The Phylosophy of Universal Grammar

The Philosophy of

Universal Grammar

W O L F R A M H I N Z E N A N D

MI C H E L L E S H E E H A N

3

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Acknowledgements viii

List 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

4.4.3 Semantic approaches to the essential indexical 149 4.4.4 The hierarchy of reference revealed through Romance

object 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 developmental

language disorders 263

8.2 Thought in genetically normal language-less

or 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

9.2 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

WH

In 2008, I received a note from Professor Elisabeth Leiss from the University of Munich, arguing that the position I had defended in my2006 book was not so much a ‘minimalist’ position as a ‘modistic’ one, in the sense of fourteenth-century Modistic universal grammar. This note would prove to have a profound influence on 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-Cartesian Linguistics’ 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. Apart from 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 Jadwiga Piskorz. Elisabeth’s linguistic thought has had a profound influence on me, and I have seen the fundamental difference between lexical and grammatical meaning most clearly through conversations with her. I leave to the historians the question of how close, in the end, this book has come (back) to the position of the Modists—but it 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 expected any PhD student to play. An inexhaustible source of energy, inspiration, equilibrium, and constructive criticism, Uli has done wonders to keep the group together, sharpen ideas, and drive it in new directions. His role in this project as a co-author of several papers has been massive, and also his role in the genesis of this book cannot be overstressed: he has commented meticulously on every chapter, and the book wouldn’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, James Miller, Andrew Woodard, and Pallavi Worah. Thanks to you, David and James, for reading and commenting on major parts of the book. As time passed, the character and 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 who nonetheless appeared to speak a common language, with a lot of common ground and intellectual ambition. Every single one of the projects that emerged out of this group 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 of academia, it seemed a sane place. My ideas, that is, seemed less insane than normally. Just a train ride of15 minutes away, a further connection emerged with language sciences in Newcastle, and I am extremely grateful and honoured by the interest that Anders Holmberg, Noel Burton-Roberts, and many others in Newcastle took in our work. A long stream of visitors, too, deserve special thanks for inspiring and enrich-ing us, particularly Cedric Boeckx, Emma Borg, John Collins, John Mikhail, Paul Pietroski, and Ian Roberts. Many further visitors that have helped and inspired us in numerous workshops and conferences over the past years are simply too numerous to mention, but I have been particularly influenced by Eric Reuland and Johan Rooryck. Farther away, a number of fabulous philosopher-linguists and friends have helped mefind my way throughout these years, and some of their fingerprints can be found dotted all over this book: notably Cedric Boeckx, Pino Longobardi, Jaume Mateu, Nirmalangshu Mukherji, Paul Pietroski, Tom Roeper, Anna-Maria di Sciullo, Rajendra Singh, and Tom Stroik. The ear that linguists have lent my concerns has been, professionally speaking, the best thing that ever happened to me. This book would 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, this particularly applies to Boban Arsenijević and Txuss Martín. On the brain sciences side, Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer has been a never-ending source of wisdom over the last two years on any matters concerning the brain; David Poeppel, too, has been friendly 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 deep gratitude for two linguists who, at one point, understood me better than I did, and brought me on my way: Juan Uriagereka and Noam Chomsky.

A few months into our project, John Davey, our editor, who has been an unfailing source of advice, wisdom and support for me for more than a decade, took an immediate interest in our plan for a book. He and his co-editor, Julia Steer, are simply 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 continue keeping me down and close.

MS

The project which gave rise to this book took me, in2010, from the relative comfort of the department of English Language and Linguistics in Newcastle to the less familiar territory of the Department of Philosophy in Durham. This transition, whilst extremely stimulating and thought provoking, could have been difficult had it not

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, and especially Ulrich (Uli) Reichard, with all of whom I had the pleasure and privilege to interact on a regular basis during my brief time in Durham. They each taught me a great deal about philosophy along the way and introduced me to questions I had never before even considered. Teaching the course‘Language & Mind’ along with Uli was particularly stimulating in this regard, and I must thank also the undergraduate students who took that course for their probing questions and unfailing interest in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy.

