier than at most100,000 years ago, on current evidence.

� Language, being symbolic in the same sense, is therefore not likely to have beenaround much earlier (for complications, see Behar et al., 2008).

� A system exhibiting discrete infinity cannot evolve gradually: the step from one-word or two-word sentences to sentences infinitely long is as large as the stepfrom three- or four-word sentences.

� A modern human culture erupts and stabilizes in a relatively discontinuousfashion in Cro-Magnon Europe around 40,000 years ago.

� Even the Châtelperronian culture, whose authorship remains unclear but whichcould have been created by Neanderthals, remains distinct from the newAurignacian culture in the short period where these co-existed, and is replacedby the latter in an abrupt fashion, as is the previous, Mousterian one, and as arethose of the Homo erectus East Asians (Tattersall, 2008: 106–7).

� After that, there is a phase change in the pace of technological change, with fourmajor cultural traditions evolving in Cro-Magnon Europe between about40,000 and 10,000 years ago.

� The difference that gave the Cro-Magnons an edge over the NeanderthalEuropeans was surely not physical, but must have been largely cognitive (Tat-tersall, 2008: 104).

� The African record for similar modernity visible from 75,000 years ago is scarce,with ‘no continuity nor real accretion of innovations’ after its first occurrence(d’Errico et al., 2009: 48–9).

� For most of the six million years after the split from the chimpanzee, evolution-ary change was mind-bogglingly slow and often stagnating, with nothing evenremotely suggesting either this eruption or showing a momentum building up toit, indicating a lack of relevant biological and cognitive capacities;

� These capacities had stabilized biologically in our species at the very latest by thetime of the Aurignacian revolution, which is also the time of the arrival of ourspecies in Australia (Thorne et al., 1999), where we see no other linguistic orcognitive abilities in humans than elsewhere.


A case therefore remains for biological and cognitive capacities distinctive of differ-ent human species, and ours in particular, even if, importantly, these appear to need areleasing, perhaps cultural factor. The facts are not consistent with a new mode ofcognition evolving largely culturally and simultaneously in different species. Suchevolution also doesn’t significantly continue in our species, given the last point above.In short it looks as if the brain has to be right, though the external conditions do too.If they are not adverse, biology will break through. Not any hominin brain will do,and we cannot explain language evolution through language ‘adapting to the brain’(Christiansen and Chater, 2009): the brain had to change first. The question we willaddress in the rest of this section is whether the releasing factor for our new mode ofcognition to break through was most likely language.

As Tattersall (2008: 103) puts it, ‘the fundamental innovation that we see with theCro-Magnons and their African precursors is that of symbolic thought, and this issomething with which language is virtually synonymous’. A creature with symbolicthought in Tattersall’s sense has stopped orienting its mental processing towardsexternal stimuli, but lives in a mental world whose primitive elements are ‘symbols’that it manipulates instead of the external objects, breaking down the external and re-creating it in their own heads (Tattersall, 2008: 101). Can such a species be differentfrom a linguistic species? What good would a new, symbolic mode of thought be, if itcouldn’t be expressed and (to some relevant extent) shared, given the sad lack oftelepathy in our species? The appropriate mode of expression for such a mode ofthought, however, is language and nothing else: the ‘embodiment’ of thought islanguage, not some other system. A mode of thought inexpressible in languagewould be a mystery to us: we wouldn’t know it exists. In the same way, languagenot used to express thought would not be called by the name of language. We cannot,say, re-define the term ‘language’ so as to only denote speech, since a creature canspeak yet be a parody of a human otherwise. In this sense, the evolution of languageand the evolution of thought are conceptually non-distinct. Evidence for doubledissociations traditionally cited in defenses of Fodorian modularity, if not outrightcircular through the way ‘language’ and ‘thought’ are defined, does not suggest theopposite, as we argue in Chapter 8.

In short, we would not call a form of speech or sign ‘language’, if the speech or signwere not accompanied by thought of the kind that we normally express in language;and similarly, a form of thought that wasn’t expressible in speech or sign, would notbe thought of the same kind, and certainly not be known or recognizable as such byothers, and it could not be shared as a public property, leading to a pace change incultural evolution. It would also not have the properties of objectivity or intersub-jectivity that so centrally marks the propositional contents of the sentences we utter,which can be grasped by two speakers in the exact same way, even if they disagree ontheir truth value (indeed they must agree on the contents, if such disagreement is to


be logically possible). Language, then, unlike speech, forms a unity with thought, andTattersall is right to see them as a package deal.

This conclusion, which we will argue, in the final chapter, to be a necessary one,would make sense of the archaeological record, for if the earliest anatomicallymodern humans had a capacity for the relevant mode of thought, there is currentlylittle evidence, as we just saw, that they could use it: language in the full sense, whichincludes externalization, was both missing and needed, explaining the relative pov-erty of their culture. Put differently: these humans had a mind, of a new andspectacular kind; but they didn’t yet know it; and thus it isn’t manifest in the materialcultures they created. The earliest cave artists knew they had a mind. They hadconcepts of both an outer and an inner world, and of experience as a relation betweenthe two; cave art, atmospheric as it is, seems to address and intentionally re-createsuch an experience. Language, it seems, is needed to know our minds; and it reflectssuch knowledge, as art does. Thought in non-linguistic species, if it exists, is thoughtwith no awareness of it; thought that has no concept of itself, a concept that requires,and is a reflection of, having language.

What we have talked about here is language in the full sense of an externalizedmedium. Unlike Humean impressions and ‘ideas’, concepts are shared, and theyapply, if they apply, independently of whether we take them to apply: objectively.Ideas are formed in response to stimuli that are given online in experience. Likepercepts, they are confined to individual agents’ minds. Concepts constitute a worldof objective (speaker-independent) thoughts or contents, which can be shared, andthe truth value of which is not a matter of what sense impressions reach our sensoryorgans: truth is a matter of thought, not of perception. We could identify conceptswith ideas, and argue that the latter are objective and shared since they are ‘innate’.But it is hard to tell such ‘ideas’ apart from the words that lexicalize them, and theconcepts that we identify as the meanings of these words. If these ideas are to do thejob of such lexicalized concepts, they need to apply to the world in an objectivefashion, so that thinkers take it to be independent of their judgements whether theyapply or not to a given object. When such thinkers become speakers, we can see thatwith language as a shared medium, and an external world shared as well in whichwords are used, a baseline of objective meaning will arise against which judgementscan be made. Without language, it is not clear what will provide the baseline, and ourcontention remains that no creature without language has ideas in the sense ofconcepts that we express in words. We return to this Davidsonian line of reasoning(Davidson, 2004) in the final chapter.

Thought in this sense is not required for survival or adaptive action: ants computepaths of motion and calculators compute numbers, without giving it any thought thatthey do—which would require concepts of what these things are. The modularisttradition aligns language with computational machinery of the mind that operatesreflex-like and unconsciously, separate from thought; yet every act of language use is


a conscious one: we know what we say, when we do. This begins to make sense if weare right that the connection with thought is essential to language, and languagemakes us conscious of the fact that we think, giving us a concept of thought, whichnothing else can.

While the externalization of thought in language is essential on this picture,appropriate vocal tract anatomy, which is widely taken to have long predatedlanguage, is not and can be present where language is not, as in seals or parrots.Evidence for such anatomy in Neanderthals, then, such as a lowered larynx is notevidence for language, pace d’Errico et al. (2009: 44), who infer normal ‘languageabilities’ from evidence of abilities for speech (p. 44), and the genetics of languagefrom the genetics of speech (p. 50), given evidence since Krause et al. (2007) that theFOXP2 critical for normal speech is present in the Neanderthal genome. In whateversense humans before, say, 100,000 years ago were ‘talking’, it seems, this was ‘talk’ of akind that wasn’t, as far as present evidence goes, paired with anything like a modernhuman culture of the kind that we see in Cro-Magnon Europe after 45,000 years ago,and hence not evidence for a mode of thought that is manifest in such a culture.Statements such as the following, which dissociate the species boundary from thelanguage boundary, are rather remarkable in this light:

We now know that genetically we were nearly identical to Neanderthals (only half a dozengenes separate us, mostly associated with skin and bone development). We thus sharedessential features with the common ancestor who goes back at least 400,000 years ( . . . ) therecan be no doubt that pre-modern humans were talking. (Levinson and Evans, 2010: 2742)

Clearly, in whatever way they were talking, they didn’t have the things to tell to oneanother that we know have richly structured the variable life world of a Cro-Magnon.As the evidence base stands, the connection between language and the speciesboundary remains crucial, and even more so if our own species wasn’t quite thespecies it would become, before it invented language as the sole appropriate mediumof expression for a biologically novel mode of cognition.

7.4 Conclusions

The story of language evolution under the Un-Cartesian perspective is not the storyof a Fodorian module, and it’s not the story of a minimalist computational systemsatisfying the interface demands imposed by pre-existing systems of thought. It isthe story of a system that is inseparable from a mode of thought that goes with it:the evolution of language and the evolution of this mode of thought are one andthe same. Language defines the mental phenotype of that species: its kind of languageis its kind of mind. None of this is to question the significance of the new socio-cognitive infrastructure that characterizes our species and the kind of communicativeintentions it may well uniquely have. But what needs to be accounted for is the


kind of mind that it has and what kind of contents it can grasp and intend tocommunicate. Grammar looked at in the Un-Cartesian way provides the cognitiveinfrastructure we need to obtain, with no extra-linguistic system of thought required.Language is thus not peripheral or an afterthought to the species problem, or how weevolved. The story of language is the story of that species, and the theory of itsspeciation, which we have not attempted to develop, should be a linguistic theory.

Our species is not uniform, however, with regards to its genetic endowment forhigher forms of cognition. There is genetic variation in our species, some of which,we will now argue, contains further pointers to the essential unity of language andthought when viewed from an evolutionary point of view. Our linguistic genotype isvariable, but our mind varies along with it.


8

Biolinguistic variation

In Chapter 5 we distinguished ‘cross-linguistic’ from ‘biolinguistic’ variation.Speakers of different human languages do not differ with regards to their linguisticgenotype, which is the subject matter of UG in the twentieth-century sense.A comparative analysis of human languages will thus not compare humans withthe linguistic genotype and without, or compare different such genotypes. In theory,one could attempt to distill a common core from the cross-linguistic variation that weobserve, and then ascribe this core to UG. Yet, capturing the seemingly enormousvariation among languages will require a rich descriptive vocabulary that may notlend itself to distilling such a biological, language-specific core. Nor may we want toascribe aspects of language that such vocabulary captures to UG, which would thenhave to be very richly specified, as it was in the GB era. The minimalist alternative, tokeep this core maximally underspecified, is also problematic, as it will then be hard tocapture the cross-linguistic variation in a principled way. It is a promising perspec-tive, then, to rather focus on variation in the linguistic genotype or UG itself, and inthe mental phenotypes that go along with that. In this chapter, we do just that, andstart by very briefly reviewing the Un-Cartesian hypothesis regarding language andthought against findings from developmental language disorders, questioning thenotion of modularity as applied to these disorders (Section 8.1). We then discusssome evidence about what type of thought can prevail when the linguistic genotype ispresent but there is no or a radically reduced linguistic phenotype (Section 8.2). Nextwe review the notion of thought as applied to beings without the linguistic genotype(Section 8.3). Section 8.4 looks at co-variation between the mode of thought and thatlinguistic genotype, when it is present, with particular regard to the case of schizo-phrenia. The case of Formal Thought Disorder is particularly important for ourenterprise here, as it is arguably characterizable as a ‘logopathy’—a disturbance ofreason—as opposed to a ‘thymopathy’—a disorder of mood, such as depression(Dörr, 2010). The Un-Cartesian hypothesis therefore predicts that this disordershould involve a fragmentation of grammar. We make a case that there is consider-able evidence for this, in Section 8.5. On the basis of this, finally, Section 8.6 makessome suggestions for where to look for grammatical meaning in the brain.

By and large, we believe that the findingswe discuss in this chapter are consistent withthe perspective we have pursued in this book, according towhich the linguistic genotypedefines a mental phenotype as well, rather than varying independently of it. There isconsiderable evidence that where there is variation in UG, thought varies alongside, andthat thought fragments where and to the extent that grammar does, as theUn-Cartesianperspective predicts.

8.1 Questioning double dissociations in developmentallanguage disorders

A traditional modularity-based perspective may superficially contradict the idea thatvariation in the linguistic genotype will be variation in the mental phenotype.However, calling instances of language dissociating from thought by the name of‘language’ has often meant to beg the question of modularity. Pinker (1994: 50–1) tellsthe story of Denyse, who comes across as a ‘loquacious, sophisticated conversational-ist’, telling lively tales in flawless English about receiving statements from her bankaccount in the mail, losing her bank book twice; or about her sister’s wedding. Yet,the stories she so earnestly tells are figments of her imagination. As it happens,Denyse has no bank account, cannot really handle this concept, and her sister isunmarried. So her conceptual system is not like ours, and she doesn’t understandwhen sentences are true or false. This is not a deficit of language only if we excludethese features from what we call ‘language’. Or consider Williams syndrome, a raregenetic disorder found in 1 in 7,500 live births (Str�mme, Bj�rnstad, and Ramstad,2002), which has been one of the classical cases supporting Fodorian modularity(Moscovitch and Umilta, 1990; Pinker, 1994), given a seeming pattern of cognitiveimpairment in conjunction with relatively spared language abilities (Bellugi et al.,1988). Yet again, patients with this syndrome have ‘normal language’, only if wedecide to ignore aspects of language that are not normal, excluding these from whatthe label ‘language’ covers, which begs the question of modularity.

Thus, in Williams syndrome, we could restrict the term ‘language’ to morphosyn-tactic and phonological processes as viewed under the perspective of autonomy, andfind these processes relatively unimpaired. In line with this, individuals with thissyndrome have been described as having ‘perfect’ syntax and morphology (Piatelli-Palmarini, 2001). Yet a recent review (Brock, 2007) finds that:

individuals with Williams syndrome have never been found to perform better than typicallydeveloping controls of comparable mental age on any tests of syntax or morphology, nor isthere any convincing evidence for a dissociation between lexical and rule-based grammar.(Brock, 2007: 119)

It is noteworthy that individuals with Williams syndrome even outperform controlson tests of receptive vocabulary as opposed to grammatical abilities, which ‘are no

8. Biolinguistic variation 263

better than one would predict on the basis of overall cognitive abilities at any stage ofdevelopment’ (Brock, 2007: 116). In turn, spatial language is distinctively impaired,and pragmatics is unusual as well, as is early language development. Semantics is notaddressed in Brock’s review, following the traditional tendency of simply not includ-ing it under the term ‘language’, as if meaning was not regulated grammatically andlocated instead at some level of ‘thought’. As things stand, more evidence is needed todraw firm conclusions from this syndrome, and as of now it does not seem to supporta modular perspective: it does not clearly exemplify a mind with impaired thought orcognition but spared language.

Classical single-case studies like that of Laura (Yamada, 1990), who was 16 at thetime of Yamada’s study, do not yield a different conclusion. Laura as described byYamada exhibits a more severe and pervasive cognitive deficit than Williams syn-drome children, and a discrepancy between her linguistic and non-linguistic cogni-tive abilities was found to be especially marked in the case of ‘syntax’. Yamadaspecifically and convincingly argued that her case study provided good evidenceagainst a Piagetian model of language acquisition and for a modularity-based model,which, in her words, posits a ‘highly evolved, specialist human ability’ at the heart ofthe language-acquisition process, as opposed to ‘cognitive, social-interactive, andperceptual’ capacities (Yamada, 1990: 6).

Laura’s language is described to be productive and structurally complex, involvingcomplex patterns such as subordination, passivization, and complementation. At thesame time, she had conceptual difficulties, and her use of ‘syntactically and seman-tically well formed utterances’ often turned out to be ‘factually incorrect’, indicating adifficulty with what Yamada describes as ‘semantic knowledge’. Thus, when askedabout who the president was, she would name a president, or asked when an eventtook place she would name a point in time (Yamada, 1990: 62; see also 67). What thismay suggest is that she could sort out lexical semantic categories, while being unableto encode propositional claims in grammar. To the extent that reference or under-standing topics are also regulated by grammatical principles, her difficulties dosuggest a difficulty with grammatical meaning in our sense. Describing her ‘syntax’as relatively impaired thus raises an issue in the present dialectical context, when it isclear that part of understanding sentential grammar is to understand when (and inpart also whether) particular sentences are true or false, or when something is a topicof which something else is a predicate. Yamada’s case against pregenerative concep-tions of language is well made, and her defence of modularity should be seen in thishistorical context. Yet again, Laura’s cognitive impairments only fail to show inlanguage if we do not include under ‘language’ those aspects of it that reflect thecognitive impairment in question. It does not seem implausible to conclude thatLaura’s language is relatively normal insofar as it connects with normal thoughts thatwe would express in language, and that it is abnormal insofar as it does not.

As for dissociation in the opposite direction, Specific Language Impairment (SLI)is found in about 7% of 5-year-olds (Tomblin et al., 1997) and has a likely genetic


basis. Again, it initially seemed to present a seemingly clear case of modularity: adeficit specific to the language faculty, but not other cognitive domains. But eventoday, SLI remains defined so as to make it an instance of modularity: it is definednegatively, or by exclusion: SLI comprises impairment of language production and/orcomprehension, in the absence of a diagnosis of autism, hearing impairments, ageneral developmental delay, and neurological disorders such as seizures or perinatalbleeds (see e.g. Schwartz, 2009). In seeming contradiction to his own definition, Schwartz(2009: 3) notes that ‘SLI may occur at the same rate in other populations of children withlanguage disorders. If this is true, subgroups of children with autism, children withgenetic syndromes, and children with hearing impairments may have SLI’. Hence SLImay not be an impairment specific to the domain of language after all.

Much research on the range of language impairments in SLI has focused onmorpho-syntax and finite verb morphology in particular, where deficits are distinctlyvisible and highly characteristic. Yet, the question of whether these affect grammar orprimarily its externalization in overt morphophonology is an open question. Eisen-beiss, Bartke, and Clahsen (2006), in a comparative study of children with SLI andtypically developing (TD) children matched for mean length of utterances, reporthigh accuracy scores for structural Case marking in both groups, as well as over-generalization of structural Cases where the adult language would require lexical casemarking (e.g. lexical Datives). This suggests sensitivity of both TD and SLI childrento abstract, structure-based regularities, and is evidence against broad syntactic, asopposed to morphological, deficits in the latter group. Investigation of linguisticmeaning in SLI seems to have focused, as is often the case, on word meaning, leavingeverything above the word level to ‘morphosyntax’ without regard to the fact thatmeaning at a grammatical level is distinctly different from meaning at a lexical level,and syntax has an organizational function with regards to meaning as well. Ifgrammatical meaning is unimpaired, this might suggest that deficits in SLI are notso much deficits in grammar or language proper as deficits in its externalization. ‘SLI’would then be something of a misnomer.

Further support for this perspective comes from evidence from a recent study ofDonlan, Cowan, Newton, and Lloyd (2007), who explored the performance ofchildren with SLI and age- and language-matched controls on mathematical tasks.While predictably underperforming in tasks that were linguistically loaded, as well asin tasks comparing number magnitudes that did make lesser demands on speechperception, comprehension, and production, the children in the SLI group did notperform differently from their typically developing peers on a test of abstractmathematical understanding that required invoking principles of commutativityand non-commutativity, respectively, across addition and subtraction operations.Algebra, however, involves principles that are not different, if not, in part, indistin-guishable, from those invoked in contemporary minimalist syntax, for example thehierarchical and recursive formation of sets leading to discrete infinity in both


domains. Indeed, traditionally, language competence has been a prime illustrationfor what has been dubbed our ‘algebraic’ mind (Marcus, 2001), indicating that ourlinguistic and mathematical abilities may involve a common computational sub-strate, with arithmetic, whose ‘lexicon’ consists of numbers, ‘abstracted’ out from thericher and more embodied structures of language. Data showing that arithmetic andlinguistic processing seem to rely on partially common neural substrates (Baldo andDronkers, 2007) also support the idea that arithmetic and language, in part, are non-distinct as cognitive domains. On this line of reasoning, the data above, together withthe general pattern of an impairment primarily of inflectional morphology in SLI,again suggest that it may not be language as such, as a cognitive-computationalsystem, which is impaired in SLI, but rather its mapping to the sensory-motorinterface: its externalization in a morphophonological surface. Once again, thecognitive tasks in the above study do not involve ‘language’, only if we excludefrom the domain of language its abstract computational principles.

There is other evidence, however, as noted, that the language phenotypes ofindividuals with SLI and with autism can overlap, and that cognitive phenotypes inthese two disorders may do, too, though the data remain conflicting (Tager-Flusberg,2004; Taylor, Maybery, and Whitehouse, 2012). If evidence that individuals with SLIexhibit cognitive characteristics reminiscent of autism was corroborated, SLI wouldbe connected to a ‘cognitive’ phenotype as much as a linguistic one. There is alsostrong evidence, surveyed in Schwartz (2009), that children with SLI have problemswith perception, with working memory, and with executive functions. This does notsuggest a deficit specific to language.

Overall, then, SLI, too, remains an unclear case for modularity, and it gives littlesupport for the view that ‘thought’may be preserved when ‘language’ is not. Thought,we maintain, is preserved to the extent that language is (and to the extent that itdoesn’t depend on language). Again, for any such view to be supported, we need toavoid circularly excluding from ‘language’ what are core properties found operativein its computational system, which we have strong independent reason to separatefrom the principles governing its externalization in a physical medium (morpho-phonology). Externalization, though a crucial part of language, as we contend (seealso next chapter), may be impaired when ‘language’ is not (or less so). We will nowreview cases where externalization is either missing altogether or severely impaired.

8.2 Thought in genetically normal language-lessor language-impaired adults

Adults that have developed no language at all, in the absence of any genetic abnor-mality leading to a developmental language disorder, have by definition normalspecifications for UG—the linguistic genotype. A famous case is Ildefonso, the hero


of Susan Schaller’s deeply insightful book ‘A man without words’ (Schaller, 2012, firstpublished 1991).1 This man was 27-years-old at the time Schaller met him in alanguage class for deaf adults: an intelligent man who, as Schaller makes veryplausible, lacked the idea of what language or words were. The book describes thejourney he undertook to ‘break the code’, the first of which was to understand thatthere was a code: that things had names, which meant something. After an arduousjourney, Ildefonso eventually did develop a sign language, yet one that, the booksuggests, remained different and more basic, though no details are provided. Raisedin poverty-stricken circumstances in Southern Mexico, he had had no exposure tosign language, and time spent with a deaf sibling brother appears not to have beensufficient for the creation of a home sign system. Particularly noteworthy are thepersistent difficulties that Ildefonso would come to have with grammar, an unfathom-able mystery when the mystery of words has only just revealed itself. Even parts ofspeech distinctions proved extraordinarily hard to teach, particularly verbs, as didcombinations of them (Schaller, 2012: 63, 72), and the related insight that words do notindiscriminately contain both the thing named and everything attached to it (p. 97).

It is very clear from Schaller’s nuanced and personal description that this man,even if his initial attempts to communicate reminded her of a ‘mimicking chimpan-zee’, had a sense of self, and a human nature: ‘I knew he had human intelligence, ahuman personality, and an awareness of himself as human’ (Schaller, 2012: 103). Onething that struck her most was ‘his strong desire to relate to others, to communicateeven without tools’ (p. 157). She also perceived him as a moral agent (p. 192), andcertainly as one with an ‘inner life’ (p. 105), though he ‘knew next to nothing aboutthe world’ (p. 110), and maybe even lacked ‘beliefs, ideas, and assumptions’ (p. 105),collecting information primarily through the record of his senses (p. 92). Though hewas by no means a tabula rasa, that is, ‘his mind was empty of all information thatneeds language as its conduit’ (p. 74). The question, of course—ours and very muchSchaller’s as well—is how much information that is. Throughout the book, thecentral question haunting Schaller was ‘what his thinking had been like withoutlanguage’. Schaller, it appears from reading this book, never found out: somehow, thematter remained shrouded in mystery. Maybe, where words are missing in a mentallife, it may prove hard to describe such mental life, once words are finally there.

Where does this striking case leave us? Much of Schaller’s book supports a case thatthe intrusion of externalized, public language into the mind is a seismic shift, remould-ing much of our mental life and thought, consistent with the present perspective,notwithstanding a rich mental life based on experience and featuring practicalreasoning independently of language. It also underlines that this was not a humanbeing using language in the privacy of his own mind, with externalization being an

1 We thank Paul Elbourne, who brought this remarkable case to our attention (and raised it as apotential objection to our programme).


afterthought that didn’t change what was going on inside: a linguistic being, whichIldefonso was in one sense clearly not, requires the use of language as a sharedcommunicative medium. At the same time, he was a normal linguistic being genetic-ally, and whatever thinking did take place in his solitary mind prior to grasping theidea of language was that of a being with a language faculty that starts operating andmaturing as we are born, and indeed earlier. We don’t know the degree to which itdid in Ildefonso’s case, and how much of the idea of a word and of sentences haddawned in him. Overall, the case shows little about the power of genuinely non-linguistic thought or its independence from language, beyond what we have alreadyassumed: that perception and practical reasoning does not depend on language.

The same, with qualifications, is true for another population of humans whoequally have the linguistic genotype, but who have an acquired language disorder,often as the result of a stroke: individuals suffering from Broca’s (‘agrammatic’),Wernicke’s (‘fluent’), or ‘global’ aphasia (in which all linguistic abilities can beobliterated).2 Considerable capacities for thought and practical reasoning can bemaintained in profound aphasic impairment, indicating a seeming autonomy ofreasoning from language within an established cognitive architecture, allowingreasoning to be maintained when language is inaccessible—at least ‘language’ involv-ing the principles and elements of morphophonology. The qualification notedabove—that this happens when and after a linguistic mind has fully evolved and hasbeen operative for much of a lifetime—is crucial, of course: none of this is evidence thatsuch thought capacities can exist when language has never got into place. Nonetheless,we can ask: does aphasia show that language can be a mere ‘scaffold’ in development,which is tossed away once the cognitive architecture is in place?

