A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
can be drawn will necessarily include a welter of accidental and irrelevant information. A universal phonological theory provides a principled basis for distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant aspects of empirical data, as in all sciences.
Consistent with this internalism, we see that, just as in syntax, Chomsky's phonology, as presented in SPE itself and many of the papers leading up to the book (Chomsky 1951, 1957b,a, 1964b; Chomsky et al. 1956; Halle 1959, 1962, 1964; Chomsky and Halle 1965), considers the actual object of study to be the cognitive system (phonological competence) that underlies observable behavior (speech production and perception). Observable behavior is just one source of evidence for competence.
Despite the clarity and coherence of SPE's radical cognitivism, much subsequent work in phonology has ignored or rejected internalism to varying degrees. As we'll see, much of the literature fails to engage with the philosophical foundations of the cognitive revolution, and has been preoccupied with describing verbal behavior, rather than the underlying knowledge that makes that behavior possible. These preoccupations have maintained or even gained in popularity from the time of the publication of SPE up until the present, as witnessed by the prominence of “output‐driven” models of phonology (e.g., Tesar 2014) and by the prevalent orientation toward “the surface” throughout the field.
Of course, most scholars accept that some aspects of language are “in the mind,” but the Chomskyan perspective is that language, phonology included, is all in the mind. Linguistic mental representations are the constituents of language, and are not understood as “representing” mind‐external entities. For example, Chomsky (2009a, p. 27) proposes that for surface phonological (phonetic) entities “such as the syllable /ba/; every particular act externalizing this mental entity yields a mind‐independent entity, but it is idle to seek a mind‐independent construct that corresponds to the syllable.” This perspective, not only for phonology, but also for syntax and semantics, is endorsed by many scholars, including Jackendoff (1992), who says “Language, as far as I can tell, is all construction,” meaning “all internal construction.”
Aside from internalism, naturalism and nativism are the most important notions of Chomsky's legacy in linguistics. These notions don't just apply to phonology as to syntax; rather it is also the case that Chomsky's consistent and radical versions of these notions can even be justified with phonological examples. As phonologists, we regret that the phonological arguments are not as well known as the syntactic ones. For the purposes of this brief discussion, we focus on the relationship between internalism and nativism.
6.3 Anti‐Internalism and Rejection of Nativism
SPE is explicit in its commitment to nativism:
The significant linguistic universals are those that must be assumed to be available to the child learning a language as an a priori, innate endowment. That there must be a rich system of a priori properties—of essential linguistic universals—is fairly obvious from the following empirical observations. Every normal child acquires an extremely intricate and abstract grammar, the properties of which are much underdetermined by the available data. This takes place with great speed, under conditions that are far from ideal, and there is little significant variation among children who may differ greatly in intelligence and experience. The search for essential linguistic universals is, in effect, the study of the a priori faculté de langage that makes language acquisition possible under the given conditions of time and access to data.
It is useful to divide linguistic universals roughly into two categories. There are, first of all, certain “formal universals” that determine the structure of grammars and the form and organization of rules. In addition, there are “substantive universals”2 that define the sets of elements that may figure in particular grammars. [p. 4]
Despite these clear statements, nativism has fared badly in the phonological literature in recent years, and we'll discuss two influential trends. Optimality Theory (OT) (e.g. Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1993) began as a strongly nativist model of phonology, consisting of an innate constraint set, built on an inventory of substantive universals, such as the subsegmental features used in SPE. In OT, a universal algorithm determines the output form for a given phonological input based on a language‐specific ranking. In OT, then, the only locus of language variation is in the ranking of the universal constraints in a given language
The initially elegant OT model appeared to offer solutions to some longstanding issues, and introduced a set of different problems—a normal situation in discussion of incommensurable theories in any scientific field. However, it quickly became apparent that the innate component of phonology in OT terms was implausibly rich, requiring an extensional characterisation of a large set of constraints as part of innate endowment. More recently, the issue of nativism is just ignored in most OT literature, but has to be understood as tacitly rejected given the specificity of the constraints posited, such as “Assign one violation for each contrast between N and NC in which NC does not have an oral release that belongs to category of 4 or larger along the RELscale,” which is an actually proposed constraint in a paper in the journal Phonology (Stanton 2019). In addition, various scholars posit constraints that are not just specific to one language, but to the realization of one morpheme in a particular language, such as the ALIGN‐um‐L markedness constraint that refers to the Tagalog morpheme /um/ (Kager 1999, p. 122).
Outside of the OT literature, we find anti‐nativist titles such as The emergence of distinctive features (Mielke 2008) and “Phonology without universal grammar” (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 2015). How is it possible that Chomsky's stature in phonology is universally recognized by the phonological community, as is his development of the idea of Universal Grammar, and yet, so much current work, even by his former students, is anti‐nativist, anti‐UG? We think we have the answer, but first let's document (with added boldface) the not uncommon denial of nativism via the denial of the argument of the poverty of the stimulus (APoS) in the phonological literature.
Perhaps it is not surprising that a psychologist like Peter MacNeilage rejects the APoS:
Example (6.1) Peter MacNeilage, The origin of speech (2008: 41):
however much poverty of the stimulus exists for language in general, there is none of it in the domain of the structure of words, the unit of communication I am most concerned with. Infants hear all the words they expect to produce. Thus, the main proving ground for UG does not include phonology.
This anti‐nativist perspective is also implicitly anti‐internalist since it suggests that words are out there for children to hear, a view at odds with the generative program as understood by, say, a syntactician like Howard Lasnik (2000, p. 3):
The list of behaviors of which knowledge of language purportedly consists has to rely on notions like “utterance” and “word.” But what is a word? What is an utterance? These notions are already quite abstract. Even more abstract is the notion “sentence.” Chomsky has been and continues to be criticized for positing such abstract notions as transformations and structures, but the big leap is what everyone takes for granted. It's widely assumed that the big step is going from sentence to transformation, but this in fact isn't a significant leap. The big step is going from “noise” to “word.”
MacNeilage's view also has an unfortunate English‐centred