Probal_Festschrift_Chomsky_1998

8/3/2019 Probal_Festschrift_Chomsky_1998

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Deriving the Dialectic

Probal Dasgupta, University of Hyderabad

1. The Two-Stroke Generative Engine

Generative inquiry involves two characteristic moves. The first, callit Move Abs, seeks an abstract generalization level where coindexing andidentities can be established. The second one, Move Conc, specifies aconcrete embodiment level where expressive diversities are retrievable.This neutral wording is intended to abstract away from differencesbetween the syntactic and phonological instantiations of the classicalmoves. This formulation also ignores the enterprise, exemplified inminimalist syntax and optimalist phonology, of bypassing the tensionsthat arose with the classical version. That enterprise inherits only thebroadest formal outlines of the tensions. It needs to be supplemented by

a substantive project of trying to understand them.One fruitful way to deal with a tension is dialectical thinking. In this

paper, I propose that generative inquiry should methodologically commititself to a version of the dialectic that can be derived from the core of thegenerative revolution itself. My proposal is one response to the tensionbetween description and explanation which is here to stay. The mainquestions addressed in this paper are, which version of the dialectic isworth deriving, why, and how.

Suppose we set phonology aside and take up a limited version ofthe problem. In syntax, Move Abs generalizes on the basis of coindexing.

Its content-fidelity has the option of ignoring cross-reference devices byshowing them as repeat copies of nominals in a deep structure. MoveConc particularizes anaphors, pronouns, relatives, epithets, deictics. Itsexpression-fidelity has the option of ignoring the possibility of seekingany unified anchorage for reference. Move Abs writ large, GenerativeSemantics, and Move Conc writ large, Lexicalism, are not mutuallyconsistent. But the Moves, which need not be writ large, are.

In what follows I argue against the widespread view that thenotions of abstract and concrete involved in such formulations havesimply been superseded. Contemporary work, I argue, needs to inheritthe Abs and the Conc at work in the classical moves, if not their

implementations in terms of linguistic levels embodying eitherabstractness or concreteness through and through.

2. Servicing Could Use a Special DialecticWould the point of a dialectic simply be to arrange servicing for the

two-stroke generative engine? In that case it would suffice to note thatobservational imperatives concretely push inquiry towards kinky datawhile explanatory ones abstractly pull it towards unmarkedmanifestations of UG. We could then propose recasting the descriptive

task, of holding the fort for both of these imperatives, in terms of a"describable Language" concept that gives linguistics a point of serious


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contact with foreign problems outside the discipline (a description wecould retain even when we graduate to the purity of students of problemsand not of disciplines). Such an arrangement would have us work out aSpecial Dialectic just for linguistics.

This would not be a pointless activity, to be sure. The duality of Abs

and Conc invites elaboration in terms of a dialectic. Our field hasneglected this task so far, at some cost. We could address this lacuna byworking on a Special Dialectic that gets our act together.

But it turns out that this work involves exploring someindependently interesting consequences of the core of the generativerevolution. These consequences -- which users of generative machineryshould take responsibility for -- build something much bigger than thisSpecial Dialectic. They seem to underpin a General Dialectic whoserelevance extends into other disciplines and rearranges questions abouthow to deal with cross-disciplinary issues. If this is so, workers who wish

to pursue a comprehensive view of the generative revolution arecommitted to the ambitious task of the General Dialectic. That task isformally simpler and more approachable than the more modest-lookingproject of a Special Dialectic just for linguistics.

3. A General Dialectic is DerivableA Special Dialectic within linguistics is not hard to understand in

principle. It involves interactions between Move Abs and Move Concconsiderations at each step in procedures and in theoretical discussions.But what is the General Dialectic?

The General Dialectic is the following pattern-fact: You encounter,at the outset of your interaction with some phenomenon, a perceptibleand salient novel formation. Its youthful, novel vitality not onlyaffectively satisfies you but meets relevant needs. But then,unexpectedly soon, you face decay. The new has grown old before yourvery eyes, dismaying you. Do you wish to continue your encounter? Thenyou must first break contact with the old site to start afresh, nonethelesspicking up old pieces to achieve continuity across the inevitable gap. Forthe terms of the encounter require a freshness that you cannot staticallypreserve, and thus have to renew.

