As a linguist or, more specifically, as a theoretical syntactician, I hold and often express some minority opinions.^[1]Outside of syntactic theory too Often these opinions are met with bafflement and an assertion like “We’ve known for years that that’s not the case” because of this phenomenon, or that piece of data—“Control is derived by movement? But what about de se interpretation??” “Merge is free? But what about c-selection??” “Long-distance Agree isn’t real? But what about English existential clauses??”^[2]I have a hypothesis that the vehemence with which someone will defend a theory or analysis is correlated with how much they struggled to understand it in school. Basically, we’re more likely to … Continue reading These sorts of objections are often tossed out as if the data speaks for itself when really, the thing that makes scientific inquiry so tough is that the data rarely speaks for itself, and when it does, it doesn’t do so clearly.

Take, for instance, the case of English existential clauses like (1) and (2) and how they are used as absolute proof of the existence of Long-Distance Agree.

(1) There ^?seems/seem to be several fish in the tank.
(2) There seems/*seem to be a fish in the tank.

In both sentences, the grammatical subject is the expletive there, but the verb agrees with a DP^[3]I still think I buy the DP hypothesis, but I’m also intrigued by Chomsky’s recent rejection of it and amused by the reaction to this rejection. that appears to be structurally “lower” in the clause. Therefore, there must be some non-movement way of getting features from a lower object onto a higher object—Long-Distance Agree. This is often presented as the obvious conclusion, the only conclusion, or the simplest conclusion. “Obvious” is in the eye of the beholder and doesn’t usually mean “correct”; Norbert Hornstein, in his A Theory of Syntax proposes three alternative analyses to Long-Distance Agree; only “simplest” has legs, although that’s debatable.

Occam’s razor says “entities should not be multiplied without necessity,” and any analysis of (1) and (2) without Long-Distance Agree will have to say that in both cases, the agreeing DP is covertly in subject position. These covert subjects are argued to constitute an unnecessary multiplication of entities, but one could just as easily argue that Long-Distance Agree is an unnecessary entity. What’s more, covert movement and silent elements both have independent arguments in their favour.

Of course, the covert subject analysis of (1) and (2) is not without its flaws. Chief among them, in my opinion, is that it would seem to wrongly predict that (1) and (2) mean the same thing as (3) and (4), respectively.

(3) Three fish seem to be in the tank.
(4) A fish seems to be in the tank.

These sentences differ from (1) and (2) in that they—(3) and (4)—presuppose the existence of three fish or a single fish, while (1) and (2) merely assert it. This contrast is clearest in (5)-(8) which are examples that Chomsky has been using for several decades.

(5) There’s a fly in my soup.
(6) There’s a flaw in my argument.
(7) A fly is in my soup.
(8) *^?A flaw is in my argument.

Likewise, Long-Distance Agree has its own problems, some of which I discuss in my latest paper. Indeed, it is vanishingly rare in any field of inquiry—or life itself—to find an unproblematic solution to a problem.

My goal here isn’t to argue that Long-Distance Agree is wrong,^[4]Though, I do think it is. but to point out that it’s not a foregone conclusion. In fact, I think that if we listed the hypotheses/theories/notions that most syntacticians took to be (nearly) unquestionable and honestly assessed the arguments in their favours, I doubt that many would turn out to be as robust as they seem. This doesn’t mean that we need to reject every idea that less than 100% solid, just that we should hold on to them a little more loosely. As a rule, we should all carry with us the idea that we could very well be wrong about almost everything. The world’s more interesting that way.