The thoughts of patients with severe aphasia at least appear rather normal: theydrive cars, make elaborate travel arrangements, can plan their finances and travels,hypothesize, and develop elaborate strategies to circumvent their communicationdifficulty. And yet, compared with SLI, where language, even if delayed, is still inplace, this is a case that can result in the radical excision of linguistic performance.Since, in SLI, a basic system of linguistic competence is maintained that can supportabstract thought, our earlier question can now be raised about severe aphasia, andbecomes more stark: if and where cognitive performance is still intact, is that becauserelevant aspects of language—though not of course morphophonological process-ing—have remained in place? At least initially, the answer now would seem to bemuch less likely, not least because the patients in question often have large left-hemisphere lesions covering the most canonical language regions in the brain.

In a recent experiment, Willems et al. (2011) tested how patients with severe aphasia,given the opportunity to convey their communicative intentions non-verbally, perform

2 We are very grateful to Rosemary Varley for conversations on issues of the following section.


on a non-linguistic communication game in which the task was to convey the positionand orientation of a geometrical shape on a grid to a naive receiver of the message. Theexpectation was that a patient whose grasp of meaning and whose communicativeintentions and general problem-solving capacities were in place, would perform wellon the task of conveying them. The same game was also played with the patients in thereceiving role, which required them to figure out the communicative intentions ofthe sender of the messages. Patients performed well on this task, clearly suggesting thatthe problem of severe aphasia is not one of communication per se, but with language.This is as expected, if aphasia is a disorder of language, not of communication.Uncontroversially, communication is not the same as language: all species, includingour own, communicate without language (though humans, in addition, communicatewith it). Just as communication does not depend on language, solving a communi-cation problem—conveying messages and understanding the content of messages—does not, either.

What Willems et al.’s experiment does not address is the question of whetheragrammatical aphasics have communicative intentions whose content requires asentence to express. If they could have communicative intentions with contents ofa kind that uniquely require a sentence to express them, such intentions and contentswould prove to be independent of whether or not there is a shared linguistic mediumin which they can be conveyed. There are two possibilities, in that case: the internalgenerative system powering or enabling the genesis of such intentions and contents isrelevantly like language in an internalist sense, which then must be still sufficientlyintact to generate them internally, even if they cannot be externalized (mapped to thesensory-motor interface); or the system is a different one. In the latter case the Un-Cartesian hypothesis would face a serious objection: thought is independent oflanguage, even in an internalist, generative sense of ‘language’. In the former case,the problem that patients with severe aphasia face is not one of language but merelyone of externalization: it’s a communication problem that their linguistic mindscannot solve any more.

We don’t know how to decide between these options, even in principle. Sincethoughts in severe aphasia cannot be externalized in language, and some thoughtscannot be expressed in anything other than a sentence, we simply don’t know how tofind out whether there are such thoughts in severe aphasia. The thoughts we can findevidence for through non-linguistic forms of communication will necessarily not beof the right kind. Some evidence nonetheless supports the idea, exactly as in the caseof SLI, that insofar as certain abstract forms of thought are still intact, relevantaspects of linguistic organization are, too.

Varley and Siegal (2000), Varley, Siegal, and Want (2001), and Varley, Klessinger,Romanowski, and Siegal (2005) tested the ability of patients with severe and long-lasting language impairments on causal reasoning, ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM), andmathematical tasks. Participants proved capable of generating causes of both possible


and improbable events; they appeared to reason about false beliefs; and they success-fully completed calculation tasks such as 59 � 13; 13 � 59; 60 � 12; 12 � 60, as well astasks requiring sensitivity to structural features of mathematical expressions such asbrackets and embedding (e.g. (5 x (6 + 8))), and the notion of infinity (e.g. realnumbers between 1 and 2). One patient, SA, in particular, had severe impairments ongrammar comprehension and production, and on word production, despite relativelyspared word comprehension. He solved a switched container task in which he wasshown containers with unexpected contents—for example a pill bottle containingbuttons. In the test phase, he learned to associate cue cards with judgements that anaive person would make about the contents of a given box: cards with ‘X thinks’written on them for judgements about belief, cards with ‘really’ for judgements aboutreality. The suggestion was that when the box contained unexpected items, personX would have a false belief. In the test phase, cue cards were presented together withquestions like: ‘What does X think is in the [container]?’ However, all that this taskseems to require is sensitivity to statistical regularities between the appearance of abox and its contents. Given the relatively intact word comprehension, it would thennot be so surprising if some of the lexical contents of the words involved would berepresented as well. But even so, this experiment seems to show nothing beyond whatwe would expect: that infants with immature grammar or adult patients withimpaired grammar that are otherwise normal will not fail tests that do not requiresophisticated grammar. Concepts like ‘belief ’ may be involved, but that lexicalsemantics is independent of grammar and that, to a significant extent, reasoning isso as well, is something we have already assumed. As is well known, 3-year-olds solvetasks of telling where an agent will look for some object first when that object hasbeen displaced in his absence (Siegal and Beattie, 1991). Other tasks in the ToMparadigm are solved even at 15 months, when more automatic/implicit reasoningtasks are posed (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005). So to the extent that we are willing todescribe all of these tasks as ‘reasoning about beliefs’, it is already known that suchreasoning does not require mature language.

At the same time, it is also widely agreed that while there are perhaps someprecursors to ToM in non-humans including chimpanzees and birds, and in pre-linguistic infants, full-blown ToM is unique to humans (Cheney and Seyfarth, 1998;Tomasello, 2008; Penn et al., 2008) and developmentally matures only together withfull access to the language faculty (deVilliers and Pyers, 2002; deVilliers, 2007).Astington and Jenkins (1999), in a longitudinal study of 3-year-olds conducted overseven months, found that scores on first-order false belief tasks were highly correl-ated with scores on language tests, with earlier language scores longitudinally pre-dicting later ToM scores, and syntactic subtests as the better predictors as comparedwith lexical-semantic abilities. Confirming and expanding these findings concerninga close link between ToM abilities and grammar, a later study (Paynter and Peterson,2010) showed for all three subgroups of their study, namely normally developing


preschool children, children with Asperger’s, and children with high functioningautism, that syntactic skills (as assessed with Bishop’s TROG-2 measure, see Bishop,2003) ‘contributed uniquely and significantly over and above both vocabulary (lexicallanguage skill) and other non-linguistic ToM correlates to the predicting of individ-ual variability in children’s false belief understanding’ (Bishop, 2003: 383). Autismmoreover is linked to a much more serious delay in the growth of ToM thanAsperger’s, with delayed language in autism as the most likely explanatory factorbehind delayed ToM. Of particular significance with regard to predicting ToMdeficits is the understanding of the grammar of clausal complementation, i.e. recursion(Lind and Bowler, 2009). In adults, finally, there is evidence that performance on anon-verbal ToM task is disrupted in adults who satisfy a simultaneous task demand forverbal shadowing, which ties up their language faculty (Newton and de Villiers, 2007).

It is very unclear whether the data from severe aphasia cast doubt on the conclu-sion that full ToM and language form a unity. So far they do not, and in fact theprofile of accomplishment of patients appears to exactly mirror the available linguis-tic resources, co-varying with them: tasks are mastered to the degree that thegrammatical requirements they impose are known to be independently masteredby the patients. A recent study (Apperly et al., 2006) investigates patient PH whosuffers from severe aphasia with a linguistic performance comparable to that of thetwo patients SA and MR tested in the studies conducted by Varley and Siegal (2000)and Varley, Siegal, and Want (2001). It mirrored the pattern observed among 3- to 4-year-old children who still fail standard false belief tasks (Smith et al., 2003). PHsolved non-verbal first-order as well as second-order false belief tasks (involving falsebeliefs about false beliefs). The latter, in their verbal versions, include grammaticallycomplex stories and questions, making failure on the task hard to assess in terms ofwhether it reflects a failure of language, executive function, or ToM (Perner andWimmer, 1985). In the non-verbal version designed for this study, PH watched videosinvolving three participants, one of which (‘the pointer’) is understood to have thetask of pointing to a box in which an object is hidden. Another participant, ‘thehelper’, was understood to assist in this task by placing a marker on one of the boxes.A third person, ‘the man’, shows the helper where the object is located. Neither PHnor the pointer knows in which box the object is hidden. Then the helper pretends toleave the room, while in fact staying in it, though neither the pointer nor the man seethis. The man swaps the boxes. The helper pretends to re-enter the room. PH needsto predict: Where will the pointer point? PH solved this task, which the authorsdescribe as one of ‘second-order false belief ’: for the pointer will have a false belief tothe effect that the helper has a false belief, and thus she will point to the box oppositeto the one to which the helper will point.

But in fact, the task need not be described involving the vocabulary of belief andtruth at all. It is enough to have seen what others have seen or not seen, to have kepttrack of this, and to engage in practical reasoning with regard to how agents behave in


light of what they have seen. This is a capacity so ancient in evolutionary terms (Hareet al., 2001) that it doesn’t seem to tell us much in the present context. Specifically, thealgorithm could be: <opposite box, if helper has seen the swapping, but pointer hasn’tseen the helper see this>.3 From this perspective it is interesting that PH performed atchance in versions of false belief that did require generating the propositionalmeaning of sentences like ‘He thinks there is a red ball in the box but really thereis a blue ball in the box’, which require a grasp of the syntax of clausal complementa-tion, and to then assess which of two pictures was truly described by such a sentence(Apperly et al., 2006: 344). On the other hand, PH did master verbal false belief taskswhose grammar was simpler, and such that the ‘meaning of the false belief questionwas not critically dependent upon its grammar’ (Apperly et al., 2008: 348). Thisillustrates that performance on ToM tasks where grammar is required aligns withgrammatical abilities, as expected.

The appropriate conclusion therefore seems to be: False belief tasks that requirethe processing of language and propositional meaning cannot be solved when thelanguage faculty is not available; tasks are solved to the degree that they impose thisrequirement and the relevant demand can be met through a residual grammarcapacity that is still in place. PH’s performance on ToM then exactly matches whatwe know and could have predicted from his linguistic phenotype, together with theintactness of his non-linguistic cognition. Overall, no evidence from severe aphasiareviewed above therefore supports a Cartesian conclusion. Apperly et al.’s (2008: 346)conclusion that ‘belief reasoning seems to be possible in the absence of the specificgrammatical construction—embedded complement clauses—that is used for repre-senting beliefs in language’ is correct, but what it means is what we should haveassumed before: that belief reasoning remains possible only insofar as no suchrequirements on grammar are made, and that it becomes impossible otherwise.

In fact, the evidence positively supports the view that insofar as systematic thoughtabout beliefs, under this description, takes place, a lexical concept of belief is needed,jointly with a specific grammar that generates propositions from such lexical con-cepts by phase. Eventually, this grammar will produce bi- or multiple-phasal struc-tures, in which two or more phases express a propositional content but only thehighest phase is evaluated for reference/truth, reflecting the viewpoint of the ‘I’ thatgenerates the thought in question. On this view, the theoretical construct of ‘ToM’,originally designed in the age of modularity as one ‘module’ among others, appears tobe simply unneeded and is misleading: to achieve full ToM, all that a super-engineerwould have needed to do is to start from the lexicalization of certain concepts, aprocess that is independently needed, and a capacity to generate phasally structured,recursive hierarchies in which embedded phases will ipso facto express propositional

3 Penn et al. (2008: 119–20) suggest a similar deflationary analysis for cases where both chimps andscrub-jays have been said to ‘engage in ToM’ (cf. Hare et al., 2001; Dally et al., 2006).


thought contents that are the syntactic arguments of verbs lexically denoting mentalevents. A creature of this sort, with lexicalized concepts and grammar and a capacityto theorize, will ipso facto have full-blown ToM, which will simply fall out from thesecapacities, assuming an otherwise normal cognitive architecture. Below the level ofsuch full ToM, of course, are then lesser abilities that are usually lumped togetherunder the term ‘ToM’ but are completely different and may not involve thought at all:‘mentalizing’ in this broad sense, in particular, can simply include the monitoringand reading of intentions and states of information of agents in strategic interactions,taking into account what they have seen and therefore ‘know’. Such monitoring maybe permanently ‘online’ in social interaction, involving the ceaseless scanning of thesocial environment and extraction of information on who wants and knows what(Bruene, 2005). In the present frame of things it is a form of social reasoning andcognition that is not human-specific and of no direct interest to the different questionwe are asking here. If decomposed into this ability, on the one hand, and anindependent capacity to conceptualize, grammaticalize and theorize, on the other,ToM becomes redundant as an independent theoretical construct. In its full form, wecould say, it does not merely depend on language, as Newton and de Villiers (2007)claimed: it is language.

Suppose, however, if only purely for the sake of the argument, that there was ahypothetical patient XY with severe aphasia who could solve ToM tasks equivalent toones for which normal grammar comprehension is required (we do not know of sucha case, or even what it might look like). In that case, such patients, with a brainmanifestly lesioned in what are taken to be ‘language’ regions, would solve tasks intheir ‘thought’ without the assistance of language. It could then be proposed thatlanguage merely ‘scaffolds’ mental development and can, later in life, leave highermental functions (‘thought’) in place when language is lesioned. Since XY’sreasoning, cannot, by assumption, have taken place in language, his reasoning willhave taken place in another language-like medium, ‘mentalese’, which by assumptionis a kind of language, and hence has a grammar, yet is not governed by the principlesof language (UG). This would then seem to establish a Cartesian conclusion withregards to the language-thought divide—except that it would have presupposed thisconclusion, which follows only if we begin from a thought-language distinction, withlanguage as a module distinct from thought, and exclude from what we denominateas ‘language’ the kinds of meanings and structures that we will take to be processed inthe posited mental language of ‘thought’. But it is not clear which independentevidence supports the view that language in the ordinary sense and in normalminds does not in fact compute such meanings and structures, so that they wouldinstead have to be included under the category of ‘thought’. We would, that is,effectively define language as reducing to what appears on its sensory-motor inter-face, that is in morphophonology, thereby excluding from it aspects of grammar thatyield the meanings in question. If so, where morphophonology has broken down,


only thought will be left—the Cartesian conclusion. But this conclusion is viciouslycircular in the face of positive evidence that grammar is the crucial generator of themeanings in question, and no other such generator is known.

The more appropriate conclusion, therefore, in the hypothetical case in question,would be that XY has core computations of grammar still intact, even if the mappingto the interfaces is lesioned. This conclusion would be reinforced by independentreasons from standard linguistic theory that we need to distinguish grammar frommorphophonology anyhow. There is some other evidence, however, that we will not,in fact, likely encounter patient XY in reality. A long-standing hypothesis in aphasiaresearch is the Tense Underspecification Hypothesis (Wenzlaff and Clahsen, 2004;2005), according to which a specific hierarchical layer in the Inflectional Phrase (IP)cannot be processed in agrammatic aphasia: finite Tense, performance on which issignificantly more impaired than on Mood (� Realis). Impairments on grammar-mediated temporal reference, rather than (subjunctive) mood or agreement marking,are seen in both production and comprehension, for both present and past tense, inboth regular and irregular verb forms, and may have analogues in pronominalreference. This suggests that they affect grammatical computations proper, ratherthan merely their morphophonological expression (Clahsen and Ali, 2009). Theproblem of agrammatism, this evidence therefore suggests, is not merely one ofexternalization: it affects how semantic information is grammatically encoded inthe brain—even if, as we have seen, this leaves much thought intact.

If nonetheless we did find a patient like XY, the alternative to the scaffolding viewwould again be to say that precisely insofar as some mentalizing function requiresstructures of a kind that UG generates, the mind in question is still not de-gramma-ticalized—even if the mapping to the sensory-motor interface is severely impaired. Thisposition would not face the problem that the scaffolding view faces: to provide evidencethat the kind of representations involved in reasoning in mentalese are conceptuallydistinct from ones we know to exist in language. The dialectic is similar with regard tothe mathematical problems that the patients studied in Varley et al. (2005) solved:structure-building in arithmetic, if recursive, minimally involves Merge and hierarchy.Good performance on the arithmetical tasks is therefore evidence that these aspects ofgrammar—which are, uncontroversially, core elements of the computational system ofgrammar (‘narrow syntax’) as described today—are still in place.

Overall, then, the case of aphasia provides again no clear evidence against theUn-Cartesian programme; and in some ways, it supports it. So far, we have notencountered serious evidence that thought dissociates from language. The picture,rather, that emerges in this section, is that language emerges robustly in this species,and thought along with it. Neither the developmental disorders we have looked at,nor the genetically normal adults without language or with language impairmentssupport the view that thought can emerge without language: rather, the formerco-varies with the latter, as slight genetic abnormalities disturb its normal course


of development, or adverse circumstances prevent it from governing thought innormal ways.

8.3 Thought without the linguistic genotype

At the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned the position of Fodor and Pylyshyn,who, back in 1988, could still confidently assert that non-verbal cognition was ofessentially the same type as verbal cognition, instantiating ‘physical symbol systems’with ‘mental representations’ that are compositional and exhibit constituent struc-ture, allowing systematicity and productivity in thought and reasoning even inde-pendent of language. If so, a ‘Computational-Representational Theory of Mind’(CRTM) (Rey, 2003) can be applied to both human and non-human organisms,and linguistic cognition will simply be an instance of a cognitive architecturedescribed in the generic terms of the CRTM. Our restrictive goal in this shortsubsection is to provide our evidence that no such thing can be assumed, partiallyrehearsing arguments already put forward in Chapter 2. The central intuition ofFodor (1975; 2008), that our mind is not an associative engine but a computationalone, is correct: to explain its workings, we need to appeal to the part-whole organiza-tion of mental representations. But this says essentially nothing about what makes alinguistic mind distinctive and distinguishes it from an insect mind, where the CRTMis equally required to make sense of complex computations mediating adaptivebehaviour (Gallistel and King, 2009).

A linguistic mind in our sense is not a computer but a concept user, where thenotion of concept is that of a lexeme and contrasts with that of ‘percept’: it issomething that can apply or fail to apply to an object. In the former case, we say itwill apply truly: the proposition saying that it holds, as a property, of that object, willbe true. In the latter case, we say that the concept user in question has made amistake. Davidson (2004) argues that, without the possibility of a mistake in thissense, there is no such thing as a concept. We think the point is well made. It isdifficult to find the same notion of a possibility of mistake in the realm of perception.There can be a form of misrepresentation there, but by and large, mental representa-tions in this domain are still stimulus-controlled (even if not stimulus-determined, asnoted in Chapter 2). The same applies in the realm of ‘core cognition’ (Carey, 2009;Spelke, 2003), where representations, while of considerable abstraction, are stillcontinuous with perception, being dedicated input-analysers in specific domains,and probably, as Carey suggests, iconic in their format.

Iconic representations do not clearly allow for intensionality, a hallmark of bothconception and thought: it arises when the question of what thought is being thoughtby an agent is systematically sensitive to what concept, with its descriptive content, isinvolved in it. This is always true of linguistic representations, all of which can switchfrom truth to falsehood as lexical concepts involved in them are exchanged for others


that apply to the same objects. My thought that three giraffes are being depicted is notthe same as my thought that three of my favourite animals are depicted, even ifgiraffes are my favourite animals. Thinking, or saying, the one thing and the other arenot the same.4 But a picture of three giraffes, as Fodor (2008) points out, cannot inthis case help being a picture of three of my favourite animals.

Do we find thought that allows for mistakes and intensionality in organisms thatlack the linguistic genotype? Organisms, Davidson (2004) notes, make adaptivediscriminations of environmental features: the sunflower orients towards the sun,the earthworm towards food, the bee computes values of algebraic variables denotingangles or the solar ephemeris. Adaptive behaviours based on discriminations ofenvironmental features and computations over environmental variables need notapply any concept of the things discriminated, and they do not require any insight onthe part of the plant or animal into what they are doing. The earthworm may takepoison for food and die, yet we lose a distinction by assimilating this to the making ofa mistake. Death doesn’t prove us wrong, and survival doesn’t prove us right(notwithstanding possible correlations between the two in the human case).

In one of Davidson’s examples (2004:141), an octopod is trained to distinguishbetween two letters, ‘V’ and ‘W’, leading it to be disposed to react to them differen-tially. What if it reacts to ‘V’ as we have trained it to react to a ‘W’? Has it made amistake? Has it misapplied a concept, or indeed our concept of a ‘V’? Suppose weanswer that what provides such evidence is that the animal does not act in accord-ance with our idea of what makes the two stimuli similar. But then, this idea is ouridea. The animal’s action is then still perfectly consistent with it acting according tosome rule—and indeed, whatever it does could be consistent with a rule, thoughpossibly not ours. And so we have no basis to conclude that the creature followed arule at all: If behaviour is always consistent with some rule, there is no rule orconcept. There is a rule or concept if there is evidence that a creature understandsthe idea of an error: that, objectively, a given concept can fail to apply. There isevidence that every normal human does so, or that we possess the concept of truththat is required for it. The evidence is a specific pattern of social and communicativeinteraction: our concept of what some object is, is connected to a range of otherconcepts, which are parts of beliefs. Many of these must be true, if doubt about someof them is to make sense. We assume this when we interpret other human beings: weassume that, largely, our beliefs are true, and those of the agents are, too. Assumingthis, we can figure out what they say and belief in a particular case.

This answer to why we grant concepts to ourselves and not the octopod depends onour sharing a conceptual framework mediated by linguistic communication, which inturns depends on what we are calling a grammatical mind. Evidence that we share

4 Even if this is denied by some philosophers, the very fact that there is disagreement on how to treatsuch cases in formal semantics shows that an intensionality effect exists.


causal encounters with external objects is not enough. We share these with theoctopod. The content of a perceptual belief such as that a lion is present, as Davidson(2004: 142) argues against Burge (1986), is not the usual or normal cause of that belief.His reason for this claim is that if past correlations of lions with stimuli similar to thepresent stimulus were the cause of my perceptual belief, then an infinity of othercauses would equally qualify as causes of my belief: for example, past stimulations ofmy sense organs, or past photons streaming from lion to eye. But then, if the causaltheory held, my belief would be about stimulations or photons, when in fact it isabout lions. The content would co-vary with endless other causal explanations wecould give; and hence the content is not explained causally. The causes are too many,but our concept, that of a lion, is only one.

What our beliefs are beliefs about, rather, is what our concepts determine.A shared concept will narrow down the possible causes to only one. What countsas ‘similar stimuli’ or ‘similar responses’ is determined by how we think of the world:our concepts determine classes of possible objects of reference. ‘When it is conceptu-alization that is to be explained’, Davidson points out, ‘it begs the question to projectour classifications onto nature’ (2004: 142). Concepts, in order to play this role, mustbe able to apply or not to apply, which is to say that they are parts of propositions thatwe assume can be true or false, forming the content of judgements. Judgements thatsomething is green, or a ‘V’, thus have external promptings, but they are notexplained by what is externally or causally there.

The truth of propositions is distinct from beliefs, and can be taken to be distinctonly if a concept of belief is available. As noted earlier in relation to ToM, evidencethat chimpanzees track what others see and want (Hare et al., 2001), is not evidencethat they have such a concept. For they need not embed any such concept inpropositions that they judge to be true or false, when practical strategies for adaptiveresponses in competitive interactions that do not involve any such concept, suffice(Penn et al., 2008). Adaptive behaviours in non-linguistic beings may be symbolic inthe sense that algebraic variables are represented that take a potential infinity ofvalues, entering formal computations (Gallistel and King, 2009). Some such symbolsmay also represent particulars, and hence are functionally discrete, giving rise to aform of ‘compositionality’, as when scrub-jays remember where they have hiddenwhat and when, for thousands of independent cache sites (Clayton et al., 2003). Eachsuch system of mental representation comes with a ‘syntax’, perhaps one for eachspecies (cf. Bloom, 2000: 517: ‘every species gets the syntax it deserves’). But nonecomes with grammar, in our sense: a system converting lexicalized concepts into actsof reference that have a systematic and objective formal ontology, involving theconcept of truth. Syntax, therefore, in the generic sense of the CRTM, is not thepoint. Grammar, if we are right, may be.

Davidson’s notorious verdict (1982) that non-human animals do not think mayseem harsh, and it has seemed circular to some, in the sense that it first defines


thought as propositional, and propositionality as sentential, and then concludes thatnon-linguistic beings do not think and are not rational. But this would be circularonly if no argument is given that propositionality depends on language. But there issuch an argument, and hence the step from propositionality to human uniqueness isnot definitional. The argument is that thinking requires knowing that thoughts canbe false. Knowing that, in turn, requires knowledge that truth is not belief, and henceconcepts of these. Neither perception, nor cooperation, nor causation are a basis forthese. Language, arguably, is.

Also the step from the existence of thought to its propositionality is not defin-itional: rather, it is rationally indubitable that we think. Thinking, the argument thenproposes, does not come in isolation, but is only what it is in the context of otherattitudes such as beliefs and desires. These must form a rational pattern, for thelogical consequences of a particular belief, e.g., are part of what makes it the belief inquestion. Hence, if the beliefs would be radically irrational or illogical, they wouldn’tbe the beliefs in question. All of these attitudes furthermore share an element: aparticular kind of content, to which all of such attitudes are directed (this does notimply that this is some kind of ‘entity’ to which they are directed). A crucial propertyof such content is that it can be true or false, independently of what we believe it is.Grasping such contents thus requires possession of a concept of truth. Thought thusturns out to be both logical and propositional, in this sense.

Could there be animals with a non-propositional kind of thought? Imagery, say? Oremotions? But what would it be for there to be such thoughts? It would, obviously, befor us to be able to interpret these animals as having such thoughts. Interpretationwould happen according to the constraints under which all interpretation takes place,and all interpretation, arguably, is such that it maximizes rationality and agreement,against a background of shared concepts and beliefs: we wouldn’t ever get far, ininterpreting others, by assuming that they do not take the same things to be true orfalse, that they are systematically irrational, or that they have radically differentconcepts. There is no room, here, for an alternative conceptual scheme, as concepts,where they are ascribed, will come out as ours. Thoughts, therefore, where they exist,must be thoughts we could have.

Nothing, here, rules out that, one day, we might be able to interpret dogs ormissiles or computers as thinking. It is just that, so far, we are not. There might bethinking dogs, one day. But a thinking dog, like Brian in Family Guy, would be atalking one: this is the argument. Language is a measure of mind, and none other is sofar known.5

5 Penn et al. (2008), providing a comprehensive discussion of comparative cognition research overseveral decades, do claim to compare human and non-human minds, assuming there to be such things asthe latter. This contention depends on shortcutting from mental representation to thought, whereas wehave been at pains to stress the distinction between representation and (intentional) reference in Chapter 2.