To summarize, the New becomes Given, counts as taken for

granted, and obstructs continued activity. To go on, you need anotherNew, but must stay in touch with the older one as you satisfy this need.Its overt preservation is a non-starter, though. For that would make youparty to the decay you witness. The dynamics that involves yourperceiving this paradoxical state of affairs in these terms and thenresponding creatively is, from your end, the General Dialectic. At theother end, partners with viewpoints distinct from yours respond, more orless creatively, to your responses. They too figure in the process as youmust see it. Thus the General Dialectic as a whole is always bigger thanone viewpoint.

A prelinguistic view would begin by suggesting that this patternderives from and recapitulates the perceptual basis of all comprehension.


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You can understand only what you perceive. And you can in general onlyperceive what stands out as a New percept whose saliency speaks to arelatively limited background. If you let a percept pile up an impressivelyheavy background, you upset the balance that keeps the perceptionmanageable, and something goes overboard. Then you are forced to

close the game and rearrange the chessboard. So each round of piling upa set of percepts and backgrounds supporting them works only up to apoint.

This approach is useful in its own right. But I had spoken of alinguistic derivation of the General Dialectic, from pieces of thegenerative action. Consider the following reasoning as a first draft wecould tighten on various fronts.

Every sentence use is transacted between persons who know thatthere are infinitely many sentences. This infinity is a formal fact aboutgrammar and a substantive fact about what can be said. At the

substantive level, both transactors know that any given sentence is likelyto come as a surprise. It stands to reason that this shared knowledgedeserves some response. The canonical response takes the form of adivision of the sentence into a topic, which keys sentence use into actualor potential shared knowledge, and a comment highlighting the newcontribution that uttering the sentence brings to bear on it. That thiscounts as a response to the transactors' shared knowledge of the normalnovelty of sentences is a substantive fact. The nitty-gritty of thecanonical response itself is a formal bridge between speaker's knowledgeand hearer's ignorance. This bridge is the point of departure for any

reconstruction of a general dialectic.It is useful to try to get some clarity over the formal-substantiveboundary at this point. Howard Lasnik observes (in a 1997 p.c.) that theformal EPP-relevant subject-predicate division of clause structure isindependent of any substantive need for a particular topic in everyclause. One may choose to conclude that the general clausal topic-comment split -- not the split in a particular clause -- amounts to asubstantive, conventional recognition of the normal novelty of clauses.The corresponding, but as Lasnik notes not identical, formal facts areparticular asymmetries in the CP, IP, VP. This picture allows certainclauses to have a trivial or null topic.

A linguistically careful version of this story might consider thepossibility that a true clause focuses on the New, while a partial or totalnominalization of a clause involves packing as Given and thus recyclablematerial that which counted as New on an earlier pass. That lead is notpursued here. The formal linguistics of clausal-nominal asymmetries andthe substantive linguistics of fresh illocutions and recycled material arepoorly understood. Formal work has tended to focus on what nominalsand clauses share. Only when we factor those aspects out are we likely tomake headway on what makes nominals formally different from clauses.Real or imagined connections between the formal and the substantive are

an interesting but as yet unexplored area. Hence the naive thematicformulation here. Even those who wish to explore derivations of the


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General Dialectic from broadly specified themes of generative inquiry willhave their hands full. Others who prefer a more technical characterizationof clausal-nominal disparities will of course explore the consequences ofusing that detailed elaboration instead.

