Talk:Principles and parameters

Dominant

The article says «Today, many linguists have adopted this framework, and it is considered the dominant form of mainstream linguistics.». I have the impression that this would have been an accurate statement back in 1995, and that a better formulation would be «Many linguists adopted this framework in the eighties, and it was considered the dominant form of mainstream linguistics until it was replaced by Minimalism in the mid-nineties.» Trondtr 20:03, 18 March 2007 (UTC).

The article for generative grammar indicates that P&P is inclusive of both G&B and Minimalism, so if the wording here is to be changed to indicate that Minimalism is dominant, it should be changed there. Before this happens, it should be checked with outside sources whether P&P includes Minimalism or not. -Space Dracula 16:21, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Universal Grammar and the Brain

This section seems highly biased to me, and is of a similar writing style to and many of the same ideas of a pragraph in the Syntax article, which I criticized and commented out with consent from others. The user who added this section, who also seems to have a preoccupation with Broca's area, seems to have failed to include summaries in doing large edits on several occasions, disrupting proper criticism of additions on articles such as these, which so rarely get updated; on a similar note, this article also refers readers to the oft-mentioned Broca's area article for references. More importantly, however, these edits contain strongly-worded, biased information that tends to be tagged to cite references. While I think it's important to address relationships between the theory of Universal Grammar, which is predicated upon making claims about the brain, it's still a fundamentally good idea to avoid language that presents ideas promoted within a certain theoretical dogma as if they were objective facts. For example, the sentence "By using neuroimaging techniques it has been recently proved that Broca's area - a portion of the left inferior frontal part of the human brain-reacts selectively to all and only those languages that follow Universal Grammar" to me implies that the author is asserting that Universal Grammar is objectively proven to be true. This should not be worded this way, and is also redundant with the better-worded, cited section Grammar and the brain in the Universal Grammar article. As such it should not be in this article, one dealing with a specific UG theory, when it's covered in an article that deals more explicitly with its subject in a much more acceptable way. I think it should be deleted, but for now I'm going to comment it out. Thoughts? -Space Dracula 16:46, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

The section should be deleted as it doesn't discuss p&p directly and is only tangentially relevant to this article. An article on Grammar and the brain would be very interesting. I have a number of papers lying around here somewhere on "grammatical aphasia" that I could dig out. - Francis Tyers · 07:17, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I also agree that it's inappropriate for this article, since the P&P program didn't really lead to any work on the brain in itself. I.e., lots of people studied the brain because they were interested in the general UG hypothesis, but not so much its specific P&P realization. Cadr 11:36, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the edit that removed this section. I'm also removing the citation to an article about Broca's area down at the bottom, which is no longer referred to in the article. I'm assuming it came from the now-deleted section. Mcswell (talk) 16:48, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Capitalization of names of principles

As a result of this comment, I moved Extended projection principle and Projection principle to Extended Projection Principle and Projection Principle, respectively. The first page of google hits supports the initial comment: all use Title Capitalization Style for EPP. But now I see that we have lots of similar pages, so it'd be good to be consistent and also correct. I'm no linguistic expert and I don't have any of the cited refs handy, so what's the correct way here? DMacks (talk) 16:55, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I believe the issue is the Wikipedia policy for naming articles. It says that articles should only have the first word capitalized. My personal opinion is I’ve always thought that policy was kind of weird but we should follow policies even if we don’t agree with them. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 23:11, 25 June 2019 (UTC)

Criticism

It seems to me that the criticism cites papers as authoritative without any real discussion of the content or presentation of opposing views. It claims that what seems to be one person's hypothesis, that there is 'strong evidence' that language is emergent. This really needs to be given proper discussion BovineBeast (talk) 10:48, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Changes made Feb 17 2009. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.--76.174.28.21 (talk) 04:58, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I concur, indeed some of the criticisms in the article are so idiotic it's embarrassing. Take this gem: "For example, while formal linguistics takes the sentence to be the canonical unit of analysis, conversation analysis (CA) takes the turn at talk as canonical." I'm sorry? This 'criticism' implies that there are some people who do not speak using sentences. How the hell can you NOT have the sentence as the thing under analysis? Absolute, unpolluted stupidity.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.153.241.116 (talk) 19:14, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