During the writing of this book, I had the pleasure of bouncing ideas off many people on many different occasions. Parts of Chapter4 and the associated Linguistic Analysis article were presented at the universities of Manchester and Cambridge, at ‘Rethinking Parameters’ in Madrid, and at the ‘Workshop on clausal and nominal parallels’ in Aarhus, where the respective audiences provided very useful questions and critique. Thanks go especially to George Walkden, Ian Roberts, Theresa Biber-auer, and Adam Ledgeway in Cambridge; Silvio Cruschina, Yuni Kim, and Andrew Koontz-Garboden in Manchester; Olaf Koeneman, Olga Fernández Soriano, and Giuseppe Longobardi in Madrid; and Eva Engels, Guglielmo Cinque, Per Anker Jensen, and especially Sten Vikner in Aarhus. A version of Chapter5 was presented at the workshop‘UG: the Minimum’ in Durham in 2011 and my thanks go also to the audience there and at the associated British Academy-funded conference‘The Past and Future of Universal Grammar’ for critical feedback and discussion, especially Anders Holmberg, Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson, and Aritz Irurtzun. Other people have also been kind enough to discuss some of the ideas presented in chapters4, 5, and6 on a more informal basis, notably Jenneke van der Wal, Joe Emonds, Heather Burnett, 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 and encouragement from family and friends whilst writing this book. Jenny, my running partner, 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 sane whilst my thoughts were elsewhere. Thanks for putting up with me!

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

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

As we approach a new domain of inquiry, we typically do it with caution. Initially, we will 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 we might dignify with the term‘theory’. This theory will give way to others, a process influenced 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 eventually crystallize: a sense of what kind of entities and structures our domain actually involves.

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 the subject matter of a struggle for properly describing and identifying it as a domain of scientific inquiry for more than two millennia. This began at the very inception of scientific inquiry in India, and it continues today, 400 years after the onset of the scientific revolution in the West. There is little doubt about the existence of grammar as a way of organizing words that is distinct from phonology. But what, exactly, is it that 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 and talk. 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 of others. No word is a‘bare symbol’. Where there is one word, others are never far, and grammar is the system within which they find their places, creating ever new meanings as they combine. Grammar is the chemistry of words.

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

So grammar may actually matter. But then again, it may not. Perhaps all that it seems 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 do is 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, if grammar is non-arbitrary, it would be only insofar as it reflects such a system of thought.

That there is a choice in the matter shows there is a question, and this is the question we address here. What is grammar really all about? Why does it exist? What does it do? The caution referred to above will typically, as scientific inquiry tries to get going, lead to background such ‘philosophical’ questions—and rightfully so. We might, for example, simply ignore the actual functioning and interpretation of the system, 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 two millennia, it is time to address the question head-on, and defend a specific claim about 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 lexical concepts—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 the format of knowledge, where this format is a uniquely grammatical one. This format of knowledge is universal in our specific version of humanity, as compared with all other hominins in the prehistory of modern Homo sapiens, and defines this peculiar version of humanity. For this reason, the topic of universal grammar, we claim, is the topic of our speciation. Thinking about human biology, about what defines our species, is to think about grammar, and vice versa.

A much more common viewpoint is what we will call the‘Cartesian’ one (never mind that Descartes himself may never have defended it): that thought is universal and immutable in this species, while language is merely a contingent way of express-ing it in a physical medium. Accordexpress-ing to this view, grammar is not an organizexpress-ing principle of our specific kind of mind, or of how meaning is organized in it (though it may, at least partially and imperfectly,‘mirror’ it). So if grammar went missing or disintegrated, much of our mind could stay intact. In a similar way, a printer or fax machine 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 in things in the world, viewed as the meanings of words and sentences; in mind- and language-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 defend this alternative, because we claim that grammar explains the species-defining features of the mode of thought in question, and because we have no idea how else to explain them. The kinds of meanings expressed in any human language, at least in part, are

not like the contents of the thoughts of any non-linguistic creature. Grammar explains, in a principled way, why these meanings exist, and how and why they arise when they do at particular moments in our lives—why, in particular, words occur in acts of reference that can take a narrow range of forms; why there is both event and fact reference; why properties are distinguished from objects or states of affairs; 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 contemporary version of universal grammar research into perspective, and we do this in Chapter1. History helps, both to see continuity in our insight into the nature of grammar over the aeons, and to see quite different takes on it. In contemporary linguistics, historical awareness of the roots of the contemporary version of the enterprise tends to stop with the rationalist Port Royal tradition; but there are at least two other sciences of grammar, 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 generative grammar to these more ancient and medieval frameworks of thought, leads, we contend, to an ultimately more interesting result.