8.4 Variation in the linguistic genotype

In the cases of language-less adults, the aphasic patients, Laura, and persons withWilliams syndrome, the claim can be defended that thought is essentially normal,despite the difficulties that all of these patients or individuals face. It may not beavailable in its full richness, and there may be low intelligence, but thought is not‘abnormal’ in the sense that it would be disordered, incoherent, or illogical. In linewith that, there is a linguistic genotype (UG) in all of these cases, and a linguisticphenotype has either developed normally, with delays, or late, or it breaks down afterit has normally developed. Abnormalities in both the linguistic genotype and pheno-type exist in some of these cases, but they may seem to affect linguistic processingmore at the periphery than in its core components, leaving, along with some aspectsof grammar, much thought intact. More interesting cases to consider in this regardare therefore ones where there is variation in the linguistic genotype, of a kind thatgoes along with a severe disruption of the very organization of thought itself: AutismSpectrum of Disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia, in both of which there is noquestion that thought is comparably disturbed. From the present perspective,thought and language, of course, should stand and fall together.

ASD affects four in every ten thousand individuals (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985), andit is, as its name suggests, a widely diverse spectrum of disorders with a range ofpartially heterogeneous symptoms and great variation in these. It is perhaps mostcommonly regarded primarily as a ‘cognitive’ and ‘social’ deficit, rather than a‘linguistic’ one. Nonetheless, apart from impairments in social interaction andinappropriately restrictive behaviour, impairments in verbal and non-verbal com-munication are a part of a basic triad of symptoms and a principal early manifest-ation of the disorder. Pragmatic language disorders are found in all autistic children(Young et al., 2005). As for non-pragmatic ones, it is noteworthy that there are stillrelatively ‘few studies [which] have examined grammatical abilities in autism, withmixed findings’ (Eigsti et al., 2007).

Most commonly, however, autism is not regarded as a disorder of the languagefaculty. Rather, language and communication abnormalities in this disorder areregarded as consequences of a more general deficiency in ‘mentalizing’ or ‘ToM’(Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith, 1985). Above we have tried tosplash doubt onto the very coherence of ToM as a theoretical construct or naturalkind. What is called ToM, as if it existed, we argued, arises in part from a disregard of

Even if the equation of thought with mental representation is endorsed, Penn et al. (2008) show thatprincipled differences in human and non-human forms of thought remain. The authors reject language asthe principle explanatory factor for the discontinuity in evolution in question. This rejection is based, inour terms, on modular or minimalist (‘recursion-only’) conceptions of language that we here question, aswell as on notions of ‘ToM’ or data from aphasia that we discuss in this chapter.


the fact that grammar is constitutively involved in the genesis of particular kinds ofmeaning, and in part reduces to capacities of perception, conceptualization, andpractical reasoning. ToM, taken as a fundamental element of what is taken to be‘thought’ rather than ‘language’, is nonetheless still very much alive within psych-ology and neuroscience in discussions of both autism and schizophrenia (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith, 1985; Frith, 1992; Bruene, 2005). Only more recently,language abnormalities in autism have received more detailed attention and havebeen looked at in their own right. In this regard it has been suggested that subgroupswith both normal language skills and impairments at all levels of linguistic organiza-tion exist within the autistic population, suggesting that impaired ToM, if universalin autism, can leave language abilities unaffected (Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg,2004; Tager-Flusberg and Joseph, 2003).

Maybe, then, the subgroup with significant language disorganization is a distinct-ive phenotype of autism that has to be thematized in its own right, and resembles thephenotypes of Down syndrome or SLI (Tager-Flusberg, 2004). Down syndromechildren have normal ToM abilities (at least to the extent that these are language-independent) (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith, 1985), showing again that deficitsaffecting the language faculty, viewed as a ‘module’ independent of the ‘ToMmodule’(Belkadi, 2006), may define an independent subtype of autism. On the other hand,findings mentioned earlier from Paynter and Peterson (2010) concerning the closelink between mastery of ToM and linguistic abilities, particularly syntactic ones,strongly question the separation of language from ToM as distinct modules. Insofaras ToM goes beyond the perceptual and practical reasoning abilities in non-humansand prelinguistic infants, it forms a close unity with language and may be conceptu-ally indistinguishable from it. The characterization of autism of the relevant subtypeas a deficiency of the language module may thus again presuppose the modular viewof language: if we decide to regard the language faculty as an autonomous module,independent of cognition and ToM, with syntax being an arbitrary formal complex-ity that plays no role for thought, then of course it can be distinctly affected, leavingcognition intact. But this view circularly depends on characterizing syntax so as for itnot to affect thought or cognition.

Nonetheless, we will not pursue the autism case further here, fascinating as it is,since schizophrenia is of much greater interest to our project, as a candidate forvariation in UG within our species. Found in about 1% of the world’s population(Jablensky et al., 1992; Mowry et al., 1994), and first manifest in early adulthood,schizophrenia is diagnosed through a constellation of symptoms and a degree offunctional impairment. Among the ‘positive’ symptoms—involving an excess ordistortion of normal function—are auditory hallucinations (particularly verbal),delusions (distorted perception and interpretation of the external world), and prob-lems in expressing thought through language leading to discourse that is disorgan-ized and difficult to follow. Positive thought disorder in this latter sense in particular


includes ‘derailment’—in spontaneous speech, the speaker tends to slip off track,juxtaposing ideas that normal hearers do not perceive as related—and ‘tangential-ity’—answering questions in an oblique or irrelevant manner. Both are aspects ofwhat Bleuler (1911/1950) terms the ‘loosening of associations’: the apparent followingup of associations between words that, together, do not produce a coherent discourse(propositional meaning, in our sense). Maher et al. (1983) give the following example:

If you think you are being wise to send me a bill for money I have already paid, I am in nowisegoing to do so unless I get the whys and wherefores from you to me. But where the fours havebeen, then fives will be, and other numbers and calculations and accounts to your no-account . . .

In rare and severe cases, speech can be unintelligible, with neither individual wordsnor sentences together yielding an overall discernable meaning: ‘word salad’ orschizophasia. Andreasen (1986) gives the following example:

They’re destroying too many cattle and oil just to make soap. If we need soap when you canjump into a pool of water, and then when you go to buy your gasoline, my folks always thoughtthey should, get pop but the best thing to get, is motor oil, and, money. May may as well gothere and, trade in some, pop caps and, uh, tires, and tractors to grup, car garages, so they canpull cars away from wrecks, is what I believe in. So I didn’t go there to get no more pop whenmy folks said it. I just went there to get a ice- cream cone [sic], and some pop, in cans, or we cango over there to get a cigarette.

Severity of thought disorder is assessed in a number of clinical rating scales, forexample the Scale for Assessment of Thought, Language and Communication (TLC)(Andreasen, 1986).

When Kraepelin first dubbed schizophrenia as ‘dementia praecox’ (Kraepelin,1896/1919), he considered ‘derailments in the train of thought’ to be fundamental tothis disease (p. 72), including loosening of associations (‘the most different ideasfollow one another with most bewildering want of connection’, p. 56) and incoher-ence (‘bewilderingly nonsensical utterances . . . apparently represent a senseless jig-gling of words’, p. 71) (cited form Kuperberg, 2010a: 177). Although thought disorderis relatively rare in the schizophrenia syndrome, Bleuler (1911/1950), too, considered‘disorders of association’ of primary importance for diagnosis, demoting delusionsand hallucinations to secondary and derivative status as ‘accessories’. But why arepatients where language abnormalities like the above are found, said to be ‘thoughtdisordered’? As Kuperberg (2010a) notes, this reflects the perspective of the foundersof psychopathology in the late nineteenth century, who regarded the abnormalities inquestion, not primarily as language disorders (aphasias), but as a manifestation of anunderlying disorder in thought (Bleuler 1911/1950; Kraepelin, 1904; Kraepelin 1906).This conclusion is telling, from the present point of view. Why should a disorder thatis manifest in language be a disorder of our mental nature, which then is only


‘expressed’ in language? Clearly this follows again only if we exclude from what wecall ‘language’ the aspects of illogicality, incoherence, and meaninglessness, that weperceive in thought disorder. Language is then simply an arbitrary medium used forcommunication, while our mind is structured by independent and non-linguisticprinciples, which break down in this case. This would be plausible if we knew whatthese independent principles were—and implausible if the actual pattern of disor-ganization we find in the language of schizophrenic formal thought disorder standsin an explanatory relationship to, or illuminates, what is described as a thoughtdisorder. From an Un-Cartesian perspective, we will naturally explore the latteralternative.

As this perspective would also predict, the boundaries between thought and lan-guage disorder in this symptom have, for more than a hundred years, proved difficultto draw. As has often been the case in discussions of thought disorder, a principledboundary between thought disturbance and language disturbance is difficult if notimpossible to draw in assessing behaviour that largely depends on verbal performance:‘thought disorder is when talk is incoherent. And talk is incoherent when the thought isdisordered’ (Rochester andMartin, 1979: 6). Andreasen (1986: 473), too, notes that mostof the phenomena captured under the label ‘formal thought disorder’, from anempirical perspective, are actually disorders of (linguistic) communication.

As Levy et al. (2010) document, although both Kraepelin (Kraepelin, 1896/1919)and Bleuler (Bleuler, 1911/1950) considered the symptom in question as primarilyreflecting a disorder of thought rather than speech, the point that thought cannot beextricated from language wasn’t lost to either of them: even from a Cartesian point ofview, verbal communication is the primary locus where thought is manifest andexternalized. Yet it is characteristic that Bleuler describes this as a deplorable limita-tion, forcing the theorist through a detour: ‘we are forced to deduce most of theanomalies from the oral and written productions of the patients.’ (Bleuler, 1911/1950:39) Kraepelin, too, referred to ‘derailments in the train of thought’ (Kraepelin, 1896/1919: 72) as much as to ‘derailments in the expression of thought in speech’ (Krae-pelin: 70) and to ‘disorders in connected speech’ (p. 67) or ‘confused syntax’ (p. 71).This stance, which assumes a duality of thought and language and a disorder of theformer as prior to a disorder in the latter, recurs to this day. Thus, Titone et al. (2007:93) write that ‘spoken or written language is the most common medium forconveying disturbances in thinking’. Yet, in their view, ‘the thinking anomaliesassociated with psychotic conditions are not, fundamentally, speech or languagedisorders ( . . . ). Rather, when language is used in an idiosyncratic way, it representsthe outcome of a deviant thought process’. Clearly, whether this is coherent com-pletely depends on what theoretical view we take of language.

Another tradition starting from Kleist (1914) disputes that formal thought disorder(FTD) is an illness of the mind (Geisteskrankheit) and claims it to rather reflect a


disorder of language (aphasia). But our Un-Cartesian stance entails that this is a falsedichotomy, which fails to recognize that language and (at least one particular kind) ofthought may be integrally related. But to this day, studies of language in schizophre-nia with systematic involvement of linguists remain rare. An early exception isChaika (1974) who, apart from echoing the classic clinical observations that sentenceswere produced ‘according to the semantic features of previously uttered words, ratherthan according to a topic’, found other abnormalities, in particular syntactic ones.The observation just cited, too, amounts to a grammatical one, if we recognize that‘topic’ itself is also a grammatical notion, related to the notion of ‘subject’ andcontrasting with the notion of ‘predicate’ (as what is said about the topic). Loss oftopic is thus possibly an epiphenomenon of loss of grammar, which in turn wouldseem to predict more reliance on word-word associations. It would also predict thathearers notice a discrepancy between word meanings and discourse-level meaning:where grammar is lacking as an organizational principle of meaning, individualwords cannot merge smoothly into a coherent grammatical meaning correspondingto a communicative intention, and words will show up in spontaneous speech thatwill seem to a hearer, who is in the process of reconstructing communicativeintentions online, to not possibly be the intended ones. In normal speakers, bycontrast, speech errors such as failures to utter intended words that are coherentwith the discourse meaning are ‘momentary deviations from a discourse plan that isimmediately resumed’ (Covington et al., 2005: 78). The assumption that there is nodiscourse plan in the schizophrenic case, because of a fragmentation of grammar thatdoes not allow such a plan to be computed and upheld, would make sense of thisdifference. One could, obviously, maintain that discourse levels only require ‘dis-course-level intentions’, with these being interpreted in non-linguistic terms and ashaving their contents language-independently. That, of course, is the Cartesian viewthat we encountered before in connection with Tomasello’s (2008) account ofcommunicative intentions. Yet again, some mechanism for generating the contentsin question must then be assumed, and it is not clear what this could be.

Positive FTD seems like a perfect case to test the Un-Cartesian hypothesis. TheUn-Cartesian model of grammar argues that the intrusion of grammar into thehominin brain specifically correlates with a fundamental shift in what we have calleddeictic reference, which we take to be essentially grammatically mediated. It beginswith index finger pointing in infancy, but grammar is required for most of our acts ofreference, including reference to propositions, facts, truths, or objects located in thepast or future. We therefore predict, on the basis of this conception of grammar, that,with grammar fragmenting, reference and propositional thinking will fragment aswell and a rational connection between thought and world will be lost. Thought willnot be ‘about’ anything anymore: there won’t be topics, which are grammatically thesubjects of predications that are true or false. Words may well be understood,consistent with lexical knowledge and semantic memory being relatively spared in


schizophrenia, but their use in coherent acts of reference to the world will beimpaired. These predictions clearly speak to a range of schizophrenic symptoms,and a range of empirical evidence supports them.

Thus there is over-proportional use in FTD, relative to non-FTD schizophrenicsand normals, of ‘generic’ and indefinite noun phrases (‘the Chinese’, ‘religion’, ‘stuff ’,‘ones’, ‘mankind’, ‘wives’, ‘a man’), which are low in the hierarchy of referencedescribed in Chapter 4. Schizophrenics, in general, seem ‘more concerned withuniversal issues than normal speakers’ (Rochester and Martin, 1979: 125). Genericsdo not refer to specific objects or discourse participants, hence do not require settingup reference chains involving specific objects referred to before, which are partiallygoverned by grammatical principles. Patients with FTD, more so than those without,use definite NPs with unclear or indirect referents (Rochester and Martin, 1979: 148,167); they prefer to point non-linguistically, and have difficulties with deixis (p. 160).Lack of referential cohesion across stretches of discourse is said to particularly affectpronouns (McKenna and Oh, 2005: 112), which are the most paradigmatically deicticdevices. Watson et al. (2012) found, among a group of people at high genetic risk ofschizophrenia, that those who would subsequently develop schizophrenia usedsignificantly more second-person pronouns, as revealed before diagnosis at twoseparate assessments approximately 18 months apart. This supports and gives aspecific linguistic-grammatical signature to the view that schizophrenia, beginningfrom preclinical stages, involves the breakdown of the ‘deictic frame’ (Buehler, 1934)of interpersonal communication—that is, the perspective of a ‘self ’ referring to itselfin the first person, who talks with a second person about a shared, objective worlddistinct from them both (Crow, 2007). Put differently, and in line with Section 4.4, itinvolves the breakdown of the system of grammatical Person.

Pursuing this line of thought, then, language in schizophrenia may not only‘provide a window into relationships between the language system and non-verbalhigher-order thought’, as Kuperberg (2010b: 8) conjectures, but speak to a strongerphilosophical view: that there is no non-linguistic (rational) thought. Where lan-guage fragments, thought does, too: it becomes illogical. This also gives us the rightcontrast with the aphasic case discussed above. If thought disorder is related specif-ically to how meaning is organized and integrated in language at different levels, itmust be the case that in agrammatism (Broca’s aphasia), where thought can belargely intact, the pattern of language disintegration is different. Indeed there isevidence that it is, and that standard aphasia test-batteries do not detect FTD (Ohet al., 2002; Covington et al., 2005). Morphophonology in particular is largely intactin schizophrenia but not aphasia. As Covington (2009: 87) notes: ‘Patients withaphasia have normal thoughts and express them with difficulty; those with schizo-phrenia have unusual thoughts (or disorganized discourse plans) and express themwith comparative ease’. Where the linguistic genotype is normal, in short, as inaphasia, thoughts are normal; where it is severely shaken, as it may be in


schizophrenia, thought disintegrates. In the next section, we discuss this conjecturein the context of current linguistic and psychiatric perspectives on FTD.

8.5 Formal thought disorder and the de-integration of grammar

There is little discussion of thought disorder in the philosophy of psychiatry, wherediscussions of schizophrenia have standardly focused on monothematic delusionssuch as the Capgras delusion, and very little reference is made to language altogether.Philosophical discussions have often focused on the status of delusional beliefsviewed as ‘propositional attitudes’ and as non-linguistic theoretical constructs(Campbell, 2001). Delusions appear to challenge ‘empiricist’ conceptions of thoughtand belief, and hence speak to the issue of empiricism and rationalism. Yet researchon language has for many decades questioned this dichotomy. Utterances express, ina pretheoretical sense, attitudes, and these attitudes can have a propositional content,but such utterances are not typically ‘caused’, in any specified sense of ‘cause’, byanything in our experience. Utterances are typically creative, and, insofar as we know,uncaused. Propositional contents in turn need not be ‘objects’ of any ‘propositionalattitudes’, when it is grammar that generates such contents from given lexicalresources, and the meaning of such mental constructs is intrinsic to them.

Campbell (2001) has interestingly broached the question of whether monothe-matic delusions involve a loss of an understanding of linguistic meaning. Yet Camp-bell’s notion of meaning is linguistically unspecific, and he makes no distinctionbetween lexical and grammatical meaning. In landmark volumes such as Chung et al.(2007) or Kircher and David (2003), a linguistic perspective barely figures in asystematic fashion. It appears that a perspective on language as a condition onmental health is systematically missing. It is also absent more generally in phenom-enological approaches to the mind, despite a strong emphasis on the distinctness ofthe kind of phenomenology that is language-mediated in Merleau-Ponty (2006: 206–11), who essentially defended what we would call an Un-Cartesian position.

One important theoretical perspective on schizophrenia (Sass and Parnass, 2003)characterizes its spectrum of symptoms under the unifying perspective of a ‘disturb-ance of the self ’ (ipseity disorder). Much evidence supports this perspective, yetlanguage is absent in this discussion, too, where traditional notions from philosoph-ical epistemology (‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘self ’ and ‘other’, ‘subjective experience’, ‘firstperson perspective’, ‘meaning’, etc.) prevail and are used in non-linguistic senses. Inphilosophy, the spectrum of views taken on the nature of the self is remarkable for itssystematic omission of language more generally—as if language simply didn’t matterto having the kind of self that we do, and was merely a way of talking about it.Discussions of the nature of the self usually begin as a departure from a view ascribedto Descartes, according to which selves are simple, immaterial substances. A secondpossibility is taken to be that we are indeed such a substance, but that we also have


physical properties (Lowe, 2006). A third is the alternative, famously proposed byHume, that we are bundles of thoughts. Each of us is ‘a bundle or collection ofdifferent perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, andare in a perpetual flux and movement’ (Hume, 1737/1888: 252). A fourth is that we areour bodies. A fifth is that we are computer programmes, hence abstract objects,which can be ‘multiply realized’. A sixth is that we simply don’t exist: there are noselves (see Olson, 2007, for an overview).

It is remarkable that in each and every one of these proposals language does notseem to matter to our existence: the existence of selves. Despite emphasis on theimportance of the ‘first-person perspective’ (Zahavi, 2006; Lowe, 2006), the assump-tion appears to be the Cartesian one that such a perspective is somehow availableindependently of language—despite the fact that a grammatical distinction (‘1stPerson’) is effectively written into them. Zahavi (2006: 27–9) stresses that self-aware-ness involved in conscious states cannot be construed along ‘subject-object’ lines, yet,as we have seen in Chapter 4, it is the grammar of self-reference that tells us exactlyhow this is the case: the grammar of 3rd-Person object reference (‘the/my self ’, ‘mybody/brain’) is different from that of 1st-Person reference (‘I’; Bianchi, 2006). Thegrammatical distinction is essential: we would worry about an English-speaking childwho never referred to itself in the grammatical 1st Person. That grammatical com-plexity increases with personal forms of reference, as discussed in Section 4.4, is notlikely an accident, making grammar essential to the phenomenon itself. If schizophre-nia, (i), is a disturbance of the self (Sass and Parnass, 2003), (ii) it involves a breakdownof grammatical principles in the organization of meaning, and (iii) self-reference ismediated grammatically, then a non-linguistic perspective on the self is challenged.

Another non-linguistic approach to FTD is what we may call the ‘pragmatic’theory. It explains FTD as a failure to master principles of rational communication,more specifically (i) to make proper use of ‘context’ (Kuperberg et al., 2006), (ii) totake the needs of a listener (knowledge, beliefs, and intentions) properly into account(Frith, 1992; Abu-Akel, 1999; Langdon et al., 2002; Tenyi et al., 2002), or (iii) to master‘cohesive ties’ in discourse (Rochester and Martin, 1979). What must be intendedhere, however, is largely linguistic communication, as opposed to communication assuch. Communication in a linguistic and specifically grammatical format makes afundamental difference (Tomasello, 2008), entailing that the term ‘communicationdisturbance’ as such makes no predictions. If ‘context’ is used so as to includelinguistic context (‘co-text’), grammar is systematically involved in the generationof context and is likely to be impaired when context processing is. Indeed, grammarwill be the mechanism that defines context: only in virtue of grammar organizingsemantic information, will there be aspects of meaning influenced by context (asopposed to grammar). Where grammar is impaired, the very distinction betweenwhat belongs to language and what belongs to context may cease to be meaningfulfor subjects: everything becomes context. The ‘pragmatic’ explanation is therefore


premised on grammar and semantics being intact, which however is the crucialquestion at issue. Do thought disordered schizophrenics really think normalthoughts and extract linguistic meaning in normal ways, while only a failure tocommunicate makes them ill?

Successful linguistic communication also surely involves taking the needs oflisteners into account and mentalizing about what they know and want. But ToMdeficits appear to be very different in autism and schizophrenia (Bruene, 2005), andin the latter they do not seem to correlate with FTD in particular (McKenna and Oh,2005: 121–2). To the extent that ToM, which, we have argued, comprises a number ofvery different phenomena, depends on language, it will fail to represent an alternativeto grammar: explicit thinking about the mental states of other people (independentlyof perception/visual stimuli) requires a certain format, which may have to recapitu-late linguistic distinctions, as in the representation [S1 He believes [S2 the puppet is inthe box]], where a propositional thought embeds another, recapitulating the patternof sentential recursion. S1 here moreover expresses the specific thought that somethird person (‘he’) thinks a thought S2, which the 1st Person (the speaker) also thinks,while at the same time the truth values assigned to it by both persons may differ.These person distinctions are not merely semantic in nature, as argued in Section 4.4,but inherently grammatical: a person referred to as ‘I’ (1st Person) and as ‘you’ (2ndPerson) may be the same person, semantically. But when that person stands in frontof a mirror and mutters to himself: ‘I hate you’, this person would typically not say ‘Ihate me’, let alone ‘I hate him’, illustrating that the grammatical Person system iscrucial to understanding the thought expressed. Deictically anchoring properties andthought contents is critical to the identity of the recursive thought above in a similarfashion. This raises questions for how a generic ‘ToM-module’ can make the rightpredictions, as the relevant grammatical distinctions are not involved in this case.

Where concepts of mental states are mastered, but they cannot be indexed toparticular grammatical persons at particular times, we predict what we find in FTD:an over-attribution of mental states (‘hyper-ToM’: Bruene, 2005: 4). Schneiderianverbal auditory hallucinations of thoughts spoken out loud or thought commentary,could then be analysed as a failure to ‘index’ thoughts and voices to the right‘persons’, where the notion of ‘person’ is grammatical, and inherently makes refer-ence to speech acts. It is crucial in this regard that the use of pronouns, which areparadigmatically marked for Person, is error-prone in schizophrenia, as noted.

Evidence from functional MRI also suggests a close relationship between grammarand ToM by showing that brain areas for language comprehension and mental stateunderstanding partially overlap. For example, a functional connectivity analysis ofthe left posterior middle temporal region shows that this core area for sentencecomprehension is strongly connected with posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS)and medial frontal cortex (MFC), considered as core ToM areas (Turken and


Dronkers, 2011; Amodio and Frith, 2006). Ferstl and von Cramon (2002) alsounderline that the MFC is involved when two different sentences are related—anaspect of grammatical meaning—as well as during ToM tasks, suggesting a connec-tion between grammatical processing in a discourse context and the representation ofmental states. The MF region shows decreased recruitment in schizophrenic patientsduring story comprehension (Dollfus et al., 2008). ‘Cohesion in discourse’, too,systematically depends on understanding referentiality in noun phrases, whichimposes grammatical constraints on such cohesion, and clausal reference, as wellas topics, in line with grammatical principles (Erteschik-Shir, 2007).

Unlike the pragmatic theory just discussed, the ‘expressive semantic’ theory ofMcKenna and Oh (2005) maintains that, if one wished to construe FTD as a languageabnormality, ‘it would be one which was characterized chiefly by semantic errors inexpressed speech’. Consistent with a modular conception, it is by contrast oftencontended that ‘at the level of syntactic processing, schizophrenic patients’ speech isusually normal, with no relevant aberrations’ (Marini et al., 2008: 145). Yet we againneed to ask what exactly ‘syntactic’ and ‘semantic’ are here taken to mean. We haveargued that meaning as organized at a grammatical level is different in kind frommeaning organized at a lexical level: for example, judgements of truth and falsehoodcannot be encoded structurally in single words, even if these are internally complex(Di Sciullo, 2005); neither can the different types of nominal reference we havediscussed in Chapter 4. The label ‘semantics’ thus captures a heterogeneous domain,with grammar crucial to one kind of meaning but not another. If so, syntax andsemantics can only partially be independent. As Chomsky noted in 1965: the ‘bound-ary separating syntax and semantics (if there is one)’ should ‘remain open until thesefields are much better understood’ (Chomsky, 1965: 77, 159). A sentence like ‘The mandrank the guitar’, typically said to contain a ‘semantic’ violation, clearly comes with afully determinate and unambiguous meaning, even if no one would have or acceptsuch a thought. This very meaning is what creates a conflict with non-linguisticexpectations in healthy individuals and is needed to explain the conflict. As Nieuw-land and van Berkum (2006) show, moreover, the right context will make a putative‘semantic’ violation such as ‘The peanut was in love’ perfectly well formed, showingthat semantics is not at fault and grammar in conjunction with the lexicon rigorouslyrules what the meaning is.

