Re: THEORY: OT Syntax (Was: Re: THEORY: phonemes and Optimality Theory tutorial)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> > In generative linguistics, this happened with what is called the
> > A-bar-trace. The theory stated that when you move a topic or wh-pronoun to
> > the front of a sentence, it leaves behind a "trace" - a footprint in the
> > structure, if you will. The evidence was weak but the intuition was good.
> > During the late 70s or early 80s, they began running tests on brain
> > activity during speech. Brainwave patterns seem to corroborate the
> > existance of traces in a very dramatic way. Once the "moved" word has been
> > pronounced, the brain goes into a flurry of activity which only goes away
> > once the speaker reaches the point where the trace was hypothesized to be.
> > That is actually very startling, and I really doubt any syntactician
> > expected evidence of this kind. Similar evidence of the A-trace is lacking,
> > but syntacticians ignore that fact.
>
>Oddness!  Are brainwave patterns used to corroborate other kinds of
>findings?  Is this a common way of researching things in linguistics, or...?
The neurological activity associated with language is an active area of
research among linguists. One of my best friends is writing her Master's
thesis on some topic in lateralization in children's brains. Generally
speaking, however, this kind of research does not corroborate linguistic
theories. Mainly because what neurolinguists and psycholinguists study are
not directly relevant to syntactic and phonological theories. Some
interesting things have been found, none-the-less.

Take a sentence like "The man admired Don's sketch of the landscape."  You
cannot say *"The man admired Don's of sketch the landscape". This type of
ungrammaticality is what syntacticians have been calling a "Phrase
Structure Violation" for decades. Now, if you attach electrodes to a
patient's head and say that ungrammatical sentece, you get a negative peak
125 msec after the "of sketch" sequence, located on the left anterior
portions of the brain, followed by a negative peak at 400 msec over the
left temporal and parietal lobes, followed in turn by a positive peak at
500 msec on both sides of the brain. This was first reported (to my
knowledge) in 1991.

There are a few other cases like this. Without going into what they are,
there is brainwave evidence for Subjacency, thematic selection, and
specificity conditions. Even more interesting: syntacticians claim all
three (four, counting the phrase structure violation above) of these things
are separate entities, and the brain's reaction to each is completely
different as well, suggesting that they are indeed distinct, identifiable
processes. I believe there is similar work on phonology as well, but (I'm
ashamed to admit) I paid less attention to those parts of the articles.


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Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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