Anyone who has tried to articulate a new idea or criticize old ones may have noticed that some ideas are washed away relatively easily, while others seem to actively resist even the strongest challenges—some ideas are stickier than others. In some cases, there’s an obvious reason for this stickiness—in some cases there’s even a good reason for it. Some ideas are sticky because they’ve never really been interrogated. Some are sticky because there are powerful parts of society that depend on them. Some are sticky because they’re true, or close to true. But I’ve started to think there’s another reason an idea can be sticky—the amount of mental effort people put into understanding the idea as students.
Take, for instance, X-bar theory. I don’t think there’s some powerful cabal propping it up, it’s not old enough to just be taken for granted, and Chomsky’s Problems of Projection papers showed that it was not really tenable. Yet X-bar persists. Not just in how syntacticians draw trees, or how they informally talk about them, but I remember commentary on my definition of minimal search here involved puzzlement about why I didn’t simply formalize the idea that specifiers were invisible to search followed by more puzzlement when I explained that the notion of specifier was unformulable.
In my experience, the stickiness of X-bar theory—and syntactic projection/labels more broadly—doesn’t manifest itself in an attempt to rebut arguments against it, but in attempts to save it—to reconstitute it in a theory that doesn’t include it.[1]My reading of Zeijstra’s chapter in this volume is as one such attempt This is very strange behaviour—X-bar is a theoretical construct, it’s valid insofar as it is coherent and empirically useful. Why are syntacticians fighting for it? I wondered about this for a while and then I remembered my experience learning X-bar and teaching it—it’s a real challenge. It’s probably the first challenging theoretical construct that syntax students are exposed to. It tends to be presented as a fait accompli, so students just have to learn how it functions. As a result, those students who do manage to figure it out are proud of it and defend it like someone protecting their cherished possessions.[2]I think I may be describing “effort justification,” but I’m basing this just on the Wikipedia article
Of course, it’s a bit dangerous to speculate about the psychological motivations of others, but I’m certain I’ve had this reaction in the past when someone’s challenged an idea that I at one point struggled to learn. And I’ve heard students complain about the fact that every successive level of learning syntax starts with “everything you learned last year is wrong”—or at least that’s the sense they get. So, I have a feeling there’s at least a kernel of truth to my hypothesis. Now, how do I go about testing it?
Addendum
As I was writing this, I remembered something I frequently think when I’m preparing tests and exams that I’ve thus far only formulated as a somewhat snarky question:
How much of our current linguistic theory depends on how well it lends itself to constructing problem sets and exam questions?
Notes
↑1 | My reading of Zeijstra’s chapter in this volume is as one such attempt |
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↑2 | I think I may be describing “effort justification,” but I’m basing this just on the Wikipedia article |