In a similar way, a violation typically said to be ‘syntactic’, such as ‘The man drankthe with’, is always also a semantic violation, since no coherent meaning results whenthe grammar is not right. Where a so-called ‘syntactically’ disorganized outcome isfound in schizophrenic speech, then (e.g. ‘People God to ought, God . . . heaven mywill point no all’ in response to ‘Why do you think some people believe in God?’),then this ipso facto entails that no coherent meaning is produced either, indicating apotential semantic problem. In turn, where a speech outcome looks syntacticallynormal, at least at the single-sentence level (‘Oh, it [life in a hospital] was superb, you


know, the trains broke, and the pond fell in the front doorway’: cf. Oh et al., 2002:235), the question arises: ‘do these words mean anything?’ (Covington et al., 2005: 92).Maybe the words do, however, but the way they are connected grammatically doesnot: there is meaning at a sentence-level, too, and the meaning arises from how wordsare connected in grammar, in a process that yields subjects, predicates and specificconfigurations required to encode a coherent thought about the world that can beproperly assessed for truth and falsehood. Therefore, if these sentences do not meanfor the patient what they mean for us—which seems plausible indeed—what maywell be impaired in them is how meaning is organized by grammar.

Indeed, the expressive ‘semantic’ anomalies that are found to be strongly associ-ated with the presence of thought disorder are taken to primarily ‘affect the assemblyof meanings at a level above that of the single word’ (Oh et al., 2002: 243), represent-ing a form of what the authors call ‘structural semantics’. If so, they precisely affectmeaning generated at a syntactic level—grammatical meanings, in our terms—andcould therefore inform our grasp of the organization of grammar as such, raisinginteresting and novel questions of how the grammar affects meaning and what kindof meaning this is: propositional meaning, we hypothesize here. This conclusionwould be consistent with a characteristic reduction of syntactic complexity (recur-sion) often reported for schizophrenia (e.g. DeLisi, 2001); with the fact that FTD doesnot affect naming (McKenna and Oh, 2005: 181), with Walenski et al.’s (2010) finding,in a study of grammatical Tense, ‘that thought disorder may be linked with gram-matical impairments’ (Walenski et al., 2010: 262), ‘unrelated to general cognitivedysfunction’; and with a recent hypothesis according to which ‘building a gestaltmeaning through language requires us not only to match input with prior-storedassociations, but also to combine words together (through syntactic and semanticmechanisms) in order to construct the meaning of individual clauses’ (Ditman andKuperberg, 2010). These two processes are fundamentally different in character: theformer is associative, the other is computational, and requires grammar. Indeed theycan conflict, as in the sentence ‘Every day at breakfast the eggs would eat’, where allwords are lexico-semantically well related, but the result of a combinatorial analysisbased on grammar yields a very implausible propositional meaning. Kuperbergargues that language abnormalities in schizophrenia arise from an imbalancebetween these two processes: where grammar-based computation of meaning isimpaired, lexico-semantic associative processes win the upper hand, yielding the‘loosening of associations’ so characteristic of schizophrenia. As we might put thisclaim: the grammatical straightjacket, insofar as it governs what is claimed to be trueabout a particular topic in discourse, or what is being referred to by a particularnominal phrase, is thrown off. Meaning based on the grammatical analysis of clausesis effectively ‘grammatical meaning’ in our present sense.

An interesting recent study of Titone et al. (2007), using a paradigm alreadymentioned in Section 2.5, can serve to illustrate this perspective (though it is not


Titone et al.’s). The authors studied noun-noun combinations such as ‘zebra bag’, aprocess that they characterize as ‘conceptual combination’. In fact, as noted inChapter 2, it is words that are being combined here, and what is, most specifically,combined, is nouns. Two kinds of interpretations were studied for these combin-ations: the ‘property interpretation’, where the modifying noun has a salient property(such as having stripes), which is then attributed to the head noun, resulting in theconcept of a bag with zebra stripes; and the ‘relational interpretation’, where ‘zebra’would signify a functional role of the head noun, like its being carried by someparticular animate agent. The interpretation generated is then: ‘bag for/carried by azebra’. It is known since Estes and Glucksberg (2000) that property interpretationsare most frequent when the modifying noun has a salient dimension (like havingstripes) that fit one dimension of the head noun, as in the case of the ‘zebra bag’. Theybecome more rare where the modifying noun has such a dimension but it fits nodimension of the head noun naturally (e.g. ‘zebra trap’). They become even rarerwhen the modifying has no salient dimension relevant to the head noun (e.g. ‘donkeytrap’).

Now, it is clear that property interpretations are easier to obtain, via a basicallysemantic strategy: ‘property interpretations elicited by these types of combinationsrequire only semantic access to the meanings of the modifier and head nouns’(Titone et al., 2007: 95). Put differently, property interpretations come close to whatwould indeed be purely conceptual combinations, without much mediation bygrammar (adjuncts, indeed, exhibit little grammar). Relational interpretations aredifferent in this respect. Titone et al. assume they require a more intricate ‘post-retrieval selection process’: ‘semantic access of word meanings is necessary but notsufficient for generating relational interpretations’ (Titone et al., 2007: 96). However,it appears more appropriate to express this fact by saying that they require moregrammar. For the control mechanism behind what the authors term the ‘controlleduse of semantic memory representations’ is just that: grammar (at least in this case).Indeed this is clear in the very grammatical complexity of ways of expressing thesemeanings: ‘bag carried by a donkey’, ‘bag for a donkey’, ‘bag with a donkey in it’, etc.Here the head noun is not a modifier but an argument, playing a thematic role, forexample as Agent or Recipient. A broad notion of ‘conceptual combination’ does notrespect this difference. Titone et al.’s experiment, thus interpreted, is an experimentin grammatical meaning, not merely in conceptual combination.

The aim of the study was to test whether patients with schizophrenia haveintact lexical-semantic retrieval, while only post-retrieval selection, as required forrelational interpretations, is impaired. This would predict that these patients couldgenerate property interpretations, but have difficulties generating relational interpret-ations. Three groups were tested: patients with schizophrenia exhibiting high levels ofthought disorder on a clinical scale, patients with low levels of thought disorder, andcontrols. The results were: the integrity of and initial access to lexical-semantic


memory is spared in schizophrenia. None of the groups differed in how noun-nouncombinations designed to elicit property interpretations were processed. By contrast,the controlled processing needed to generate relational interpretations is impaired inboth groups diagnosed with schizophrenia, with patients with high levels of FTDproducing significantly fewer such interpretations than patients with low levels.Unlike the authors, we interpret this as a strong pointer to the view of FTD as adisintegration of grammar, in which grammatical meanings get gradually out ofreach of the patient’s mind.

The grammatical perspective on FTD emerging here also makes sense of manyindependent findings about the schizophrenic brain. Studies in structural and func-tional MRI have shown that severity of thought disorder is ‘integrally related to theabnormal neural activity observed in language-related networks’ (Borofsky et al.,2010; Shenton et al., 1992). Aberrant functional connectivity and activations withincortical language circuitry are a consistent finding in both patients and subjects atgenetic high-risk (Kircher et al., 2001; 2005; Li et al., 2010). Of particular significanceis the left-lateralization of language in the normal human brain (Vigneau et al., 2011),and the reduction of cerebral asymmetries (de-lateralization) in patients with schizo-phrenia compared to controls (Dollfus et al., 2005; Li et al., 2007; Angrilli et al., 2009).This provides an independent argument that schizophrenia and language are related.An argument from migration patterns of modern Homo sapiens further suggests thatboth language and schizophrenia must have biologically stabilized in our species byaround 40,000 years ago, when our species reached Australia, where we do not seeany further development of our basic cognitive or linguistic abilities. Neither haslanguage, as we have concluded in Chapter 7, originated long before the speciation ofHomo sapiens (Crow, 2008). Language and schizophrenia, which are both confined toour species and universal in it, may thus be intrinsically related, like two sides of onecoin: schizophrenia may reflect a failure of left-hemispheric dominance for language(Miyata et al., 2012), turning it into a by-product of the evolution of language itself—or its ‘price’ (DeLisi, 2001; Crow, 2000; 2002a, b; 2008).

With this possibility, we can now pull all strands of discussion in this and theprevious chapters together, against the background of the Un-Cartesian project. Weneed to account for a cognitive discontinuity in human evolution, which is species-defining and linked to language. Only at a point in evolutionary time when it iswidely assumed that full language had arrived, do we also see a new mode ofcognition and thought manifest that generates a recognizably modern culture unpre-cedented in the evolutionary record or in any other species at this point. The Un-Cartesian view is that language and thought, in our species, form a unity, with thespecific mode of thought expressed in language inextricable from language. We nowhave an additional argument that this may be the right conclusion: language may bemore central, not merely to thought, but also to mental health, than is commonlyassumed. In defining a new mode of thought, the language faculty also defines a


new notion of what it is to be rational, distinct from notions of rationality that we canapply to animals, where such notions will typically connect with a notion of adaptivebehaviour. This possibility is less likely in the human case, where the adaptiveadvantage of a notion of truth is not, to put it mildly, obvious. Why, in fact, shouldwe be thinking in the first place? We turn to rationality, and how linguistics is linkedwith it, in the next and final chapter. We close this chapter with some notes on whatthe above suggests in terms of the implementation of language in the brain.

8.6 Grammatical meaning in the brain6

The most pressing question must be where grammatical meaning is located in the brain.As noted in Hinzen and Poeppel (2011), several decades of neuroimaging the humanbrain have not only taken modular conceptions of language on board, but also modularconceptions of the internal architecture of language. Thus decades of investigations oflooked for ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’ in the brain, as if these are separable constructs. AsPylkkänen (2011) notes, cases where sentence-level semantics (grammatical meaning) isconsidered and hence semantics is not simply equated with lexical semantics, are rare.Pylkkänen herself reconstructs the notion of sentence-meaning compositionally, henceas a composition of given lexical meanings, but this is to assume the descriptiveframework of standard formal semantics, which was designed as a formal (non-psychological or neurophysiological, perhaps even non-empirical) account of lan-guage-world relations in the tradition of formal logic, where language and world relateas ‘form’ and ‘content’ do (or ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’): hence language is not involved inthe genesis of new content, or a new kind of meaning. None of this is surprising when itis clear that linguistic theory itself has, equally for decades, stressed that ‘syntax’ and‘semantics’ are axiomatically distinct, and the boundary between them has defined kindsof linguists and even drawn disciplinary boundaries, with philosophers of languagealmost exclusively focused on ‘semantics’ and logic, as if grammar simply didn’t muchmatter to it. In addition to this, early studies of language in the brain were stronglyrelying on the lesion method, which suggested particular loci in the brain as regions inwhich particular linguistic functions can be localized, with Broca’s region (Brodmann’sareas 44 and 45) associated with ‘syntax’ and Wernicke’s area with ‘semantics’.

As we have argued above, the modular separation of ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’borders on incoherence: every single sentence containing a syntactic violation issemantically deviant; and every grammatical expression is ipso facto also meaningful,as the famous sentence Colourless green ideas sleep furiously illustrates, whichcontrasts with Furiously sleep ideas green colourless not merely in grammaticalitybut also in meaning. The interpretation of such a stimulus as carrying a particularmeaning, moreover, is a reflexlike operation, which we cannot consciously control.We cannot decide to perceive a language that we speak as ‘pure form’. That the brain

6 The following section would not have been possible without the help of Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer,who has been an unfailing source of advice (but not to blame for any errors in what follows).


should compute form autonomously from meaning would thus a priori not beexpected. The same problem in severing grammar from meaning can be illustratedwith thought disorder, if we are right above that it has an important grammaticaldimension. If there is such a thing as grammatical meaning—meaning intrinsicallydepending on grammatical organization—it couldn’t logically be that there is a‘syntax’ region that was not also a ‘semantics’ region (though the reverse is nottrue, to the extent that lexical meaning is grammar-free).

Consistent with this, 14 out of 16 neuroimaging studies on semantic aspects ofsentence comprehension reviewed in Hagoort et al. (2009) found reliable activationof left inferior frontal cortex including BA 44 and 45. A study of Rodd et al. showedthat the same areas are sensitive to ambiguous words processed in sentential contexts(e.g. ‘There were dates and pears in the kitchen bowl’ vs ‘There was beer and cideron the kitchen shelf ’). Willems et al. (2009) argue that the regions in question as wellas the posterior part of the superior temporal sulcus are multimodal areas involved inthe integration of semantic information from language, gesture, pantomime, andpictures, during sentence processing. Aboitiz et al. (2006) relegate the syntacticfunctions of Broca’s region to working memory and not to language-specific mech-anisms, as do Fadiga et al. (2009), who see Broca’s region as subserving complexhierarchical dependencies in general, as involved in language, music, and the execu-tion and understanding of action. If so, Broca’s region may inform us about theneural basis of ‘syntax’ in the generic sense that we have tried to avoid here, but tell uslittle about grammar in the language-specific sense that we target here.

Against such views as Aboitiz et al.’s, Grodzinsky and Santi (2008) argue that twodistinct intra-sentential dependency relations activate different brain regions, andonly one activates Broca’s area: syntactic movement (e.g. Which boy does the girlthink t examined Steven?). The other dependency is antecedent-reflexive binding(e.g. Jill thinks the boy examined himself). But while these may indeed differsyntactically, they differ semantically as well. Grodzinsky and Santi’s point aboutsyntactic specificity in Broca’s region is also not meant to be inconsistent withsemantic processes being located there too.

A ‘syntacto-centric’ perspective dissociating semantics and syntax in the brain hasalso come under critical scrutiny since Kuperberg (2007), who argues that the braindoes not strictly ‘respect a distinction between semantic and syntactic representationand processes’. Vigneau et al. (2006), in a large-scale meta-analysis of a decade ofneuroimaging studies of language processing, found, unlike what was observed forphonology and semantics, that semantic and syntactic brain areas appeared inter-mingled, supporting a theoretical shift to viewing ‘cognition in the brain as supportedby overlapping and interactive large-scale cognitive networks rather than modules’.Another study (Röder et al., 2002) comparing sentences composed of words andpseudo-words also underlined a substantial spatial functional overlap of semantic


and syntactic language areas, questioning the functional–anatomic link betweensyntax/Broca’s area and semantics/Wernicke’s area.

Recent functional connectivity studies of brain activity in the conscious, restingstate (‘day-dreaming’) have also provided evidence for a language network that goesbeyond the traditional superior temporal (Wernicke’s) regions (for comprehension)and inferior frontal (Broca’s) regions (for production), including also adjoiningprefrontal, temporal and parietal regions as well as bilateral caudate and left puta-men/globus pallidus and subthalamic nucleus (Tomasi and Volkow, 2012). Brainactivity in this state involves ceaseless conscious activity that is interrupted andinhibited by task demands (e.g. perception, which ‘interrupts the train of thought’),and appears to in part involve the same left-lateralized conceptual processes that aremediated by language: in the words of Binder et al. (1999), ‘semantic knowledgeretrieval, representation in awareness, and directed manipulation of representedknowledge for organization, problem-solving, and planning’ (see also Ferstl et al.,2002; 2008; and Turken and Dronkers, 2011).

While the networks subserving grammatical meaning remain to be isolated, it maybe that the networks involved will include in particular the frontal medial area, whichis part of the extended language network. It would be the neural correlate of theinterface between grammar, the expression of thoughts, their understanding, and thenotion of self. Following the hypothesis of Crow that language symptoms in schizo-phrenia are related to decrease in leftward lateralization (Crow, 2002b; Angrilli et al.,2009) and investigating the reproducibility of fMRI (funcational magnetic resonanceimaging) in patients compared to healthy volunteers two years apart, Mazoyer et al.(1993) applied a paradigm comparing story listening in the mother tongue (involvingdeception and ToM-related material) to story listening in an unknown, foreignlanguage, known to be sensitive in detecting higher order language comprehensionareas. In healthy controls, the task activated a large left-hemispheric network for themeaningful stories, which is reduced to a sparse and weakly lateralized set whenmeaningless sentences are processed. In support of Crow’s hypothesis, lower leftwardasymmetries were observed in schizophrenic patients (Dollfus et al., 2005), whilelower reproducibility was present in the left posterior part of the superior temporalsulcus, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left posterior middle frontal gyrus (Maïza et al.,2010). This increase in variability was dependent on performances in patients only,who were paired with controls for age, gender, handedness and educational level. Theregions showing more variation in activity and reproducibility when patients pro-cessed the stories had been shown earlier to increase their activity from word tosentence and text, independently of the modality, in healthy volunteers (Jobard et al.,2007). It is possible, therefore, that these areas provide neural support of grammaticalmeaning, and that modifications of activity in these areas in patients that have lowercomprehension of the texts correspond to a deficit in grammatical meaning in thesepatients. This illustrates that, in the search for the biological foundations of language


in the brain, the notion of grammatical meaning, contradicting a traditional syntax-semantics split, may well be able to play an important role, and enough pointerssuggest that this will be a fruitful avenue to explore.

8.7 Conclusions

As we vary the linguistic genotype, different linguistic phenotypes arise that definedifferent kinds of mind. In all of the cases we have considered, language remains aplausible ‘measure of mind’—mirroring and allowing us to map its capabilities andincapabilities. The basis of grammar on our account is referring, but referring is notmerely something semantic. It is the expression of the deictic intentions of a creaturethat is also rational. We refer for a reason. Our species is thus not only rational in thesense that it thinks, and that it has a concept of thought, and hence has a concept oftruth. It is also rational in the sense that its linguistic capacity defines a standard ofmental health. Language, that is, may not merely organize our mind. Rather, whenthis mind becomes disorganized or irrational, that disorganization appears insepar-able from a disorganization of language. This is what the Un-Cartesian hypothesisdirectly predicts. The disorganization of language particularly in its referential-deictic aspects may well account for core features of the thought disorder syndrome.

One could explore alternatives, such as a disturbed ToMmodule, yet as a theoreticalconstruct, the latter seems ill-defined, comprising a range of different phenomena thatform no natural unity: some are perceptual and undoubtedly language-independentand not uniquely human; others involve thought and concepts and seem to depend onlanguage. And viewed in isolation, ToMmakes no predictions for propositionality andtruth, which is what we need to explain, and which we argue we can explain if weregard them as grammatical in nature. The evolution of language, then, may well be theevolution of thought, and thought and the linguistic genotype may fragment together.

This brings us to our next and final chapter, the most philosophical one of thisbook: grammar cannot define thought, if it does not also define truth. It is one thingto argue, as we have, that the forms of (pro-)nominal and clausal reference availablein this species are grammatically configured: this, in traditional terms, is a ‘syntactic’story. It is another thing to argue that beyond this syntactic story, no additionalsemantic story is required: that grammatical meaning is just that, grammatical, andnothing other than grammar grounds it.


9

Thought, language, and reality

This chapter addresses the philosophical challenge just posed—the challenge of how,having taken traditional semantic notions out of the context of ontology and meta-physics and integrated them into grammar, to tell in what way they still connect withthe intuitions associated with these semantic notions. Thought, grammar, and realityhave to be woven into a single coherent scheme. As we saw in Chapter 1, they havevery much been part of such a scheme in Ancient India, in Aristotle, and throughoutthe Middle Ages, with the Modists adding a particularly sophisticated version of thisidea, in which grammar is the world as known: experience converted into knowledge,or knowledge in a uniquely linguistic format. In Cartesian rationalism, this singlescheme got broken (Leiss, 2009): language, more or less deficiently, mirrors theindependently given structure of rational thought, but not of reality. How close canthe conception we have now developed be to the Modistic and ancient ones? We willbegin with some notes about the status of semantics within philosophy and linguis-tics, and the traditional question of whether semantics is ‘mathematics or psychology’(Partee, 1980)—an alternative that leaves out grammar, or the possibility that mean-ing may, in part, be inherently linguistic. We then address the question head-on ofhow it can be that truth comes out as a notion of grammatical semantics. Our answer,in Section 9.2, will appeal to Tarski’s Equivalence Scheme, which we will claim togrammatically derive. Section 9.3 provides a unified account of truth-attribution thatcomprises both lexical and non-lexical versions of this phenomenon, and explainstheir relationship. Section 9.4 locates the phenomenon of truth-attribution within theoverall architecture of grammar, and discusses evidence that it is, in fact, the limit ofgrammar, which, at the same time, also appears to be the limit of thought. With thisaccount of the relation of grammar and truth in place, we return to the metaphysicalquestion just raised, in Section 9.5: If truth is a grammatical notion, what should weconclude for the connection between language and reality? Finally, in Section 9.6, weclose this book with a reflection on where this leaves us with regards to prospects fora science of thought, and whether Friedrich Max Müller (1887/1909) was right whenhe proclaimed that any such science is identical to the science of language. As we willsee, a prominent tradition in philosophy maintains that meaning and the mental arenot subject to a natural science, which is said to be in part because they are inherently

normative, and no naturalistic investigation can bring out what makes this so. Wewill by contrast conclude that, in essence, our linguistic mind as naturalisticallydescribed is the only thing that grounds reason and norms in this sense.

9.1 The nature of semantics

How we think of the discipline of semantics today is, unavoidably, in part a conse-quence of its contingent intellectual history. Meaning, perhaps more than any otheraspect of natural language, has always caused philosophical problems, and semanticsgot shaped in part in response to these problems. Much of contemporary linguisticsemantics has its intellectual roots in the nineteenth-century analytical philosophicaltradition, although the interests of the latter have been quite different from theinterests of most linguists today: they primarily related to concerns in philosophicallogic, logicism, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. In the first half of thetwentieth century, many of these concerns remained, but they also got transformed.A chief concern was the epistemological and metaphysical problem of realism, orwith how our minds really ‘connect’ with the world. This is one rationale for why theprimary issue in semantics was reference, in the sense of a semantic relation to amind- and language-independent world, and why questions about putative ‘referenceto non-existents’ as in the case of ‘the king of France’ or ‘Pegasus’ have beenincessantly discussed in philosophy ever since Russell (1903) (see Lycan, 2008, foran overview). In addition to a concern with realism, however, another core commit-ment emerged, which was equally metaphysical in nature: naturalism. Spearheadedby Willem van Ormen Quine, ‘naturalizing philosophy’ would become one of themost central philosophical projects in the second half of the twentieth century. It inturn entailed naturalizing semantics.

The relevant notion of naturalism, here, is crucially that of metaphysical natural-ism, which is, in essence, the same as contemporary physicalism in the philosophy ofmind, and is crucially distinct from the methodological naturalism of Chomsky(2000a). Metaphysical naturalism is an ontological view, based on an a priori andfixed distinction between ‘physical’ entities and ‘non-physical’ ones. A further com-mitment to physicalism then leads to a problem with regard to meanings, since theseare thought to fall on the non-physical side, and non-physical entities cannot be‘first-class’ citizens of the world when a physicalist ontology is assumed. This in turnleads to a number of familiar metaphysical solutions, such as that non-physicalentities (including meanings) must be non-existent or fictional, that they need tobe reduced to physical entities, must supervene on them, or be identical with them.The problem this has created for a naturalized semantics has again motivated aprimary concern with reference in the semantic sense, and a theoretical bias in favourof viewing meaning extensionally in terms of causal or perhaps conventional‘symbol-world’ relation unmediated by concepts or the mind. Symbols, the thought

9. Thought, language, and reality 297

was (and is), are physically individuated objects, and so are the objects that suchsymbols ‘stand for’. If meaning is reference, and reference is causal, the metaphysicalproblem of meanings seems to disappear (at least until intensionality effects startcausing problems again).

It is clear from the above that the notion of reference in question is a technical one,defined by specific theoretical concerns in a given philosophical context. It is notprimarily rooted in the empirical study of language, or motivated by insights fromthe latter. Nonetheless, it is thought to apply to ordinary language use, and hence it isvulnerable to empirical scrutiny. Evoking empirical features of such language use,Chomsky (2000a) argues that the technical notion of reference in question does not,in fact, apply to language viewed as a natural object and from a biolinguistic point ofview. Whether this is right or not, it illustrates that an agenda motivated bymetaphysical naturalism does not necessarily reap empirical benefits. A reference-theoretic theory of meaning may make sense from the viewpoint of physicalism as ametaphysical doctrine, but not actually yield an object of naturalistic inquiry that candefine a research programme. In this book, we have assumed that how humans usewords to refer to the world is a crucial object of naturalistic inquiry. But this inquiryhas made no use of a semantic relation of reference between words and things:indeed, we have emphatically stated that there is no such relation, at a lexical level(although there is lexical content at that level), and that, at the grammatical level, theorganizational principles behind reference are not semantic but grammatical.

In general, metaphysical naturalism has made it hard to see how meanings couldbe at least in part mediated by language or the mind, and how meanings of this kindcould be subjected to naturalistic inquiry. In the wake of the cognitive revolution,philosophers developed the framework of the Computational-RepresentationalTheory of Mind (CRTM: Lycan, 2003; Rey, 2003), which made room, in the head,for ‘mental representations’. But these are not linguistically specific entities: they arerepresentations, with the meanings they represent again outside both language andthe head or mind. The move in question is consistent with metaphysical naturalism,and indeed motivated by it: such representations would again only be symbols,viewed in turn as physical entities, which means that they can enter causally intothe genesis of behaviour. If we further define computations over such physicalsymbols, and let these track environmental relations between contents of such symbols,thinkers will become ‘physical symbol systems’, which pose no metaphysical problems.There can be thinking in physical nature, and such thought can be studied computa-tionally (see Fodor, 2000: ch. 1). Yet again, it is not clear how an actual object ofnaturalistic inquiry arises from this move: there is nothing in it that makes usunderstand why some of these mental representations have propositional meanings,for example, and others not; or why we seem to think different kinds of thoughts,at least in part, from other species. It doesn’t answer the former question to say:mental representations that are propositional are those that denote extra-linguistic


propositions; or to say: because thought is propositional, some of these mentalrepresentations must have a propositional format.

