Ontological status of syntactic transformations

Question

Syntactic theories in the generative tradition involve transformations, i.e. movement of constituents, between deep structure and surface structure. What is actually meant by this? Is it intended as a model of the linguistic mind, a metaphor, or something else?

For example, take the statement "English passive clauses are derived from underlying active clauses by a set of transformations". I can think of two things this might mean:

1. It might be intended as an actual model of the linguistic mind. That is, the claim would be that when you form a passive clause, your brain first puts together the corresponding active clause, then applies the transformations to produce a passive clause out of it.

2. It might not be intended as a model of the linguistic mind, but simply as a formal system, i.e. a set of algorithms that can produce linguistic forms that correspond to those that actual speakers produce, but without necessarily going through similar processes.

If 1 is intended, what evidence is there that it's true?

If 2 is intended, what is the point of such a set of algorithms, when what we really want is to understand the actual workings of the linguistic mind?

Answer 1

OK, this is an Answer, not a book, and conversations are inhibited here.
So I'm going to observe some restrictions to keep this relatively short.

1. I'm not dealing with Chomsky here; I find Chomsky's proposals and theories about language and its supposed relation to human brains, minds -- and lately biology and genetics -- to be at best irrelevant, and at worst embarrassingly ridiculous. Either way, what he might say, or has said, is of no interest to me. For details, see The Chomskybot.
2. I'm restricting myself to a discussion of syntactic rules as they are developed in McCawley 1998, which is pretty basic and non-formal (formality in syntactic theory is only justifiable to the extent it makes theories machine-washable, and that is not the issue here).

That said, here's the presenting question:

• What is the point of 'a set of algorithms that can produce linguistic forms that correspond to those that actual speakers produce', when what we really want is to understand the actual workings of the linguistic mind? [all presuppositions by the original poster]

Well, there are an awful lot of different sentences in any language; if not an infinite number, at least an extremely large number, especially if you allow recursion without limit.
How does one describe them all? No matter when we start, we'll never finish.
That's not helpful.

It's the same problem with anything alive; there are a lot of worms, for instance.
How do we describe them? By noting similarities and differences, and positing clades, like species.
Same thing in syntax. We look for similarities and differences, and posit clades.

For instance, take the Passive construction in English.
I call it a Construction, but it could be called a Rule just as well, or an Alternation, though it's not cyclic. You have asked "Why say the active is basic and the passive derives from it?"

Look at the data. Assuming one can recognize Passive sentences and distinguish them from Active sentences, one will soon discover that for every Passive sentence there is a corresponding Active sentence -- perhaps with an indefinite subject when the Passive sentence lacks a by-phrase -- but that this is not true in reverse.
The following Active sentences, for instance, have no corresponding Passive sentences:

• Bill is sick ~ Mary ran yesterday ~ It's all over now. ~ He's being honest.

That is, there are Active sentences with no corresponding Passives, but there are no Passives with no corresponding Actives. This is a fact, and if grammar is about facts, it ought to be able to state this fact. One way to do this is to consider Passive a special effect that can be applied to most transitive sentences, but not to intransitive sentences.

Another point to make is that corresponding Active/Passive sentences mean the same thing.

• Bill ate the cake = The cake was eaten by Bill.
• Mary kicked Bill's ass. = Bill's ass was kicked by Mary.

These are synonymous (if one is true, so is the other, and if one is false, so is the other),
even though they look and sound different. So the meaning of the Passive is predictable from its corresponding Active. Furthermore, the form of the Passive is also predictable from its corresponding Active, by the following "algorithm":

a) Promote Object of main verb to Subject
b) Add auxiliary be
c) Follow be immediately with the past participle of main verb
d) If desired, express former Subject as object of by-phrase.

This allows the form and the meaning of passive sentences to be described, simply, by means of reference to the corresponding active sentence. And, by unwinding, to produce a corresponding active from a passive. This cuts the number of sentences that have to be described way down, because now Passives can be completely specified by reference to the prototype Active. And every time you discover another rule, you simplify the prototype that much more. That's the rationale, basically.

Surely any scientific theory of grammar should be able to describe such a simple correlation between simple sentences in a simple way. This is one such way. If you've got a neater way, tell us about it. And Passive is just one rule of several hundred in English, and this way works for all of them.

As for the tag in the question ...

when what we really want is to understand the actual workings of the linguistic mind

Who's this "we" you refer to?

There is no evidence that there is such a thing as "the linguistic mind" as a separate or separable entity (even ignoring problems with the ontological status of mind), except in the imaginations of theorists.

There is not even any evidence that different people speaking the same native language use the same internal syntactic processes. Much less all humans speaking all languages. Forget about "the linguistic mind" and "universal grammar"; it would be nice to be have telepathic X-ray syntax vision, but not even Superman has that.

Real linguists just have data to look at. And the data shows patterns. And the patterns can be viewed as algorithms, or as databases, or as formatting for ideas, or as social activity, or as cultural conventions, or as a lot of things. But you have to be able to state them somehow, and get the job done before the heat death of the universe.

Answer 2

The question is excellent. I would like to answer the question as well, adding an overlooked aspect of the issue.

Some derivationalists will likely defend the first interpretation of syntactic movement listed in the question, stating that syntactic movement (or copying) is a real condition of the human faculty for language. Humans have an innate ability to move syntactic units around in their "minds". Thus syntactic structures are generated in a bottom-up fashion, whereby certain constituents first appear in one position and are then moved to higher positions, and this all occurs in the mind before the actual structure is uttered by the speaker.

Other syntacticians and grammarians (including myself) reject this conception of how humans produce the syntactic structures of utterances. For me, a more plausible understanding of how humans produce utterances is that they access constructions in a lexicon (or constructicon) in an online fashion as they actually speak utterances. On this sort of account, the syntactic structures of utterances are produced left to right, not bottom up. They are produced left to right moving in the same direction that our speech organs can produce sounds and in the same direction that our comprehension absorbs meaning. This sort of account rejects the first interpretation of syntactic movement in the question, although it does not necessarily agree with the second.

A difficulty facing those syntacticians (like myself) who reject the innateness hypothesis of Chomskyan syntax is the fact that much of the terminology associated with the study of syntax was established in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when Transformational Syntax (think deep and surface structure) were the main game in town. Thus since the terminology that we use today was established at that time, the presuppositions that that terminology bears remain intact in the field of syntax in general. Terms such as extraposition, extraction, scrambling, fronting, topicalization, shifting, etc. all carry the presupposition of movement.

If a non-derivationalist wants to examine, for instance, the phenomenon denoted by the term extraposition, he/she is faced with a dilemma. He/she can use the term extraposition (which presupposes that something has been "extraposed") so that his/her audience knows immediately the phenomenon that is meant, but in doing so, he/she has to accept that the term itself expresses the unwanted presupposition of movement. Or he/she can avoid this unwanted presupposition by choosing another term, but this option has the drawback that introducing unknown terminology is difficult. Doing so requires more patience of the reader/listener, a fact that will likely reduce the size of the audience.

What I am describing here is a situation that perpetuates the transformationalists' interpretation of syntax. The transformationalist has a major advantage, since if the non-transformationalist wants to be understood, he/she is almost forced to employ a terminology that actually supports the transformationalists' stance.

The long and the short of all this is that many more syntacticians, grammarians, and linguists would likely choose the second option listed in the question than the first, and there are others like myself who completely reject the first and distance themselves from the second, choosing instead a third interpretation which sees "syntactic movement" and "transformations" as constructions that are stored in the lexicon/constructicon.