So much for Chomsky

I just finished Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (ed. Dirk Geeraerts).  I wanted to get up to speed on this cognitive linguistics, as the kids call it these days.  I actually like it more than generative syntax, though I think its program is better than its progress.  It wants to be cognitive, even if mostly it’s still people noodling around on sketchpads rather than, say, in the genome.  But it’s still an improvement over Chomsky, who despite holding that grammar is innate, is aggressively uninterested in the brain, in the evolution of language, or in any way language might be integrated into general cognition.

I used a few of the essays as fodder for my upcoming Xurnese grammar; but I thought I’d highlight one here: “Usage-based linguistics”, an overview of developmental studies by Michael Tomasello.  What’s most striking about his research, to me, is how incompatible it is with Chomsky’s latest theories.

Briefly, Chomsky thinks syntax is innate– we’re born with a complete universal grammar, and all the child has to do is figure out a few switches to flip once she discovers that she’s learning English rather than Ojibwe.  He supports this idea with the “poverty of stimulus” argument, which claims that there is far too little linguistic input to learn the full complexity of syntax.

Here’s what Tomasello found: children at first learn single-meaning utterances (’holophrases’).  Some are imitations of entire sentences (”Gimme-that”), but it’s pretty clear that they’re used as invariable units.  Next, they try two-unit phrases– usually a noun filling a slot (”More juice”), though sometimes the added element is a verb (”I-wanna walk”).  Later the slots get more complicated.

He had an unusually rich corpus for one 2-year-old, and took the last half-hour, counting 455 distinct utterances.  Then he compared each one to the previous weeks of data.  78% were word-for-word duplicates of previous utterances.  18% were copies of previous utterances with one minor change; just 4% had two changes, though in each case the particular changes were themselves already attested. 

That is: the vast majority of utterances were things the child had said before, or very minor variations on them.  It’s been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern that’s demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as meaning that they don’t imitate adult speech.  But now we see that they don’t do it because a single instance isn’t enough data for them.  They don’t venture to use a new construction till they’ve heard it many times and know how to use it.

A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional languages don’t learn the six person/number combinations at the same rate.  They first master the ones with the highest frequency in adult speech– e.g. 1st person singular, rather than 3rd person plural.  Again, they’re learning by imitation, and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn something.  They also seem to learn each verb paradigm separately– it takes a long time before they start generalizing.

Another supposed bit of evidence that children don’t imitate adult speech is that they make errors like “Her open it.”  But Tomasello points out children hear plenty of expressions like “Let her open it” or “Help her open it.”  They’re reproducing part of an utterance that they’ve heard without understanding the whole thing.  They don’t make mistakes like “Mary hit I”, because that never occurs in what they hear.

A child may use what seems like a complex construction, but it can be an illusion.  For instance, he found that kids pretty quickly say “I think…”  But at that age they didn’t have other forms (”she thinks”, “I don’t think”, “I thought”, or even “I think that”).  So this is very likely not real subordination; rather, they’re using “I-think” to mean “maybe”.

Now, why is all this striking?  Because it doesn’t fit at all with an innate, complete understanding of syntax. If all the kid had to do was flip switches, she wouldn’t struggle like this.  They aren’t born knowing the patterns of language; they have to laboriously acquire them, adding new features only after they’ve been exposed to a load of data.

 

Seeing the Shi`a

Wow. Occasionally I find a book that unwinds my mind and rethreads my head. This is one: The Shia Revival, by Vali Nasr.

By now people often know about the Sunni/Shi`i distinction and even know where each is concentrated.  And you can hardly get your pundit license without knowing that the conflict derives from a 1300-year-old succession dispute: the Shi`ites believe that only descendents of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali can rightfully rule.

But Nasr makes this come alive.  He starts with the celebration of Ashura in Karbala in 2003, which Americans took as Iraqis celebrating some kind of religious festival Saddam had prohibited, thus a victory for “freedom”.  In fact Ashura is an emotional ritual commemorating the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn, and this gathering of two million Shi`i marked the transformation of the Middle East not according to Bush’s neocons, but in the direction of Shi`a revival.

Bush– like many of the leaders Nasr describes, ancient and modern– didn’t know what he was stirring up.  More confusion has reigned in Bush’s support for the Iraqi premier’s attacks on Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra, which has been depicted as a struggle against Iran… although in that fight Iran supported the government.  Similarly McCain’s confusion of al-Qaeda with Iran isn’t just a minor point; it’s a failure to understand what’s going on in the region.

Unwittingly, the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan empowered the Shi`ites, who were oppressed by Saddamn and the Taliban, and has greatly strengthened Iran, which saw two neighboring enemies disappear.  It had no need to meddle to secure influence in Iraq; shared Shi`ite values and relationships gave it that on a platter.  At the same time Iraq created a new Shi`ite hero in Ali al-Sistani, who is more moderate and conservative than the Iranian leadership. 

