
Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016) - mrkgnao
http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2016/grammar.html
======
YeGoblynQueenne
>> the feud between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett

That "feud" is as much a feud as the "controversy" over climate change. Daniel
Everett is very obviously a complete and utter crank, who has made absolutely
ridiculous claims about Piraha the language and Piraha the people (e.g. that
they can't learn basic arithmetic skills, like 1 + 1), to which he claims to
be the sole authority.

To give an account of his "feud" with Chomsky, Chomsky claims that recursion
(in the sense of embedding sentences into sentences) is the defining
characteristic of human language that sets it apart from other animal
languages. Everett claims that the Piraha language doesn't display recursion
and _therefore Chomsky 's claim is wrong_.

Stop for a moment and consider this. It's like claiming that, only Europeans
have pale skin, but if we find one European population with brown skin, then
it's not true that only Europeans have pale skin. What Everett is claiming is
exactly that wrong.

Everett has only risen to prominence because he's a big old troll, and there
are lots of people in cognitive science and linguistics who are very
frustrated with the inability of both fields to make any progress on natural
language, despite everyone's best efforts- and who have somehow singled out
Chomsky as the culprit, because he had the audacity to hold on to a theory
that hasn't really been comprehensively disputed yet.

Far from a feud, this is just a case of shoot-the-messenger. Shoot him with
sour grapes that is.

~~~
canjobear
The other side isn't exactly a bunch of careful scientists either [0].

Other people have visited the Pirahã and done experiments with them. It is
true that they do not understand counting, for example [1][2], though I'm sure
they could learn it if they had to.

Other linguists have also independently claimed that other languages lack
recursive embedding, for example Riau Indonesian, so the claim about Pirahã is
not isolated or crazy a priori.

The Chomskyan side of the argument has also been characterized by moving the
goalposts and formal incoherence. See for example [3].

Basically, amidst a huge storm of verbiage and anger and inflated claims from
both sides, all of which is about personalities and definitions and not at all
about science, there are a few mildly interesting findings about Pirahã and
language.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Hauser)
[1]
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5695/496.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5695/496.full)
[2]
[http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JA...](http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JAO0ZG.pdf)
[3]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000114...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0388000114000412)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Other people have visited the Pirahã and done experiments with them. It is
true that they do not understand counting, for example [1][2],

Those are not "other people". The first reference is a paper where Everett is
one of the authors and the other is a paper from a collaborator of Everett:
the author even studied the Piraha and their arithmetic skills while living
with the Piraha along with the Everetts. Show me a paper on the Piraha
language that has nothing to do with Everett and that duplicates Everett's
findings.

>> The Chomskyan side of the argument has also been characterized by moving
the goalposts and formal incoherence. See for example [3].

I don't think that reference means what you think it means. Actually I think
it means exactly the opposite:

 _What I can say, what I have said, with most certainty is what recursion is
supposed to stand for within the theory Chomsky has constructed—with
remarkable consistency, I should add._

Which is what I've also heard before from critics of Chomsky in general (frex,
I believe Alex Clark has said similar things, but I might be wrong). Chomsky
himself has been remarkably consistent, to the point he sounds like a broken
record, regarding what recursion in language means.

Whether "his side" (other linguists of his school) has been more or less
consistent, I don't know but in any case I'm more interested in the fact that
Daniel Everett seems to be a complete and utter sleazebag who is unashamedly
taking advantage of a peoples who can't really speak for themselves (because
he's standing in the way!) to further some obscure personal agenda.

>> Other linguists have also independently claimed that other languages lack
recursive embedding, for example Riau Indonesian, so the claim about Pirahã is
not isolated or crazy a priori.

I hadn't heard of Riau Indonesian, so I looked it up in wikipedia and I could
not find anything about it lacking recursive structure. Instead it " _is
considered by linguists to have one of the least complex grammars among the
languages of the world,[citation needed] apart from creoles, possessing
neither noun declensions, temporal distinctions, subject /object distinctions,
nor singular/plural distinction._"

~~~
canjobear
> I hadn't heard of Riau Indonesian

Googling "hierarchical syntax riau" seems to pull up the relevant stuff, if
you're interested.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Googling that with quotation marks brings up only your own comment- for a
moment there I thought you were making a joke about recursion.

