Spell THIS out

The more I get in to Minimalism, the more I find I like it. I started with some pretty strong prejudices against it, but I realize now that those were issues I had with Government and Binding Theory, and that the Minimalist Program exists largely to fix those issues.

That’s not to say that I buy the program hook, line and sinker. It’s more that we dovetail. Minimalism’s issues with Government and Binding are my issues, but it’s still obvious in a lot of areas that what I understand a theory of Grammar to be and what the Minimalist Program understands by that are not the same thing.

One such example came up today in an email exchange with Joel Wallenberg. We were talking about how to adapt Pronounce (my contribution to formal Syntax – the Sequentialization algorithm that interprets the tree for PF) to deal with phases. And that’s just the thing – I’ve never been a big fan of phases. Partly for the reasons that Epstein and Seely spell out in Derivations in Minimalism (condensed version: phases are a purely theoretical construct designed to solve a problem that seems empirical but is in fact, on closer observation, a problem with the theory – basically, that Chomsky is creating them to solve a problem that he created as a side-effect of trying to solve another problem). But mostly just because I can’t really make sense of what I think most researchers mean by “Multiple Spell-Out.”

This is something that Juan Uriagereka came up with and made public in 1999. The idea, as far as I can tell, is to enforce a kind of no-tampering condition on parts of the derivation that are “finished.” So, in a bottom-up, word-by-word theory driven entirely by adding a lexical item to a partially-assembled structure – which is what Minimalism assumes – that allows one to copy and “re-Merge” items or phrases that have been combined at earlier stages (this is Minimalism’s version of a “transformation” – note how non-transformative it actually is), we sometimes find we want to limit the domain of choices for “re-Merge.” So, Juan invented “Multiple Spell-Out.”

Anyone familiar with Minimalism knows the drill: the central question is to what extent can thinking about grammar as a system that it only concerned with legibility at the interfaces lead us to rethink the theory in ways that reduce the computational burden. So we start by assuming that there are only the motor-articulatory interface and the logical-semantic interface, and we go from there. Building up a syntactic structure means building up a structure that will serve as input – “instructions” – to both the articulatory and the semantic systems – and in this way the pairing of sound and meaning that’s central to language is accounted for.

Now, one’s first thought would be that you first assemble a complete structure, and then, to the extent that that structure obeys the rules of the language (= the principles of Universal Grammar parameterized in the particular way that is the language we’re talking about), PF (the articulatory interface) and LF (the logical-semantic interface) interpret the structure in their own terms. Sending this structure to PF and LF for interpretation is called “Spell-Out.”

Now, that much makes sense to me. It’s not exactly how I think about grammar, though. Rather this is a way of thinking about grammar that speaks to Chomsky’s Biolinguistic concerns.

I myself think of grammar in much more traditional/computational terms. For me, a language is a set of strings – in the case of natural language, it’s a set of strings of morphemes. So, a given language has a bag of morphemes (words, endings, etc.), and the potential members of the language are any sequence/assembly of these morphemes of any length. Obviously, trying to list the legal sequences is hopeless: there is reason to believe that not only is the number potential/candidate members of this set infinite, but the actual membership in the set is infinite too. So, having despaired of trying to simply list them, we try instead to come up with a computer program that generates them. Specifying the rules according to which the generative engine operates is the job of Syntax.

Unfortunately – thinking of Syntax as trying to characterize membership in a(n infinite) set of possible strings of morphemes turns out to be a handicap for understanding multiple spell-out. Or, rather, understanding it the way that it’s normally talked about.

Normally, when people write about multiple spell-out, they don’t really spell out the mechanics, but what they all seem to have in mind is that at not one but several stages in the derivation narrow syntax sends information to the interfaces. But I don’t understand what this means!!!

For me, the job is – given a sequence of morphemes – to say (a) whether it is a member of the set(= the language in question) and possibly also (b) whether this sequence is paired with one or multiple interpretations. Ok, well, given that that’s the case, and given that the question is about the complete sequence, and given that for at least some sequences (those with long-distance wh-movement, for example) characteristics from all parts of the sequence need to be inspected to answer the question, then surely it’s nonsensical to talk about part of the sequence having been sent to the interfaces for interpretation!

The way I see it, sequences are atomic with respect to the narrow question of whether they belong in the set. That is, the question is being asked of the whole sequence, not parts of it. We break the sequence into parts to analyze it because this is the only way that we know to account for the discrete infinity of the set. But it’s still the entire sequence that has a pronounciation, and it’s still the entire sequence that has an interpretation.

I suppose the idea is that the bits that get sent to the interfaces at various parts of the derivation are taken to be complete, and that they compose with each other to make the whole. That I can buy, but only in the narrow syntactic sense. These parts do not have self-contained interpretations and pronounciations. They may (in fact there is strong evidence they do) have self-contained syntactic life.

So I prefer to think of multiple spellout like this: spellout in this case just means that a particular subcomponent of a derviation is not (fully) accessible to the derivation after a certain point. After a certain point, the system can recognize that a particular phrase is no longer going to change. Or, in Minimalist terms, elements from it will no longer feed extensions of the tree being assembled. Any elements it contains are now syntactically inert. It is ready for interpretation, though how it combines with the rest of the structure might not be (it might re-merge at some later stage, thus participating in multiple places in the hierarchy). So for me – and man is this anticlimatic after all that background – multiple spell-out only makes sense if I think of it as the treatment of a complete phrase as though it were a single lexcial item for the remainder of the derivation. Itis, however, still present for interpretation at tne end of the derivation. That is, PF and LF don’t “read” it, and Pronoucne doesn’t try to sequentialize it (crucial!!!) until after all syntactic operations required to assemble this particular candidate member of the set have stopped. Sequentialization (linearization) and semantic interpretation wait until it’s all through.

- Joshua