4. The Point of Deriving OneTo try to outline a formal derivation here would surely be

premature. The work of deriving a General Dialectic from the core of thegenerative revolution involves both form and substance. To build thatderivation is to renegotiate the formal-substantive equation itself, and totake on the reconstruction of the dialectic as a careful mode of thinking.If this project is worth undertaking in the first place, then able hands willof course segment it into the usual manageable pieces and do theresulting jobs. Why, then, is the General Dialectic worth deriving from the

generative revolution or any other source? Who needs it?At least we do, as students of matters linguistic. Grammar does

some of our jobs for us. But eventually many of us find it necessary toreturn to Language. Consider two examples. The verb give in English,which is in some sense a Basic verb, permits the double objectconstruction, while non-Basic verbs like donate do not. Phonologicalprocesses can only be described systematically if both lento and allegrolevels are considered. The allegro segment of the language is clearlyBasic in the same sense. It is also clear that grammatical tools, even ifthey allow for some unification of syntactic and phonological reasoning --

in a generalized theory of features or admissible operations -- fail toelucidate this notion of Basic. At this point we encounter language as asocial object, to be studied by social science methods, as is widelyrecognized.

There we need the General Dialectic. For the garden variety socialfact encompasses the comprehension of key patterns of the social fact bysome or all of its participants. We have seen that the perceptual basis ofcomprehension gives rise to the interrupted continuities that a dialecticcan help visualize rigorously. To conceptualize adequately the status oflanguage, one must touch base with what the speaking public thinks itspeaks, and therefore with public perceptions constituting languages as

social facts.The return to language is not institutionally a matter of

grammarians hastily patching up a pax linguistica with sociolinguists, ofcourse. The point is for linguists to get a rigorous act together and jointlydeal with the literary critical activity domain where the public still thinksthe real making sense of language as a social fact has to get done. Themain problem for linguistics is not the grammar-sociolinguisticsbifurcation, but the factors that prevent our taking on the challenges atthe literary site of language studies.

One such factor is the paucity of equipment for revisiting the

speech vs writing bifurcation that used to be important when linguisticsfirst emerged as a speech-focused alternative to writing-focused


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grammatical studies. Another factor is our cognate unpreparedness for areexamination of the prose-poetry bifurcation that has emerged, in thehistory of careful aboriginal speech and the history of careful state-organized writing, as an orthogonal but related distinction whoseclarification will improve our understanding of language. These are

operational hurdles.There is also a conceptual problem. We need to approach it

carefully. As we get better at seeing what is at stake here, the GeneralDialectic will begin to help us, whereupon we will see why we need toderive it from the part of the generative revolution that we already havea grip on.

5. The Problem of MysteriesOne conceptual problem preventing our tackling the literary critical

challenge is the unbridgeable gap some of us see between clarifiable

Problems and inherently obscure and intuition-bound Mysteries. Am Isuggesting that Mysteries should be seen more constructively as simplyVery Hard Problems? No, on the contrary. I believe that such a recastingwould represent a failure to pose the basic conceptual problem properly.Once we do approach this conceptual problem, precisely that which nowmakes it hard to conceptualize the Problem-Mystery frontier will help usto cross it.

To achieve some clarity on these issues, consider the basicobservation that underlies the Problem-Mystery distinction. The Greeks(and classical thinkers elsewhere) concerned with what we may call

conceptual issues, philosophical in the modern sense, were saying thingscompared to which contemporary work cannot be said to have madeserious progress. In contrast, the Greeks working in the domains of whatnow count as empirical sciences achieved a take-off surpassed in currentwork. Research on empirical Problems involving matters of fact, so thestory runs, achieves greater success than work by comparably intelligentscholars on conceptual Mysteries involving matters of freedom.Presumably humans are better equipped to approach the former than thelatter.

In the sciences, something like the Problem-Mystery distinction hasguided the general assumption -- and contemporary academic

programmes implementing it -- that contemporary workers need activeaccess only to current writings and practices. These surely supersede thepast in domains where progress is tangible. In contrast, scholars in socialand human studies are supposed to inherit the textual baggage of earlierwork. So the curriculum takes you through it all. This is sometimesassociated with the view that "essentially contested" fields fail to exhibitprogress; hence the non-obsolescence of their past.

