Deriving the Dialectic Probal Dasgupta, University of Hyderabad 1.

The Two-Stroke Generative Engine Generative inquiry involves two characteristic moves. The first, call it Move Abs, seeks an abstract generalization level where coindexing and identities can be established. The second one, Move Conc, specifies a concrete embodiment level where expressive diversities are retrievable. This neutral wording is intended to abstract away from differences between the syntactic and phonological instantiations of the classical moves. This formulation also ignores the enterprise, exemplified in minimalist syntax and optimalist phonology, of bypassing the tensions that arose with the classical version. That enterprise inherits only the broadest formal outlines of the tensions. It needs to be supplemented by a substantive project of trying to understand them. One fruitful way to deal with a tension is dialectical thinking. In this paper, I propose that generative inquiry should methodologically commit itself to a version of the dialectic that can be derived from the core of the generative revolution itself. My proposal is one response to the tension between description and explanation which is here to stay. The main questions addressed in this paper are, which version of the dialectic is worth deriving, why, and how. Suppose we set phonology aside and take up a limited version of the problem. In syntax, Move Abs generalizes on the basis of coindexing. Its content-fidelity has the option of ignoring cross-reference devices by showing them as repeat copies of nominals in a deep structure. Move Conc particularizes anaphors, pronouns, relatives, epithets, deictics. Its expression-fidelity has the option of ignoring the possibility of seeking any unified anchorage for reference. Move Abs writ large, Generative Semantics, and Move Conc writ large, Lexicalism, are not mutually consistent. But the Moves, which need not be writ large, are. In what follows I argue against the widespread view that the notions of abstract and concrete involved in such formulations have simply been superseded. Contemporary work, I argue, needs to inherit the Abs and the Conc at work in the classical moves, if not their implementations in terms of linguistic levels embodying either abstractness or concreteness through and through. 2. Servicing Could Use a Special Dialectic Would the point of a dialectic simply be to arrange servicing for the two-stroke generative engine? In that case it would suffice to note that observational imperatives concretely push inquiry towards kinky data while explanatory ones abstractly pull it towards unmarked manifestations of UG. We could then propose recasting the descriptive task, of holding the fort for both of these imperatives, in terms of a "describable Language" concept that gives linguistics a point of serious

contact with foreign problems outside the discipline (a description we could retain even when we graduate to the purity of students of problems and not of disciplines). Such an arrangement would have us work out a Special Dialectic just for linguistics. This would not be a pointless activity, to be sure. The duality of Abs and Conc invites elaboration in terms of a dialectic. Our field has neglected this task so far, at some cost. We could address this lacuna by working on a Special Dialectic that gets our act together. But it turns out that this work involves exploring some independently interesting consequences of the core of the generative revolution. These consequences -- which users of generative machinery should take responsibility for -- build something much bigger than this Special Dialectic. They seem to underpin a General Dialectic whose relevance extends into other disciplines and rearranges questions about how to deal with cross-disciplinary issues. If this is so, workers who wish to pursue a comprehensive view of the generative revolution are committed to the ambitious task of the General Dialectic. That task is formally simpler and more approachable than the more modest-looking project of a Special Dialectic just for linguistics. 3. A General Dialectic is Derivable A Special Dialectic within linguistics is not hard to understand in principle. It involves interactions between Move Abs and Move Conc considerations at each step in procedures and in theoretical discussions. But what is the General Dialectic? The General Dialectic is the following pattern-fact: You encounter, at the outset of your interaction with some phenomenon, a perceptible and salient novel formation. Its youthful, novel vitality not only affectively satisfies you but meets relevant needs. But then, unexpectedly soon, you face decay. The new has grown old before your very eyes, dismaying you. Do you wish to continue your encounter? Then you must first break contact with the old site to start afresh, nonetheless picking up old pieces to achieve continuity across the inevitable gap. For the terms of the encounter require a freshness that you cannot statically preserve, and thus have to renew. To summarize, the New becomes Given, counts as taken for granted, and obstructs continued activity. To go on, you need another New, but must stay in touch with the older one as you satisfy this need. Its overt preservation is a non-starter, though. For that would make you party to the decay you witness. The dynamics that involves your perceiving this paradoxical state of affairs in these terms and then responding creatively is, from your end, the General Dialectic. At the other end, partners with viewpoints distinct from yours respond, more or less creatively, to your responses. They too figure in the process as you must see it. Thus the General Dialectic as a whole is always bigger than one viewpoint. A prelinguistic view would begin by suggesting that this pattern derives from and recapitulates the perceptual basis of all comprehension.