Chapter2 begins a journey that answers this question: What are the effects of grammar on the organization of meaning? A logically possible answer is: none. That is, the grammaticalization of the hominin brain changed absolutely nothing regarding what meanings we can grasp or thoughts we can think. But this answer seems far too radical. In our species, we see grammar where we see the mode of thought in question. In other species, we see, in essence, neither. Where language breaks down due to brain lesions or other acquired disorders, much thought can be preserved. But in this case, the linguistic genotype is normal, and language has developed 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 seems implausible that grammar would have no such effect on the organization of our rational minds. So what is the effect, exactly? Chapter2 begins from a form of semantics already present in prelinguistic perception. But as percepts become lex-icalized as words, and as words then start to develop grammatical functions, the organization of meaning changes again, and with each step. We specifically develop an account of the kind of semantics associated with lexical atoms and with part of speech distinctions: the distinction, say between how the word run functions when read as a noun (‘a run’) or as a verb (‘to run’, ‘runs’). Once we have arrived there, we argue, we have already arrived at grammar, and the semantics in question reflects how words implement grammatical functions: grammatical semantics.

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

ultimately language-specific and should not be part of the vocabulary of universal

grammar. And so, in Chapter3, we develop an account of grammar as purely

relational, and as defining a novel semantics in which reference and truth are possible. Moreover, we argue that the recursivity of language can be reconstructed, predicted, and understood on this basis. The chapter also develops an account of the smallest unit of grammaticality, which we identify with the phase of contemporary grammatical theory.

This unit of grammatical organization moves to centre stage in Chapter4, where we claim to derive formal-ontological distinctions in the objects we refer to in language from the grammatical dynamics in which such acts of reference are configured. An example of what we call a formal-ontological distinction is the difference between an action and an object, or an object and a fact. These are not distinctions like those between a man and a woman, or between whisky and water, or between water viewed as H2O or as XYZ. They are formal distinctions, not material

ones. They do not concern existence in a metaphysical sense. The availability of a system 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 to follow from something. We argue that it follows from grammar, and from nothing else. Grammar is the only known principle that can, and does, organize the forms of reference in question. In this sense, formal-ontological distinctions are, in essence, grammatical distinctions, and the world as characterized by such distinctions is a grammaticalized 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 and thought. For the kind of content that comes, in our argument, with grammar, and the formal ontology in question, is a (or even the) prime feature of the kind of thought that philosophers since ancient times have highlighted: thought that can be true or false, that is responsive to reasons, and that can be shared. If the content and formal ontology in question fall out from grammar, there is nothing else for a theory of 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 a peripheral organ, or an expressive tool. If this expressive tool is subject to massive cross-linguistic variation, as it plainly seems to be, and thought is not, then there must be a categorial thought-language distinction. And so we need to address the issue of cross-linguistic variation. Does it provide a challenge for our account of universal grammar? Not if the primary dimension of variation is the organization of language at a lexical and morphological level; not, if traditional dimensions of variation, as captured through syntactic parameters, are given their proper place in the grammar, as only affecting their sensory-motor externalization.

Yet there are other, massive challenges to our account. Some aspects of linguistic organization traditionally identified as grammatical, such as Case, are said not to feed into the organization of thought or meaning—at least not directly. So why are they there? If they exist in the organization of grammar, they therefore either disconfirm the view that grammar necessarily subserves the organization of a special kind of meaning, or they are wrongly taken not to feed into the organization of meaning. We argue that once morphological Case features are carefully distinguished from the grammatical relations they express, they turn out to be interpretable indirectly in the formal ontology of meaning. This is argued in Chapter6.