The criticism doesn't suggest that sentences are not used in speech; rather, it is a perfectly valid reminder that in the study of communication, the sentence is neither the largest unit of discourse, nor necessarily the most important. Perhaps the real problem here is that complex ideas are not explained, making it inaccessible for those unfamiliar with communication theories. D4g0thur 13:09, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree that the above criticism is unwarranted but for different reasons. CA and P&P differ fundamentally about the fundamental object of linguistic study is. For CA, the object of study is of performance as reified in a contextualized, conversation where the minimal unit of analysis is, in principal, the utterance; the main focus is what language is USED for i.e. it is a variety of functionalism. For P&P, it is taken for granted that language has functionality, the fundamental object of study is competence and the usual unit of study is taken as the (I-language) sentence for methodological reaons (there are analyses that sometimes use other methods e.g. corpora (e.g. historical linguistic studies) , contextualized discourses etc). For P&P there is no a priori committment to excluding certain types of data. So P&P and CA differ in the same way that chemistry and cookery differ: one is the study of fundamental interactions at a mico-scale in a deterministic model that attempts to be scientific in the broad sense, the other is a more macro-scale, non-deterministic, non-scientific model focussing on use of chemicals in everyday situations in the real world. So, in short, this "critique" misses the point. The other "criticisms" are dubious for similar reasons: P&P is NOT a model of language use (it is a model of what is allowed in a language) and therefore it is simply irrelevant to claim that certain constructions are rare in actual use. It is for these reasons that the contribution of CA, DA and to a lesser extent of those who see corpus linguistics as a discipline (as opposed to a methodology) to any kind of syntactic theory has been pretty much zero: just read the journals and decide for yourself. Furthermore, the following claim: "Evidence from historical linguistics also suggests that grammar is an emergent property of language use" is an overstatement. There have been certain individual words that have been grammaticalized and it is one theory of grammaticalization that this follows from (frequent) use (e.g Bybee's work). But this is a far cry from saying that grammar as a whole is emergent. This claim has not been fully demonstrated and is certainly not a standard view. Actually, there are many historical linguistic studies which draw on the P&P approach (e.g. Lightfoot's work). There ARE real criticisms of P&P that are more interesting: e.g. the inability after 30 years to compile a clear and agreed-upon list of universal parameters; the tension between representation and derivation; the tension between a production model and a competence model; the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) is actually the most comprehensive critique of the P&P model from a theory-internal perspective. (Grumpygiraffe (talk) 08:00, 19 May 2010 (UTC))

I just tagged the criticisms section for POV. The problems with this section are amply noted above. In addition, there is unfortunate phrasing e.g. "Whereas Chomsky and other formal linguists have painted language as a static, linear information transmission system". In this sentence, use of words like "painted" and "static" portray chomskyans in an unnecessarily bad light. Static implies "no change" and no chomskyans support this: should be changed to "synchronic". The "linear" claim is meaningless since Chomskyan tree structures are hierarchical. The idea that language is an "information transmission system" is also not part of standard Chomskyan assumptions... it might be taken for granted but it does not form part of the premises of the theory. (Grumpygiraffe (talk) 14:25, 24 May 2010 (UTC))

These remarks are spot on, Grumpygiraffe, and I highly encourage you to make as many changes as you see fit to. The section overall is quite unbalanced, and neither reflects the practice of the field, nor the intellectual space in which the debate is rightly situated. You seem to have a handle on these issues, so please edit! Mundart (talk) 15:10, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

I'll agree with Mundart that Grumpy Giraffe is right. Furthermore, the impression that the criticism section gives is that Conversational Analysis is a decisive critique of P&P. This is rather odd; first, the CA criticism pertains to virtually all theories of syntax (HPSG, LFG, Minimalism,...). Second, it has little to say about how syntax does work, I guess maybe it's a claim that there is no such thing as syntax. So more to the point would be the problems that GG outlines above: failure to come up with agreed-on parameters (of course, one could say that about phonological features...), and in fact the way that parameters seem to be becoming more and more fine-grained. (I've seen that in print somewhere, but I can't recall where--I came to this article hoping to find the references :-).)

