Meeting the Boojum

There are a multitude of different linguistic theories on the market with sometimes quite different formal properties. This situation is beneficial to linguistics as a field for at least two reasons. First, different formal mechanisms make salient different sorts of generalizations, and the different communities have in addition different methodological commitments; this means that researchers from different traditions will tend to not only approach the same data differently, but will also see different patterns therein. In other words, having a wealth of communities with different modes of engaging with the data and with different prior beliefs, increases the chances of finding interesting generalizations. Second, particularly given the mixed attitudes [5, 18] toward formal precision and mathematical rigor among linguists, the need to engage across notational boundaries forces some essential metatheoretical reflection about what exactly the commitments of one’s analyses are; what is the theoretical wheat, and what the notational chaff? Müller and Wechsler engage precisely in this activity in the present paper. I think that this opens the door to a considered and rational discussion of the nature and content of the debate between ‘phrasal and lexical’ approaches to grammatical analyses. What I think is quite clear is that lack of formal precision is an impediment to this sort of discussion. Therefore, if one thinks (and I do) that such discussions should be had, then one should endeavour to make his or her theory more formally explicit; this is then a case where “inquiry is advanced by [. . . ] fuller formalization” [5]. I view Müller and Wechsler’s paper as having two facets. On the one hand, it is arguing against recent proposals of Tomasello and Goldberg, and is thus part of a continuing dialogue regarding the merits of two different styles of analysis (CxG à la Goldberg and HPSG à la Müller and Wechsler). The broader moral drawn however is that lexical approaches (to argument structure) are better than phrasal approaches. It is this broader claim that I will focus on in this response. There are three problems that I have in particular. First, it is not at all clear what the distinction Müller and Wechsler are trying to make is. Second, Müller and Wechsler’s claims about simplicity favoring the lexical approaches are ungrounded. Finally, Müller and Wechsler’s conclusions trade on an equivocation between ‘analyses which make certain distinctions between expressions’