The CRTM was one philosophical account of how psychology could be science,following from an earlier such account: in the first half of the twentieth century,Watson (1913) and Skinner (1953) vowed to make ‘psychology scientific’, just asBloomfield (1933) vowed to make ‘linguistics scientific’ (and free of psychologyaltogether). But none of these programmes led to what we would consider asnaturalistic inquiry into language or the mind today (Chomsky, 1959). Neither hasthe ‘naturalized philosophy’ of Skinner’s close colleague Quine led to naturalisticinquiry into the mental: in its shape as eliminative materialism, there evidently can beno such inquiry; in its shape as functionalism (Lycan, 2003), such inquiry would beradically different from that of any other aspects of human biology; and in its shape asanomalous monism (Davidson, 2004), the mental is an ‘anomaly’ in physical natureand no natural object of inquiry either (Hinzen, 2006). Not only need a metaphysical,physicalist stance not yield a naturalistic research programme, however, but anexplanatory approach to a particular kind of meaning pursued in the spirit ofmethodological naturalism may not be sensitive to such metaphysical constraints.Thus, Chomsky (2000a) denies even the coherence or formulability of physicalism.Contrary to the behaviourists, generative grammar, endorsing a methodologicalnaturalism only, did not engage in the rhetoric of making psychology scientific andinstead insisted that the proof of ‘naturalistic’ inquiry can only consist in pursuing it.Such inquiry, in order to proceed at all, will naturally define new objects of inquirythat lend themselves to naturalistic inquiry in a productive fashion (e.g. ‘I-language’).But it is not premised by a prior metaphysical view of what a natural object is or canbe, or whether there are meanings or not.

We might compare this way of proceeding with the philosophical worry expressedby Fodor (1990: 51) that, if intensional and semantic predicates were to ‘form a closedcircle’, this would:

preclude a physicalistic ontology for psychology since if psychological states were physical thenthere would surely be physicalistically specifiable sufficient conditions for their instantiation.But it’s arguable that if the ontology of psychology is not physicalistic, then there is no suchscience.

Intensional and semantic predicates, therefore, should not form a closed circle: theyshould lend themselves to physicalist reduction. If so, it makes sense, with regards tothe discipline of semantics, to distinguish a physicalist ontology of form, positedinternally to the organism—a system of structured mental representations definedthrough their formal-computational properties—from an ontology of content, whichinvolves causal relations of such representations to things in the world (Fodor, 1990;1998). Nothing different, effectively, was assumed in modern generative linguisticsitself, which in practice focused on uninterpreted properties of form as well, viewed


as internal to the organism and subject to computational study, while leaving contentto ‘semantics’ or denying that it would lend itself to naturalistic inquiry at all.

Fodor’s above concern is shared by Davidson (2004: 147), who agrees that theontology of psychology is physicalistic, and that psychological events can, one by one,be physically describable, yet who contends that no definitional or nomologicalreductions of mentalistic vocabulary to physicalistic vocabulary is on the cards.Unlike Fodor, therefore, Davidson concludes that the mental is only an issue ofchoice of vocabulary: insofar as nature is described in mentalistic terms, it is not upfor reduction, and the mental is an ‘anomalous’ aspect of nature in this sense. At thelevel of ontology, however, it plays no role.1 In this sense, there cannot really be a‘science of the mental’ viewed as an object of nature. Psychological descriptions willforever remain inherently normative, in a way that physicalistic vocabulary is saidnot to be (Davidson, 2004: 115). Even if we expel the mind from the naturalistic studyof objects of nature, however, it will then again be true that we can study it formally:through formal semantics, decision theory, and logic, which do not study either themind or language as natural objects. These indeed are the prime ingredients of David-son’s ‘Unified Theory of Thought, Meaning and Action’ (Davidson, 2004: 151 ff.). Werevisit this Unified Theory in the end of this chapter, arguing that it systematic-ally eliminates grammar in the present sense from its theoretical scheme.

A formal approach to semantics is thus consistent with both the reductionistperspective and that of anomalous monism, since it is defined so as to assume acategorical form-content distinction in place, and along with it a conception of‘syntax’ where syntax is solely on the side of ‘form’, leaving out meaning. Syntax orform are what’s in the head on the reductionist conception or the CRTM moregenerally, while, from the viewpoint of the anomaly of the mental, they are merelypart of a formal framework used to describe the mental. The categorical form-content dichotomy is also behind the familiar contention that ‘syntax is not seman-tics’, used classically by Searle to reject the computer model of mind, and morerecently by Davidson (2004: 132–3) to reject the philosophical significance of cogni-tive and linguistic theory. It is also consistent with the neo-Fregean contention that‘semantics is not psychology’: semantics is outside the head/mind, which cannot haveany influence on meaning.

As these paradigms developed in the second half of the twentieth century, genera-tive linguists of course did all the while regard their emerging field as a branch ofpsychology. The goal of linguistic theory, on this view, is to describe the state ofknowledge in which native speakers are when they know the meanings of, and thewell-formedness conditions on, linguistic expressions. Something in those speakers’

1 Cf. Davidson (2004: 114): ‘[i]n my view the mental is not an ontological but a conceptual category.( . . . ) To say of an event, for example an intentional action, that it is mental is simply to say that we candescribe it in a certain vocabulary—and the mark of that vocabulary is semantic intentionality.’


heads is taken to determine what this knowledge is like. Generative linguistics isinternalist inquiry in this sense. But then a conceptual tension with the status ofsemantics will automatically arise: for semantics, by Frege’s definition, is aboutrelations between mind (or language) and world, and it is not psychology; andeven for psychology in the sense of the CRTM, both extensions and intensions aremind-external. Semantics thus pulls the internalist linguist in an externalist direction,and a conceptual problem arises with what semantics could even mean, if it is to be amatter of psychology. One predictable reply has been to pull semantics back into theinternalist domain (Jackendoff, 2002), leaving reference and truth either out of it (seealso Horwich, 2010) or turning them into optional ingredients of a semantic theory(Pietroski, 2011). A predictable response of the philosophical semanticist has beenthat ‘semantics without reference’ is not semantics (Borg, 2012): even a ‘minimal’semantics needs to include the technical philosophical notion of reference. In thisbook, of course, we have tried something different, circumventing this whole issue:we have just studied a phenomenon, intentional reference in ordinary language use,and we have done so grammatically, since it seems to arise in grammatical patternsand to be governed by grammatical principles. We have neither regarded grammar asa part of psychology or as ‘internal’, nor as ‘external’. We have engaged in noontological reflections, in any metaphysical or extra-linguistic sense of ontology, at all.

Another response to the problem was the initial one of formal semantics itself:semantics, much like syntax and pragmatics, was simply a formal science, a branch ofmathematics (Montague, 1974). What it is, ontologically speaking, that we areformalizing, and how it relates to obscure matters of ‘mind’, then just doesn’t matter.In practice, however, linguists have not been content in taking this stance, tryingrather to fit formal semantic models into a speaker’s head somehow, aligning the newformal discipline of semantics with their prior view of linguistics as a branch ofpsychology.2 But as Partee (1980) argues in a classical discussion of whether seman-tics is ‘mathematics or psychology’, the attempt to interpret the formal models ofsemantics as describing an aspect of psychology falters when it comes to the semanticsof the propositional attitudes: what speakers mean and believe is not in line with whata model predicts that assumes propositions are functions from possible worlds totruth values. Any semantic theory that wants to be psychologically sensitive hasto question the notion of a proposition involved in the semantic models concerned.The tension between the attempts to regard semantics as a formal science and as apart of psychology, analogously with linguistics, has thus remained.

Partee’s problem, and the solutions later developed for it, assumes that themeanings of sentences are propositions and that there are ‘propositional attitudes’

2 More recently, several philosophers have made a similar move (King, 2007; Soames, 2010), like Hinzen(2006; 2007), while still not invoking grammar in an explanatory role, or indeed engaging in an explanatoryproject for what form the organization of meaning in the grammatical brain actually takes.


that are defined as ‘relations’ to them. These assumptions reflect a categoricalthought-language divide, with the meaning of language conceived as the content ofthought (Fodor, 2001), and a Cartesian ontology in place on which a proposition is anon-linguistic entity, while a ‘sentence’ is either deprived of a content or has it‘derivatively’. Again, we do not see how propositions so conceived will lend them-selves to naturalistic inquiry; nor does it become clear why they relate so intimately tolanguage. So we have endorsed a different heuristic here, first suggested in Hinzen(2006): that what has been metaphysically characterized as ‘propositions’ is simplyone element in a formal ontology that comprises other formal distinctions such asthat between propositions and facts or that between facts and truths, and is system-atically regulated grammatically. These ‘entities’, then, are not primitives of someposited semantic or metaphysical ontology (indeed they are formal categories, andhence not entities at all), nor do they belong to psychology. On this approach, astandard argument for propositions that we find in all textbooks of the philosophy oflanguages doesn’t get off the ground. The argument is that two sentences, from thesame or from different languages, can have the same meaning or ‘express the samethought’; hence meaning must be something non-linguistic. Yet, clearly, to whatever(limited!) extent two sentences of the same language can have the same meaning,grammar will explain that: for example, theta-theory, a subcomponent of grammar,explains why John killed Bill and Bill was killed by John have the same meaning—tothe (not complete!) extent that they do. Similarly, that a French and an Englishsentence can mean the same is explained by the independently established fact thatgrammar is independent of morphophonology: grammatical relations do not sound aparticular way. The argument for propositions as metaphysical entities follows only iflanguage is reduced to the morphophonological surface, deprived of meaning, whichis circular when the view that language is deprived of meaning is to be establishedand a non-linguistic ontology of meanings is to be motivated (Hinzen, 2006; 2007).This heuristic is, as noted in Chapter 5, refutable, through evidence that the formalontology of semantics does not co-vary with grammatical distinctions or map ontoindependently given grammatical patterns.3

With this grammatical perspective, the scene now changes: the question is not anymore whether semantics is psychology or mathematics, or whether it is defined over a

3 See Reichard and Hinzen (2012) for some further case studies in the grammatical essence of what areclaimed to be ontological of metaphysical distinctions. For example, Soames (2010: 102) makes a meta-physical distinction between ‘act-types’ and ‘propositions’. The latter are claimed to be ‘a certain kind ofproperty’, unlike propositions. Yet, in all examples given, the two categories correspond closely to thegrammatical one between Complementizer Phrases (CPs) (propositions) and gerundive constructionslacking an agent (act-types). Similar remarks hold for Moltmann’s (2007) distinction between ‘tropes’,which correspond to adjective nominalizations (e.g. ‘wisdom’), and ‘states’ (‘John’s being tired’), which aregerundive constructions. Grammar systematically co-varies with the distinctions made, and it arguablyexplains why we have the different intuitions about them that we do, which means that they do not have toremain metaphysical primitives in our semantic ontology—a clear advantage of this approach.


structure of mental representations or not. The question, rather, becomes whethersemantics as a field has an independent formal ontology, with respect to the ontologythat grammar yields. Such an ontology can, of course, be formalized within seman-tics, but formalizing it will not yield the answer to the question just raised. Positing areference relation, too, is to formulate the problem rather than provide its solution:the problem of why humans, beginning from infant pointing, refer, in a way that noother species does. Our causal encounters with an environment make no predictionsin this regard. Nor does it help to simply posit an ontology of thought that language isthen said to ‘reflect’. Nor will it help to presuppose some formal meta-language andwrite up ‘logical forms’ in it that help to encode intuitions we have about the truthconditions of expressions. Since the logical forms are simply designed to formalizethe intuitions in question, they do not answer the question of where these truthconditions come from—whether grammar induces them, or they have an independentorigin. We may observe that representing proper names have a distinctive form of rigidor direct reference (Kripke, 1972); but representing them as constants in ‘logical form’will not answer the question of why they exist or refer in the way they do: such a formalrepresentation will be our problem, not the answer to our problem.

Partee’s question of whether semantics is mathematics or psychology is thus char-acteristic for a possibility that it omits: that semantics might be linguistics, and part ofgrammar in particular. In part, of course, we have argued, it isn’t, for even percepts havea distinctive semantics, which we already do not know how to explain (Section 2.1).Lexicalization viewed as the creation of a lexical atom then comes with a semantics,too, as do lexemes and their inherent hierarchical organization in terms of hyponymyand hyperonymy. Grammatical patterns, too, come with a distinctive semantics oftheir own; and here is where things end. The ontology of our theory of the propos-itional forms of reference is grammatical. Calling it psychological adds nothing to ourproblem, and we do not see how we can go deeper than grammar, laying a foundationfor grammar itself. Indeed, also with regards to calling it ‘internal’, we surely cannotdisregard the fact that the sole place where grammar is found is in humans whocommunicate linguistically and at a population level. Grammar does not mature inthe individual—it is, factually, only a population-level phenomenon, even if themembers of such populations, as is surely the case, individually need a sapiens-specific brain and the linguistic genotype to partake in this phenomenon. For thisreason, too, our account endorses no internalist ontology. It is language in the social-interactive and population-level sense, where issues of reference arise: we do notpoint in the privacy of our own heads. Truth, too, is not a subjective phenomenon, oreven an intersubjective one.

All that said, there is a problem, with which the rest of this chapter will beconcerned. It is one thing to provide evidence that it is a consequence of grammarthat, as lexical concepts are inserted into a grammatical derivation, a formal ontologyarises and the concepts in question are converted phase by phase into referential


expressions. Another thing is to say that when we talk about the formal ontology oftruth, what we are talking about is indeed what the philosopher or semanticist takestruth to be: a semantic notion that intrinsically connects with issues of objectivity orthe reality of the external world. Arguably, an account of truth that does not makesense of the objectivity of truth, is not an account of truth at all. Nor is it an accountof thought. The notion of objectivity here need not be a controversial metaphysicalone. The fact is much simpler: as we understand the notion of truth, truth is notappearance or likelihood; not belief or assertion; not presupposition. Truth is justthat: truth, and being objective is part of what truth means.

It is true that the inputs to the grammatical process are lexical items that we haveassumed are ultimately grounded in percepts. Percepts are rooted in the externalworld that we act in. But perception, we have also assumed, cannot ground objectiv-ity. So how can grammar do so? This is not the problem that grammar is ‘pure form’,and cannot speak to matters of ‘content’—for precisely such a distinction, which canbe metaphysically or methodologically motivated, has not been made here. If aparticular kind of form is intrinsic to a particular kind of content, no form-contentdichotomy is coherent any more. So it is not as if we posited some forms, and theproblem of how to connect these to independent and external matters of content isnow still completely open. But the concern remains. For we have developed anaccount of sapiens-specific thought that makes such thought come out as intrinsicallygrammatical, and which also gives a grammatical explanation of the fact that suchthought can be true or false. The question that remains is how it can be that truthinvolves a relation to the objective world, and yet be grammatical? Indeed, come tothink of it, might we have cut the connection between thought and reality, supportingsome kind of idealism in the end, on which truth is ‘mind-dependent’? Would thisnot be to contradict the very content of truth, in which case we have achieved littleand a semantic story is yet to be added to our account?

9.2 How can it be that truth is a grammatical concept?

Anyone can agree that the connection between truth and grammar is very close in thefollowing sense: lexemes cannot be evaluated yet as true or false, nor can even manygrammatical configurations: the grammatical correlates of truth are in fact quitespecific, as we will see again below. The insight was first formulated by Aristotle,who noted that ‘falsity and truth have to do with combination and separation’(De Interpretatione 1, 16a, 13). But the combination and separation in question isnot simply a generic one: they have to do with grammar—which is what combinationand separation means in this case.4 Truth attribution, in this sense, is a structural

4 For evidence that this was, indeed, Aristotle’s view, see Reichard (2013), Section 3.1.


phenomenon, and more specifically, a grammatical one, as the prime ingredients thathave to be combined and separated in appropriate ways are grammatical ones:for Aristotle, a subject, a predicate, and finite Tense, occurring in the right configur-ation.5 Where Tense is missing, in particular, as in the small clause (SC) in Johnconsiders [SC him [a man]], no truth is attributed by either speaker or hearer to thepredication encoded in this SC (i.e. him being a man). Moreover, it is ungrammaticalto say: ‘him a man is true’; or ‘it is true that him a man’. So the notion of truth cannotbe applied. Where Tense is added, but remains non-finite, as in John considers[SC him to be [a man]], the same remains true. Even where Tense is present andfinite, no truth needs to be attributed to the proposition of which it is a part, as seenin John believes [CP he is [a man]], where no such truth as that he is a man is assertedby the speaker.

Yet, specific as the grammatical preconditions for truth may be, this says abso-lutely nothing about what being true means; or when a given proposition is true; orwhat conditions have to be satisfied for this to be so. For millennia, philosophers andmetaphysicians have tried to specify these conditions. Thus they ventured theproposals like that the world has to be a certain way, namely so as the propositionsays it is: what the proposition says is the case, also has to be the case; the propositionhas to mirror or correspond to reality. This all sounds innocuous enough, if only weknew how to tell what ‘being the case’, ‘mirroring’, or ‘corresponding’means, withoutcircularly using the notion of truth to elucidate these notions. This asks for a genuine‘theory’ of truth—a theory that tells us, in terms other than truth itself, what truth is.But a widespread consensus today maintains that there probably is no such theory(Horwich, 2010). It wouldn’t follow from this that truth does not exist. But it wouldsuggest that it is a primitive: it cannot be analysed, or broken down into constituentson the basis of which we could construct a theory of it.

Even so, this would not be the end of the theory of truth, since Alfred Tarski had aprofound insight in this regard. Rather than further pondering the content of truth,he wondered, why not reduce our statement of the conditions that have to hold for agiven proposition to be true to instances of the following schema, where ‘P’ denotesan arbitrary sentence that is referred to on the left-hand side (LHS) of the equivalencein (1) and used on the right-hand side (RHS):

(1) The Equivalence Schema:‘P’ is true iff P.

For example:

5 Which is not to say that the function of finite Tense in English, which is the deictic anchoring ofsentences, is implemented in the same way in all languages. Arguably, such anchoring in Halkomelem(Salish) is on location rather than time, and it is on Person in Blackfoot (Ritter and Wiltschko, 2009).


(2) ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.

The profundity of (1) lies in the fact that (as long as ‘P’ does not contain any lexicaltruth predicate itself ), there is a lexical truth predicate present on the LHS, but noneon the RHS, while, at the same time, the two sides appear logically equivalent.Ordinary speakers, that is, will typically agree that (2) is the case: the LHS andRHS seem to have the same semantic content, whether we spell this out in termsof both sides having the same truth conditional content, or inferentially, through twoseemingly valid (truth-preserving) inferences:

‘Snow is white’ is true∴ Snow is white

Snow is white∴ ‘Snow is white’ is true

The natural conclusion from these observations is what we independently know: thelexical truth predicate (as present on the LHS) is not in fact required to state a truth,or to predicate truth of a proposition.6 Thus, a speaker who utters the sentence (3)with normal intonation in the course of a conversation, will normally be taken tohave claimed the truth of the proposition that John left:7

(3) John left.

Such a speaker would normally be taken to be contradicted by another personuttering any of the sentences in (4), but crucially not by a speaker uttering eithersentence in (5):

(4) a. No, this is not true.b. That John left is not true.

(5) a. That John left is unlikely.b. You don’t believe that John left.

It is possible, therefore, to state a truth without using the lexical concept of truth (thelexeme true). (5) shows that, while the speaker who utters (3) puts forward theproposition that John left as true, he does not assert anything about what he believesor finds likely, say. As he might comment later: ‘I said that John left, but I didn’tbelieve it’, and he would then not have contradicted what he said (though he will haveeradicated its conversational force). As we will put this point technically in what

6 Strictly speaking, the very term ‘truth-predicate’ is a misnomer: ‘predicate’ is a grammatical notion,not a lexical one. ‘True’ is lexically an adjective, which tends to (but of course need not) functiongrammatically as a predicate.

7 If it is a conjecture or supposition that John left, not an assertion, intonation and/or grammar willtypically have to change (‘if John left . . . ’, ‘Suppose John left’, ‘John left?’, etc.).


follows: without using the lexical truth predicate, the speaker effects a truth-attribution.Somehow, that is, truth is predicated when (3) is asserted, whereas the predicates ‘likely’or ‘being believed’ are not involved: this, at least, would seem to be a natural explan-ation of why we obtain a contradiction with (4) but not (5). How exactly the truthpredicate is ‘involved’, even if it is not present as a lexeme, is the central question weaddress in the rest of this subsection.

The truth and significance of (2) are quite unobjectionable. (2) is not trivial, inparticular. Rather it is a surprising fact that a sentence of which truth is predicatedthrough a lexical truth predicate should be equivalent to one where there is no suchtruth predicate. (2) is also unobjectionable in the sense that it does absolutely nothingto dispute the objective force that the notion of truth has. Ordinary speakers includingchildren would agree, on reflection, that truth is objective in this sense: it is not thesame as belief, or assertion, or even agreement. Truth can hold even where our beliefsare wrong; or when we both are wrong. (1) does not contradict this insight in anyway, and indeed partially tells us why it holds: the condition stated in (1) for ‘P’ to betrue does not constrain this condition in any way, and not in particular by anyepistemic clauses (such as are involved in statements like “P” is true iff P is/can beknown/verified’). Above that, (1) tells us that the reason truth has this objective forcecannot lie in the lexical content of the word ‘true’: for the statement that the speakermakes in (3) comes with the same objective force as when the lexical truth predicate isused, and it is equally taken to state a fact that holds objectively, or independently ofwhether the speaker happens to assert it or not.

We are learning from (1), in short, how to talk about objective conditions forpropositions to hold, without bringing in any semantic ‘relations to the world’ asexpressed by certain words or predicates. All we need, it appears, is an appropriatesentence, like the RHS of (1) or (3), and an act of using it in which the objective forceof truth will be implicit (the exact notion of ‘implicit’, again, needs to be clarified).This clearly points in the direction in which we want to go: grammar suffices. Maybetruth does not require us to go beyond grammar. (1) does not take us beyondlanguage, to any non-linguistic ontology. It simply invokes the equivalence of twosentences, the explanation of which is, we will argue below, purely linguistic. But letus first look at the grammar of truth-attribution in more detail.

As noted in Chapter 3, the objective force in question disappears when we changethe grammar of a sentence like (3), as when we let it occur as a syntacticargument in (6):

(6) Bill said John left.

There is here no truth predicated of the proposition that John left. Since the reasonwhy this is so cannot be lexical—the lexical elements in the proposition in questionare identical—the reason must be grammatical. The grammatical difference involved,namely that ‘John left’ is a syntactic argument in the one case but not the other,


moreover explains the difference in interpretation, since, as we have seen in Chapters3 and 4, it is a completely general fact about syntactic arguments that they never effectan attribution of truth (by the speaker): truth is asserted (by speakers) in matrixcontexts only.

The lexical truth predicate, then, is not necessary to effect a truth attribution. Itturns out that it is also not sufficient. Thus, trivially, if the speaker had uttered (7), thelexical truth predicate would have occurred and it would have been attributed to thevery same proposition (that John left), but the speaker would not of course then haveasserted that very proposition:

(7) Bill considers it true that John left.

Had the speaker uttered (8), on the other hand, he would have attributed truth to (orasserted) the proposition that it is true that John left, but not the proposition thatJohn left (though his implicit commitment to asserting this latter proposition wouldhave followed logically, by a familiar reasoning):

(8) It’s true that John left.

To effect an attribution of truth to the exact proposition that John left, therefore,rather than another proposition that entails it, (3) is exactly what is needed. In linewith this, the question whether John left is answered naturally by (3), and onlybizarrely by (8), which normally presupposes that (3) has been asserted in the samediscourse before. Truth-attributions in which the lexical truth predicate occursthus asymmetrically depend on truth-attributions exemplified in (1), where it doesnot occur.

Uttering (3) with normal intonation is a matter of choice, but effecting a truthattribution, when doing so, is not: context-independently, a truth-attribution to aparticular proposition will be effected.8 Whatever the context and whatever thespeaker’s intention, if he said (1) with normal intonation, it isn’t optional then totake him to have said that (1) is a probability, that it is what he believes, or his life’sgreatest wish. In this sense, the effect is not a ‘pragmatic’ one. This is also the momentto fend off another contrarian intuition: that the truth attributed in (3) is part of an‘implicit commitment’ that a speaker who asserts (3) shoulders. On this view, thecommitment to the fact that the proposition that John left is true would be part ofwhat can be derived from (3) using various auxiliary assumptions from logic andspeech act theory—but it would not be an inherent aspect of the grammar of (3),and so truth would not be a grammatical notion, any more than the notion of beliefis. A speaker asserting (3), the thought is, will also typically believe that John left.

8 Though not by an actor on stage of course, whose assertions are made on behalf of a character (whothen is committed to the assertion as much as any person not on stage would be, and may indeed die as aresult, contrary to the actor). We thank Uli Reichard for this clarification.


But surely, the predicate ‘believes’ is not somehow involved in the grammar of (3)? Sowhy should this be more plausible in the case of truth predication?

But we have already addressed this objection: ‘This is not true’, said in response toan assertion of (3), is in contradiction with it. ‘You don’t believe this’, by contrast, isnot: it is rather a complaint about why the assertion took place. Relatedly, (1) tells usthat a sentence in which the lexical truth predicate occurs is equivalent to one whereit does not occur: no such equivalence is available for the belief-predicate. The twopredicates are therefore crucially distinct: in our assertoric use of ‘snow is white’, thetruth predicate must somehow already be implicit, which is why we get away with theequivalence; but the belief-predicate is not, and therefore we don’t, in that case.9

Truth-theoretic force not only co-varies with grammar, as illustrated by (6) above,but such co-variation is highly systematic, as we saw in Chapter 4 (and see the nextsubsection below). This co-variation leads us to the following answer to the questionwe have raised in this subsection: all we need to understand, in order to understandtruth, is the grammar of truth attribution, disregarding the lexical truth predicate orthe lexical concept of truth: the phenomenon is no deeper than that (or, to put itdifferently, grammar is deep enough, and maybe there isn’t anything deeper).

This answer depends on deriving (1). Before we do that, note that what accountsfor the truth attribution effected in (3) also cannot be the lexical predicate that we seeovertly occurring in it, namely ‘left’. The truth predicate that we are claiming is‘involved’ is not somehow ‘absorbed’ by this lexical predicate that is overtly present.This is because this same predicate is also present when (3) occurs in (6), where notruth is predicated of the embedded clause by the speaker, as noted. Crucially,therefore, the truth predicate involved in the truth attribution encoded in (3) ispurely structural or configurational.10 The same is true when a lexical truth predicatedoes occur, and a truth attribution is effected, as in (8). But what is asserted there isnot that John left but that it is true that he did. This, (8) says, is true. Therefore, thereis another truth predicate involved in (8) as used assertorically that is not lexicallyexpressed, but is purely structural and has the lexical one in its scope. Indeed, (8) onlyneeds to occur embedded as an argument, and no truth will be attributed by thespeaker to (8) at all, showing that the lexical truth predicate is not decisive.The crucial elements, rather, which are both necessary and sufficient for a truth-attribution to occur, are (in English) a subject, a predicate, and finite Tense, as

9 Of course, the view we are developing does not exclude modelling truth like belief, as an implicitcommitment of speakers, and formalizing such commitments in a logical meta-language. But we are afterthe source of the phenomenon of truth, and the more intrinsic and intricate the co-variation withgrammatical patterns is, the less explanatory an account based on implicit commitments will become.