You can understand only what you perceive. And you can in general only perceive what stands out as a New percept whose saliency speaks to a relatively limited background. If you let a percept pile up an impressively heavy background, you upset the balance that keeps the perception manageable, and something goes overboard. Then you are forced to close the game and rearrange the chessboard. So each round of piling up a set of percepts and backgrounds supporting them works only up to a point. This approach is useful in its own right. But I had spoken of a linguistic derivation of the General Dialectic, from pieces of the generative action. Consider the following reasoning as a first draft we could tighten on various fronts. Every sentence use is transacted between persons who know that there are infinitely many sentences. This infinity is a formal fact about grammar and a substantive fact about what can be said. At the substantive level, both transactors know that any given sentence is likely to come as a surprise. It stands to reason that this shared knowledge deserves some response. The canonical response takes the form of a division of the sentence into a topic, which keys sentence use into actual or potential shared knowledge, and a comment highlighting the new contribution that uttering the sentence brings to bear on it. That this counts as a response to the transactors' shared knowledge of the normal novelty of sentences is a substantive fact. The nitty-gritty of the canonical response itself is a formal bridge between speaker's knowledge and hearer's ignorance. This bridge is the point of departure for any reconstruction of a general dialectic. It is useful to try to get some clarity over the formal-substantive boundary at this point. Howard Lasnik observes (in a 1997 p.c.) that the formal EPP-relevant subject-predicate division of clause structure is independent of any substantive need for a particular topic in every clause. One may choose to conclude that the general clausal topiccomment split -- not the split in a particular clause -- amounts to a substantive, conventional recognition of the normal novelty of clauses. The corresponding, but as Lasnik notes not identical, formal facts are particular asymmetries in the CP, IP, VP. This picture allows certain clauses to have a trivial or null topic. A linguistically careful version of this story might consider the possibility that a true clause focuses on the New, while a partial or total nominalization of a clause involves packing as Given and thus recyclable material that which counted as New on an earlier pass. That lead is not pursued here. The formal linguistics of clausal-nominal asymmetries and the substantive linguistics of fresh illocutions and recycled material are poorly understood. Formal work has tended to focus on what nominals and clauses share. Only when we factor those aspects out are we likely to make headway on what makes nominals formally different from clauses. Real or imagined connections between the formal and the substantive are an interesting but as yet unexplored area. Hence the naive thematic formulation here. Even those who wish to explore derivations of the

General Dialectic from broadly specified themes of generative inquiry will have their hands full. Others who prefer a more technical characterization of clausal-nominal disparities will of course explore the consequences of using that detailed elaboration instead. 4. The Point of Deriving One To try to outline a formal derivation here would surely be premature. The work of deriving a General Dialectic from the core of the generative revolution involves both form and substance. To build that derivation is to renegotiate the formal-substantive equation itself, and to take on the reconstruction of the dialectic as a careful mode of thinking. If this project is worth undertaking in the first place, then able hands will of course segment it into the usual manageable pieces and do the resulting jobs. Why, then, is the General Dialectic worth deriving from the generative revolution or any other source? Who needs it? At least we do, as students of matters linguistic. Grammar does some of our jobs for us. But eventually many of us find it necessary to return to Language. Consider two examples. The verb give in English, which is in some sense a Basic verb, permits the double object construction, while non-Basic verbs like donate do not. Phonological processes can only be described systematically if both lento and allegro levels are considered. The allegro segment of the language is clearly Basic in the same sense. It is also clear that grammatical tools, even if they allow for some unification of syntactic and phonological reasoning -in a generalized theory of features or admissible operations -- fail to elucidate this notion of Basic. At this point we encounter language as a social object, to be studied by social science methods, as is widely recognized. There we need the General Dialectic. For the garden variety social fact encompasses the comprehension of key patterns of the social fact by some or all of its participants. We have seen that the perceptual basis of comprehension gives rise to the interrupted continuities that a dialectic can help visualize rigorously. To conceptualize adequately the status of language, one must touch base with what the speaking public thinks it speaks, and therefore with public perceptions constituting languages as social facts. The return to language is not institutionally a matter of grammarians hastily patching up a pax linguistica with sociolinguists, of course. The point is for linguists to get a rigorous act together and jointly deal with the literary critical activity domain where the public still thinks the real making sense of language as a social fact has to get done. The main problem for linguistics is not the grammar-sociolinguistics bifurcation, but the factors that prevent our taking on the challenges at the literary site of language studies. One such factor is the paucity of equipment for revisiting the speech vs writing bifurcation that used to be important when linguistics first emerged as a speech-focused alternative to writing-focused

