When anomalies reveal the cost of closure
The Platonic, Cartesian, and anti-Darwinian closures of Chomskyan theory create an elegant but isolated framework. Within this frame, acquisition, variation, and language use appear as anomalies—“hard problems” that resist formalisation.
Relationally, these are not failures of the system. They are signals of mislocated ontology: the relational conditions of language have been bracketed, and so the phenomena that arise there are treated as external puzzles.
1. Acquisition as a Puzzle
Within UG:
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Children are assumed to set innate parameters.
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Variation in input is largely treated as noise.
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Errors are temporary glitches in parameter tuning.
Yet in practice:
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Acquisition is deeply social, interactive, and context-dependent.
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Children adapt to emergent norms, negotiate meanings, and develop creativity in real time.
The “hard problem” is not that children cannot learn. It is that learning is relational, and the model has exiled relation from its ontology.
2. Variation as Peripheral
Languages change and diversify. Dialects emerge, innovations spread, and usage patterns shift across communities and generations. UG treats these phenomena as:
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Parameter settings, or
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Peripheral deviations from an ideal grammar.
Relationally, variation is intrinsic to language, not derivative. By placing it outside the formal system, UG misattributes the source of anomalies to learners or culture rather than recognising the co-constitutive dynamics of language in use.
3. Use and Creativity as Anomalies
Language is not static. Speakers constantly:
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Generate new constructions,
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Repurpose old forms,
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Manipulate pragmatics, tone, and context.
Within UG, these innovations appear as irregularities or exceptions. Yet they are exactly the phenomena that reveal language’s relational character: grammar only becomes intelligible within interaction and meaning-making.
4. Mislocated Ontology
The pattern is now clear:
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The “hard problems” do not reside in nature, the learner, or grammar itself.
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They arise because the system has been formalised in isolation.
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By stabilising grammar as a pre-existing, computational, genetically fixed system, relational dynamics are exiled.
Anomalies are then misattributed to learners or contexts, rather than recognised as consequences of the cut.
5. Consequences for Linguistic Theory
This mislocation leads to recurring methodological and interpretive issues:
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Efforts to patch UG with ad hoc rules or parameters multiply.
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Pragmatics, usage, and social context remain marginalised.
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Predictive success within narrow domains hides broader explanatory gaps.
The hard problems are not errors in the world; they are indicators of closure over relation.
6. Looking Ahead
Having traced the structural sources of linguistic anomalies, the series is ready for its constructive turn. In the final post, we will re-inscribe relation in linguistics, showing how grammar, acquisition, variation, and use can be understood as emergent, relational, and semiotic processes, rather than as mysteries of innate structure.
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