10 This possibility should not be surprising, as many concepts that are also lexicalized can, in otherinstances, be present purely structurally: identity, for example, is expressed in the lexical concept ‘identical’,but also in the sentence ‘John is him [pointing]’ or ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’. The same applies to thematicrole concepts: ‘Agent’, qua thematic role, is a grammatical notion, as we have stressed, and is expressedpurely configurationally; but ‘is the agent of ’ is a way of denoting the agent of an action lexically.


occurring in a matrix or root configuration. As noted, all of these elements arecrucially grammatical notions: they relate to grammatical meaning in our sense.

Consider now how this configurational analysis explains why the EquivalenceSchema intuitively holds, which in contemporary discussions (cf. Horwich, 2010)has the status of an unexplained or primitive fact about how the notion of truthhappens to be used. Consider (9):

(9) ‘John left’ is true iff John left.

Why is this true? The answer is that although (3) identically occurs as a constituent in(9), as much as it does in (6), the grammar of (6) and of (9) are again not the same,just as was the case with (3) and (6). If the grammar of the right-hand side (RHS) of(9) contained what we have called the structural truth predicate, in exactly the waythat (3) does when (3) is asserted, then it would not be puzzling at all that the RHS of(9), if asserted, could be equivalent to the LHS, where a truth predicate is lexicallypresent. The question therefore is: Is the RHS indeed grammatically relevantlyidentical to (3), and relevantly different from that of (3) as occurring in (6)? Theanswer is of course yes: for whereas the grammar of (3) as occurring in (6) is that of asyntactic argument, the grammar of (3) as occurring in (9), is not: (9) is a paratactic,not a hypotactic construction, and (3) occurs in a root (or ‘unembedded’) context in(9) (Heycock, 2006). (9), then, holds because the structural truth predicate is presenton both sides.

This explanation, however, is not complete. For on the LHS there is an additionallexical predicate. So the explanation is only complete if we can also explain why thislexical predicate does not disturb the effect of the structural predicate present there.This lexical predicate on the other hand has no substantive descriptive content: itdoesn’t add any content to the compositional semantics of an utterance. So we do notexpect it will affect the truth-attribution effected on the LHS. Nonetheless, we need toexplain why this predicate, lexically empty as it may be, does crucially not induce anopacity effect for the embedded clause on the LHS: curiously, in the sentence ‘ThatJohn left is true’ as much as in the sentence ‘It’s true that John left’, the full truth ofJohn’s having left is assumed by the speaker. Why is this? This remaining riddle willbe solved in the next subsection.

Consider what alternative explanation we might have tried: it so happens, wemight have said, that, in the language of the person we are interpreting, the sentence‘John left’ expresses the belief that John left. ‘True’ as occurring on the LHS thereforeis a predicate that, as applied to the language of this person, has the sentence ‘Johnleft’ in its extension. This sentence is therefore true in that language iff John left. Thisexplanation invokes no grammar (except that one word is isolated as a predicate,which is a grammatical fact, but often mistakenly taken to be a lexical one), and itdoes invoke a non-linguistic ontology of ‘belief ’. What meanings are associated withan utterance is then a matter of what beliefs are expressed in it. The two explanations


couldn’t be more different, therefore. All we invoked in our explanation was gram-mar, and there was no need for an ontology of belief at all. We will revisit this curiousconclusion below, when arguing that the ontology in question only arises when wefail to give grammar its due.

9.3 The grammar of truth: a unified account

Let us now turn to what we just identified as the remaining riddle, and also expandthe coverage of our account to the full range of constructions in which truthattribution can be effected:

(10) It seems that John left.

(11) It’s that John left. (Moro, 1997)

(12) It’s true that John left.

(13) That John left is true.

All of these constructions are similar in that they come with some assertoric or truth-theoretic force assigned to the embedded proposition. This could be questioned for(10), which, apart from the reading of interest here, has another reading of which (14)is a paraphrase (see Ruwet, 1991):

(14) It appears that John left.

The reading that we are interested in, however, is paraphrased as in (15), where thelexical truth predicate appears:

(15) It seems true that John left. / That John left seems true.

While (14) expresses the conjecture or impression that John left, in (15) the sameproposition is put forward with somewhat more certainty, involving more truth-theoretic force. To be sure, the speaker of (10), under the intended reading, falls shortof asserting that John left—and indeed, the grammar of (10) itself suggests no suchthing, according to our own analysis, since ‘John left’ is not a root clause in it. But it isalso not that the speaker asserting (10), under the intended reading, considers thetruth value of the proposition that John left still totally open. Rather, the moment thatdoubt was to creep back in, the reading would shift to (14) (and ‘seems’ would beintonationally stressed).

The truth-theoretic force in question is also clearly stronger than in the case of ‘Itseems possible/probable/likely that John left’, which does not capture the intuitivemeaning and force of (10) at all, under any reading, and which therefore demon-strates that ‘true’ is quite the right notion to use in (15) to bring out the force of (10)under the reading in question. The force is also of course stronger than in (6), where,


as we noted, essentially no truth-theoretic force is attached to the embedded propos-ition. In sum, the embedded clause in (10), while technically in a subordinatedposition (‘John left’ is no matrix clause), is not in a position as opaque as the onewhere it occurs in (6), but not as transparent as that of a root clause either.

The important conclusion to draw from all this, of course, is that the lexical truthpredicate used in (15) to bring out the relevant reading of (10) is again not lexicallyovert in (10). And again, the truth predicate lexically expressed in (15) and structur-ally present in (10), under the relevant reading, is again, in either case, within thescope of another and structurally expressed truth predicate. For this very reason, whatis asserted to be true in (15) is that it seems that John left, not that John left. Putdifferently, the structurally present truth predicate again overrides the effect of thelexical one, and it always has maximal scope. Against this background, let us nowlook at (11), the second construction type above, repeated here as (16):

(16) It’s that John left.

If we first compare ‘said’ in (6) with ‘appears’ in (14), then ‘appears’ with ‘seems’ in(8), and then ‘seems’ with the cliticized copula ‘’s’ in (16), we see the lexical content ofthe matrix verb gradually fading away, until eventually it is bleached altogether, evenmorphologically. As the lexical content of the matrix predicate fades away, the truth-theoretic force of the embedded proposition increases. (10), under the relevantreading, when asserted, involves some truth-theoretic force attributed to the propos-ition in question. In (16), curiously, the truth of the proposition that John left ispresupposed: it is taken as a fact that John left. (16) might for example be an answer tothe question ‘what’s the matter?’ or ‘what is it?’ (see Moro, 1997), and when answeringthis question with (16), the answer could roughly be paraphrased with (17):

(17) It’s the truth/the fact that John left.11

The point about example (16), then, is again that, unlike in (12) or (13), no lexicaltruth predicate is present. Yet truth is attributed to the proposition that John left. Ipsofacto, once again, the phenomenon under investigation is not lexical: it must followfrom the grammar. The effect is achieved by voiding the matrix verb of lexicalcontent completely, and by thereby avoiding the trap of syntactic embedding.

The difference in the degree of opacity of the embedded clause in the aboveconstructions and in relation to (3) and (6) can now be traced to a purely grammat-ical fact: the clause occurring embedded in either (10) or (16) is not the syntactically

11 (16) is not fully grammatical for some speakers of English (including one of the co-authors of thisbook), but it improves with ‘just’ inserted before ‘that’. It is also fine in German (Es ist, dass sie geweint hat)or Italian (C’è que Gianni e partito). For some, (17) with ‘the truth’ is out. This correlates with the fact thatthe proposition embedded in (16) is factive (presupposed as true and referenced as a fact) rather thanasserted as a truth. This is what we expect given the general fact that no proposition, as long as it isembedded at all, is asserted as true (see Chapter 3).


subordinated argument of the matrix verb ‘seems’ or ‘is’, respectively, in the way thatit is the syntactic argument of ‘says’ in (6). Instead, ‘seems’ in (10) and ‘is’ in (16) takea Small Clause as their complement, of which ‘John left’ is the subject. The generalrule is that the more we approximate a root context, the more a clause becomestransparent.

Consider clausal adjuncts in this regard: since adjuncts are not syntactic argu-ments, lacking Case and thus exhibiting reduced connectivity to the matrix clause(see Chomsky, 2004: 116–18), they, too, approximate a root context or a form ofparataxis. In line with that, truth-theoretic force reappears in them:

(18) Bill said John left, even though John didn’t.

Here, the clause ‘even though John didn’t’, being an adjunct, has syntactic connect-ivity with the syntactic object to which it attaches that is looser than in the case ofarguments. The above account thus predicts that it should also be transparent fortruth-evaluation. And of course it is: the speaker of (18) does assert it as true that Johndidn’t leave. This again confirms our earlier conclusion that when, and when not, atruth-attribution occurs, and to which degree it occurs, is regulated by grammar (‘it‘supervenes’ on grammar, in philosophical terms), not by non-grammatical kinds ofentailment or implicit commitments.

Let us now turn to (12) and (13), repeated here as (19) and (20):

(19) It is true that John left

(20) That John left is true.

These are the most canonical constructions discussed in philosophy when the ‘truthpredicate’ is being discussed. The first observation to make here is that these arecopular constructions. This is by now exactly what we expect, and what can now beexplained grammatically: for whoever asserts (19) or (20), does assign truth-theoret-ical force to the proposition that John left. Hence the sentence denoting thisproposition cannot occur as a syntactic argument, predicting that we find a copularconstruction with a Small Clause complement instead. The copular verb is not even‘seems’, but the one completely bleached of lexical content, namely ‘is’.

The derivations we take to be as follows. In (20), That John left is clearly the subjectof the predicate ‘true’:

(21) is [SC [CP that John left] true]

This whole subject moves to the specifier of T(ense), yielding (22):

(22) [[CP that John left] T is [SC t true]]

Also (19) is derived from a SC, but this time the subject is the expletive ‘it’:

(23) is [SC it true]


Again the subject ‘it’ moves to the sentential subject position:

(24) it is [SC t true]]

The that-clause, however, which functions as the ‘associate’ of the expletive, forms anadjunct that is extraposed, as the fact suggests that it can be omitted (yielding thefully grammatical sentence It is true):

(25) [[it is [SC t true]] [SC that [John left]]]

This yields an explicit and unified account of the syntax of (19) and (20), which alsoexplains their semantic properties. The embedded clause in these instances can haveno greater assertoric force than in these very constructions, short of occurring as aroot clause itself. This is because in neither case is the clause a syntactic argument ofthe matrix verb. Lack of opacity follows.

We now also expect why ‘seems’—called the ‘quasi-copula’—forms an intermedi-ate case. Given how weak the copula and quasi-copula are in terms of their substan-tive lexical content, neither of them can refer to an event that is properly independentof the one referred to by the embedded verb ‘left’. In other words, they have no eventposition of their own, which could take another event or proposition as argument,creating a structure semantically in which one event is part of another. In this sense,(19) and (20) are more like a mono-eventive (or mono-clausal) structures, predictingthe empirical facts we observed: that its embedded clause will be less opaque than in aclearly bi-clausal and bi-eventive structure such as (6), where there are two events,one of saying and one of leaving. The embedded clause can therefore carry sometruth-theoretic force, as indeed it does. While truth predication is paradigmatically amatrix (root, or whole-sentence) phenomenon, raising constructions approximatethis phenomenon to some (though not a full) extent.

As for (13), it is grammatically exactly like (19), except of course that there is nolexical truth predicate in it at all, despite the fact that a truth-presupposition occurs.In an assertion of (19), which is ungrammatical when used out of a relevant context,there is nonetheless no assertion that John left. It’s being taken as old information,rather, that he did, turning this into an established fact, which is referenced in theparaphrase ‘It’s the fact/truth that John left’. If we want to have this structure aspatterning with the previous ones, and with copular constructions in general, we haveessentially only two options: we will begin with a SC forming the complement of ‘is’,and that can logically either be the one in (26) or the one in (27), in which the roles ofsubject and predicate have simply reversed:

(26) is [SC it [CP that John left]]

(27) is [SC [CP that John left] it]


In short, ‘it’ is either the subject of the SC or its predicate. There do not seem to beother options. As Moro (1997) argues at length, several empirical facts suggest thelatter option, and we will adopt this analysis here. For example, it is quite implausiblefor the clause to be a predicate in such constructions, as the ungrammaticality of (28)suggests:

(28) *Peteri is [[SC ti [CP that [IP John left]]]

Also, there is no particular reason why an NP such as ‘it’ should not to play the role of(or to stand in for) a predicate, since definite nominals, for example, can be perfectlygood predicates, as in (29), and can then invert, making perfectly good sententialsubjects:

(29) John is the mayor.

(30) The mayor is John.

In line with this, the analysis of ‘it’ as a predicate as in (27) would reflect an ‘inverse’option generally available in copular sentences, with the SC-predicate moving overthe SC-subject into sentence subject position, to yield the overt form (11/16). Furtherevidence for this hypothesis is that where the predicate does ‘invert’ over theSC-subject in this fashion, we see that there is generally a copula required, as (32)shows where such inversion has taken place:

(31) I consider [SC John [NP the problem]]

(32) I consider [SC the problem *(to be) [NP John]]

In line with that, (33) is ungrammatical:

(33) *I believe/consider it that John left.

But why, then, is (34) ungrammatical, which, if ‘it’ is the SC-predicate, would simplycorrespond to the ‘canonical’ (‘non-inverted’) case?

(34) *That John left is it.

However, there is a compelling independent reason for why (34) should be ungram-matical: ‘it’, as a placeholder for a predicate, is a pro-form, which as such cannot beleft stranded (see Moro, 1997: 179–80). Inversion of the predicate over the subject istherefore obligatory, and (30) is predicted to be out. The analysis of (11/16), then, (35):

(35) iti is [SC [that [John left]] proi]

In this construction, there is no lexical predicate in the SC, and the copula does notencode an independent event, as a normal matrix verb does (it lacks an independentevent position, in Neo-Davidsonian terms). Hence it seems plausible that the truth-attribution cannot be delayed to the matrix clause in this case, and the grammar can


realize the required structure for an attribution of truth only by resorting to a‘dummy’ predicate, whose only function is to assemble the configuration requiredfor a truth-judgement to occur. For considerable further evidence in favour of thisanalysis, see Moro (1997) and Hinzen (2013a). (35) now suggests that the structurefor (36) should be (37):

(36) it seems that John left

(37) iti seems [SC [that John left] proi]

By contrast, when the lexical truth predicate is present, the structure is (38), where‘that John left’ is again an extraposed adjunct that is the associate of the expletive:

(38) a. [it seems [SC __ true]] [that John left]

In support of the presence of a ‘dummy’ predicate in (37), consider that (39), where‘John’ is raised from the position of the subject of the embedded clause to sentence-subject position, is fully grammatical, while (40), from Moro (1997: 195), is out:

(39) John seems [ t to be sad] ‘John seems to be sad’

(40) *it seems [for John to be sad]

This data follow on the above analysis. For if the SC in (37) assembles the configur-ation for a truth-attribution (though finite Tense is still missing), the predicateobviously requires a truth-evaluable constituent to apply to. But the non-finite clausein (39) doesn’t qualify as such, as we independently know: no truth can be grammat-ically predicated of it:

(41) *[for John to be sad] is true

Why, in turn, can we say It seems that John left, but not *That John left seems? Again,because the underlying structure would be (42), and pro must move, parallel to (34):

(42) *[That John left] seems [SC t pro]

By contrast, we expect That John left seems true to be fine, as it indeed is.In summary, we have now provided a unified analysis of four constructions in

which truth-theoretic force is present, yet not in a root context. It has transpired thatin all of these cases, a root context, and the relevant configuration required for atruth-attribution to occur, is closely approximated. This is possible because in noneof the cases is the clause in question syntactically subordinated as a syntacticargument. Opacity is maximal when the clause occurs as a properly hypotacticallyembedded syntactic argument. As we move to more mono-eventive structures, wherethe embedded clause is not a syntactic argument of the matrix verb, opacity is slightlylifted, and a truth predicate can be inserted, as we have just seen. As we move to


matrix clauses, finally, or to coordinative or paratactic constructions, it is liftedcompletely, and transparency is maximal.

Truth-theoretic force, in short, is regulated grammatically. At the same time, themost basic fact about knowledge of truth is (1). And to appreciate (1), all we needed tounderstand was the grammar of truth attribution. Our understanding of truthreduces to our understanding of grammar, and this is the answer to our questionwhat it means that truth is a grammatical notion.

9.4 The limit of grammar and the limits of thought

Any root context in grammar has a special, extensional semantics. If I shout (43),I directly refer to John, who must be a part of the speech context (or must betaken to be):

(43) John!

Reference is not left open or undecided here, any more than I have argued truth is inan utterance of (3). Both are root phenomena, illustrating, now in the nominal case,the correlation we have argued for. When proper names occur in embedded pos-itions, on the other hand, we again see that referential force is lost, and referencebecomes less direct. Thus, in (44), the speaker clearly doesn’t ipso facto refer to John,in the sense that there is some direct or causal connection to him within the speechcontext:

(44) I called John yesterday.

This is even more obvious in (45) and (46):

(45) I have no idea who John is.

(46) Are you John?

Root uses of proper names thus connect with the external world in ways thatembedded uses of them do not, paralleling what we observed for clauses. Only theformer uses can be described as ‘indexical’. Similar observations apply to interjec-tions, as in (47), where it will be immediate from the circumstance of use what ‘Sh***’refers to:

(47) Sh***!

The same is true of the actions that imperatives such as ‘Come!’ refer to: nothing herecan drive a wedge between the utterance and the action it refers to. The same appliesto the intended subject of the action, which is the always silent YOU that is part ofsuch a speech act.


In line with these general observations on the role of the grammatical root, we haveargued above that as the grammatical derivation reaches the root (and nothing takesplace to pervert the normal course of events, for example wh-movement to form aquestion), a potential truth is assembled: language, if you allow the metaphor, cannow ‘touch’ the world. At this point, nothing lexical mediates the act of reference anymore: all concepts have entered the derivation and are processed for reference,having been converted into referential acts or predicates in the course of thederivation. In (43), by contrast, there is still at least the minimal lexical content of‘John’. In an assertion, however, we are, as the derivation stops, alone with grammar,and truth. No lexical concept with descriptive content stands between us and theworld, and reference is maximally ‘direct’, yielding the most extensional form ofreference that exists. In that form of reference, all concepts can now be substituted forco-referential ones, leaving the truth in question untouched: truth is ‘extensional’.

Beginning from conceptualization, then, we are, with truth, at grammar’s otherend. And this, indeed, is the limit of grammar: nothing happens, grammatically,beyond this point. It follows that grammar and truth intrinsically relate: the organiza-tion of grammar inherently reflects the organization of truth. And the limit inquestion, it turns out, is also the limit of human thought. To arrive at this conclusion,consider what else can happen in grammar after a truth-attribution has been effected.We cannot, of course, add a completely new clause I said that, to derive (48), for thiswould deprive us of the truth-theoretic force again:

(48) I said that John left.

Moreover, as noted in Chapter 3, such ‘recursion’ will anyhow only reassemble thebasic Aristotelian template that a statement of truth exploits, with ‘I’ as the subject,‘SAY that John left’ as the complex predicate, and Tense marked as an inflection onthe matrix verb (leading to the spell-out of SAY as ‘said’). Not only does the addedclause not have any new structure itself. The newly arising complex (or recursive)sentence also does not have any different structure from that of a single sentence: itstill only has a single subject, a single (complex) predicate, a single Tense (PAST),12

and (most crucially) a single truth value, as we have seen. In this sense, truth-attribution remains the ‘maximal’ phenomenon ever computed in grammar: allthat ever happens (unless an interrogative, optative, or imperative is derived, ofcourse), is that a single truth value is assigned, with truth value assignment beingcrucially an undivided phenomenon.

12 Of course there is an embedded Tense (specified on ‘left’). However, at the matrix level, Tense isevaluated as indexical in relation to the point of speech (the Now of the speaker), and embedded Tenses areevaluated differently, namely at least partially in relation to the temporal reference point established by thematrix Tense. In particular, (6) has a reading where what Bill said is ‘John left’, hence where the leavingtook place prior to the saying (see Giorgi, 2010).


After the truth is assembled, we could on the other hand add a clausal adjunct. Inprinciple, an arbitrary number of such adjuncts can be added to a fully configuredassertion (John left, without any doubt, before noon . . . ). Every such adjunct functionsas a further specification of the truth claimed, but none is grammatically required,and none of this changes this truth as such, or the fact that it is being attributed to agiven proposition. In languages where assertions require a specification of evidenti-ality (the source of information on the basis of which the assertion is made), on theother hand, we would have to add a relevant verbal inflection or clitic to the assertion.These are arguably not the same as modals, and where an assertion is specified forevidentiality in such languages, the truth value of the proposition is not wiped out, asit is in (48) (cf. Aikhenvald, 2004: 2): the assertion stands, and what is added is anindication of its epistemic source. This difference interestingly correlates with adifference in the grammar of evidentiality markers as compared with that of modals(or adjuncts): while modals are recursive to some extent (e.g. ‘Evidently, Johnpossibly left’), evidentials lack this property, in a similar way as English tag-questionsdo, which similarly are consistent with an assertion taking place (cf. ‘John left, didn’the?’, but not ‘*John left, didn’t he, did he?’).13

At the point in a syntactic derivation where modals are added, then, the derivationis not yet ‘halted’ and the truth value is not yet assigned. By contrast, whereevidentials or tags are added, the truth value has been assigned, and this is whystructure-building is essentially stopped: the process of adding the evidential or tagtherefore won’t be recursive, and it also won’t change the truth-conditional (orcompositional) semantic content of the assertion made. Modals and adjuncts,which are recursive and have compositional propositional content, are not grammat-ically required. Evidentials, where they exist in a language, are grammaticallyrequired (and tags are at least similar and unlike modals/adjuncts in exhibiting nolexical content). Non-recursivity in the latter case thus points us to an inherent limitto structure building in grammar.

Truth, then, does indeed have a signature as a ‘maximal’ phenomenon in thedesign of grammar: when the truth value is assigned, both recursion and composi-tionality are halted. Of course, when (3) is uttered, another person may hear thisutterance and also hear it doubted. Thus she may want to re-confirm it. Thismoment, where the epistemic subject changes, is the moment where the lexicaltruth predicate acquires its crucial function. For the person may now utter (49):

(49) It’s true that John left

13 As Uli Reichard notes in personal communication, even though tags cannot deprive a sentence ofassertoric force, they can weaken the force. On our account here this is expected, given that they intervenebetween force and the root.


Although this adds nothing to the compositional semantic content of (3), it doesinvolve a change in indexicality, in the sense that the predication of truth willtypically be indexed to a different speaker (or epistemic subject) than the assertionof (3) to which (49) reacts. If so, however, there is then still a single structural truthpredicate present, necessarily indexed to the speaker in the actual act of utterance.Where more lexical truth predicates are recursively added, and the epistemic Selfremains the same, only a reading is derived in which, with every new round ofiteration, the message gets ever more intense (until one feels this must be the speechof a maniac):

(50) It’s true that it’s true that it’s true that John left.14

Let us assume, then, that the predication of truth is a ‘maximal’ structuralcomplexity towards which a syntactic derivation gravitates, and which stops thederivation when it is reached. This makes a prediction for those constructions inwhich some assumption or presupposition of truth is in place, although there is nolexical truth predicate: namely (apart from of course (3)) the copular constructions in(10–11). If, in these constructions, with the help of the pro-predicates that we arguedthey contain, the basic skeleton of a truth-attribution is assembled, an iteration ofthese constructions should be difficult or out. Consider, then, the attempt to performsuch iterations in (51) and (52):

(51) *?it’s that it’s that John left

(52) ?*it seems that it seems that John left

Judgements on these constructions differ. For us, the second only has the readingwhere ‘seems’ has the reading of ‘appears’, consistent with our prediction; and (51) isessentially uninterpretable. As we noted, the meaning of (51) is similar to ‘it’s a factthat John left’. And the above predicts why we cannot go further than that: havingmade reference to a fact in this construction, we can’t make reference to thisreference, as it were. We have reached the limits of grammar. And hence, on theabove hypothesis, we should not be able to iterate. Where, on the other hand, thelexical truth predicate occurs, idle or even non-idle (as in the case of an indexicalshift) iterations are possible; but, as we have argued, truth as structurally expressed isthe more fundamental phenomenon. And that phenomenon does not iterate.

Let us connect this point to a curious fact about an apparent limit imposed on whatwe may call the ‘semantic ontology of natural language’. This ontology happens to be

14 One could attach ‘it is false’ to an assertion of ‘it is true that John left’, and thus change the semanticpredicate. This does yield a compositional semantic effect—which is exactly what we predict from the factthat negation unlike truth is always lexically overt and a paradigmatic example of an element that yields acompositional semantic effect. But any such negative element will necessarily be in the scope of a sententialtruth predicate (we never assert a falsehood).


such that metaphysicians commonly distinguish between ‘propositions’ and ‘facts’.For example, we might wonder whether John left; once we have established that, wemight utter (53):

(53) It’s a fact that John left.

For a fact is semantically similar to a proposition that is (or has been) evaluated astrue. If we say (53), however, we usually consider the matter settled. In no humanlanguage does there seem to exist a third ontological category—call this fictionalcategory ‘pact’—such that, once it was challenged that (3) is indeed a fact, as claimedin (53), and we concluded that (53) was indeed correct, we could comment as in (54),with the semantics that the fact has now been converted into a pact, just as wepreviously converted a proposition into a fact:

(54) It’s a pact that John left

More fundamental than facts, in other words, things don’t get. Truths can, at best,be facts, and that is it. Truth, in the grammatical sense, is not ‘recursive’ in this sense,and doesn’t iterate for this reason. This is not simply a metaphysician’s theoreticaldecision or choice: rather, we find ourselves confronted, in thought, with an absolutelimit. Why should there be this curious restriction on the ontological categoriesinvolved in the semantics of natural languages? If we can move from propositions tofacts (with the latter category being ipso facto truth-involving in a way that propos-itions are not), why can’t we move further?