grammatical studies. Another factor is our cognate unpreparedness for a reexamination of the prose-poetry bifurcation that has emerged, in the history of careful aboriginal speech and the history of careful stateorganized writing, as an orthogonal but related distinction whose clarification will improve our understanding of language. These are operational hurdles. There is also a conceptual problem. We need to approach it carefully. As we get better at seeing what is at stake here, the General Dialectic will begin to help us, whereupon we will see why we need to derive it from the part of the generative revolution that we already have a grip on. 5. The Problem of Mysteries One conceptual problem preventing our tackling the literary critical challenge is the unbridgeable gap some of us see between clarifiable Problems and inherently obscure and intuition-bound Mysteries. Am I suggesting that Mysteries should be seen more constructively as simply Very Hard Problems? No, on the contrary. I believe that such a recasting would represent a failure to pose the basic conceptual problem properly. Once we do approach this conceptual problem, precisely that which now makes it hard to conceptualize the Problem-Mystery frontier will help us to cross it. To achieve some clarity on these issues, consider the basic observation that underlies the Problem-Mystery distinction. The Greeks (and classical thinkers elsewhere) concerned with what we may call conceptual issues, philosophical in the modern sense, were saying things compared to which contemporary work cannot be said to have made serious progress. In contrast, the Greeks working in the domains of what now count as empirical sciences achieved a take-off surpassed in current work. Research on empirical Problems involving matters of fact, so the story runs, achieves greater success than work by comparably intelligent scholars on conceptual Mysteries involving matters of freedom. Presumably humans are better equipped to approach the former than the latter. In the sciences, something like the Problem-Mystery distinction has guided the general assumption -- and contemporary academic programmes implementing it -- that contemporary workers need active access only to current writings and practices. These surely supersede the past in domains where progress is tangible. In contrast, scholars in social and human studies are supposed to inherit the textual baggage of earlier work. So the curriculum takes you through it all. This is sometimes associated with the view that "essentially contested" fields fail to exhibit progress; hence the non-obsolescence of their past. In contrast to this conventional format for the Problem-Mystery distinction, I will unpack an alternative view of the deeper conceptual problem underlying the tangle. Contemporary approaches in natural and mathematical sciences actually differ from those in social and human studies mainly in the different Domain Embodiment Assumptions (DEAs)

-- concerning the textual and practical presence or public availability of these fields of inquiry for potential entrants or critics -- and in the Reading Strategies that correspond to DEA differences. Once DEAs are made explicit, we naturally rethink standard responses to them. Such rethinking, pursued into regions one cannot specify in advance, could conceivably undo the Problem-Mystery tangle, without a mindlessly optimistic relabelling of Mysteries as simply Very Difficult Problems. Cutting some red tape, I shall speak of Scientists and Humanists, with the understanding that these stereotypes for scholars in the natural and mathematical sciences and those in textual fields of study are of very limited use. "Scientists", then, work under DEAs that treat only experimental reports and experiment-accountable theoretical writing as constituting DE, the bodily presence of the relevant science. Only published constituents of DE -- public writing or speech presenting scientific activity so defined -- are subjected to scrutiny as to demonstrable truth or falsity. The remainder of utterances by persons engaged in such activities are held to be outside DE and do not invite such scrutiny. "Humanists" act on very different DEAs. For them, and for the public gaze constituting them as humanists, their entire corpus of edited writing and speech is the DE of their inquiry, such as it is, and deserves whatever perception, with or without scrutiny, such inquiry merits. This reasoning is familiar. It has some basis in our common responses to thinkers in these domains. Many of us maintain that Heidegger's complicity with the Nazis or Nietzsche's later madness should be allowed to affect our evaluation of their work, without assuming a sharp separation between the person and the thinker. In contrast, Frege's anti-semitism is considered irrelevant to the merits of his logic. Readers who take seriously Weber's claim that his sociology is a science hold that knowledge of his nervous breakdown should not influence our response to the way he interprets rationality as the key to the Western cultural mainstream. I note the familiar basis of this reasoning in order to stress that the relation between the scientist-humanist contrast and assumptions about how much of your speech you are accountable for is not new. The point is to realize that there is a DEA asymmetry and to explore some consequences of this realization. The conceptual problem in terms of which we can recast the issue of Problems and Mysteries can now be posed as a preliminary question: Should the thinking public, taking into account what can be learnt from the scientific exploration of Problems and the humanistic consideration of Mysteries, continue to leave the DEA asymmetry between the two sets of domains unexamined? What follows once we make the DEAs in their current asymmetric form explicit? Some of the implications worth exploring have to do with the practice of public scrutiny. Why should the written corpus produced by scientists not be regularly subjected to the sort of public scrutiny that we quite properly expect a Heidegger or a Nietzsche to undergo? Scientists

