Month: April 2022

Why are some ideas so sticky? A hypothesis

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

Notes
↑1 My reading of Zeijstra’s chapter in this volume is as one such attempt
↑2 I think I may be describing “effort justification,” but I’m basing this just on the Wikipedia article

Bad omens for generative syntax

In the last few weeks there have been a couple of posts in the generative linguistics blogosphere that don’t bode well for the field.

The first is the sad announcement from Omer Preminger that he is leaving academia in order to live in the same town as his wife. This news is also rather shocking, since Preminger is a fairly prominent syntactician—someone whose work, though I didn’t always agree with it, had to be addressed seriously—and if a scholar of his prominence and ability can’t negotiate something as reasonable as a spousal hire, what hope does anyone else have in having a life and an academic career too. I’m just a sessional lecturer, so treating me like a robot is still the norm, but to hear that faculty members are also expected to be robots, is disconcerting to be sure.

Omer promises more reflections on his time in academia, which I will read with some interest when it comes out, but I am sorry to see him leaving academia.

The second concerning report comes from Chris Collins. Collins, it seems, applied to some of the same tenured/tenure-track jobs as me this past year, and got the same boilerplate rejection emails as me. That a tenured professor is in the same job market as me is not especially surprising, It should be surprising that no university wanted to hire him, since he not only has a fairly strong empirical program, but he’s made important contributions to syntactic theory—while the idea of label-free syntax is commonly attributed to Chomsky (2013; 2015), he cites Collins for the idea, and slightly more recently, Collins’ work with Ed Stabler formalizing minimalist syntax in a few ways predicted Chomsky’s most recent move to workspace-based MERGE, and on a personal note, has been an invaluable resource to my work.

Collins’ explanation of his unsuccessful applications is twofold and both parts suggest bad trends in generative syntax.

The first explanation is one that I gather is common across all academic fields[1]At least those fields that modern capitalism deems useless.—department budgets are too tight to hire a senior scholar like Collins, when junior candidates are available and cheaper. Collins is probably right on this, but unfortunately commenting on the last war. While it’s probably true that junior hires are preferred over senior hires for budgetary reasons, junior tenure-track faculty are not the floor. Why hire an expensive faculty member who you have to provide with an office, a small research budget, and a pension, when you can hire a few precarious adjuncts for cheaper?

As an aside of sorts, I remember having arguments in grad school with my fellow grad students about whether our department should hire tenured faculty away from other departments. The standing wisdom was that that was the trajectory—smaller departments hired junior faculty, and once they’d proved themselves they’d move on to bigger and better places, opening up a spot at their old place. There was a feeling that, sure, there was no growth in faculty positions, but they were at least going to replace faculty that left or retired. I was skeptical of that line. University administrators had adopted the neoliberal model almost entirely—The Market reigned supreme—and The Market was clear: Linguistics, along with the broader humanities, was useless, so why not take every opportunity to squeeze those useless departments, say, by delaying replacement hires.

All of this is to say that I think Collins has identified a trend, but not a new one. The lower echelons of academia have been enduring this trend for some time now. Perhaps now that it’s reaching the upper echelons, we can see about stopping or reversing it … perhaps.

Collins’ second explanation is that, while he has made valuable contributions in recent years, the field doesn’t appreciate those contributions, and I think he might add the qualifier “yet” to that assessment. Again, I think he’s correct, and he’s identified a trend that I first saw identified by Norbert Hornstein, namely that much of what we call “theoretical syntax” is actually empirical/analytical work. This trend, I think, has morphed first to the point where so-called theoretical syntacticians were puzzled by actual theoretical work, then to the point where they are hostile to it. I suspect Collins has been a victim—though he in no way frames himself as a victim—of this hostility.

So, while there is a decided difference in degree between these two career setbacks, I think they are both part of the same trend, a trend which has been affecting more marginalized and vulnerable parts of academia for some time. The fact that this trend is now directly affecting established generative syntacticians should make the field as a whole take notice. At least I hope it does.

Notes

Notes
↑1 At least those fields that modern capitalism deems useless.