Given the above, one answer is now natural: this restriction reflects an analytictruth of grammar. Anything more complex than truths, the grammar cannot com-pute. As we have argued, the sentential truth predicate we have posited brings theprocess of generating the complexities of grammatical semantics to a close. In termsof categorial complexity, nothing happens after that. There is thus a hierarchy ofsemantic evaluations: we can evaluate an object for its colour or beauty, an act for itsmorality, or proposition for its possibility or desirability. But evaluations like theformer two will happen inside of clauses, and evaluations like the latter will be in thescope of evaluations for truth. But a more basic or fundamental level of semanticassessment—more abstract even than truth—does not seem to exist.

In this section we have considered clausal embedding, modals, adjuncts, eviden-tials, tags, and lexical truth predicates: once a configuration is assembled that caneffect a truth-attribution, any of these can be added. Sometimes, this is possible in aniterative, recursive fashion; sometimes not. Where not, this illustrates that thegrammatical process has come to an end with the configuration obtained; where itis possible, the recursion reassembles the same template in the next step, but thetemplate never changes; and the structural truth predicate will never iterate orbecome recursive. The conclusion is that the point in a syntactic derivation wherean expression is evaluated for truth and put to an assertoric use in discourse does


indeed mark an upper boundary in the build-up of structural complexity in gram-mar. This is why, when the lexical truth predicate is now added, nothing in thecompositional semantic content changes, and it can be dropped again. The root of a(declarative) clause is not merely the moment where truth is attached to the propos-ition that the clause expresses, it is also the moment where the grammatical processitself comes to an end. Grammar, in this sense, is bounded by truth.

This conclusion derives a central contention of a ‘deflationist’ approach to themetaphysics of truth: that the truth predicate has no substantive empirical content, inthe way that ‘blue’ does, or ‘water’. Why is this so? It simply follows, if truth is agrammatical notion. Being structural in nature, we do not expect it to have asubstantive lexical content, and we have a positive reason to conclude that the searchfor an external relation of truth—in the way that we may want to assume a relationbetween ‘water’ and the substance H2O that it denotes—is misguided, exactly as thedeflationist contends. The function of truth in grammar is to bound, rather thanextend, the compositional process applying to lexical meanings. When this boundaryis reached, semantic valuation for truth takes place and no compositional and truth-conditionally relevant content can be added. The function of the truth predicate is notto contribute substantive semantic content but to stop the process of composing it.

Of course, we have also derived the Tarskian Equivalence scheme, the centrepieceof the deflationist edifice (at least for sentences not themselves containing the truthpredicate). The explanation is: two truth predicates are involved, one lexical and onestructurally expressed, and the second is present even where the first is not, in a rootcontext. Overall, our account then vindicates and derives the deflationist intuitionthat the truth predicate has no real-world, empirical, or substantive content, and thattherefore no naturalistic or reductive analysis is appropriate for it (Horwich, 2010).For its content is purely grammatical, and our understanding of the notion of truthreduces to our competence in handling grammar.

At the same time, there is of course another way of reading our result as well,which we think is ultimately more appropriate. Rather than saying we have ‘deflated’truth, reducing it to grammar, we could say that we have directed attention tosomething curious about grammar: that it lays the foundation for truth. While wehave, in a sense, deflated truth, we have, at the same time, inflated grammar. In thissense, the mystery of truth remains the same it has been all along: it has just beentransferred to another domain—grammar, where we argue it has its home. This leadsus, finally, to a metaphysical epilogue of our book.

9.5 Language and reality

Our perspective involves an account of thought, and no such account would becomplete from a philosophical point of view if it came without an account of truth, anotion to which thought is taken to intrinsically relate. We have now said, using (1),


what it is for a sentence to be true, and our answer has closely linked truth with thepractice of assertion. But there is no argument here that what we assert to be true is infact true. Nor should there be such an argument, for no such fact obtains: assertiondoes not entail truth. Nonetheless, might it be the case that what we think is true andchoose to assert, is in fact largely false? This is not a metaphysical question, concern-ing the objectivity of truth, which we have addressed above. It is rather an epistemo-logical question, asking whether the way in which we think and use language mightbe largely out of touch with reality. Maybe we do indeed regard assertions sometimesas ‘gambles’, perhaps especially in a scientific context: we never really know, we think,whether what we say is true is, in fact, true. Our assertions, we feel, are just our ‘bestbet’. Nonetheless, the more an assertion approximates a gamble, the more we sensethat its status converts from an assertion to a conjecture, and that intonation mayindicate that. We think that there is something to be said, especially outside of ascientific context, for the claim that we are, in choosing to assert what we do, alsomostly right, and that the idea that our thought might be out of touch with reality isreally mistaken. Assertion, in other words, is not a gamble.

An immediate objection to this claim is that an agent who thinks truth conditionalthoughts must have an ability to be surprised—as when his beliefs unexpectedly turnout to be mistaken (Davidson, 1982). But notice that our claim wasn’t actually oneabout beliefs, but rather one about assertion. An assertion—putting forward aproposition as true, which in turn has now transpired to simply mean: using theproposition in the right configuration—is, on our account, a deictic act, like pointing,though a more grammaticalized version of it. There is a sense in which we cannotmake a mistake in pointing, not even in declarative pointing. An infant silentlypointing to an airplane in order to draw an adult’s attention to it may well bewrong that it is an airplane. But this doesn’t make the act of pointing mistaken orunsuccessful. The child may also be pointing to the airplane, and I can’t figure out,from his extended index finger, and from the context, what it is he is pointing to.Again, while the act does not succeed in this case, it is not mistaken. But an assertionin our framework is nothing other than an act of pointing: to a ‘truth value’, if youwill. This suggests that assuming that such acts can be ‘false’ is to make a categorymistake: propositions are true or false, not acts of asserting them.

In that case, however, it is also a category mistake to say that such acts will typicallybe right. The claim under discussion, therefore, must rather be the claim that theproposition that is put forward as true in an assertion will, typically, also be a trueproposition. There is a proposition involved, in any act of assertion, and theproposition can be false even if the act of assertion says it is true. This allows forthe possibility of mistake, even if, as our claim goes, such mistakes are rare. Why thenshould we endorse this claim? Our answer appeals to the fact that the practice ofassertion, on our analysis, has the notion of truth built-in, so to speak. Truth, whenasserted, is not marked, but falsehood is: asserting ‘John left’ suffices to assert a truth,


but asserting a falsehood does require a lexical marker: negation. So truth is the basis,falsehood the marked exception. Even if we assert the falsehood of some propositionP, it’s still a truth that we assert: that P is false. Truth is in this sense an inescapabledefault, and falsehood is marked as the exception, as the negation of truth. Truth andfalsehood are in this sense not on an equal footing, and this is because truth isgrammatical, and falsehood is lexical. We cannot reverse this asymmetry, makingfalsehood the default or the configurational case: uttering ‘John left’ when we thinkthis is false, and adding an assertion marker when we exceptionally think it is true.For such a reversal is not simply a matter of changing the meaning of one conven-tional lexical marker for another: it amounts to de-grammaticalizing our mind.

The impossibility of a reversal is not logical or conceptual, for falsehood iscompositional: it is the negation of truth. Falsehood, in this sense, presupposestruth, and we couldn’t make an empirical discovery to the effect that, in some culture,it did not. The minds of the speakers of such a culture would be ones that we couldn’tinterpret. A recent film directed by Ricky Gervais depicts the ‘invention of lying’, in aculture where there is no word for truth, and everything people ever say is what theytake to be true. There is a scene where the mutant protagonist, having just told thefirst lie ever, tries to express the thought that what he said on this occasion,amazingly, wasn’t true. Yet, as there is no word for truth, the thought cannot beexpressed, leading to complete consternation in the faces of his friends. This is aculture in which the configurational analysis of truth holds to the strongest extent:there is no lexical item ‘true’, and hence there are no thoughts about truth. If, in ourterms, speakers in this culture say something false, it can only be by accident. Theculture could barely function otherwise—just as perception could not work in theway it does, if hallucinations were the rule rather than the exception. It is hard toimagine a culture, by contrast, in which, not lying, and not the lexeme true, but truthitself was invented. If we are right, it would be a world without grammar. It couldn’tbe one in which all people tend to always lie, for, conceptually, lying presupposestruth. People might only be making bets, yet bets, again, as understood by us, are betsthat something is true.

A world with grammar in which there is no lexeme ‘true’, and hence no reflectionon (or reference to) truth, is a world in which falsehood must be rare. Our world hasboth grammar and the lexeme true, and even a lexeme false, which could lexicalizethe grammatical pattern ‘not true’. Further lexemes could then be lexicalized, like theconcept of possibility, which again could arise grammatically, as the disjunction ‘trueor false’. In a sceptical mood, we might then decide to prefix everything we normallysimply assert with the qualifier ‘it is possible that’. But we couldn’t then escape fromtruth here, and it would be the truth of a possibility we would assert. Scepticism onlymakes sense against a background of truth that is assumed. As the conceptual edificeis built, in short, the essential phasal template that gives us truth in the first place ispresupposed, as its grammatical foundation. We can then lexicalize grammatical


patterns, and among the lexical concepts that we then construct, true will be themost fundamental. For if any concepts at all apply to an object, they do so truly. For aconcept to apply to an object is for it to be true that it applies to the object. Truth, andhence grammar, are thus the foundation on which all thought rests.

If conceptualization and falsehood both presuppose truth, we cannot be largelywrong: falsehood can always arise, and hence truth be absent—but not at large. Forthat would deprive thought of a foundation. It would suggest that there is somethingmore fundamental than truth, perhaps divine whim, which is the foundation ofthought. But this does not seem to be the case. And we would see why it is the case, if,ontologically, there was nothing more fundamental than grammar, and truth was agrammatical concept. If there was something more fundamental, it would have toencompass grammar, but somehow go beyond it. Such a system would be very easy toimagine, if grammar is just an arbitrary formal system. For then, immediately, thereis a deeper system, which provides the ultimate foundation: the world itself, and theformal ontology in it that metaphysicians posit. But the formal ontology of the world,we have argued, falls out from grammar: with grammar, we reach rock bottom. It setsthe framework for thought. For the sceptic to be right, the framework would have tochange.

This line of argument connects with an epistemological and pragmatist one,proposed in the domain of the dynamics of belief revision (Levi, 1980; Rott, 2001):confronted with a doubt in a given instance, we must assume that what we dootherwise believe is also largely right. Doubt can arise coherently only against abackground of beliefs that we hold on to; possibility is coherent against a backgroundof truth. Falsehood is a drop, or a current, in an ocean of truth. Any particular beliefwe hold may be up for grabs as new evidence we receive throws doubt on it. But evenif we give up a particular belief, converting it back into a mere hypothesis, we will stillleave much of our other beliefs intact. While this argument appears intuitively notimplausible, the above is slightly different: it does not depend on an ontology ofbelief, and it is more naturalistic: rather than positing a pragmatic norm of rationalbelief change, it exploits the hypothesis that grammar, as a matter of naturalistic fact,configures our mind. Our mind then can only move in this format, and it deprivesitself of a foundation if it attempted to move in a world of mere possibility, say, ratherthan a world of truth in which possibilities arise against a background of truth. Theconfigurational analysis of truth adds an element, then, and perhaps power, to anargument that its epistemological version lacks. While there is a conceptual connectionbetween belief and truth, there is no independent and empirically based configur-ational analysis that supports it, if belief is, as commonly supposed, a non-linguistic‘propositional attitude’ that is largely defined in logical terms, namely as occupying aposition in logical space or corresponding to a ‘set of possible worlds’ (Stalnaker, 1984).

Here is a second argument for the conclusion that what we assert to be true also is,largely, true. Before an act of assertion takes place, a proposition involved in the act is


true or false, we assume. After we make a decision and assert it, it becomes part of anact of ‘pointing’: to a truth value, in this instance. The tense of the event that theproposition in question encodes is then deictically anchored relative to the speechtime and speech location, as determined through the act of speech itself, a physicalevent taking place in time, space and discourse. The assertion itself, as an act, isanchored in the agency of the speaker, as is the assertion’s assertoric force, which isanchored in the same agent viewed as an epistemic subject, rather than merely aspeech agent. This Ego is also ultimately responsible for which object is denoted byany nominal in the sentence: each such object is located in space in relation to thissubject viewed as the ‘deictic centre’ or ‘origo’ of a deictic space of possible referencein the sense of Buehler (1934).

All of these specifications are grammatically necessary in every single act ofassertion: no assertion can be assessed by a hearer without them. To understand anassertion, then, we need to ‘bind’ all temporal and spatial reference that takes place, aswell as illocutionary force, to the Origo. Beyond that, there is nothing in which toground a speech act: the external world as the context in which the act takes place, theepistemic subject that enacts it, the hearer to whom the act of reference is directed,and the language that the speaker uses, are all part of a single scheme, which nothingelse grounds. It is, in a sense, the sum-total of things. The question of a mistake, wehave also noted, only arises for the propositions that are part of assertoric acts. But ifwe look at the complexity just depicted, then, what exactly is the proposition that wecan extricate from its web of relations, so as to obtain a theoretical construct that isa potential candidate for what can be systematically false, even when we assert itto be true?

In early analytic philosophy, where the issue is the semantics of mathematics, theissue does not really arise. Whether the proposition that 2+2=4 is true or false makesperfect sense as a question: we do not need to consider any speech act. The questionwhether ‘John left’ is true, by contrast, taken as such, doesn’t make any such sense.We have no idea who ‘John’ refers to, for example: only embedding the propositionin the speaker’s deictic space will tell. We also have no idea where the event of leavingmarked grammatically as ‘past’ is located, for to know this we need to locate it inrelation to a time of an actual act of speech. To evaluate a proposition as simple as‘John left’ for truth, then, we have to abandon the world of propositions: we have tolook at the linguistic act of which it is a part, and in which it is asserted as true. The‘proposition’, then, only exists insofar as we extricate it from an act of language use ata specific moment in time. If what is said to be true or false can only be determinedfrom the act of assertion, the actual truth of what is said to be true cannot bedetermined in abstraction from the act of assertion.

This is our second argument: there is ultimately no locus for truth, except in the actof assertion itself, as a concrete event in time and space. And in that act itself, truth isfoundational and inescapable. It is well true that, in order to agree or disagree,


speakers need to extricate propositions from the speech acts in which they are config-ured, and to make them sufficiently independent of these acts, so the proposition canremain the same even if speakers disagree on their truth value. Nonetheless, math-ematics is special in its relative lack of sensitivity to the deictic anchoring of propos-itions in speech acts; in ordinary discourse, such independence is harder to achieve.

We might call this a linguistic approach to realism. It says that in virtue of havingthoughts that have been grammaticalized, we have minds of a kind that can, usinglanguage, assert things that are, by and large, also true, for there is nothing thatgrounds this practice, nothing that we can evaluate it against: the notion of truthagainst which we would evaluate truths that we assert, is the same old notion of truth,and no more foundational than it. The truth that is an inherent aspect of languageuse already sets the standard of what counts as real. Minds of such a kind arepropositional and logical ones: they are rational. Perhaps there is no option yet,biologically, for the opposite. The opposite—disorganization, systematic irrationality,and systematic falsehood—is seen only very rarely and when the biology andstructure of the brain have radically changed: for example, in the case of thoughtdisorder in the schizophrenia syndrome. If so, a theory of the curious rationality ofour species is a biological fact: its basis can be investigated in biological terms.

It begins with the emergence of lexemes, which, if we are right about them inChapter 2, are ultimately selections from features describing percepts, which arecausally controlled, even if attention is not. Whatever referential act we may con-struct in grammar, the same lexemes, as ultimately tied to their experiential origins,will be involved. Lexemes in this sense are one safeguard against human thoughtevolving into a mere flight of fancy, freeing itself from perceptual reality. Grammar isthe other safeguard, as it is designed to configure units of referentiality, and no singlederivation can fail to derive, or does ever fail to derive, an act of reference. Eventhought taking place in a grammaticalized brain, then, can ultimately only be aboutthe world, or reality, and it defines what reality is, as truth exists in no other domain.So thought is about reality, necessarily: the truth just is reality. In this sense, if truth isa linguistic notion, reality is a linguistic notion as well: Bhartrihari’s conclusion,which we encountered in Chapter 1.

This conclusion nonetheless seems to meet the opposition of a long traditiondescribed as supporting ‘realism’, in which the truth is not taken to be ‘language-dependent’, and in which making it language-dependent is said to be an expression of‘anti-realism’. The fear is a traditional, Fregean one: if the contents of thought were‘psychological’, how could they be objective? Coming back to the beginning of thischapter, however, we have not been talking psychology, but grammar, and we haveendorsed no such view as that grammar is ‘internal’. The existence of grammarrequires a sapiens-specific brain, but this does not make grammar internal or non-objective. Nor is there anything in our account of truth that makes it language-dependent. We have taken the Equivalence Schema as our guide, and that schema


says nothing about the language-dependence of truth, and as we have noted, it seemsto lend no support to any other non-realist notion of truth either.15 That truth, turnsout to be a grammatical notion also does not make it a non-semantic notion: not if weaccept the notion of grammatical meaning, and not if we accept that a grammatica-lized mind will also develop a model-theoretic competence, in the sense of a logicalability that can take given grammatical meanings as inputs, define model-theoreticequivalence classes over them, and define a relation of logical consequence for them.For example, for such a mind, ‘If a man smokes cocaine, he will get mad’ is made trueby the same models as ‘A man who smokes cocaine will get mad’, though these twosentences are grammatically different. A grammatical creature will thus naturally be alogical one, and nothing in our account contradicts the Goedelian insight that agrammaticalized mind will eventually also grasp truths that it cannot deductivelyderive.

All that said, the contents that this logical mind operates with, whose truth-conditions are stated schematically in (1), are, on our account, ultimately linguisticin nature. What does this entail for the objectivity of the notion of truth used incharacterizing them? Does it entail that the truth of such contents can fall short ofreality, driving a wedge between the true and the real? Not if ‘true’ means ‘real’, andthe content that we are asserting to be true, when we assert that John left, is that Johnleft. For we are not asserting, then, that it seems that he did, that he may have doneso, or that he hasn’t really left. We are not leaving open that reality might be different.We are saying it isn’t different. The notion of reality, therefore, adds nothing to ourpractice of assertion. For that practice to be out of tune with reality, in turn, as arguedabove, the conceptual framework that supports it would have to change—impossiblyso, if it is biologically rooted rather than merely a conventional aspect of howlanguage happens to be regulated. If no nominalist conception of language isendorsed, nothing then follows for the objectivity of truth if the contents that aresaid to be true are linguistic in nature.

9.6 Is there a science of thought?

We develop our answer to this final question as a critique of an alternative answer,due to the philosopher Donald Davidson, who has developed the project of a ‘scienceof rationality’, also identified by him under the heading of the ‘Unified Theory of

15 Tarski defined the truth predicate for sentences rather than propositions, and his definitions of suchpredicates are language-specific. But the insight we have taken from the Equivalence scheme is independ-ent of that feature, as we have not attempted to define truth at all (see also Horwich, 2010). Even in Tarski’scase, the condition for any such predicate to hold of a sentence is not language-relative. Moreover, asDavidson (2005) points out, any attempt to empirically test a given ‘T-theory’ (which derives instances ofthe Equivalence Scheme for a given language) invokes a general truth predicate (which Tarski did notdefine).


Thought, Meaning and Action’ (Davidson, 2004: 151 ff.). This Davidsonian theorydoes not identify the science of thought and the science of language, as we effectivelydo, following Müller’s (1887) early similar proposal. It is also not naturalistic:Davidson, as noted in Section 9.1 above, argues for strong limits on the extent towhich thought can be investigated biologically, or as part of natural science. Theaccount of thought that he offers is said not to be ‘in competition with any naturalscience’ (Davidson, 2004: 134). As noted in the beginning, the ‘normativity’ of themental is primarily responsible for this conclusion: ‘The reason mental conceptscannot be reduced to physical concepts is the normative character of mental con-cepts’ (Davidson, 2004: 115). That is, the mental is intrinsically described in termsthat, by their very nature, will not lend that domain to naturalistic study. In thissection we will argue that this conclusion is far too strong: our mind can remain anobject of nature, as can language, even if (and maybe especially if ) we expand thescope of grammatical theory beyond the confines traditionally imposed on it, so as toview it as an instrument of thought.

Davidson’s theory has an ontology that figures propositional attitudes, on the onehand, and language, on the other. The two are crucially distinct, although they are, onhis account, closely linked. Above that, there is an ontology of actions viewed as‘rational’ by the standards of formal decision theory. Beliefs, Davidson proposes,never occur in isolation. They are what they are only in the context of other beliefs,and of other propositional attitudes such as desires and intentions. They must form arational pattern: in particular, it is in the nature of beliefs or thoughts to form logicalrelations among one another, and a given belief wouldn’t be the belief it is, if it wasn’tpart of the same logical network. A radically irrational agent, therefore, wouldn’thave the belief in question. Having a belief at all, then, is to be a rational agent.Irrationality arises against a background of rationality, as a departure from a norm.

Just as beliefs we hold must be largely rational, the account maintains that theymust also largely be true—in addition to being assumed or taken to be true. Whatmakes our belief that a snake is approaching a belief about a snake approaching, andhence the belief it is, for example, is that what we believe about snakes is largely true.If we believed that snakes were evil spirits or branches of trees with a motor built in toallow movement, we wouldn’t have the belief that we have just described as the beliefthat a snake is approaching. It wouldn’t be a belief about snakes. Concepts we have ofthings are, in this sense, a warrant for a degree of truth: for they necessarily form anetwork, a conceptual structure, and they are parts of beliefs, which in turn must belargely true for these concepts to be what they are.

Thought in the human format requires a grasp of the notion of truth, which ismastered only if it is distinguished from belief, which in turn means that a notion ofbelief (or thought) is required as well. A creature that has the kind of thought inquestion, therefore, also has notions of belief and truth—as manifest, for example, inany such creature’s capacity for surprise (Davidson, 1982). Surprise that the sun does


not set, when I thought it would, shows that I realize that I thought it would set, andyet it didn’t set, making my thought false. Such thought, Davidson argues, requiringas it does a notion of truth, also requires language—an argumentative move thatillustrates the ontological distinctness of the propositional attitudes and of languagein Davidson’s account, as much as their connectedness.

Language as shared with a second person is, on this account, though maybe not theonly way in which such a notion can arise, a context in which it arguably can arise.But what is it about language on this account that makes such a peculiar notion as thenotion of truth possible? Clearly, it cannot merely be communication with a secondperson, which will enable such a notion, for we communicate with our pets, too, andon Davidson’s own account, these pets do not think, or not in the same way.Moreover, much of our communication is non-linguistic. So linguistic communi-cation must be the issue—yet again, what is it about language, on this account, whichgives it this special role of providing the ontological framework in which thought canarise? It simply doesn’t suffice to think of it as a shared commodity, or a symbolsystem—indeed symbols (but not thoughts, on this account) are what we share withthe ‘language-trained’ apes.

The answer, within Davidson’s framework, relates to the fact that language hascontent, just as beliefs do. These two, in fact, inherently connect on this view: workingout the beliefs of a person depends on understanding what he says; but understand-ing what he says systematically depends on assumptions about what he believes. Thisagain illustrates the distinctness, yet connectedness, of language and the propos-itional attitudes in Davidson’s theoretical ontology. So words have meanings, andthese intrinsically connect with the beliefs that the speaker of the language expresses.Using this assumption in a situation of ‘radical interpretation’, where we knownothing about the meanings of the words that the speaker uses and attempt to figurethem out, we will make observations about his preferences among (for us) uninter-preted sentences of his language, in given circumstances that we observe and wherewe assume he will hold particular beliefs. From patterns of preferences of somesentences over others, interpreted by Davidson as preferences for one sentence to betrue in a given context rather than another, we will then deduce further structureamong his beliefs and desires. These beliefs and desires are the basis for assigningmeanings to his words and utterances: for interpreting him.

We assume, in short, that the meaning of what he says is a reflection of the contentsof his beliefs; these beliefs come with a notion of truth; and behaviour is interpreted asreflecting preferences for the truth of one sentence over another. Davidson’s position,in this regard, despite his insistence on the language-dependence of thought, is aconservative and Cartesian one: although thought is said to depend on language,truth is a property primarily of the contents of thought viewed as a propositionalattitude, not of language. Language may enable, but it cannot explain, why we thinkthoughts with a truth-theoretic content. In line with that, the notion of truth remains a


primitive in Davidson’s theory of rationality, and it becomes the most fundamentalnotion in his theory of meaning, which in turn takes it for granted. That theory takesthe form of a systematic theory of truth for the speaker’s utterances, which we developas we progress in our attempt to figure out what he believes as he chooses expressions.

In this attempt, we will necessarily have to assume—rather than waiting forevidence that this is the case—that these beliefs form a logical pattern, taking ourown standards of logicality and rationality for granted, as we must. This necessaryassumption—which Davidson calls charity—is one crucial limit that he sees withregard to the extent to which a theory of thought can be naturalistic: our subjectmatter is regarded as satisfying a norm of rationality from the start, which isautomatically factored into the process of radical interpretation as just described.In line with the assumption, the sentences held true by the speaker will be regarded asforming a pattern, which allows us to start ascribing a composite structure to hisutterances (called ‘logical form’), which the theory of truth for these utterances willtake as a basis to state truth conditions for them recursively. Eventually, his languagewill thus reflect a grammar (though it is, essentially, a logic), and along with it, it willexhibit productivity, compositionality, and discrete infinity. As we add quantifica-tional apparatus, it will eventually come to involve what Davidson calls an ontology,which, he suggests, provides a ‘framework for thought’ (Davidson, 2004: 140). Themature form that the formal theory of the meanings of the speaker’s utterances takes isthat of a Tarskian ‘T-theory’, which, based on axioms about word meaning, grammat-ical constituent structure, and logical apparatus, deductively derives T-conditions inthe format of (1) recursively, with ‘T’ interpreted as truth, for every given expressionof the person’s language. We adjust this theory as needed, sensitive to how ourinsights into the person’s beliefs grow. The theory at any given stage is tested againstour decision-theoretic account of the speaker, assuming him to be a rational agent,and it has empirical content in this sense.