I'll have a look at the stuff that comes up without quotes, thanks.

------
d_burfoot
I'm a huge fan of Mumford, but I think he's stretching a bit when he says that
natural images have grammar like language has grammar. The production
processes for the two phenomena are enormously different. A natural image is
formed when a collection of objects is illuminated by incoming light, and the
resulting image is projected onto the retina. The human brain is not involved
at all in this process (leaving aside nitpicking about how humans may have
shaped the environment). In contrast a natural language sentence is produced
when an idea occurs inside the brain, and then various linguistic production
processes transform the idea into a serial form, as text, speech, sign
language, etc. The latter process involves constraints, capabilities, and
eccentricities of the human brain at every stage.

Maybe you could argue that human brains _perceive_ images using grammar-like
structures.

~~~
mistersys
You're treating input/output as the same.

We receive speech coming from a source and parse it using a grammar. One could
imagine it being a similar process for the perceiving images captured by the
retina.

For output, when a human paints an image they are panting from an imaged
visualized inside of their mental canvas, just like we realize thoughts
produced within our minds as speech.

~~~
smallnamespace
> when a human paints an image they are panting from an imaged visualized
> inside of their mental canvas

Yes, but images produced by humans are a tiny fraction of images processed by
the eye. But _every_ written or spoken sentence was ultimately created by a
human brain.

That's why it seems like a big stretch to claim there is a 'universal grammar'
involved in visual processing, if you believe that grammar is primarily a way
for brains to encode information for communication purposes...

~~~
pygy_
> Yes, but images produced by humans are a tiny fraction of images processed
> by the eye.

Processed by the eye, yes, but that rises to 100% for images processed by the
brain. The brain appropriates images by imparting its processing on the lower
level visual cortex. Perception is an active process.

~~~
taeric
This seems... Wrong. Consider, kids process images and sounds long before they
are capable of sentences.

~~~
pygy_
Vision and language are processed by distinct brain areas, which mature at a
different pace.

That doesn't rule out the possibility of grammar-like processing in visual
areas.

~~~
taeric
Apologies for neglecting this over the weekend.

This is true. I did not mean to say that just because I think it is wrong,
that it is. However, the claim seemed to be that the images experienced by the
brain are fully synthesized by the brain. Which seemed off.

Again, just because it seems off to be does not mean it is wrong. Not my
field, and whatnot. I can even see something to be said for visual processing
going in stages such that the stage that you are cognizant of is effectively
on images constructed by you. That seems to be a different claim, though.