In chapters7 and 8, which form a unity, we look at variation of a very different kind, which we call biolinguistic variation, following Boeckx (2012): variation in the linguistic genotype, and the shifts in our mental phenotypes that such variation can systematically 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 particular attention to Formal Thought Disorder in schizophrenia, for which the Un-Cartesian hypothesis makes an obvious prediction: grammar should disintegrate in this condi-tion as well, along with the fragmentacondi-tion of thought that we observe there. This, we conclude 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 health as well. That language in its normal use is a condition for mental health seems a natural suggestion: a sane thinker is also a speaker. Yet language has barely been looked at as 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 final chapter. If forms of reference such as truth and object-reference are grammatical in nature, what does this really mean, in terms of the meaning of the notions of reference and truth involved? ‘Truth’, in what sense? This notoriously inscrutable notion intrinsically connects with metaphysical issues: issues of objectivity, in par-ticular. If truth is a grammatical concept, as we centrally contend here, how does this affect our notion of what truth is? Can we really mean by‘truth’ what contemporary discussions of the notion since Tarski have taken it to mean? Yes, is the answer—it is just that the notion in question has been presupposed in these discussions. The story we tell, by contrast, is an explanatory one. It provides an aetiology for it: a rationale for why it exists, and has the features it does.

Seen as a whole, this book reflects the ambition to rethink the place of grammar in human nature, and thereby to rethink its place in philosophy as well. We wanted to weave inquiry into the nature of grammar into a single scheme, in essentially all 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.

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 philosophical book. Yet, at the same time, we do not think that essentially any of the points we will be making is independent of the empirical facts of language and how we interpret these. Shielding the philosophy of language from systematic exposure to such facts predicts nothing good, we think. While we are crucially trying to weave a whole picture, 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 read by philosophers as well. But we have trusted that the project is worthwhile, and of intrinsic human interest, disciplinary separations aside. In more practical terms, we trust that, where the linguistic details get too gruesome, as for example in Section4.4 of Chapter4, in Chapter 5, and in parts of Chapter 6, philosophers will simply choose to read introductions and summaries, and otherwise turn a blind eye. We stress that, apart from itsfirst section, Chapter 5 really is written with linguists in mind, and the same is true for all but thefirst two sections of Chapter 6. We are no less concerned for our linguistic readers, and have reserved much of the metaphysical dimensions of our story for Chapter9, leaving our empirical claims about, say, the grammar of reference or Case assessable independently.

While this is very much a collaborative book, with both authors working closely together throughout, WH can be considered primarily responsible for the material in all the chapters with the exception of chapters 4 and 5. The first three sections of Chapter4 are based on Sheehan and Hinzen (2011) and the fourth on Martín and Hinzen (2012). In addition, Section 3.6 and parts of Section 3.5 of Chapter 3 are based on Arsenijević and Hinzen (2012).

Last but not least, we emphasize that what we call‘Un-Cartesian linguistics’ is a programme. Like the Minimalist Program, you can engage with it or not, but it cannot 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 promises rewards: to make more principled sense of grammar. But there is nothing wrong in not pursuing it, and nothing intrinsically right in doing so. If you think that thought is ‘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 that grammar does not organize the formal ontology of semantics, that semantics is autonomous, and that thought is independent of grammar. Therefore, we formulate, over and above an Un-Cartesian programme, an Un-Cartesian hypothesis: that the formal ontology of language, and hence the content of thought, obeys grammatical principles.

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 is rather surprising, if we think about it. I may have never seen your father, and he isn’t present. 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. And so 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 truth is involved is part of what defines thought itself: as Frege put it, ‘I call a thought something 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 the non-linguistic world, we can extract knowledge from grammatical strings of expres-sions, based on thought. While perception and the extraction of adaptively relevant information from sensory data via inference are ubiquitous in the animal world, and perception, too, is normally of objects as existing independently of us, knowledge obtained in this other way is a singularity, and it has a different quality. We cannot perceive 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 organizing meaning 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 epistemological significance 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, and they are at the heart of the veryfirst attempt to develop a ‘science’ of language more than2,500 years ago in Ancient India (Matilal, 1990). In the West, grammar was discovered as a potential domain of scientific inquiry only much later, but the idea of a connection between grammar and a different way of cognizing the worldfigures prominently 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). Since we are nowhere near a genuine science of grammar today and the struggle for making sense of it as a domain of enquiry very much continues, we believe that our discussion will benefit from taking a broader historical perspective, within which contemporary assumptions can be properly contextualized.2

The philosophy of grammar we will develop here gives grammar a principled role to play in the genesis of a particular kind of meaning: grammatical meaning, as we will 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 one as 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 (the proposition theory), and (iv) the‘use theory’ (meaning as deriving from how we use words). The mental particulars posited on thefirst conception are not linguistic in nature; nor are the physical objects in the world that define the meaning of words and sentences on the reference theory; nor are, evidently, propositions; nor is the use of words on the fourth conception, where this‘use’ is thought of in more generic terms and analogized with chess playing in Wittgenstein (1953), governed by the ‘rules and conventions of a community’ like many other non-linguistic activities.3So, 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 the philosophy of language is on the word (and indeed, the name) as the basic unit of meaning and reference.