In contrast to this conventional format for the Problem-Mysterydistinction, I will unpack an alternative view of the deeper conceptualproblem underlying the tangle. Contemporary approaches in natural and

mathematical sciences actually differ from those in social and humanstudies mainly in the different Domain Embodiment Assumptions (DEAs)


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-- concerning the textual and practical presence or public availability ofthese fields of inquiry for potential entrants or critics -- and in theReading Strategies that correspond to DEA differences. Once DEAs aremade explicit, we naturally rethink standard responses to them. Suchrethinking, pursued into regions one cannot specify in advance, could

conceivably undo the Problem-Mystery tangle, without a mindlesslyoptimistic relabelling of Mysteries as simply Very Difficult Problems.

Cutting some red tape, I shall speak of Scientists and Humanists,with the understanding that these stereotypes for scholars in the naturaland mathematical sciences and those in textual fields of study are of verylimited use. "Scientists", then, work under DEAs that treat onlyexperimental reports and experiment-accountable theoretical writing asconstituting DE, the bodily presence of the relevant science. Onlypublished constituents of DE -- public writing or speech presentingscientific activity so defined -- are subjected to scrutiny as to

demonstrable truth or falsity. The remainder of utterances by personsengaged in such activities are held to be outside DE and do not invitesuch scrutiny. "Humanists" act on very different DEAs. For them, and forthe public gaze constituting them as humanists, their entire corpus ofedited writing and speech is the DE of their inquiry, such as it is, anddeserves whatever perception, with or without scrutiny, such inquirymerits.

This reasoning is familiar. It has some basis in our commonresponses to thinkers in these domains. Many of us maintain thatHeidegger's complicity with the Nazis or Nietzsche's later madness should

be allowed to affect our evaluation of their work, without assuming asharp separation between the person and the thinker. In contrast, Frege'santi-semitism is considered irrelevant to the merits of his logic. Readerswho take seriously Weber's claim that his sociology is a science hold thatknowledge of his nervous breakdown should not influence our response tothe way he interprets rationality as the key to the Western culturalmainstream.

I note the familiar basis of this reasoning in order to stress that therelation between the scientist-humanist contrast and assumptions abouthow much of your speech you are accountable for is not new. The point isto realize that there is a DEA asymmetry and to explore some

consequences of this realization.The conceptual problem in terms of which we can recast the issue

of Problems and Mysteries can now be posed as a preliminary question:Should the thinking public, taking into account what can be learnt fromthe scientific exploration of Problems and the humanistic consideration ofMysteries, continue to leave the DEA asymmetry between the two sets ofdomains unexamined? What follows once we make the DEAs in theircurrent asymmetric form explicit?

Some of the implications worth exploring have to do with thepractice of public scrutiny. Why should the written corpus produced by

scientists not be regularly subjected to the sort of public scrutiny that wequite properly expect a Heidegger or a Nietzsche to undergo? Scientists


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do take part in the techno-politico-commercial public packaging ofscience through science reporting, science fiction, and otherpopularizations. Science writing of these sorts is careful, edited prose,rather than casual speech. It follows that beginners in science should betaught to expect such scrutiny and see it as conceptually continuous with

the scientific peer review of their experimental and theoretical work.Surely the courage to face public scrutiny should count as part of thefalsifiability that supposedly makes scientific statements special.

Of course, students training for science will need to be equipped toface such scrutiny if it is going to occur when they come of age. Trainingis virtually the only phase in the scientific production cycle whereintervention might bring about the mind-set modification called for. Thisseems to me to involve changing the way science apprentices today areencouraged to rush through the socio-historical component of theircurriculum which they imagine to be undemanding on the analytical

front. Although we are not often asked to give advice about the propertreatment of young quantifiers in ordinary English, surely linguists can dosomething about the formation of linguists. From the reasoning presentedhere, or from a cleaned-up version introducing the reader's favouritehedges and revisions, it follows that one must ask whether the researchand teaching practices described as linguistic science in the universities ofthe industrialized countries -- where the natural sciences have beenelevated to state religion status -- should be reexamined with theseconsiderations in mind, on academic and not merely pedagogical grounds.These are academic-strategic consequences that follow from the

realization that the humanist-scientist difference has to do with a DEAasymmetry that now exists and needs to be questioned.Consequences of another type that merit exploration pertain to