I do however want to say that the comment higher up "that there are some people who do not speak using sentences" is perhaps not the issue. The fact is that people speak using sentences some of the time, and other things--NPs, VPs, and even single words--at other times ("'Where did you go?' 'Out.' 'What did you do?' 'Nothing.'"). But that fact does not negate syntactic theories, it just means that they should either accept other phrasal nodes at the top level besides S (or IP or whatever the latest fashion is), or else they should come up with a theory of ellipsis that takes an S and throws away everything but one phrase. I don't think CA is of much help here, unless it would be to serve as a corpus of examples. Mcswell (talk) 16:46, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

After a long hiatus, I have comprehensively reworked the criticisms section. I have not deleted the CA and other critique, but have rather tried to briefly point out its inadequacy and frame some of the critiques. I don't know if this overcomes the POV issues which I flagged originally. I think that more references would be welcome, especially in the section about the lack of consensus on a list of globally defined parameters. Grumpygiraffe (talk) 10:02, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

I tend to agree with your criticisms of the Criticism section. Could it be split into two subsections: criticisms detailing valid critiques directed at elements of P&P, and broader criticisms of the syntactic approach itself (such as it sounds like adherents of CA might suggest)?

Also: for clarity, the section citing Terrence Deacon could say "having been subject to the forces of _biological_ natural selection" to distinguish it from other, non-genetic kinds of selection (i.e., memetic evolution, such as language undergoes). When I first read the line mentioning Deacon, I thought it was suggesting that language didn't evolve - a seemingly untenable position, or we wouldn't be able to correlate relationships among languages with genetic evidence of population migrations. --Memetics (talk) 09:44, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

The theory makes absurd predictions.

The nativism called "universal grammar" actually predicts that adaptation to different languages should, by natural selection, have produced groups of humans genetically incapable of learning foreign languages. That racist prediction have been conclusively disproved in lots of studies. Avoiding falsifiability by avoiding extrapolation of theories to their logical extremes is not scientific at all. Furthermore, there is no way to explain why a vast range of redundant linguistic capacities obviously not needed to build a complex language (no language uses the whole worldwide range and some languages only use a very small fraction of it) should have evolved in the first place. This is explained in more detail on the pages "Brain" and "Origin of language" (and to some extent "Piraha"), all on Pure science Wiki, a wiki devoted to the pure scientific method unaffected by academic obsession with status and prestige. 95.209.8.118 (talk) 13:42, 8 January 2013 (UTC)Martin J Sallberg

P&P vs. Government Binding theory

The intro of the article currently says: “Principles and parameters as a grammar framework is also known as government and binding theory.” I think this is wrong. The two are highly related, I believe that the principles are mostly or completely defined using government binding theory but the two theories are not the same. Government binding theory is an attempt to simplify the complex transformations required in previous approaches by viewing all phrases (noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) as examples of the general concept of a phrase with aspects such as the head of the phrase. P&P is the claim that all natural languages can be described by a small set of principles and various (related) Parameters (e.g., head first vs. head last) of those principles. They are highly related but not the same. This is clearer in the subsequent text: “That is, the two terms principles and parameters and government and binding refer to the same school in the generative tradition of phrase structure grammars (as opposed to dependency grammars)” but I think that sentence that they are the same is wrong and should be changed. If anyone disagrees please reply, if no one comments I will change this. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 22:59, 25 June 2019 (UTC)