In thinking about mind, modern philosophy more generally, and the Port Royal tradition in particular, has favoured the idea that there is a universal system of thought 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 language}

as such, while reserving capital letters (Universal Grammar/UG) for the modern technical sense of universal grammar.

3

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

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

The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby 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 is independent of us seeing it:

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

According to Frege, the thought is thus prior to and independent of its linguistic articulation. As such it is also the locus of semantics or content, and grammar has nothing to do with its existence or intrinsic nature. Accordingly, from this point of view, 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 to convey them. The empirical study of grammar, it would then seem, is just more psychology, which Frege and many others after him axiomatically banned from what would become analytic philosophy. A position of this nature can motivate the consistent lack of a systematic study of grammar in philosophical curricula in the philosophy of language over the last150 years, where logic and semantics have been the frameworks of choice, and linguistics has had little influence on the philosophy of language.4The inherent epistemological significance of grammar also disappears on another 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 merely expressive of thought, is generative of the specific kind of thought that we find expressed in languages across the world, and a rationale for its existence. It provides a thought with a novel structural format that makes it possible, thereby enabling knowledge and forming a crucial element in the genesis of human reason itself, as well as a new species (see Chapter7).

In this opening chapter, we begin by tracing Cartesian rationalist linguistics to its beginnings in the seventeenth century, and identify a core problem in it that we think is 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}

the persistent criticism it has received over the last three centuries. This problem is the very separation of a universal, immutable world of ‘thought’, ‘concepts’, or ‘notions’, on the one side, from an expressive and variable system of ‘language’, on the other. After the demise of the Port Royal tradition and universal grammar itself in the 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 of grammatical meaning—that some kinds of meaning are intrinsically grammatical— doesn’t surface. Instead, the attempt is to turn grammar into a ‘natural object’ defined by its formal properties only, with no reference to meaning, though perhaps ‘inter-facing’ with it, as in contemporary Minimalist grammar. In the Ancient Indian context, as we discuss in Section1.3, grammarians crucially did work with a notion of grammatical meaning, and they made it the basis of their metaphysics, much as we will do in Chapter9. The same applies, in other ways, to Modistic grammarians, which we discuss in Section 1.4. Again, the objective of grammar as a science is achieved there, not by abstracting from meaning, but by attempting to delineate the

specific kind of meaning that comes with grammar—for the Modists, meaning

associated with the parts of speech. We will partially disagree with this particular Modistic conclusion in Chapter2, 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 reflected in morphological properties of words, but the latter, unlike the grammatical func-tions, are variable across languages. Section1.5 concludes.

1.2 Cartesian linguistics, 1637–1966

The philosophical conception of language as a tool for the generation of knowledge is quite different from the one that underlies modern linguistics. The latter is an instance of the rationalism that characterizes Cartesian linguistics in the tradition of Port Royal, which in turn leaned heavily on Descartes’s Regulae and was revived in Chomsky (1966). Central to this conception is a distinction between grammar and logic, 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 Cartesian universe, speech is squarely located in the‘material’ world, while thought uncontro-versially belongs to the‘mental’ world—a ‘dualism’ that the quote from Frege above illustrates again, though in his own nineteenth-century terms. Thought, in short, is universal and structured by logic, while grammar is a conventional system for expressing it‘materially’.

This directly predicts that any claim about a‘universal’ grammar will have to come out as controversial, for it is virtually inconceivable that, given the diversity among the world’s languages in their external appearances (and that they are not all like Latin, 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 by definition, the science of grammar is bound to fall victim to abundant variation. As we shall see below, this almost inescapable scepticism about universal grammar is indeed a recurring theme where rationalist assumptions about language and thought are made.

