19. Thanks to Norbert Hornstein (personal communication) for raising this issue.
20. Hornstein (1984, chapter 3) gave some grammatical support to this distinction via his distinction between Type I and Type II quantifiers. Type I quantifiers include names, descriptions, any, a certain, and so on; Type II quantifiers include a, some, every, and so forth. The distinction was essentially based on whether QR (quantifier raising) applies or not. Since Hornstein rejected QR on minimalist grounds later (Hornstein 1995), as noted (section 3.3), the distinction is no longer motivated in those terms.
21. Siderits (1998, 507) observes that, according to the Navya-Nyaya school of Indian philosophy, universal quantifiers are always used to mention a number: ""To say "all crows are black" is to say that everything qualified by crowness is also qualified by a particular number, namely the number of crows, and that every-
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thing qualified by that number-particular is in turn qualified by blackness. We, of course, do not know the number of this totality of crows, but Nyaya is quite confident that there is such a number, since otherwise we should be unable to refer to all the crows""!
22. The conclusion probably extends to believes that in the de dicto sense (Ray 2007).
Chapter 4.
1. The a.s.sumption is questionable in view of data such as many (of his) arrows didn"t hit the target / the target wasn"t hit by many (of his) arrows (Lasnik and Uriagereka 2005, 181). Perhaps we can question the very idea of (large-scale) synonymy for natural languages (Hinzen 2006).
2. I am not counting his (often lengthy) critical remarks on theories of meaning proposed by others, especially, the philosophers (Chomsky 1975, 1980, 1986, 1994b, 2000d).
3. Ormazabal (2000) suggests that the feature /aanimate plays a significant role in syntax-for example, the presence of this feature in tandem with the Minimal Link Condition helps explain a variety of raising of nominals. As we will see, part of this phenomenon is typically explained in terms of feature checking of syntactic Case. If correct, Ormazabal"s thesis goes some way in eliminating the Case system from the syntactic component. The move seems natural to Ormazabal because ""unlike syntactic Case, which is a theory-internal construct, features like /aanimate . . . survive to one of the interface levels"" (p. 254).
4. See Fodor and Lepore (1994, 146147) for remarks on the answer calculated John.
5. See Lidz, Gleitman, and Gleitman 2004 for review and implications for language acquisition.
6. Thanks to Wolfram Hinzen (personal communication) for pointing this out.
7. Ascription of rules to insects and other nonhuman organisms, and to domains such as face recognition, gives rise to other conceptual problems that I discuss later in the work (chapter 7). I will ask: What does it mean to view face recognition, as contrasted with language, as a rule-governed behavior in the first place?
Kripke is not raising this specific problem about nonlinguistic domains. He objects to the idea of rule following anywhere, especially in the case of language.
8. There is some evidence that children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have diculty in mastering regular tense morphology, but have fewer problems with irregular verbs (Leonard 1998, 5966).
9. These include the claims that semantic decomposition is exhaustive, gives the necessary and sucient conditions for the meaning of a word, requires a distinction between semantic knowledge and encyclopedia, and so on.
10. It is a legitimate question if this notational move has any explanatory value, or whether it is just representation of data. I am setting such problems aside for 248
Notes.
now because the issue of the (explanatory) salience of a notational scheme arises only after a coherent scheme has been found. It is unclear if that stage has been reached for bachelor.
11. I consider Fodor"s criticism of a variety of other approaches in lexical semantics to be decisive (Fodor 1998). It is interesting that Murphy (2002), which is supposed to be a comprehensive doc.u.ment on recent empirical work on concepts, does not address any of Fodor"s objections although Fodor (1998) is listed in the bibliography. As noted, I also fail to attach explanatory significance to Fodor"s own Old Testament Semantics (see sections 1.3.3 and 3.5.1 of this book).
12. Apart from the a.s.sumed SM and C-I interfaces, language is certainly interfacing with the visual and other perceptual systems, and the system of emotions.
13. Thanks to Norbert Hornstein (personal communication) for phrasing the current scene like this. Also see Baker 2003.
Chapter 5.
1. If this evidence holds, then the observation in Lasnik and Uriagereka 2005, 2, that CHL was an ""aspect"" in the cla.s.sical theories in generative grammar is misleading. It misses the radical departure proposed in MP.
2. Thanks to Norbert Hornstein and Bibhu Patnaik for a number of suggestions on this section. Needless to say, I am responsible for the remaining mistakes.
3. The sketch of MP presented here is obviously sanitized; it ignores turbulent debates over each G-B principle for over a decade through which an outline of MP slowly emerged. In fact, some G-B principles were found to be wrong, not just dispensable. X-bar theory could be one of them. Presence of SVO structures in supposedly SOV languages, the striking example of polysynthetic languages (Baker 2001), and so on suggested that X-bar may not even be true. Thanks to Wolfram Hinzen (personal communication) for raising this. Also, see the illuminating discussion of phrase-structure theory in Hinzen 2006, 180193.
4. Formally, it could be b as there is nothing to distinguish between a and b at the first step of derivation since both are LIs. We suppose that one of the products of Merge will be ""deviant"" and thrown out. Notice the problem disappears after the first step for the concerned lexical items (Chomsky 2006a); it will reappear, if two new LIs are to be merged as in the tree below (figure 5.3).