Reading Strategies.Why do the humanists still read material from past centuries as

part of their training and research when scientists can afford to stopreading superseded theoreticians? I would argue that the reason is notthe paucity of progress outside the sciences. Rather, humanists andscientists offer readings of social and natural facts respectively. The wayparticipants in social facts construe themselves, as in narratives andother texts from the culture, precedes and grounds fresh construals by

outsiders. The historical, archive-sensitive component of the interpretivedisciplines is thus part of the core challenge that makes social inquirytick. In contrast, natural and formal scientists offer readings of naturaland formal facts. Notice that literary critics can and do stop reading oldcritics even though they cannot trash old literary texts. Scientists,likewise, preserve astronomical records and other data even as they sendsuperseded prose about the data to the attic.

Exploring further the boundary between reading natural facts andreading social facts, consider the case of social scientists. If a Marx or aWeber or a Freud creates a theoretical fabric, one reads such an author's

work both literarily, as a textual narrative whose coherence has to dowith the interpretable integrity of the author's intentions, and


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scientifically, in terms of hypotheses that interact impersonally with thework of others to yield falsifiable predictions. How is it that we do notread the work of natural scientists both literarily and scientifically, then?In fact, we do; but the conventions of scientific reading hide thiselementary fact. The genres of writing that count as serious science

impose DEA-related Reading Strategies identifying the material as arigorous opposite of literature. Readers of technical scientific writing aremade to feel the peculiar emotions of dispassion also brought into play inreligious sermons, media commentaries, and other contexts associatedwith claims that the truth is being told and that therefore emotion wouldbe out of place. The default result is a certain pathos. A systematicallyinculcated selected avoidance of introspection prevents many readersfrom perceiving this pathos as a banal emotion elicited by genericconventions.

My argument here, of course, rests not on obviously literary

devices, but on the use of terms, notations, formalisms, and othermarkers of inter-scientific textual dependencies that weave the genericfabric of science writing qua writing. Young scholars trained as"scientists" are led by their training to fail to see this function ofnotational conservatism.

This argument may facilitate our transition from a linguistics thatsets its sights on emulating the criticism-limiting natural sciences to onethat accepts the need for some of our writings to negotiate their rigorousway into social science generic conventions. The transition has been heldup by a belief that social scientists who get "hung up on Freud or Marx"

are not scholars pursuing a research programme, but victims of someunscientific personality cult.On the contrary, well-behaved docile readers -- tricked into

believing that classical physics texts, say, are not anaphoric to theNewtonian corpus -- are the real victims, of an unscientific impersonalitycult. The more we allow ourselves to publicly think about these issues,the more seriously rational our field will be, freeing itself at last from longaccepted naturalistic (scientistic) propaganda to the contrary. Thispropaganda cannot withstand even a moment's scrutiny, and hassurvived only because we have permitted non-accountable (sciencelike)practices of publishing, refereeing, and discussion in the high-profile

linguistics periodicals.

6. Substantive ProposalsSo far I have dwelt on inquiry format issues. I now present

substantive proposals. The implications of the considerations providedabove lie mainly in the area of changing our Reading Strategies. We needa reasonably far-reaching change, affecting not just "us" in the exact andinexact sciences, but "them" in the supposedly anti-exact culturalstudies. My thesis is that this far-reaching change takes the form of a

transition from cultural readings of texts, which hastily allow that this orthat variation might be a matter of arbitrary cultural diversity that our


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understanding has to find a way around, to historical readings, whichplug all that we read into a jointly constructed, meaningful, historyemerging from our collective cognitive efforts. My proposal for aderivation of a General Dialectic from generative inquiry serves thistransition. The General Dialectic makes social and human readings less

opaquely cultural and more transparently rational to the extent thatdialectical reasoning helps mediate between the apparent arbitrariness ofcultural specificities and the achievable transparency of cross-domaingenerality.