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

La Grammaire est l’Art de parler. / Parler, est expliquer ses pensées par des signes, que les hommes ont inventez à ce dessein. / On a trouvé que les plus commodes de ces signes, estoient les 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 that it 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 ones that 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 perfect mirror of or transparent‘window’ into the world of thought. The contents of this world 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 function of the‘body’, and segregated from thought viewed as a function of the ‘mind’. So there will be no unified science of grammar and thought, any more than there can be a unified theory of noise and meaning. Cartesian dualism soon became obsolete through Newton’s destruction of the mechanical philosophy that defined the notion of body involved (Chomsky,2000a), and even Frege’s nineteenth-century version of it has recently come to be questioned in approaches that regard propositions as a consequence of what kinds of mind we possess (Soames,2010).6Yet, 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 humans}

have invented for this purpose. One has found that the most suitable of these signs are sounds and the voice.’ (Our translation.)

6 _{Soames (2010: 7) develops what he terms a ‘cognitive realist’ account of propositions, according to}

which propositions are types of‘cognitive events’ involving predication, which is said to be a ‘primitive cognitive act’. But the notion of predication in question is a grammatical one, it is one kind of denotation that clauses can intuitively have, and the term ‘cognitive’ does not increase understanding of why propositions (or the other types of clausal denotations) exist and have the structures they do (see further Reichard,2013: ch. 1).

Thus, the Strong Minimalist Thesis of Chomsky (2007a) and the comparative approach of Hauser et al. (2002) are both based on the view that we need not account for thought: it is what provides the constraints for language to satisfy, much as in the 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 account for. There also is the idea that the sensory-motor externalization of language in a physical medium is only a contingent aspect of language that it in principle could do without.7That internal system, Chomsky (2008: 4) specifically suggests, evolved first, with externalization a later evolutionary development,‘a secondary process’, which used already existing sensory-motor articulators. If so, grammar in its core aspects— in what remains after we subtract externalization—will be purely ‘internal’, a mental system (yet even as such still distinct from‘thought’, from which it is divided by the semantic‘interface’).

On the other hand, the Minimalist Program is as suchflexible enough to allow for quite different conceptions of what role grammatical structuring might play in regards to the posited internal systems of thought. One view could be that the grammar merely internally articulates them, giving them a linguistic form. Another is that it fundamentally changes and reorganizes these systems, thereby giving us a different mode of thought, if not thought as such. In the latter cases we clearly cannot speak of an‘interface’ between grammar and thought any more, and this is the view we 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 format on which a distinctly human system of thought inherently depends (something needs then to be said about what kind of thought this is).

On the other hand, little in current Minimalist syntax gives us any insights about what it is about grammar that makes it play that role of constraining the language of thought. This is particularly true for conceptions of narrow syntax that reduce it to the 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 into what makes grammar specific, let alone a source of a particular and novel mode of thought. Indeed, Minimalist syntax has been virtually based on a conception of grammar on which it does not change the nature and structure of thought or the

C-I systems, reducing grammar to a mere ‘linking system’ between meaning

(assumed already given) and sound or sensory-motor articulation (also assumed already given, cf. Chomsky,2005).

7 _{And that partially disguises the essential nature of the internal system that such externalization}

Our more specific question in this book then will be how grammar might play a role 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 not only of interest in itself, we will argue in Chapter7, but is also needed for biological reasons, namely in an account of human speciation: the distinctive‘rationality’ of our thought is something that can be dated, and there is no good evidence for its existence prior to that of modern Homo sapiens, or even in the anatomical beginnings of our species: for in this species itself, there is no such evidence before about75,000 years ago in Africa and40,000 years ago in Europe, which is when a novel mode of thought is richly manifest in the unprecedented creativity of the essentially modern cultures arising then. This mode of thought needs to be explained, and we will argue that language explains it: not merely because we have evidence that language was present at these times and not (long) before them, but because the grammatical organization 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 theory of thought and language, and we do not know how to pursue an explanatory theory of thought or semantics—a genuine cognitive theory—otherwise. That theory will not turn out to be consistent with regard to physical externalization—a merely contin-gent aspect of linguistic organization which language, at least in principle, could do without. If we think of cognition as‘embodied’, then language is the unique embodi-ment of the kind of thought we are addressing here, and embodiembodi-ment requires a physical substance. We return to this matter in chapters8 and 9.