------
woodandsteel
Why do linguists like Chomsky assume that grammar is a completely radical
break from animal brain functioning? I think it is mainly because of a deeply
rooted assumption in Western religion and much (but not all) of Western
philosophy that human beings have free, moral, non-material souls that animals
lack.

~~~
sunstealer
Chomsky's reasoning is that the arbitrary complexity (recursive structure) of
human language implies some sort of low level computational engine to do the
relevant computations. I don't have an opinion either way. We can see that
LSTMs can emulate this kind of logic, but they also make mistakes. Also, I'm
not sure that human reasoning is as logical as it might seem. E.g. I read
somewhere (lost the reference) that the earliest languages may have lacked the
ability to arbitrarily nest clauses. So maybe humans only emulate logical
thinking.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
_We can see that LSTMs can emulate this kind of logic, but they also make
mistakes._

Humans can also make mistakes when processing language. We're still better
than LSTM's, but I'm not sure we can claim a qualitative difference.

Furthermore, even though we _can_ process sentences with very deep embedding
like "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped", my intuition is that we are
not using our normal language processing systems for that. When I read that
sentence, I just fail to process it and then I invoke my logic systems to try
to determine the structure and decode it, in a way that feels totally
different from processing a normal sentence (I'm not understanding it in real
time, in a natural way, but rather solving a small puzzle). So I personally
don't find the Chomskyan arguments based on that kind of corner cases very
convincing.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped"

That is indeed a contrived example of recursion, but recursion (in the sense
of embedding) can be much simpler and easier to parse. For example:

"John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, is coming
over for dinner".

This sort of embedding is what makes human language infinite in scope- you can
keep embedding sub-sentences for ever, and so you can produce new utterances
forever.

This ability to infinitely extend and recombine the meaning of utterances is
what gives human language its expressive power, and what is absent from animal
languages, so far as we know.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Examples like that are parsable because they are similar to what we would
call, in programming, tail recursion (i.e., recursion that doesn't really need
recursion). It's true that you can embed an infinite number of subsentences
("John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, who had an
affair with the bartender, Jack, who hated his sister, Lisa, who was a fan of
Lady Gaga, is coming over for dinner") but you only need two "stack frames",
one to remember John and the other for the rest.

The middle part is basically equivalent to saying "Mary had an affair with the
bartender, Jack. Jack hated his sister, Lisa. Lisa was a fan of Lady Gaga". My
intuition is that it's parsed basically as separate sentences. Once you finish
one of them you can just forget it, you only need to remember John (as there
is more information about him in the end). Sentences where you need to
remember more elements (i.e., you actually need unbounded recursion) become
unparsable in real time as my previous example.

Of course, I don't have scientific evidence to back the things I'm saying,
it's just intuition, but the same can be said of the Chomskyan theories.

------
smallnamespace
This article doesn't seem to make a strong case that a hierarchical tree is
the best model for language (or motor control, or image recognition). Just
because you _can_ model something as a tree doesn't mean that's the most
parsimonious or effective model. The relative lack of success thus far of
symbolic parse tree based techniques in NLP compared to techniques grounded in
other models should be a strong hint that trees are not the best map of the
territory.

~~~
rntz
I do not work on NLP, but my understanding was that, for purely syntactic
work, standard parse-tree-based techniques had been quite successful in NLP;
and that it is only for semantic work that symbolic representations begin to
show weaknesses. Since we often care about the meanings of words, this is a
pretty strong limitation; still, it suggests that standard grammar-and-parse-
tree approaches do capture something significant about how human languages
work.

Is this inaccurate?

~~~
smallnamespace
I don't work in NLP either, but from my understanding, the boundary between
syntax and semantics is never as clean as one might imagine, and each language
draws the boundary differently, so in general the utility of just looking at
syntax can greatly vary.

Another issue is that many real life sentences have more than one possible
parse, and we use context and semantics to disambiguate, e.g. how do you parse
'fruit flies like a banana'.

~~~
mcguire
...vs. "time flies like an arrow."

If you try to parse natural language with a strong distinction between syntax
and semantics, you get a lot of ambiguous parses.

Most current successful NLP work uses statistical models. (Don't mention those
to Chomsky.)

------
mannykannot
Is this not almost tautologically true? Will not any collection of related
information have the potential to be represented by some sort of hierarchical
structure?

~~~
stonemetal
It can be represented as a hierarchical structure as long as the relationships
are simple. In any of his examples if you added a number of extra
relationships to complicate what is there, the hierarchical structure becomes
a generic graph.

------
raverbashing
While we like to think of Grammar as a perfect logical structure, in practice,
"the brain" (or some higher level structure) processes things in a highly
probabilistic fashion. This is how we are able to understand imperfect
information (and the mention of the animal "grammar" is on point - a pet can
learn and find their way around a house easily)

It's probably something more complex than a LTSM structure, but the point
stands.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
The problem with representing processes with grammars is that you can
represent pretty much any process with a grammar, right up to the level of
Turing machines and the Lambda calculus etc. The question is, always: how
useful is it to do this in practice?

With language, we assume that there is some sort of underlying structure that
can best be modelled as a grammar (well, some of us do). In simple terms, we
assume that natural language already has a grammar so that we can hope to
eventually reconstruct it somehow- either by hand, or by automated inference
etc.

Unfortunately, in practice every effort to do that sort of thing undertaken
since Chomsky's Syntactic Structure was published in 1957, has been met with
failure and even theoretically the outlook is bleak (see Gold's result and a
ton of bibliography on inductive inference before and after it).

In short, the problem is not that it's hard to convince ourselves that there
are processes in nature that are best modelled using hierachical
representations, like grammars. The problem is that even armed with those
representations we've so far proven incapable, with all our science and
technology, to accurately use such representations to fully model those
processes.

Basically, our current situation regarding the modelling of complex
hierarchical processes is like being given the key to heaven, but no map to
the damned gates.