do take part in the techno-politico-commercial public packaging of science through science reporting, science fiction, and other popularizations. Science writing of these sorts is careful, edited prose, rather than casual speech. It follows that beginners in science should be taught to expect such scrutiny and see it as conceptually continuous with the scientific peer review of their experimental and theoretical work. Surely the courage to face public scrutiny should count as part of the falsifiability that supposedly makes scientific statements special. Of course, students training for science will need to be equipped to face such scrutiny if it is going to occur when they come of age. Training is virtually the only phase in the scientific production cycle where intervention might bring about the mind-set modification called for. This seems to me to involve changing the way science apprentices today are encouraged to rush through the socio-historical component of their curriculum which they imagine to be undemanding on the analytical front. Although we are not often asked to give advice about the proper treatment of young quantifiers in ordinary English, surely linguists can do something about the formation of linguists. From the reasoning presented here, or from a cleaned-up version introducing the reader's favourite hedges and revisions, it follows that one must ask whether the research and teaching practices described as linguistic science in the universities of the industrialized countries -- where the natural sciences have been elevated to state religion status -- should be reexamined with these considerations in mind, on academic and not merely pedagogical grounds. These are academic-strategic consequences that follow from the realization that the humanist-scientist difference has to do with a DEA asymmetry that now exists and needs to be questioned. Consequences of another type that merit exploration pertain to Reading Strategies. Why do the humanists still read material from past centuries as part of their training and research when scientists can afford to stop reading superseded theoreticians? I would argue that the reason is not the paucity of progress outside the sciences. Rather, humanists and scientists offer readings of social and natural facts respectively. The way participants in social facts construe themselves, as in narratives and other texts from the culture, precedes and grounds fresh construals by outsiders. The historical, archive-sensitive component of the interpretive disciplines is thus part of the core challenge that makes social inquiry tick. In contrast, natural and formal scientists offer readings of natural and formal facts. Notice that literary critics can and do stop reading old critics even though they cannot trash old literary texts. Scientists, likewise, preserve astronomical records and other data even as they send superseded prose about the data to the attic. Exploring further the boundary between reading natural facts and reading social facts, consider the case of social scientists. If a Marx or a Weber or a Freud creates a theoretical fabric, one reads such an author's work both literarily, as a textual narrative whose coherence has to do with the interpretable integrity of the author's intentions, and

scientifically, in terms of hypotheses that interact impersonally with the work of others to yield falsifiable predictions. How is it that we do not read the work of natural scientists both literarily and scientifically, then? In fact, we do; but the conventions of scientific reading hide this elementary fact. The genres of writing that count as serious science impose DEA-related Reading Strategies identifying the material as a rigorous opposite of literature. Readers of technical scientific writing are made to feel the peculiar emotions of dispassion also brought into play in religious sermons, media commentaries, and other contexts associated with claims that the truth is being told and that therefore emotion would be out of place. The default result is a certain pathos. A systematically inculcated selected avoidance of introspection prevents many readers from perceiving this pathos as a banal emotion elicited by generic conventions. My argument here, of course, rests not on obviously literary devices, but on the use of terms, notations, formalisms, and other markers of inter-scientific textual dependencies that weave the generic fabric of science writing qua writing. Young scholars trained as "scientists" are led by their training to fail to see this function of notational conservatism. This argument may facilitate our transition from a linguistics that sets its sights on emulating the criticism-limiting natural sciences to one that accepts the need for some of our writings to negotiate their rigorous way into social science generic conventions. The transition has been held up by a belief that social scientists who get "hung up on Freud or Marx" are not scholars pursuing a research programme, but victims of some unscientific personality cult. On the contrary, well-behaved docile readers -- tricked into believing that classical physics texts, say, are not anaphoric to the Newtonian corpus -- are the real victims, of an unscientific impersonality cult. The more we allow ourselves to publicly think about these issues, the more seriously rational our field will be, freeing itself at last from long accepted naturalistic (scientistic) propaganda to the contrary. This propaganda cannot withstand even a moment's scrutiny, and has survived only because we have permitted non-accountable (sciencelike) practices of publishing, refereeing, and discussion in the high-profile linguistics periodicals. 6. Substantive Proposals So far I have dwelt on inquiry format issues. I now present substantive proposals. The implications of the considerations provided above lie mainly in the area of changing our Reading Strategies. We need a reasonably far-reaching change, affecting not just "us" in the exact and inexact sciences, but "them" in the supposedly anti-exact cultural studies. My thesis is that this far-reaching change takes the form of a transition from cultural readings of texts, which hastily allow that this or that variation might be a matter of arbitrary cultural diversity that our

understanding has to find a way around, to historical readings, which plug all that we read into a jointly constructed, meaningful, history emerging from our collective cognitive efforts. My proposal for a derivation of a General Dialectic from generative inquiry serves this transition. The General Dialectic makes social and human readings less opaquely cultural and more transparently rational to the extent that dialectical reasoning helps mediate between the apparent arbitrariness of cultural specificities and the achievable transparency of cross-domain generality. At the detailed level, I propose to identify the Concrete with the online real time production, reception, and mutual monitoring of speech. This pits it against an Abstract seen in terms of some off-line support system rooted in the lexicon. At that juncture the Lexis, or human knowledge of lexical material, becomes intrinsically Given, while Performance, or the on-line use of language, counts as the staging of a dynamics of mutually defined Givens and Novels -- an observation one may encode by calling Performance intrinsically Rhythmic. Such a conceptualization polarizes the intrinsically Rhythmic concreteness of performance, and of the Pragmatic study of the contexts anchoring language use, against the intrinsically Given abstractness of the Lexical study of words and of grammatical frames surrounding them. This picture contrasts the Given with the Novel. The Given directly invites Lexical inquiry. The Novel directly invites Pragmatic inquiry. Grammar is where the language system and language use are negotiated in a back and forth between the intrinsic Givens and the intrinsic Novels. When you wish to think about a back and forth, your thinking has to go dialectical. We have seen that it is cheaper to invest in a general dialectic usable elsewhere than to try to custom-make a specially linguistic dialectic. If Grammar is a specifically dialectical zone, it stands to reason that grammarians can, if they try, make a contribution to the general dialectic. There is more where this comes from. Speech contrasts with Writing. At that juncture, Writing focuses on the Givenness of what stays available, whereas Speech focuses on the Novelty and evanescence of what is on immediate offer. One must of course complicate this. Writing casual notes or messages involves an intention to throw the text away the way we forget speech. Speakers on stage perform bookishly, for the record. We are therefore dealing, not with extralinguistic substances, but with a linguistic reimaging of speech and writing that can break the usual alignments of the formal with the substantive. With these and related caveats, the linguistics of speech versus writing also appears on an agenda that seeks to root the general dialectic in the observations about the canonical novelty of all freshly spoken sentences, in all their infinity, that have kept the generative revolution going. Some readers may find this proposal not concrete or propositional enough, and will need to note that proposing a redirection of inquiry means attempting explicitness levels that correspond to the task of agenda construction. Other readers may doubt that this proposal

connects with any transitions for which known energies are available. They need to work out the way the proposal here converges with the postmodern rethinking of the writing-speech, concept-percept, and centre-periphery dualities in literary studies and more recently the social sciences. 7. How Derivations Outlive Reductionism This leaves us with a methodological worry to deal with. The field of inquiry we are postulating sets up a new tension -- between the reductionist verticalism of analytical scientific work, which hopes to derive complex mechanisms from simpler submechanisms, and the antireductionist lateralism of dialectical inquiry that does not expect to derive results in one field from a more fundamental neighbour. How is my oxymoronic talk of a derivable dialectic helpful? I tackle this worry in three stages, labelled as strategic, tactical, and operational. At the strategic stage of my response, I specify that the term Grammar in the proposal above names all processes, before and after Spellout, in any derivation, conceivably redrawing the boundaries for such notions as syntax and phonology. Likewise, the term Pragmatics in the proposal concerns not just conversational maxims unpacking what an ordinary consciousness can believe to be normative cooperation, but possibly more inclusive and specific mechanisms fuelling the normal, semi-aware, flickering, ambivalent participation by speakers in transactions that alternate between a sleepy ritual charade and serious give and take. These respecifications of Grammar and Pragmatics refer to the fact that the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete is already at work in the very terms of inquiry within each of our constituent methodologies. My proposal, such as it is, only brings out explicitly what our work in any event forces on us. We thus have no choice. If we have to do all this, we might as well do it carefully. The dialectic is an obvious format for the appropriate type of care. Existing grammatical and pragmatic practices derive theorems and maxims from system imperatives, not to shrink the space of work, but to let the diverse consequences and unifying systems illuminate each other in these derivations. Grammarians and pragmaticists who choose to go in for a dialectic will of course subject it to current derivational practices without prejudice to other issues. The second, tactical stage of my response focuses on the nature of derivations, proofs, and other rigorous demonstrative procedures. In the context of having to modify our Reading Strategies consequent to the rethinking of existing Domain Embodiment Assumptions as in section 5, one may want to avoid the old approach to proofs (and other demonstrations) that reads them as arguing that, given valid antecedents plus viable demonstrative machinery, the consequent is valid. One may choose instead the approach that reads a demonstration as an unpacking of problem content that highlights -- as lines in the demonstration or

