By Juan Uriagereka
As all of you know, every time I listen to a talk by Randy Gallistel, I think I have made a career mistake–I should have studied a different animal. But anyway, in the interests of interdisciplinarity, I will talk about human animals, in particular a puzzle that arises in them when considered from the minimalist viewpoint. This might offer a perspective that could be interesting for the general issues of evolution and cognition that we have been discussing.
As all of you know, in the minimalist program we seek what you may think of as internal coherence within the system–but in its natural interactions with other components of mind (its interpreting interfaces). That is, we are interested in their effective integration. The puzzle that I would like to talk about arises with a phenomenon that is actually quite central in language, namely the hierarchy of Case features–that is, the order in which values are decided within the Case system. I will give you one concrete example, but the phenomenon is general, and the reason the puzzle arises is because the hierarchy involves uninterpretable information, to the best of anybody’s knowledge.
That is, a fortiori, this type of information cannot be explicated in terms of interface conditions based on interpretability. There are very interesting stories out there for hierarchies that arise in terms of interpretable information. For instance Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002) gave us an approach to thematic hierarchy from just that point of view. But the problem I am concerned with is different. We have interesting interpretations of thematic hierarchy, but whatever featural arrangement we are going to have in terms of uninterpretable Case, such an arrangement simply cannot be the consequence of interpretative properties. So where does it come from?