~~~
eternalban
> Basically, our current situation regarding the modelling of complex
> hierarchical processes is like being given the key to heaven, but no map to
> the damned gates.

More accurately, you have been given a key that is _claimed_ to be the key to
heaven, but no one has yet found a gate that the given key opens, yet you
insist on asserting that it is the key to "the damned gates".

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Ouch.

Look, no. Grammars look like "the key to the gates" because of the equivalence
between grammars-language-automata etc. You can write up grammars for fully
Turing-complete languages, or indeed context-free languages that allow you to
declare Turing-complete automata.

You can create grammars that display infinite recursion with minimal effort:

    
    
      A --> ε
      A --> Aa
      a --> <whatever you please>
    

So it's not like someone (cough, Chomsky) woke up one nice day and thought
"blimey, I'll tell the world that grammars are a powerful tool for modelling
hierarchical processes". It's that they _are_.

We _have_ used grammars in practice to model complex hierarchical processes-
except it's only those processes that we already know how to model, because we
came up with them ourselves, like the aforementioned Turing-complete ones.

The problems begin when we try to fit a process we hardly understand to a
grammar. That is not a limitation of the tool itself. It's a limitation of our
ability to use it.

~~~
sunstealer
To me, and I think many other outsiders, putting a lot of emphasis on the
equivalent of grammars-language-automata looks like mathematical naivety. I
don't say this to be rude but because you (and Chomsky) claim to be able to
interpret the implications of these mathematical results, but I don't think
you are doing so correctly. Grammars look like a human (mathematical)
invention and not some deep mathematical structure, and these results appear
shallow. In the broader context, _lots_ of mechanisms are able to do Turing
complete computation.

This doesn't just apply to grammars. There is a huge array of formalisms (e.g.
logics, type systems) out there and most just look like the result of someone
saying "what if I did this?".

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> I don't say this to be rude but because you (and Chomsky) claim to be able
to interpret the implications of these mathematical results, but I don't think
you are doing so correctly.

It's alright- if I'm being naive, I'm being naive.

But- what am I missing? You're saying we're doing it wrong- how? For me the
intuition that infinite generative ability flows naturally from unbounded
recursion, like an egg from a hen's bottom, is kind of obvious. Is it naive? I
guess it's empirical, for me at least.

Also, btw, I was introduced to the idea of language equivalence through
Hopcroft and Ullman, so from the point of view of computer science, where it's
been very useful, in practical terms. I guess if you're coming from a
mathematical or theoretical physics background it might sound a bit silly, but
it's allowed us to make a lot of progress, for instance to create a few
thousand different architectures and languages... but maybe I shouldn't be
bringing _that_ up as progress...

Anyway, I don't know- how would you interpret the observation correctly? Where
are we going wrong?

------
joe_the_user
Yeah no,

The problem is that language is not simply a hierarchical representation of
reality. Human language involves a number of uniqe specific qualities - enough
that I can't list all of them off the top of my head but just for example,
_symbolic representation_.

Sure, an animal represents the world in its brain. But a lot of animals don't
get that a symbol in the world can represent another symbol in the world. I
know a common example is pointing - only the most representation-adept animals
"get" that a person can use their finger to indicate something else.

And this, symbolic representation, is just one aspect of human language
broadly.

------
hyperpallium
By recursion Chomsky means of the same component, which is potentially
infinite. Hierachical and recursion is like the difference between regular
expressions and context free grammars.

Of course, in practice, most people struggle with just a few levels of
recursion. So I'm not sure I agree with Chomsky - but that's his theory.

BTW the grammar-related Piraha ideology of immediate experience is appealing,
as theories and abstractions can obscure what's actually happening, and
reminds me of DNA's ruler of the universe.

------
paufernandez
Thanks a lot for posting this! It made me very happy. I hold the same opinion
as him and for many years I've searched the literature looking for people with
similar views!

------
bambax
> _the feud between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett_

"Don't sleep, there are snakes" which recounts the experience of Everett among
the Pirahas people is a fantastic book.