As Nasr shows, it’s useless to talk about Islamic fundamentalism… we have to ask instead which Islamic fundamentalism: Sunni or Shi`i.  In recent years the most dangerous variety is the Sunni, which is responsible for 9/11, the insurgency in Iraq (directed as much or more against the Shi`i taking power as against the US), and violence against Shi`i in Pakistan.  Some Sunni clerics have declared that Shi`i are not Muslims and can be attacked with impunity; it’s common to consider them a fifth column supporting either US or Iranian influence, depending on which enemy is more despised at the time.

 At times Nasr seems to hold out the tantalizing possibility of a US-Shi`a alliance.  The interests of the Shi`i are close to ours, in that they benefit from democracy and oppose Sunni terrorism.  This would have to mean some kind of rapprochement with Iran.  Isolating and demonizing its leaders is a losing proposition, and Iraq is likely to fall into chaos without Iran’s help.  On the other hand, being too pro-Shi`a would only intensify the Sunni extremist backlash against both us and the Shi`ites.

On the whole Nasr isn’t very hopeful; he considers that the alliance of convenience with Sunni leaders, for instance, was a mistake, convincing many Iraqi Shi`ites that the US would not protect their interests.  What’s certain, however, is that a whole lot of events in the next few years, from Lebanon to the Gulf states to Saudi Arabia to Iraq to Pakistan, will be determined by the Sunni/Shi`a divide.

 

 

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I just finished William Poundstone’s book, which sports the clanky title Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It).  It’s about voting systems, a subject which, curiously, seems to engage only wonks.  Despite the object lesson of 2000, most Americans can hardly conceive that anything besides plurality voting exists, much less that it might be better.

 Till recently, game theorists were almost as pessimistic.  Kenneth Arrow’s 1948 paper seemed to show that no voting system was free of paradoxes.  Whatever you picked– plurality, single transferrable vote, Borda counts, Condorcet voting, instant-runoff voting, approval rating– you can construct an example where the wrong guy wins.  Plurality voting systems are prone to spoilers or clones; more sophisticated systems fall prey to strategic voting (where voters conceal their true preferences to give an advantage to their favorite); ranking systems in general fail if voter preferences aren’t transitive.

Poundstone unveils his own best candidate last (spoiler warning): range voting.  You very likely know it already: it’s the numerical ratings used at Hot or Not or rottentomatoes.  It bypasses Arrow’s paradox because it’s not a ranking system; it easily handles spoilers and strategic voting, and it’s simple to boot.

 

Recent reading

Most recent books: Bernard Lewis’s From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East and Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper.  Both are reports from unfamiliar cultures; in that regard Diablo is fresher.

The Lewis book is a collection of essays, thus inherently uneven and a bit repetitive.   He’s at his best when talking about Ottoman Turkey, a state he seems to really admire.  It was a major military power as late as 1683 (when it besieged Vienna); Elizabethan travelers generally found it well ordered and prosperous, and till relatively late, it had no trouble winning the loyalty of its Arab and even Christian inhabitants. 

Lewis has expended a lot of ink explaining how Muslim civilization went from being the planet’s most advanced and prosperous culture to being a backwater, which is not only important in understanding the frustration of modern Muslims, but offers a warning to any culture– say, our own– which thinks that its supremacy will be eternal.  In a few words, Islam felt that it had learned everything worth knowing about the rest of the world (and that didn’t amount to much), and just didn’t notice when the situation had changed, till too late.  A 17C Ottoman account of Christianity, for instance, depends on medieval Arab sources and covers the Roman church councils, but doesn’t have a word to say about Protestantism. 

On contemporary affairs Lewis is just a pundit, and can get things spectacularly wrong– e.g. he expected that the overthrow of Saddam would result in “rejoicing” and the establishment of a government that would “seek to resolve, not provoke conflicts” (p. 380).  On the other hand, he can delve deeper than the journalists, simply because he knows Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish, something that ought to be basic in reporting on the Middle East.

An interesting oddity: diplomacy between Turkey and the West in the early centuries was generally conducted in Italian, the only language likely to be shared by both sides.  (For centuries certain Greeks would send their children to be educated in Italy to provide a source of translators.)

 As for Diablo Cody, she’s a lot of fun; her stripping memoir is full of the same energy and wit as Juno.  And refreshingly, she feels no need at all to offer regrets or moral redemption.  (It’s an old literary tradition, dating back at least to Augustine’s Confessions, that you can vicariously enjoy someone’s depravity so long as they repent by the last chapter.)

 Still, I wish someone would offer a book deal to Ali Davis for her True Porn Clerk Stories, which is as funny and a good deal more insightful than Candy Girl.

 

Fun and then depressing reading

I’ve been slowly discovering Christopher Moore.  I enjoyed The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror a few years ago, and I just finished Bloodsucking Fiends: a love story.  I recommend both for good frothy fun.  Moore is funny in a slightly edgy, slackery way, without any real nastiness.  In Swatoons terms he is more of a Lore than an Agto.

But that means I should go finish A New Green History of the World, which is pretty depressing reading.  (Synopsis: It was a mistake to stop hunting/gathering and we’re all doomed.)

 

The failure of neoliberalism

I’ve been reading Ha-joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans: The myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism.  It’s amazing.

