The Primacy of Grammar Part 25

Chapter 7.

1. Chomsky's ''third factor'' consists of a variety of other things, such as resources for a.n.a.lyzing perceptual data; I set them aside. I am also setting aside the FLI systems from the picture since it is unclear if they belong to FL proper.

2. Cherniak's leading idea is that the ''body plan'' of biological systems often exhibits a preference for ''least-path'' organization such as the location of the eye and the brain near the front of the body axis.

3. I am setting aside possible independence between language and arithmetic witnessed in some cases of lesion resulting in hemispheric dissociation (Varley et al.

2005). As Chomsky (2006c) rightly points out, their significance is uncertain in view of the competence-performance distinction.

4. Pesetsky explains: ''V 'five' (i.e., a chord built on the fifth note of the scale, called the dominant), I 'one' (a chord built on the first note of the scale, called the tonic). The subscripted arabic numerals following the Roman numeral indicate which note of the chord is the lowest note heard, and whether there are any pitches in the chord besides the three pitches of the basic triad. This is traditional chord notation.'' Pesetsky's ingenious proposal is currently available only in the form of an enigmatic handout. Many details are currently missing. See also Katz and Pesetsky 2009.

5. Pesetsky also suggests that the ''hierarchical organization of rhythmic beats . . . is the product of a distinct system that provides an additional kind of organization (perhaps absent in certain 'free' styles, e.g., chant or recitative).''

6. I am not saying of course that sound is ancillary to music as well. However, we need to explain that Beethoven composed his later music while he was totally deaf.

7. I will use the more general notion of tonal s.p.a.ce, rather than the specific notion of pitch s.p.a.ce, because not all music, such as Indian music, has fixed pitch.

8. A part of the why-question can be addressed in terms of a list of what Lerdahl and Jackendo (1983, chapter 9) call ''well-formedness rules'' and ''preference rules,'' which are essentially attempts to formalize facts about prolongational-reduction trees such that application of these rules to specific pieces of music will generate the trees.

9. In contrast, Vijaykrishnan (2007, chapter 8) suggests that all of individual pitches, scales, raagas and their distinguishing motifs, among other things, const.i.tute the lexicon of Carnatic music. There are at least two problems. First, scales, motifs, familiar tunes, and the like, are themselves complex SOs built out of simpler elements. Which combinatorial system constructs these objects? Second, as his earlier elegant discussion (2007, 8788) brings out, traditional claims of 22-microtones for Carnatic music notwithstanding, this form of music essentially uses the familiar 12-semitone system per octave used in much of Western cla.s.sical music. However, he goes on to suggest that the additional microtones in Carnatic music are ''cognitively'' constructed in the system as raaga-specific requirements are enforced (chapter 8). It follows that there is a clear division of labor between 252

Notes.

a largely universal set and the one enforced by the raaga-system in a specific tradition. To dump everything under ''lexicon'' misses this crucial architectural feature. See Mukherji 2009.

10. From this fact, Pesetsky (2007) concludes that music has no lexicon! The conclusion seems unwarranted. If there is no lexicon, what is Merge merging?

11. Apart from Chomsky's thoughts on these issues already cited, see Stewart 1995 and 2001, Flake 1998, Leiber 2001, Jenkins 2000, Uriagereka 1998, Martin and Uriagereka 2000, Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2004, Carroll 2005, for detailed case studies from physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and ethology that bear on biolinguistics. Much of this work mentions d'Arcy Thompson 1917 and Alan Turing 1952 as starting points; some trace it to Goethe 1790.

12. Fluid of course is a technical term entrenched in theory: a ''perfect fluid'' has zero viscosity.

13. Another closely related aspect is that Turing machines are, in an abstract mathematical sense, ''mechanical'' devices.

14. I a.s.sume that not every symbol system, especially the finitary ones, is a computational system; only unbounded (recursive) ones are.

15. It is another story why this obvious restriction on computationalism got side-tracked in the brief history of the cognitive sciences.

16. I will only make some breezy remarks on what seem to me to be the immediate worries. Thus I will not discuss the (neural) cost of having a computational system, the possible distinction between computational and ''causal'' explanations, ''Saussurian arbitrariness'' of sign systems, and the like, not to mention the ubiquitous problem of ''rule following.''

17. See Mukherji 2000 for an attempted reconstruction of the doctrine of dualism from this direction; also see Mukherji, forthcoming a.

18. Regarding the issue of whether nonhuman animals have the ability to use signs, Descartes' worry was that ''there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible'' (cited in Leiber 1991).

19. In my opinion, the example that Boeckx (2006, 31) wants us to ''imagine'' is even worse: anti-anti-anti-missile missile missile missile.

20. This is not true for (some) vocalizing primates (Cheney and Seyfarth 1999), although, unlike birdsongs, primate calls exhibit very little internal structure.

21. In his response to Gentner et al., Marc Hauser points out that the mere presence, if any, of recursion in songbirds does not imply that songbirds can acquire human languages; this is because human languages crucially involve meanings (reported in ''Songbirds Learn Grammar,'' The Hindu, April 27, 2006). This obvious problem could have been raised before Hauser and colleagues themselves embarked on the study of tamarin monkeys to find out if these animals have the capacity to learn human languages.

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