5. See Boeckx 2006, chapter 5, for a glimpse of the range of controversies.
6. The postulation of unambiguous paths has a variety of consequences for virtually every component of the system. Chomsky (2006c) observes that this ""limi-tation"" could be involved in minimal search within a probe-goal framework, requirement of linearization, conditions of predicate-argument structure and others. (See below.) 7. This is not to trivialize the complex problem of how linear order is in fact obtained in sound-that is, outside CHL.
8. Thanks to David Pesetsky (personal communication) for help.
Notes.
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9. Although I have cited from a recent paper, the general idea appears repeatedly in Chomsky 1995b.
10. Hauser 2008 finds some indirect support for this view from cross-species studies.
11. See Reinhart 2006 for dierences in computational mechanisms within the (narrow) language system and the systems just outside it leading to complicated ""interface strategies.""
12. One consequence, among many, is that the operation (External) Merge can no longer be viewed as taking place at predesignated y-positions.
13. If we view the system of I-meanings, which enter into computation (chapter 4), as another layer before cla.s.sical C-I, the conception of FL would be even broader.
14. Chomsky (1995b, 261) does propose alternative formulations for a principle of last resort. But this was largely a rhetorical device to reject them all.
15. What follows is a quick summary of Mukherji 2003a; see this paper for details. I am indebted to Taylor and Francis Publishers for permission to use the material.
16. There seem to be some exceptions involving long-distance agreement to this general phenomenon, currently under study; see Chomsky 2006c for a powerful explanation.
Chapter 6.
1. Bickerton also includes ""self-consciousness"" as a part of hominization.
2. See Mukherji 2000, chapter 4, for criticism of popular impressions in this area.
3. I am setting aside the complex phenomena of singing and listening to songs.
Songs seem to require simultaneous access to linguistic and musical systems. Introspective evidence is too thick for determining the nature of ""trade-os"" between the two systems.
4. I am indebted to Roberto Casati for raising this general issue.
5. By ""pa.s.sive"" I do not mean that the visual system is an inactive receptor of stimuli; it is well known that perceptual systems actively partic.i.p.ate in the formation of visual representations-addition of ""depth"" in a 21-D sketch, for example.
2.
6. I am indebted to Lyle Jenkins (personal communication) for this example and references.
7. This a.s.sumes for now that the visual system is a computational system, which I doubt (see chapter 7).
8. Notice that SMH does not require that the systems of language and music access CHL in the same way or to the same extent. Plainly, language and music are very dierent cognitive systems geared to process and store dierent kinds of information. These and other system-specific properties are likely to influence their conditions of access to CHL and developmental patterns. In turn, these dierences 250
Notes.
might explain cases of selective impairment of language and music (Peretz 2001; Peretz and Coltheart 2003; Sch.e.l.lenberg and Peretz 2007).
9. See Mukherji 2000, chapter 4, for a discussion of some other objections against the musilanguage hypothesis.
10. In distributed morphology, as we saw, semantic features such as human, count, animate, and the like do not even enter the syntactic computation to LF (Harley and Noyer 1999).
11. Curiously, Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky 2005, who favor the view that language and music are distinct domains, do not rule out the possibility that music may have ""purely syntactic aspects of const.i.tuents such as complementizers, aux-iliaries, or function words"" (p. 203).
12. I have heard serious philosophers of music talk about heavyhearted resoluteness. Others hold ""persona"" theories in which a given piece of music serves as a prop for make-believe behavior as if someone is angry, joyous, sad, and so on; see Walton (1993) for one proposal in this direction. A detailed discussion of this amazing proposal is beyond the scope here. But the following remark from Wittgenstein 1980, 69e may be instructive: ""Are we supposed to imagine the dance, or whatever it may be, while we listen? . . . If seeing the dance is what is important, it would be better to perform that rather than the music. But that is all misunderstanding.""
13. Visit the site to listen to the music.
14. In the literature on aesthetics and philosophy of music, there is a good deal of dispute as to how the relation between music and its aect is to be formulated: as the meaning of music, the expression of music, or simply as what music is expressive of; see Davies 1994.
15. Scruton also invokes Frege"s conception of meaning in the context of musical understanding. He had brought in Frege earlier in Scruton 1983, which I had criticized in detail in Mukherji 2000, 105111.
16. A drone instrument, such as a taanpuraa, is used as a support because Indian cla.s.sical music has no fixed pitch. I have used Western idioms such as tonic, dominant, etc. only for suggestive comparison. There is much controversy as to whether these terms are accurate for Indian music.
17. Visit for a performance of aalaap in Yaman. Also go to for a lucid introduction to the raaga.
18. I have omitted all ""ornamentations,"" variations in duration of notes, emphasis, and the like. Sometimes these things are crucial for determining the form of a raaga.
19. Note that the present task is to show how musical progression meets the informal criteria of recursion suggested by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002. Later, in section 7.1, we will see a more explicit hierarchical organization of music due to Pesetsky 2007.
20. I am indebted to Krishna Bisht, professor of music (University of Delhi) and a well-known artist of Hindustani cla.s.sical music herself, for help with alaap in Yaman.
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251.