Language Acquisition and the Explanatory Adequacy Condition

Abstract

I examine John Collins’ reconstruction of the cognitive revolution in linguistics, showing that one of the main arguments for cognitivism is simply not compelling. While there is a convincing case for aiming to achieve “explanatory adequacy” in linguistics, over and above mere observational and descriptive adequacy, this aim need not be underwritten by a cognitivist conception of language. A unified theory of all human languages is desirable whether or not cognitivism is correct. Next, I point out that, although cognitivism entails that grammars are psychologically real, the reverse entailment does not hold; a grammar can be psychologically real even if the objects of the formal syntactician’s concern are public, conventional E-languages. Chomsky’s view entails that psycholinguists should seek a relatively transparent relation between the syntacticians’ grammar and the “knowledge-base” that constitutes competence—a “natural” grammar-parser combination. Progress toward this goal has been slow, in part because syntacticians are not as concerned with psycholinguistic data as a cognitivist would expect them to be. In the mainstream syntax literature, psychological reality is a distant, dimly understood, and rarely invoked desideratum. Nevertheless, a parsing model that makes direct use of independently plausible syntactic principles is the simplest and strongest theoretical option.