~~~
ktRolster
Pretty sure Chomsky won that 'fight' hands down.

~~~
bambax
Pretty sure he didn't. Also, Everett book isn't only about the controversy
with Chomsky, it's about his own experience in the jungle and his coming of
age. It's a great book even if you absolutely love Chomsky.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
He did too. Everett tries to make the point that because Piraha doesn't use
recursion (which we only know by his own account, and nobody else's, since
nobody else knows Piraha as well as he and the Piraha do, also by his account)
then Chomsky must be wrong.

How is Chomsky wrong if Piraha doesn't have recursion? According to Everett,
always, Chomsky's position that recursion is the distinguishing characteristic
of human language, must necessarily mean that _all_ human languages have
recursion.

This is exactly like saying that, because it only snows in winter, it's not
winter if it's not snowing.

For Chomsky to be right, it suffices for a single human language to display
recursion. If even one human language displays recursion, then humans in
general can learn any language that displays recursion- because we know well
that human infants learn the language of the linguistic communities they're
reared in (and therefore any human can learn any human language). For
instance, even a Piraha baby raised in a Brazilian family would learn to speak
Portuguese, and Portuguese has recursive embedding.

Everett of course claims that Piraha, somehow magically unlike any other human
being in the world, are incapable of learning any other language than Piraha.
He also claims that they were unable to learn simple arithmetic, beyond 1 + 1
= 2, despite his, um, best efforts.

In fact, all human languages except Piraha, and only by Everett's account,
display recursion. Which makes Everett's claim about Piraha so hard to accept.
The fact that he remains the only (self-professed) authority on Piraha makes
it even harder to take him seriously.

Generally, it's not so much that Chomsky has won anything here. Everett is so
clearly a total troll, and his books the printed equivalent of clickbait, that
it's ridiculous to even claim there is anything like a debate to be had. It's
like "debating" a climate denialist.

------
moomin
Hasn't Chomsky's idea been fairly comprehensively disproven? I seem to recall
a survey of language features that concluded there were no clusters of
grammatical constructions of the form his theory predicts.

~~~
txru
No, not at all. I think people might be surprised at just how basic the
structures that he uses his evidence are.

The Piraha study was a study with poor research practices (subsequent
researches have found conflicting findings from Everett's), and always ignored
one massive problem, as told by a joke:

"Professor Chomsky! There's a language in Brazil that doesn't seem to have
recursion or large numerals!"

Chomsky doesn't turn around.

"Can they learn Portuguese?"

"... Yes."

That's a lot of what his theories are-- that for a set of features in human
language including types of structure like recursion, every homos sapiens has
the ability to use them in language.

~~~
bambax
Not a very good joke. Everett doesn't argue that the Pirahas are a different
species; they're human so of course they can do what humans do!

What he's saying (and I think demonstrated pretty well) is that _not ALL
languages are based on the same fundamental structures_ : to show this, one
counterexample is enough.

~~~
ktRolster
I don't know anywhere that Chomsky (or anyone) claimed that ALL languages are
based on the same fundamental structures, but Wikipedia talks about it, and
has links to articles showing that _Everett 's own examples_ include
recursion. See here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Recent_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Recent_controversy)

~~~
bambax
The paragraph on Wikipedia has links to a grand total of 3 articles, one of
which by Everett himself, and the other two by the same trio of people. So
it's disingenuous to write that Wikipedia "has links to _articles_ ".

Wikipedia points to a controversy started by 3 people, to which Everett
responded, to which the same 3 people responded again.

It's difficult to go any further since said articles are behind a paywall.

