Reflections on Syntax

Brain Analogies. This led to so-called (historic) ‘brain-analogies’. For instance, it was once understood that the brain was analogous to mechanical ‘clocks’ (of the philosophical ‘clouds & clocks’ argument, see Karl Popper ‘Objective Knowledge: an evolutionary approach’ Ch. 6). In this antiquated notion, the ‘brain as clock’ was said to be made-up of levers and gears which would interact in very trivial ways with the environment. The most obvious interaction with our brain-as-clock metaphor was to count and remember things. A person was understood to be the mere product of the things we came across in our environment, the things we noticed and counted: ‘man as ultimate calculator’. (See Locke’s notion of man as a blank slate, a tabula rasa). Whether or not a person was ‘smart’ was based on how well he noticed and remembered his token counts of environmental interactions; of course, there was no notion as to why a person might notice one thing over another (that question might have more to do with the psychology of observation, ‘a cloud’). The idea of how a ‘bad’ experience might impact our brain/clock—for example, how a person’s personality might be affected and formed—was not considered. In fact, such ideas of ‘personality’ really don’t begin to be formulated, psychologically, until the 19th century, coming to bear on the work of Freud, etc. (But there were earlier antecedents for sure, found in 17th century early modern English literature: e.g., Shakespeare’s first psychological profile of MacBeth).

But the hybrid dual-model provides strong evidence that decomposed rules are indeed obligatory for regular stem+affix formations (where no stem sound-shift are observed). I have suggested in various writings that the dual mechanism model can be extended to capturing the dual morphological stages of child language acquisition, where stage-1 memory of undecomposed lexical schemes come on-line prior to a stage-2 of decomposed inflectional rules. Much work of the 1960s generative grammar enterprise, including Berko’s famous Wugs test, set out to demonstrate the nature of such creative and productive morphological processes as only decomposed rules could offer. In this sense, I often use the Skinner v Chomsky debate as a kind of ‘pedagogical device’ in capturing the debate on morphological processing.

This [[…] edge]-feature, as we will show below and throughout the text, allows for the most crucial property of language of all, that of recursion. It is this outside property at the edge which is abstract and removed from the obligatory binding of memory-based schemata. Without such an ability for displacement, movement, affix lowering and raising, inversion, fronting, and most crucially embedding, there could not be a syntax as it manifests in human language.

The Dual Mechanism Model. This dichotomy in essence leads to how a ‘hybrid model’, (i.e., a Dual Mechanism Model (Appendix-2, 5)), which can incorporate both clocks and clouds, might be embedded in our psychological processes of language, and how these two modes of processing indeed have a real physiological presence in our brain: viz., the idea that there are two fundamentally different areas of the brain which bring about this dichotomy of processing. A very simple example of this dual processing could be how an English speaker differently processes the two verbs DO in the expression: ‘How do you do?’, noting how both verbs ‘DO’ have the same spelling and the same phonology, but how they may hold different meanings—of course, also how the two may have very different psychological realities. Try to guess which DO is a clock, and which is a cloud: which has ‘calculative’ meaning and which is ethereal ‘neither here nor there’.

Regarding the Dual Mechanism Model, we can simply note how the expression ‘How do you do?’ allows the deletion of the first ‘do’ but not the second ‘do’ (in quick, spontaneous speech). But why might this be, given that at least on the surface-level, the two verbs appear identical?

Well, the two DOs are not identical! In fact, the two have very different psychological states, are located in different areas of the brain, as well as hold different linguistic status. The first ‘Do’ is an auxiliary verb (a cloud) which doesn’t deliver the kind of meaning usually attributed to main verbs, while the second ‘Do’ (a clock) is a main verb which delivers main verb meaning. As we can quickly see, the two verbs hold very different linguistic and psychological status: note the acceptance (in spontaneous speech) of ‘How__ you do?’ versus *How do you__? (where __ marks deletion of ‘do’). One question that naturally follows is if the two different verbs occupy different areas of the brain, in addressing a brain-to-language corollary. They do! The discussion now leads to abstract/non-substantive functional-category words (clouds) such as the Determiner ‘The’, the Auxiliaries ‘Do, Be, Have’ (this is not an exhaustive list), etc. versus substantive/lexical-category words (clocks) such as Nouns, (Adjectives), Verbs (Adverbs), Prepositions, and how the former functional categories are attributed to Broca’s area (front left hemisphere), and how the latter lexical categories are attributed to Wernicke’s area (left temporal lobe).

Priming-effects & Slips. Priming effects are another example of ‘brain as clock’ since the frequency of token items seems to affect how we come to notice and remember certain language structures. We can give a couple of easy examples here: