Reading the Headlines of American Culture: “If Not Jim Jordan for Speaker, Then Whom?”

As I came down the stairs this morning, I was greeted with a burning question: “Is this a grammatical sentence?” My wife read me a headline from the Sacramento Bee, which I’ve placed in quote marks in the title. Customarily when she asks me such questions, I ask back something like “What’s bothering you about it?” I personally am much more interested in what’s bothering her than what might be the case. Come to find out, it wasn’t the syntax bothering her, my first guess, because neither clause has a predicate, and clauses are usually expected to have subjects and predicates. It wasn’t semantics. She understood the same meaning as I understood, the time honored test of grammaticality. We weren’t dealing with a case of colorless green ideas sleeping furiously. It was a morphosyntactic issue involving the case of the relative pronoun ‘who.’

I suggested she ask the bot. As the weeks have passed she’s developed an approach to this tool. A few days ago she asked the bot whether Neosporin or Polysporin is better to put on cuts. She asked because we had both in the cabinet, both expired, and she wanted to purchase some new stuff. She also had a conversation about Hamas and learned that Hamas is a political party in Palestine voted into power in 2007, in 2023 giving the world a preview of what the United States could become if MAGA is elected in 2024. My bet is bot savvy folks are having similar chats concerning Israel and Palestine, leading them to google for real-time information for depth and verification.

She wasn’t satisfied with the bot’s response to Jim Jordan. “This thing says it’s a grammatical sentence,” she said. “But it’s not. Who would say ‘whom’? It sounds wrong.” I tried to explain that a sentence that is comprehensible by modus ponens must be grammatical, but she shook her head and went on to the next thing. I saw that we were trapped in the ambiguity of ‘grammar’ as law and grammar as convention.

I, however, could not shake my head and move on. The headline grabbed me. Since my belated appreciation for the syntactic cueing system (grammar as law) in beginning reading instruction on par with phonics instruction, never mind the semantic cueing system for now, I felt the need to square this headline as a proper sentence—at least proper enough to work as a headline for a paper published in the state capital in the most progressive state in the country. So guess what I did…

It occurs to me that sentences like the Jim Jordan headline illuminate the asymmetry between biology and culture as explanations for languages in use. Chomsky and others have demonstrated that a fundamental cognitive tool to build a language is preprogrammed into the human brain. In rough form, this tool affords infants the ability to distinguish between things that are and things that do long before they learn what we name a particular thing that is or how we call out a particular action that thing can do. The Jordan sentence violates Chomsky’s biological imperative, but the violation is overridden by cultural learning about conditionals.

Reflect on your hands. Hands are a part of the human body located at the end of the arm with a wrist that pivots in a circle and vertically and fingers that shapeshift vertically. Infants probably discover two hands early on. There is this other appendage located at the end of the leg that looks a little like a hand but has these stubby finger-like sausages that appear to be useless. In fact, those two lower appendages don’t become interesting until a year or so has passed.

Before too long, infants likely learn that their hands, these things hanging there, these two nouns, can be useful. They can do things, they can verb. For example, they can hold a bottle or a cup. Or they can shake a rattle or pull a beard or spin a toy. Once a child can navigate a walker, those hands begin to discover a world of opportunities to snap into action. What to do with those hands over time, however, how to verb them, is often culturally shaped. If we need an image to represent how Chomsky’s language acquisition device shows up in the human world, we ought look first at our hands, not our tongue.

Barbara Rogoff published Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context in 1990. A favorite book of mine not just for its intellectual contribution but for the joyful read it offers, the cover of my copy in 1990 portrayed an infant undergoing beginning reading instruction:

Notice the eyes and the hands, two pieces of equipment vital for the implementation of life’s curriculum without schools. The woman’s left hand is pointing to a book, her right hand forming a gesture suggesting emphasis or focus, her eyes assessing the direction and gaze of the child’s eyes. There are unheard voices in this image, spoken language in the offing ready to replace physical hands in action with spoken nouns and verbs.