The uncontroversial universality of grammar in our species does not then lie, for us, 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, it is precisely the virtually unavoidable divergence between a (presupposed) system of ‘concepts’ and the variation in their external expression that has historically lead linguists to reject Universal Grammar, as the following quote from Jespersen illustrates:

With regard to the categories we have to establish in the syntactic part of our grammatical system, we must first raise an extremely important question, namely, are these categories purely logical categories, or are they merely linguistic categories? If the former, then it is evident that they are universal, i.e. belong to all languages in common; if the latter, then they, or at any rate some of them, are peculiar to one or more languages as distinct from the rest. Our question 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 falls with the alignment of grammar and logic, with logic thought of as structuring thought 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 the grounds that unlike thought (or reality), grammar appears highly variable and as such does not seem to reflect the immutable logical and semantic structure of thought or 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 in the same universal number (‘omnial’, as Bréal calls it) and in the same universal or generic tense, but the subject of the former in the common gender and that of the latter in the masculine gender, for then the meaning would have been unmistakable: ‘all human beings have been, are, and always will be mortal,’ and ‘all male human beings have been, are, and always will be deceitful.’ But as a matter of fact, this is not the way of the English language, and grammar has to state facts, not desires. (Jespersen,1924: 54–5).

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

‘A universal grammar is no more conceivable than a universal form of political Constitution or of religion, or than a universal plant or animal form; the only thing, therefore, that we have to do is to notice what categories the actually existing languages offer us, without starting from a ready-made system of categories’ (Steinthal, Characteristik, 104f.). Similarly, Benfey says that after the results achieved by modern linguistics universal and philosophical grammars have suddenly disappeared so completely that their methods and views are now only to be traced in such books as are unaffected by real science (Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 306). And according to Madvig (1856, p. 20, KL p. 121), grammatical categories have nothing to do with the 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’, and both of these from the categories of reality itself, where the categories of thought and those of reality are both taken as given (Jespersen says nothing about their origin, any more 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 the categories 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 is}

rejected in writers such as Haspelmath (2007; 2010) today. It is also interesting how much of science is guided by largely a priori intuitions about what is‘conceivable’ or not. Steinthal’s biological speculation about 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 there is no universal grammar. This general pattern of argument has not essentially changed in the last one hundred years. As Haspelmath (2010: 3) notes,

Typologists have often observed that cross linguistic comparison of morphosyntactic patterns cannot be based on formal patterns (because these are too diverse), but has to be based on universal 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 valency position’ (where, crucially, ‘reference’ is not taken to be a grammatical notion, as it will be here). The concepts in question are classified as constructs of the typologist that allow language comparisons, but that do not correspond to anything in either a speaker’s language or mind. Indeed there are no cross-linguistic categories, for nothing in language corresponds one-to-one to the conceptual-semantic constructs. Haspelmath (2010) illustrates with the putative category ‘dative’: no ‘concept’ defined in conceptual-semantic terms like the above is ‘instantiated’ by, say, the Nivkh Dative-Accusative case, which, as it happens, encodes the causee of an act rather than the recipient. Neither is, Haspelmath argues, such a category instantiated by, say, the Russian Dative or the Finnish Allative, both of which, although they do encode the recipient of physical transfer actions, have many properties that such a definition will not capture, and which therefore cannot be equated as instances of the same category.9

Let us now consider how the argument would go if grammatical categories are sui generis, a genuine innovation in hominin evolution, reflecting a new mode or format of thought that did not predate grammar. Then the project of wanting to match such categories with those of non-linguistic thought is forlorn: one cannot‘translate’ them into 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 Chapter2. Even less we would expect that the independent description of reality would reflect the grammatical relations in which we argue knowledge becomes possible.

Now the entire starting point changes. If we do not allow ourselves to presuppose the categories of a Cartesian system of‘thought’ or of ‘notions’, nor a ready-made categorial 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.

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 are immutable, there should be some evidence independent of grammar that the relevant non-grammatical categories exist, and that they can be accessed independently of grammar. But we know of no such evidence: they are inherently grammatical, or linguistic categories and relations in disguise.