At the detailed level, I propose to identify the Concrete with the on-line real time production, reception, and mutual monitoring of speech.This pits it against an Abstract seen in terms of some off-line supportsystem rooted in the lexicon. At that juncture the Lexis, or humanknowledge of lexical material, becomes intrinsically Given, whilePerformance, or the on-line use of language, counts as the staging of a

dynamics of mutually defined Givens and Novels -- an observation onemay encode by calling Performance intrinsically Rhythmic. Such aconceptualization polarizes the intrinsically Rhythmic concreteness ofperformance, and of the Pragmatic study of the contexts anchoringlanguage use, against the intrinsically Given abstractness of the Lexicalstudy of words and of grammatical frames surrounding them.

This picture contrasts the Given with the Novel. The Given directlyinvites Lexical inquiry. The Novel directly invites Pragmatic inquiry.Grammar is where the language system and language use are negotiatedin a back and forth between the intrinsic Givens and the intrinsic Novels.

When you wish to think about a back and forth, your thinking has to godialectical. We have seen that it is cheaper to invest in a general dialecticusable elsewhere than to try to custom-make a specially linguisticdialectic. If Grammar is a specifically dialectical zone, it stands to reasonthat grammarians can, if they try, make a contribution to the generaldialectic.

There is more where this comes from. Speech contrasts withWriting. At that juncture, Writing focuses on the Givenness of what staysavailable, whereas Speech focuses on the Novelty and evanescence ofwhat is on immediate offer. One must of course complicate this. Writingcasual notes or messages involves an intention to throw the text away

the way we forget speech. Speakers on stage perform bookishly, for therecord. We are therefore dealing, not with extralinguistic substances, butwith a linguistic reimaging of speech and writing that can break the usualalignments of the formal with the substantive. With these and relatedcaveats, the linguistics of speech versus writing also appears on anagenda that seeks to root the general dialectic in the observations aboutthe canonical novelty of all freshly spoken sentences, in all their infinity,that have kept the generative revolution going.

Some readers may find this proposal not concrete or propositionalenough, and will need to note that proposing a redirection of inquiry

means attempting explicitness levels that correspond to the task ofagenda construction. Other readers may doubt that this proposal


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connects with any transitions for which known energies are available.They need to work out the way the proposal here converges with thepostmodern rethinking of the writing-speech, concept-percept, andcentre-periphery dualities in literary studies and more recently the socialsciences.

7. How Derivations Outlive ReductionismThis leaves us with a methodological worry to deal with. The field of

inquiry we are postulating sets up a new tension -- between thereductionist verticalism of analytical scientific work, which hopes to derivecomplex mechanisms from simpler submechanisms, and the anti-reductionist lateralism of dialectical inquiry that does not expect to deriveresults in one field from a more fundamental neighbour. How is myoxymoronic talk of a derivable dialectic helpful?

I tackle this worry in three stages, labelled as strategic, tactical,and operational.

At the strategic stage of my response, I specify that the termGrammar in the proposal above names all processes, before and afterSpellout, in any derivation, conceivably redrawing the boundaries forsuch notions as syntax and phonology. Likewise, the term Pragmatics inthe proposal concerns not just conversational maxims unpacking what anordinary consciousness can believe to be normative cooperation, butpossibly more inclusive and specific mechanisms fuelling the normal,semi-aware, flickering, ambivalent participation by speakers in

transactions that alternate between a sleepy ritual charade and seriousgive and take.These respecifications of Grammar and Pragmatics refer to the fact

that the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete is already at work inthe very terms of inquiry within each of our constituent methodologies.My proposal, such as it is, only brings out explicitly what our work in anyevent forces on us. We thus have no choice. If we have to do all this, wemight as well do it carefully. The dialectic is an obvious format for theappropriate type of care. Existing grammatical and pragmatic practicesderive theorems and maxims from system imperatives, not to shrink thespace of work, but to let the diverse consequences and unifying systems

illuminate each other in these derivations. Grammarians andpragmaticists who choose to go in for a dialectic will of course subject itto current derivational practices without prejudice to other issues.