Its target is clear enough, but like any criminal enterprise it has a confusing array of names.  Europeans call it “liberalism”, Americans call it “neoliberalism”; I’ve also heard it called the Washington Consensus.  It’s the set of policies– free trade, eliminating tariffs, free movement of capital, privatization, safeguarding intellectual property, balancing budgets– that the IMF pushes on developing countries, and the Economist holds up as the self-evident standard for everyone.

Pretty obviously these are policies that rich First World companies like: they want to sell their products everywhere without restriction, they don’t want copycats, they hate when protectionist or nationalist governments get in their way.  But it’s also claimed that these policies will somehow promote development and prosperity; indeed, enthusiasts like Tom Friedman maintain that it’s “the only model on the rack”.

As Chang shows, it’s not.  It’s not how the First World developed.  It doesn’t produce prosperity and it doesn’t develop economies.

• In the 1960s and 70s, under protectionist import substitution policies, the developing world grew at 3.0% annually.  In the 1980s and beyond, under neoliberalism, the rate was 1.7%.
• Where neoliberalism was implemented earlier and more thoroughly, in Latin America, the contrast is even greater: 3.1% in the 1960s/70s; 1.7% in the 1990s; 0.6% in the 2000s.
• Africa didn’t grow much in the ‘bad old days’ (1 to 2% a year), but it’s shrunk under neoliberalism.
• Mexico grew at a rate of 3.1% under import substitution (1955-82); neoliberalism was a disaster, with growth rates from 0.1% (1980s) to 0.3% (2000s) to 1.8% (1990s).  The free trade agreement with the USA wiped out whole swaths of Mexican industry.

Most damningly, the policies the First World preaches to the rest of the world are completely the opposite of those it used in its own development.  Neoliberalism is climbing up the ladder, kicking it away, and advising those below to learn to fly.

• The first nation to modernize, Britain, did so by state intervention, going back to the Tudor monarchs who pressed for the creation of a wool processing industry rather than shipping raw wool to the Netherlands.  Britain protected its industries with high tariffs on manufactured goods– 45-55% in 1821.  (It also prevented its colonies from developing manufactures.)
• The United States was built on protectionism too; by 1820 average tariffs were 40%.  They were raised during the Civil War and stayed that way till WWI.  During this period it was the fastest growing country in the world, and had the highest tariffs.
• France had something of a free trade policy in the 1800s (tariffs at about 20%).  Concluding after WWII that this had something to do with its economic underperformance, it reversed these policies, directing the economy through state-owned banks and nationalizing key industries; tariffs rose to 30%.  The strategy worked; France was a technological leader by the 1980s.
• South Korea, Chang’s native country, was desperately poor in 1961, with a per capita income of $82 (less than Ghana).  Under heavy state direction, it achieved growth rates above 6% and its PCI today is $13,980.  Its growth slowed in the 1990s when it was forced to accept some IMF direction.
• Japan developed after WWII under heavy state direction.  Imports were tightly limited; foreign ownership was banned in key industries, and where allowed, subject to restrictions (technology sharing, limited ownership, local contents requirements).
• China is big enough to ignore the IMF and develop under its own protectionist regime.

Not only does protectionism work, it’s the only thing that does.  Naturally it doesn’t and shouldn’t last forever: once national industries are in good shape they can compete without government help.  But without protection and local control of investment, the nation won’t have national industries.

Chang goes on to show that state enterprises can work quite well; that free movement of capital was rightfully restricted by the First World during its own development; even that corruption and lack of democracy don’t in themselves prevent development (and tend to lessen once countries do become prosperous).

Intellectual property ‘rights’– actually demands by corporations– sound benign, but Chang points out that they are a great obstacle for developing nations, which cannot afford First World prices for pharmaceuticals, software, and textbooks.  Developing nations need to absorb a huge amount of new knowledge; copyright doesn’t benefit them, but stands in their way– it’s a luxury of rich nations.  And once again, it was only promoted by the First World long after they’d put away their own historical piracy.

Neoliberals have belatedly started to notice that their prescriptions don’t work as well as they should.  Their favorite explanation now is “culture”… some people, they say, just have the wrong values.  Chang neatly demolishes this by going back in time and showing that people’s complaints about poor people are always the same.  The Japanese were once described as lazy and emotional, and with “a quite intolerable personal independence”.  Koreans were dirty, sullen barbarians.  The Germans were “a dull and heavy people” who “never hurry”, unable to cooperate or receive new ideas, and prone to thievery.  Such observations are either simply wrong, or have nothing to do with whether nations can develop.

Despite the somewhat incendiary title, Chang isn’t against capitalism, trade, or globalization.  He simply wants the Second and Third Worlds today to have the same ability to control and encourage their own development that the First World nations enjoyed.

Chang has the best answer I’ve seen to David Ricardo’s old explanation of how poor nations ought to stick to whatever they have a relative advantage in… which generally ends up being resource extraction.  That is the best approach for maximizing current income.  But it fails if you want to increase your income beyond that point– if you want to develop, in other words.  To change those relative advantages– and perhaps create some absolute advantages– you have to sacrifice some current income (e.g., set tariffs to encourage native industries, or direct investment to future possibilities rather than current hot spots, or invest in R&D).