Even if so, the question now remains whether grammatical categories and relations are 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 can use a word to refer to an event and distinguish such an act of reference from one referring to an object; one can refer to an object (a‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’) as distinct from the speaker and the hearer; one can express a proposition whose truth value is objective 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; and so on. These are defining features of human rationality. Suppose, secondly, that these very distinctions in reference are unavailable pre- or non-grammatically, and again that they cannot be characterized in independent semantic terms, as long as we do not implicitly invoke grammatical distinctions. Thirdly, suppose that a proper analysis of the parts of speech and their grammatical functions exactly aligns with these 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 was characterized by a revolt in linguistics against the Port Royal model of grammar and the general attempt to align grammar with logic (Graffi, 2001). Instead, the linguists of the day—for example Steinthal, mentioned above, but also the earlier Neogram-marians, for example Hermann Paul, whose Principles of Linguistic History is from 1880, and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920)—tried to align grammar with psychology, to the extent even that the terms ‘sentence’ and ‘judgement’ (German Urteil) came to be used virtually interchangeably. Grammatical processes, in short, reflect psychological ones involved in the genesis of a judgement viewed as a mental operation.

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) were stressed 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 to return to an alignment of language and logic, and to address the issue of meaning in abstract propositional rather than grammatical terms. This alignment would remain in place for much of the twentieth century, where anti-psychologism became an axiomatic 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 of psychological‘ideas’ internal to the head is thus preserved, as is his idea that content is non-linguistic. The notion of grammatical meaning—that grammar itself could provide or organize a novel form of meaning—does not surface. In our proposal, of course, meaning is not a matter of non-linguistic‘ideas’, either. But nor is it a matter of metaphysics or causality, being a matter of grammar (and of course the lexicon) instead.10

Nineteenth-century historical-comparative linguists never quite warmed to the question of linguistic meaning in thefirst place, focusing on phonology and the laws of sound change, in particular. While phonemes are beyond the threshold of human conscious apperception in ordinary language use, on the other hand, meaningful words are not. So, with a move to morphology, the mysterious box of meaning had to be opened. Bloomfield (1933: ch. 9) thus addresses the matter of meaning, yet going barely beyond the word level and treating grammar without reference to meaning. He moreover sticks to a behaviourist methodology where the meaning of a word is assumed to be the situation in which the word is uttered and the response its utterance elicits. A related position in Skinner (1957) would become a central target of Chomsky (1959), running directly counter to the creative aspect of language use that Chomsky adopted from the Cartesian tradition.

But words as such are not the locus of human freedom or reference yet, in the sense that they are largely given to us as something we need to acquire. Freedom of self-expression and reference to arbitrary objects of our thought depend on the generativity that only comes with the phrase and the sentence, which have their own meanings. Yet, even in twentieth-century linguistics, this matter remained difficult to address. By 1930, linguistics as a field had become autonomous from both logic and psychology, having becomefirst a comparative-historical discipline and 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 developed}

crucial insights on the formal structure of meaning as aligned with that of grammar. And Husserl, while engaging in what he called Cartesian Meditations and widely perceived as preoccupied with the intentional fine-structure of consciousness and its phenomenology, in fact regarded language as a constitutive condition of rational knowledge (Bruzina,1981), like Merleau-Ponty (1945) would do later. Husserl also made a foundational distinction between‘empirical grammars’ and ‘the grammatical’ itself, or the ‘ideal form of language’, which is the a priori and universal basis for logic, but is crucially conceived, unlike in Chomsky, in non-psychological, and indeed normative (but not social-conventional), terms. Like the Indians 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 meaning built from other such units, in accordance with their structure. The sentence is formed in accordance with a priori laws of signification and must necessarily have a sense, which moreover is necessarily one (the ‘unity of 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 the most elaborated proposal for a universal grammar in the twentieth century, apart from Chomsky’s, Edie notes 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 of data. As transpired in historical-comparative linguistics, even the parts of speech system of the generalized Indo-European language family were by no means univer-sal, a relativistic perspective gained ground on which change and diversity were not accidental but essential aspects of language, which any empirical perspective had to respect.11As Bloomfield summarized the situation in 1933:

The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations. Features which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomes accessible. Some features, such as, for instance, the distinction of verb-like and noun-like words as separate parts of speech, are common to many languages, but lacking in others. The fact that some 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 of general grammar and to explain these similarities and divergences, but this study, when it comes, 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 suspected30 years ago, namely, that we can pursue the study of language without reference to any psychologistic doctrine, and that to do so safeguards our results and makes them more significant. (Bloomfield, 1933: vii)

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

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