The second, tactical stage of my response focuses on the nature ofderivations, proofs, and other rigorous demonstrative procedures. In thecontext of having to modify our Reading Strategies consequent to therethinking of existing Domain Embodiment Assumptions as in section 5,one may want to avoid the old approach to proofs (and otherdemonstrations) that reads them as arguing that, given valid antecedentsplus viable demonstrative machinery, the consequent is valid. One may

choose instead the approach that reads a demonstration as an unpackingof problem content that highlights -- as lines in the demonstration or


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derivation -- points of potential contact between one problem, explicatedin a particular breakdown, and cognate problems amenable to similarformatting. Demonstrated points of potential inter-problem contact invitescholars to consider whether and how to handle the two problemstogether. It is possible to take the position that this is all that a

derivation does. It connects two problems without seekingasymmetrically to ground one in the other, or to suggest that the fieldinhabited by one problem is more fundamental than, or even owns, thefield where we find the other problem. The process can be read laterallyrather than vertically.

To take an example within linguistics, consider the possibility ofderivationally connecting the pragmatics of empathy fields, within whichanaphors corefer with the anchor and pronominals obviate from theanchor, to a formal syntactic theory of binding in the conventional sense.Does it make sense in principle to derive the relevant piece of syntax

from the relevant piece of pragmatics, or the other way round? No, if toderive is to make one field an asymmetric dependent of the other. Yes, ifderivation establishes lateral, enriching, nonreductive bonds.

The lateral tactics I argue for serve to make Reading Strategies, inthe sense of section 5, more historical and less cultural. How is this so?The goal of finding foundational antecedents to which one could reduceconsequents had the unfortunate side-effect of leaving the irreducibles,especially in the interpretation-prone cultural domains, look perforcearbitrary and extrarational. This imposed a hasty culturalism on manyfields of inquiry and left scientists in the position of tolerating, with a

shrug, large areas of hopeless obscurity, creating improbable scientist-humanist coalitions perpetuating a belief in the existence of intrinsicopacity. Once we switch over to a lateral rather than a verticalinterpretation of derivation formalisms, this can give way to a serious,transparency-maximizing approach to inquiry in all fields, brooking noexceptions. This is what I mean by the transition from a cultural to ahistorical approach, and by claiming that the approach advocated herecontributes to this transition. Scientific-minded formal syntacticians arenot compelled to shrug and tolerate a functionalist or soft pragmaticistbackyard. Everybody can work together towards intellectual rigour andserious debate without wearing false tolerant masks.

Now for the third, operational stage of my response to themethodological worry. Even these preliminary explorations of thedialectical agenda change our understanding of the way derivations workin straight linguistics. We can see that, as Grammar in the broad sensethat includes phonology has moved ahead, Lexis has grown less"abstract" and Pragmatics has steadily become less "concrete". ForGrammar has, in alternating phases, taken material away from thesedomains, and given some back, showing that we have to renegotiate atevery step what we are doing with such dualities. As we get used tohaving to do such methodological negotiation at each paradigm

transition, we begin to wonder if we can put such a process into theregular working of the machinery within grammar, if grammar itself can


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formalize the fact that the givenness of lexis and the newness that makespragmatics tick impose tensions that have to be worked out on line.

One contemporary response to the idea that Lexis and Pragmaticsaren't what they used to be is to try and make Grammar optimal orminimal. In that case Grammar as such seems to shrink and disappear.

The process leading to this over the decades has shown classicaldialectical symptoms. We were piling rule on rule in the sixties, and thepile crashed. The nineties have been about whittling grammar down, intoa Phoenix egg, which then reappears from its ashes, a bird willing tosquawk at whoever may have thought that the availability ofperformance principles might mean that Grammar simply vanishes. If wehave learnt from these experiences, surely it is time we converted ourknowledge into usable principles. And if these principles are useful, wemight as well take formal responsibility for them, both their instantiationsin our linguistics itself, and their rigorous consequences outside the field

as we know it today.

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