Time and again, Davidson has returned to the question of whether, and in whatsense, this ‘Unified Theory of Thought, Meaning and Action’ is naturalistic, orwhether the science of rationality he proposes is or can be science: ‘Is thought, asI have described it, amenable to scientific study?’ (Davidson, 2004: 145). One limitthat he sees, as mentioned above, is the necessary assumption that the agent isrational, where what we consider rational will set the standard for what he does:

What makes the empirical application of decision theory or formal semantics possible is thatthe norms of rationality apply to the subject matter. In deciding what a subject wants or thinksor means, we need to see their mental workings as more or less coherent if we are to assigncontents to them. ( . . . ) We cannot compare our standards with those of others withoutemploying the very standards in question. (Davidson, 2004: 148)

People are as publicly observable as anything else in nature, but the entities we use to constructa picture of someone else’s thoughts must be our own sentences, as understood by us


( . . . ). The meanings of our sentences are indeed dependent on our relations to the worldwhich those sentences are about, and our linguistic interactions with others. But there isno escape from the fact that we cannot check up on the objective credentials of themeasure we are using ( . . . ); we cannot check up on the objective correctness of our ownnorms by checking with others, since to do this would be to make basic use of our ownnorms once more. (Davidson, 2004: 134)

Rationality, therefore, is never an objective fact of the world. It is a standard againstwhich interpretation, as described above, proceeds. Hence there is no objectivescience of rationality. Does the Un-Cartesian view improve on this predicament?

There is one resounding omission in Davidson’s scheme of thought, whose coreingredients are: (i) decision theory; (ii) a Tarskian T-theory interpreted as a theory ofmeaning; (iii) logic, including a formal-semantic notion of ‘logical form’. What ismissing here is nothing other than language, and grammarmore specifically. Viewedas ‘syntax’ in the autonomist and internalist tradition, Davidson can be forgiven fornot regarding the investigation of what we have called the linguistic genotype and itsexpression in the human brain as having any intrinsic significance to his project orphilosophy altogether (cf. Davidson, 2004: 132–3). Such ‘internalist’ investigations, hecontends, and in line with the form-content dichotomy discussed in Section 9.1, donot address the crucial philosophical conundrum: the nature of ‘content’, and what itis to be able to make sense of other beings in linguistic interactions. But this, ofcourse, is from our point of view simply the reflection of a Cartesian perspective: itreflects the view that linguistic form as studied in generative linguistics is just that,form, and content is separate from and external to it. If thought is not merelylanguage-dependent (Davidson’s contention), but language transforms thought, thepicture changes: language can (and must) inform content, and the empirical investi-gation of language does speak to the philosopher’s concern.

The omission of what grammar does in relation to the human mind is, we submit,why the question of how language turns the trick of yielding a sense of truth isultimately left unanswered by Davidson. Although, crucially, thought is said to belanguage-dependent by him, and he brands himself as ‘almost totally non-Cartesian’(Davidson, 2004: 17), Davidson crucially assumes a dual ontology invoking both adomain of thought and of language, as noted, with different interlinked componentsof his overall theory of rationality targeting these, respectively: a version of Ramsey’sdecision theory for the propositional attitudes, and a Tarskian T-theory for themeanings of linguistic expressions. Grammar, as an independent explanatory factor,does not come into view. It is because of that, we contend, that his unified theoryoffers no account of truth, no account of belief, and no account of language. Belief ispresupposed insofar as it is a condition for interpretation. In this role they must beassumed to be coherent, largely shared, and largely correct. Language is presupposedinsofar as it is a necessary condition for thought. But as noted, it is not clear what it is


about language that allows for propositional thought, for we cannot say that trutharises with language, as it doesn’t do on this account, since the account lacks a notionof grammatical meaning. Truth, rather, is simply written into the semantic compon-ent as its most basic and primitive notion, and it is presupposed to be a property ofthe contents of propositional attitudes that a rational language user expresses in whathe says. Clearly, this account is not consistent with the contention that language, byintruding into the hominin brain, transforms the cognitive mind and yields a novelformat for thought, opening a new world.

The consequence of this Un-Cartesian move is to radically diminish the role of thedecision-theoretic component of Davidson’s account of rationality, which is based ona belief-desire psychology that has played essentially no role in this book: thiscomponent is where, on his account, all content effectively comes from, and fromwhich linguistic meaning is derivative. This way of setting things up has not only thedisadvantage of overlooking that an account of grammar is an account of (one kindof) content (unless the existence of grammar is completely irrelevant to what kinds ofmeanings exist in this species, contrary to evidence suggesting the opposite). It alsooverlooks that no account of belief can be an account of grammar and grammar-conditioned effects on meaning, since how grammar organizes meaning largely doesnot exploit decision-theoretic principles, or what we consider rational in light of whatwe believe and desire. Grammatical meaning is not a matter of rational choice. Wemay find it hard to believe that ‘The hiker who lost was kept walking in circles’ iswhat somebody expresses in an utterance—it would be more rational to hear ‘Thehiker who was lost kept walking in circles’—yet the decision isn’t ours, but grammar’s(Berwick et al., 2011). If an expression means what it does in virtue of its grammar,this is what is the case and we cannot change that.

Any assertion does express an attitude, but which attitude it expresses is not amatter of a hearer’s rational choice, suggesting that the rational theory of decision isnot the right framework to understand the nature of linguistic meaning (thoughchoices among expressions can no doubt illuminate or reveal, and in this sense allowus to study, what meanings we take a linguistic expression to have). We choose whatwe say, not what grammatical expressions mean, or how grammar organizes mean-ing in our brains. By organizing meaning in our brain in novel and propositionalways, however, grammar does make us rational: it makes us thinkers, in very muchDavidson’s sense. We obtain, therefore, an account of a new cognitive phenotypefrom an account of the linguistic genotype, on an empirical basis. In this sense, ouraccount of thought is naturalistic—it takes our cognitive phenotype as an object innature that we can study as an expression of its linguistic genotype.

It is only in this way, we contend, that the fine structure of normativity can beunderstood and grounded. Far from the cognitive mind failing to be a source ofnormativity, it is, ultimately, the only such source. Normativity comes in severalvarieties, not all of which are language-dependent. One form of normativity is


conventional, like driving on the left in Britain or saying ‘rain’ for rain rather than‘Regen’, as in German. Such conventional arrangements lead to normativity in thesense that they restrict our behaviour and we accept such restrictions for the sake ofavoiding sanctions. But we nonetheless perceive such conventions as arbitrary, and inexactly this sense, community norms such as these have no normative force: there isnothing right about driving on the left, and nothing right about calling rain ‘rain’rather than ‘Regen’ (Germans are not wrong for making the opposite decisions).Normativity in this first sense thus poses no problems, and other species are capableof developing norms in this sense as well. The same applies to social norms such asare imposed by dominance hierarchies in baboons based on kinship relations (Wittiget al., 2007): it is not humanly specific, grounded in biology and perception of socialreality, and does not pose any particular philosophical problems.16

A third sense of normativity is again perceptual, but is more interesting byreflecting constraints unconsciously imposed by the organization of our mind onthings in various cognitive domains. Thus, we hear a melody played backwards asbeing ‘wrong’ somehow, and the same applies to when we hear a grammaticalsentence played backwards. Some cross-cultural data suggests universals of musicperception across otherwise fundamentally different musical genres (Hauser andMcDermott, 2003), and some studies suggest that aspects of this are innate, with 16

week old babies turning away from speakers playing dissonant chords showing signsof distress, while looking towards speakers smilingly in the consonant case (Trainorand Heinmiller, 1998). In line with such findings, Broca’s area ‘lights up’ on MEGscans when subjects hear a dischordant musical sequence ‘in much the same way as itdoes when they hear an ungrammatical utterance’ (Maess et al., 2001). And in thedomain of language, human infants from a very early age distinguish sentences fromtwo non-native languages in different rhythmic classes—as long as the sentences areplayed forwards; they are unable to do so if the sentences are played backwards(Jusczyk, 1997). In adults, the brain, confronted with patterns of a new languageviolating principles of UG, will first turn on Broca’s area, which then howeverdeactivates, reflecting a response to the perception of a ‘wrong’ grammatical pattern(Musso et al., 2003). And where infants perceive languages signed or spoken that donot cohere with principles of full-blown languages, as in pidgins, infants create a richerlanguage, imposing it on the impoverished language present in their perceptual experi-ence, suggesting they perceive the Pidgin they hear as ‘wrong’ somehow: it doesn’t meeta linguistic standard, which their minds impose. Clearly, normativity in these senses,found in a number of cognitive domains, is grounded purely in biology again.

A fourth and the most relevant kind of normativity is arguably only found inlanguage, since it depends on a notion of objectivity and truth, and these notions are

16 In this and the following paragraphs I am obliged to Rhiannon Bull.


only reflected upon in linguistic creatures. Normativity in this sense, then, is againnot due to environmental influences or conventional community norms, butdepends on a specific cognitive system, language. It is the result of having a linguisticmind, not what creates such a mind. If we include language within biology—viewinglanguage as a natural object, a subject matter of biology—then this final normativityis again grounded in biology. A grammaticalized mind will distinguish claims fromtruths. It will reason about why something is false if its truth was assumed orbelieved. It will hypothesize and test, invoking causes and probabilities. It will thusreason logically, and it will reason morally as well, if it has moral concepts that can beinserted into an emerging logic machine. One can see how a community structuregenerated by linguistic minds in this sense will exhibit morality and standardsof truth.

Normativity, then, pace Davidson, is no principled limit to understanding themind as a natural object. If we begin from a metaphysical premise, and excludemusical and grammatical cognition from the domain of the ‘biological’, talking aboutbiology will not ground any normativity. If we don’t, and the biological, at least in thecase of our species, includes the musical and the linguistic, biology not only canground normativity, but it is not clear what else might do so. The normativity inquestion is crucially different from conventional ways of restricting behaviour, whichby contrast to forms of normativity by the nature of our minds, do not in fact come,we have argued, with genuine normative force.

Nonetheless, if we let this conclusion stand like this, it would not be all there is tobe said in terms of the possibility of a science of thought. Prelinguistic ‘thought’, ifthis is the right word, involves cognitive processing that is adaptive—proceeding intune with the adaptive constraints imposed by the environmental niches that anorganism inhabits. If we wanted to develop a prelinguistic notion of truth thatapplied to organisms in general, it would capture this adaptivity in some way oranother. With the grammaticalization of truth, however, things fundamentallychange, creating a new framework for thought in which truth itself eventuallybecomes a subject of reflection. This yields a metaphysics, a concern with theworld as such, and what things exist in it. Such thought takes place in the singlescheme described above, involving language, the way it is anchored in the speaker’sdeictic space, and the world itself in which deictic acts supported by grammar takeplace. We can, it turns out, explore the grammar of this single scheme, in whichthought, language, and world, come together. Needless to say, however, this explor-ation is not independent of the scheme itself. Thus it cannot be foundational, in thesense that it would tell us how grammar itself, or the framework for thought, arisesfrom a deeper foundation.

Curiously, then, nothing prevents us from investigating grammar naturalistically,and advancing on the riddle of what changed the hominin brain, creating the neuralinfrastructure for language, and a new species defining an unprecedented form of


culture. But there is no reason to expect, for the reason just given, that the investi-gation of language at the level of the biology and evolution of the brain will yieldconcepts that are foundational for grammatical ones. Ontologically, they will notinform the theory of grammar, which they presuppose, even if, empirically, they will.

9.7 Conclusions

No account of thought can be that: an account of thought, if it does not addressproperties that, for millennia, have been associated with thought in philosophicalreflections: thought, apart from being in some sense a ‘psychological’ process, alsorelates to reality, or has content. For this reason, no account of thought can be‘internalist’, or purely psychological. But this does not mean it cannot be grammat-ical. It hasn’t been, in much of modern philosophy, because grammar was regarded asextraneous to it. In the previous eight chapters, we have argued that empiricalevidence does not support this claim, which we call Cartesian. The organization ofgrammar systematically reflects the organization of thought, and no system inde-pendent of grammar needs to be invoked to explain how thought comes to involvethe curious formal distinctions that much of this book has been about: distinctionssuch as those between substances and individuals, objects and properties, events andpropositions, facts and truths, selves and their bodies, appearances and reality.Grammar, looked at with fresh eyes, yields these distinctions, and it should begiven credit for generating them rather than merely lending them physical expres-sion—which is what morphophonology does. Yet, for all that, our question aboutthe emergence of a framework of thought, cannot be merely one about some formal-ontological distinctions: we need an account of how thought involving such distinc-tions relates to the real world, the world in which grammar is processed.

Our response in this chapter has been that grammar, in defining a new frameworkfor thought, comes with truth and the Self factored in. In the case of truth, this isbecause the use of the word ‘true’ is, by a common assumption in the contemporaryphilosophy of truth, governed by a certain equation: the Equivalence Scheme. As wehave interpreted this scheme, it shows that our sense of truth is ultimately not lexicalbut grammatical. Our use of the lexeme true just points us back to our use ofgrammar. In using grammar, the notion of truth, and hence reality, is factored in. It isnot as if we make a choice in endorsing it or not: we find ourselves having and usingit, as we start using language, and the denial of truth would require a differentconceptual framework altogether. As language arises, truth is present, and it will bedistinct from appearance, and from belief. The question whether truth as configuredin grammar really is truth presupposes the idea of truth, but that idea is no differentfrom the notion of truth that is present in the system whose foundations are herequestioned.


With a notion of truth and objectivity, minds will operate with a different norm.There is a different standard now for what is true, different from the one that is set bywhat is taken to be true. So the structure of normativity, which begins with percep-tion and does not depend on language, will change, and a different foundation is laidfor human behaviour. Due to its foundational nature, no external grounding can begiven for it. Yet it can be investigated in naturalistic terms, if we shed metaphysicalpresuppositions on what does, and what does not, belong to the realm of thebiological, recognizing the mental not only as real, but as setting a normativestandard in nature for what else is real.


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Index

Agree 101, 216–19Ailly, Pierred’ 51alignment parameter hierarchy 200

aphasia 268–74

and communication 269

assertion 323

as pointing 323, 325–6atom, atomism (lexical) 17, 21, 47–53, 100,

106, 244Autism Spectrum of Disorders (ASD) 279–80

and schizophrenia 287

autonomy 13, 87, 115, 202, 240–1, 263unreal at the level of the brain 293

Aristotle 15, 304–5

Bhartrihari 19–23, 327behaviourism 250

and species-uniqueness 250

Bickerton, D. 42, 239biolinguistics 238–9, 242, 248–9, 258, 335Blackfoot 50

Bleuler, E. 281Bloom, P. 277Bloomfield, L. 11–12Boeckx, C. 26, 77, 109, 176, 179Borer, H. 226, 229, 232Burge, T. 277

Campbell, J. 285Carey, S. 39, 45–6Cartesian see linguisticsCase 78, 132, 144, 183, 313and Agree 218–19

as cross-linguistically variable 209–10

exceptional 213

Filter 214–15, 218–19meaning of 205–7

as morphological 203

and phase domains 206

as (ir)rational 202–4, 206, 211, 224, 226and referentiality 212

as reflecting the formal ontology oflanguage 207, 235

as reflecting the relational interpretation ofnominals 203

as relational 203–4, 211, 213and telicity/boundedness 224–36

and Tense 218, 221–4and thematic roles 206–7, 211–12, 232no uninterpretable features 208, 211, 216,

220, 226Chaika, E. 283charity 331

Chomsky, N. 6, 12–14, 18, 23, 26, 31, 46, 54, 76,85, 97, 179–80, 202–3, 206, 214–15, 217–18,240, 248, 250, 253, 288

Christiansen, M. and N. Chater 242, 258Cinque-hierarchy 181–2

cliticsaccusative 158–61

and Case 213

dative 161–6

hierarchical structure of 167

mapping to morpho-phonology 215, 219partitive and neuter 156–8

personal 168–70

and strong pronouns 171–2

cognition 241

cognitive linguistics, 59Colourless green ideas sleep furiously 292

composition(ality) 51, 79, 88–95, 97,108–9

as locality 109

Computational-Representational Theory ofMind 253, 275, 277, 298–9

communication 238, 243–4, 246, 269, 330

concepts 38–40, 47, 50–1, 53–7, 275–6, 259concept combination 51

‘Conceptual-Intentional’ (C-I) systems 6, 178consciousness 260–1

contentand form 85–6, 95, 241, 292, 299–300,304, 332

of grammar 76–8 see also grammar;meaning

of propositions as opposed tosentences 301

context 151, 173, 286convention 334

cooking 85

copular constructions 313–16

core cognition 275

Croft, W. 59, 62–5, 69, 71–2Crow, T. 19, 294

D-to-D movement 168

Davidson, D. 63, 83, 245, 259, 275–7,299–300, 323, 328–35

d’Errico, F. 256, 260definite descriptions 126–7, 133, 141deixis 80, 94, 144

and assertion 323

in Dative clitics 166

and rationality 295

and thought disorder 283

Descartes, R. xvi, 249description 54

ditransitive alternation 232–3

ECM 213

Elbourne, P. 142–3, 153, 267embedding

as meaningful 106embodiment 254, 258empiricism 21, 250–1equivalence scheme (Tarski) 305–7, 310, 322ergative 197–201

Evans, N. 242, 246–7, 260Everett, D. 175events 83

and states 235–6

evo-devo 251–2

experience 62

externalism 250–1, 300externalization (of language) 6–7, 18, 134,

177–8, 179, 184, 195, 238, 243–6, 303in agrammatic aphasia 269

(not) an afterthought or accident 6, 254,259, 267–8, 260, 267, 327

of Case relations 218–20

with regard to SLI 265

extraction 136–7

factivity 133–4

Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC) 189–93

Finnish 224

Fodor, J. A. 13, 39, 48, 50, 240–2, 253, 260, 263,275, 298–9

form see contentFormal Thought Disorder (FTD) 283 see also

schizophreniaconcept combination in 289

expressive semantic theory 288

in functional MRI 291

and grammatical meaning 288–9

and monothematic delusions 285

pragmatic theory of 286

Frege, G. 1, 3, 79, 132

Gallistel, R. 45–6, 275gradualism 252, 256grammar

in the brain 292–3

content of 76–7, 83, 85, 91–2, 96defining truth 295

device for extended deixis 80

of deixis 144

epistemological significance of 1, 119, 174as foundational 84, 87, 174, 295, 303, 322as an invariant 249

limits of 296, 317–20and logic 7–8, 16, 328, 331, 335as organizing a formal ontology 72–3, 174see also ontology

376 Index

as a reference system 47, 148, 220, 248as relational 75, 77, 82, 101and thought, and reality 296

vs. ‘syntax’ 277, 288, 292, 293, 295units of 102

Harley, H. 48Haspelmath, M. 9, 33headedness 52, 92Heider-Simmel 40

Himmelmann, N. 60, 66–7Homo Heidelbergensis 255–6

Horwich, P. 301, 305, 310human nature 253, 267Hume D. 40, 286Husserl, E. 1, 11

Ildefonso 266–8

indexicals 43, 93–4, 99, 123, 139–43, 148–9,150–1

as ‘essential’ 172–3inserted in the edge 154

(not) as lexically semantic 149–53, 173not a unified lexical class 153

indexicalization 47

inflected infinitives 221–2

interfaces 76, 79, 85, 97, 100‘radical’ conception 202

intensionality 55–6, 90–1, 133, 275–6intentionality 36, 246internalism 56, 250–2, 301, 303, 327, 332

Jackendoff, R. 68, 301Jespersen, O. 7–9

Kraepelin, E. 281Kuperberg, G. 284, 293

Langacker, R. 59Language of Thought 6, 50, 238, 241, 247not required 261

Laura 264

Leiss, E. 31, 296Levinson, J. 242, 246–7, 260

lexemes 47, 60as bundles of perceptual features 47–50

and concepts 54

lexicalization 35, 47–53Linear Correspondence Axiom 186

linguistic genotype 261, 239, 261–3, 266,275–80

linguistic relativity 248 see also Whorf, B.linguistic variation see variationlinguisticsCartesian xvi, 8, 62, 175, 239, 242–3, 247–9,

272–3, 283, 296, 331–2, 336Un-Cartesian 14, 175, 202, 241, 248, 260–1,

282–3

Lithuanian 50

logic 81

Longobardi, G. 118–19, 123, 154, 168

McKenna, P. 288Main Point of Utterance 137

Mausfeld, R. 40meaningin the brain 292–5

grammatical 66–7, 69–70, 91–2, 106, 116,217, 288–9, 293, 309–10

vs. associative cognition 289

in the philosophy of language 2

not a matter of rational choice 333

measure of mind 295

mentalas an ‘anomaly’ 299–300science of 300

mereology 71, 105–7, 223, 227, 232, 235–6Merge 76–7, 80, 88, 109–10, 251Merleau-Ponty, M. 285Minimalism 6, 76, 85, 96, 217, 240, 248, 262mistakes 48

Modern Synthesis 252

modes of signifying 69–71

Modists 15, 23–32, 50–1, 69, 74, 296modularity 3, 238–9, 241–2, 259–60, 263–6,

280, 292as circular 263–5

and Theory of Mind 272–3

Index 377

Moro, A. 43, 79–83, 311–16morphological decomposition 52

Müller, F. M. 296, 329

names (proper) 122–4, 129, 141, 150, 152, 317nativism 240

Neanderthals 253–6, 257, 260naturalism 10, 28–9, 33–4, 174, 297, 331

metaphysical and methodological 297–9nominalists 50, 87normativity 334–5

ontology (formal) 46, 59, 64, 68–71, 73, 79,86–7, 89, 107, 121–2, 139, 173, 176, 224,235–6, 247

commitments 118–19

as grammatical 83–4, 95, 139, 302–3limits of 321–2

and phases 103, 107, 205other minds 57–8

Out of Africa 254–5

Pāṇini 16–18

Partee, B. 296, 301, 303partial control 221

parts of speech 37, 59–69, 75perception 35–6, 245

semantics of 38

Person 78, 155, 217complementary with Gender/Number 168

in Dative clitics 167–8

first Person 142–9, 150–2semantics of 142–4

perspectives 56, 68, 71, 73phases 80, 102, 131, 137, 153, 173, 204, 206

and cross-phasal dependencies 205

Pietroski, P. 31, 301Pinker, S. 13, 263pointing 80, 245, 303

and grammar 248

Port Royal xvii, 2, 5, 10, 32predication 63, 75–6, 82, 87–8

not a part of speech 75

Preminger, O. 218

principles and parameters 14, 77, 176, 179alignment parameter 197–201

head parameter 184–93

null subject parameter 193–7

PRO 220–3

propositions (and propositionality) 62–3,246, 278

belief 325, 330propositional attitudes 301–2, 310–11, 325,329–30

Pylkkänen, L. 292

quasi-copula (seems) 314

Quine, W. v. O. 297, 299

rationality 143, 245, 249, 278, 283–4, 292, 332realism 86, 322–7recursion 80, 101–2, 107–8, 319

as cyclic 111

not direct 110–15

in mind-reading 245

reference 36–7, 57, 91–4, 99, 117–18, 128, 297–9and event ontology 225

and extraction 137

to facts 133–8, 143functional 42, 57, 99as grammatical 37, 82, 91–3, 123, 128, 130,138–9, 148, 298, 303

to kinds 129–30

organized hierarchically 117, 148, 156, 167as the problem rather than solution 303

and reason/rationality 295

as scalar and hierarchical 126–8, 173strong in Dative clitics 164

topological 117–18, 130as tracked by Case 209, 212to truth 131–2

Reuland, E. 147rigidity

of clauses 139

as an explanatory problem 303

of proper names 124

roots 50

Russell 78–9, 82–3

378 Index

Sakha 50

Schaller, S. 266–8schizophrenia 280–92

and aphasia 284

and autism 287

as a disturbance of the Self 286

and laterality 291

as a logopathy 262

and reference 283–4

selection 106–7

Self (‘first person’) 143, 173, 285–6in D. Hume 286

disturbance of 286

semantics 77, 296–304 see also contentas explanatory 150

grammatical 60, 116, 140, 153, 301–2 see alsomeaning

outside of the head 300

as (not) psychology 301–3

sentence 80

not a part of speech 76, 81serial verbs 111–12

Sigurðsson, H. 206, 208–9, 215, 217Skinner, B. F. 250–1, 299slifting 135–7

speciation 239, 249–50event 253–4

and language 258, 260speciesand language 254, 260reality of 252–3

-specificity 62, 239, 244, 250,303, 328

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) 265–6

and autism 266

Stringer, C. 254–5Strong Minimalist Thesis 6

Tagalog 50, 65Tarski, A. 305, 322Tattersall, I. 19, 252–3, 255–6, 258Tense Underspecification Hypothesis 274

telicity 224–35

thematic structure 76, 207, 232Theory of Mind 244–5, 270–4

in autism and schizophrenia 279–80, 287in the brain 294

dependent on language 271

and grammar 287–8

many different things 273

as a module 272–3, 287, 295no predictions for propositionality 295

thought 1, 7, 58, 99, 240, 242, 247–8in animals 98, 276–7as conscious 261

as co-varying with the linguisticgenotype 261–3

dependent on language 259

disordered 279, 281–5without conceptual scheme 278

‘embodied’ in language 258

evolution of 238–9

invariant, like grammar 249

Language of see Language of Thoughtlimits of 318–22

as natural and biological 335

non-propositional 278

science or theory of 7, 328–30, 335–6in severe aphasia 268–72

and truth 329–30

Titone, D. 289–90Tomasello, M. 242–6, 283Topological Mapping Theory 119, 130, 148,

154, 168, 173extended 130, 134, 139, 153

triangulation 21–2, 245truth 85, 132, 304–14and assertion 323

-conditions 305

and copular constructions 313–16

deflation of 322

epistemology of 323

grammar of 311–21

as grammatical 304–17, 328as independent from belief 277–8

as the limit of grammar 318

as objective 304, 307and realism 323–7

theories of 305

vs. survival 276

Index 379

unaccusatives 230

uninterpretable features 78

universal grammar 77, 240in India 15–23

genetic variation in 261, 262, 279organological conception 240

Un-Cartesian hypothesis xx, 14, 175, 180, 183,202, 241, 248, 260, 262, 269, 274, 282–3,285, 291–2, 295, 332–3, 336 see alsolinguistics

Unified Theory of Thought, Meaning andAction (Davidson) 300, 328–9, 331

Universal Theta Assignment Hypothesis(UTAH) 182

V2 134–5

Varley, R. 270–2, 274variation

biolinguistic 262–95

cross-linguistic 195–201

fundamentally lexical 181, 247in semantics 177

Vergnaud, J. R. 214

Williams syndrome 263–4

Wittgenstein, L. 84Whorf, B. 247word

grammatical 61

380 Index

Documents

The Phylosophy of Universal Grammar