derivation -- points of potential contact between one problem, explicated in a particular breakdown, and cognate problems amenable to similar formatting. Demonstrated points of potential inter-problem contact invite scholars to consider whether and how to handle the two problems together. It is possible to take the position that this is all that a derivation does. It connects two problems without seeking asymmetrically to ground one in the other, or to suggest that the field inhabited by one problem is more fundamental than, or even owns, the field where we find the other problem. The process can be read laterally rather than vertically. To take an example within linguistics, consider the possibility of derivationally connecting the pragmatics of empathy fields, within which anaphors corefer with the anchor and pronominals obviate from the anchor, to a formal syntactic theory of binding in the conventional sense. Does it make sense in principle to derive the relevant piece of syntax from the relevant piece of pragmatics, or the other way round? No, if to derive is to make one field an asymmetric dependent of the other. Yes, if derivation establishes lateral, enriching, nonreductive bonds. The lateral tactics I argue for serve to make Reading Strategies, in the sense of section 5, more historical and less cultural. How is this so? The goal of finding foundational antecedents to which one could reduce consequents had the unfortunate side-effect of leaving the irreducibles, especially in the interpretation-prone cultural domains, look perforce arbitrary and extrarational. This imposed a hasty culturalism on many fields of inquiry and left scientists in the position of tolerating, with a shrug, large areas of hopeless obscurity, creating improbable scientisthumanist coalitions perpetuating a belief in the existence of intrinsic opacity. Once we switch over to a lateral rather than a vertical interpretation of derivation formalisms, this can give way to a serious, transparency-maximizing approach to inquiry in all fields, brooking no exceptions. This is what I mean by the transition from a cultural to a historical approach, and by claiming that the approach advocated here contributes to this transition. Scientific-minded formal syntacticians are not compelled to shrug and tolerate a functionalist or soft pragmaticist backyard. Everybody can work together towards intellectual rigour and serious debate without wearing false tolerant masks. Now for the third, operational stage of my response to the methodological worry. Even these preliminary explorations of the dialectical agenda change our understanding of the way derivations work in straight linguistics. We can see that, as Grammar in the broad sense that includes phonology has moved ahead, Lexis has grown less "abstract" and Pragmatics has steadily become less "concrete". For Grammar has, in alternating phases, taken material away from these domains, and given some back, showing that we have to renegotiate at every step what we are doing with such dualities. As we get used to having to do such methodological negotiation at each paradigm transition, we begin to wonder if we can put such a process into the regular working of the machinery within grammar, if grammar itself can

formalize the fact that the givenness of lexis and the newness that makes pragmatics tick impose tensions that have to be worked out on line. One contemporary response to the idea that Lexis and Pragmatics aren't what they used to be is to try and make Grammar optimal or minimal. In that case Grammar as such seems to shrink and disappear. The process leading to this over the decades has shown classical dialectical symptoms. We were piling rule on rule in the sixties, and the pile crashed. The nineties have been about whittling grammar down, into a Phoenix egg, which then reappears from its ashes, a bird willing to squawk at whoever may have thought that the availability of performance principles might mean that Grammar simply vanishes. If we have learnt from these experiences, surely it is time we converted our knowledge into usable principles. And if these principles are useful, we might as well take formal responsibility for them, both their instantiations in our linguistics itself, and their rigorous consequences outside the field as we know it today.