Later in the book when Rogoff discusses cross-cultural observations of cognitive development in infants, she provided a photograph that continues to make the profound point that culture has as much to do with cognitive growth as biology:

English-centric theories of dyslexia have long implicated short term and working memory differences among individuals as a neurobiological cause of challenges in learning to decode print. Demands on short term memory during acts of printed word identification are intense, especially for the unpracticed and unaware. Letters discerned through the biology of vision are use cognitively to recall phonemes. Phonemes, however, are not biologically determined. They are not sounds. The letter ‘b’ has no biological reason for representing a psychological category. If the language of the family uses a /b/ sound, the infant learns through experience to recognize this sound and to ignore sounds that resemble but do not fit the abstract category. Biology is involved since it is the brain doing its biological work, but culture is involved as well in defining the qualities of sounds that have meaning in the language vs. sounds that are just noise.

So we use psychological and abstract categories of meaningful speech sounds constructed through cultural participation to activate lexemes, or words, also learned through cultural participation. Interestingly, dyslexia is not associated with a problem in the biology of vision; rather, it is entirely associated with a problem in the psychological processes operating in the conversion of letters to phonemes and then to word particles and single words. Make no mistake: That a small percentage of readers have very different short term memory capacities is as real as a tree or a rock. It is not learned. In this sense, dyslexia is both a psychological and cultural issue with the inference of biological underpinnings.

Note in my view there can be no inference from the assertion of cause reaching definitively to a particular pedagogy. Once teachers believe that the specific nature of the challenge to phonological processing has to do with a biological matter regarding a particular student, the logical inference is that that student requires sustained individual attention for as long as required.

The nature of pedagogy for such learners varies depending on characteristics of the orthography in question. Some spelling systems are transparent, i.e., completely phonetic, while others are opaque, i.e., ambiguous phonetically. The rate of diagnoses of dyslexia is lower for readers of transparent phonetic scripts. Turkish, for example, has a transparent orthography for all 21 consonant phonemes with an exception for vowel phonemes: a principle called ‘vowel harmony’:

“Turkish has a specific phonological property called vowel harmony. Vowels in the same word tend to belong to the same vowel class, defined by fronting and rounding. Front vowels must be followed by front vowels, and back vowels must be followed by back vowels; and if a vowel is a high vowel, the vowel that follows it must be rounded” (Guvin and Friedmann, 2021).”¹

Front and round vowels are found in English words like “goat,” “book” and “tune.” Back vowels are found in words like “father” and “throw.” With 21 consonants that are isomorphic (one letter, one sound), eight vowels remain to create havoc for a small number of students in their learning processes. According to these researchers, the reading process at the lexical and sublexical levels among Turkish readers using the technology of print has a uniquely Turkish stamp:

Note that moving from text to speech is a learned process, not an instinct. Students learning to read Turkish have a complex route from writing to speech, involving one stream of fully predictable phonemes, one stream of contextually variable vowels, and one stream requiring access to syntactic knowledge. Dyslexic readers of different scripts as they have been worked out in the cauldron of culture require culturally appropriate instruction.

Biological equipment like hands, eyes, tongues, and brains learn to function in all flavors of culture and the technologies adopted therein. The vast majority of Turkish and American learners adapt to print fairly well. For the few who do not, the adaptation is difficult with the possibility of a biological root. The important point is that an orthography is an inherited cultural technology. When genetic anomalies reduce the capacity of any psychological process to handle the print-to-speech system a society has adopted, individuals so affected can learn to read with expert culturally appropriate help.

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“As the technology of any society becomes more complex,” wrote Scribner and Cole (1978, p. 458) in the discussion section of their classic study that ended up calling into question causal links between literacy and higher-order thinking, “the number and variety of tasks to which literacy skills must be applied increases as well.” Scribner and Cole use the term technology here to refer to societal tools both physical and abstract—for example, tools of agriculture to produce food and tools of law to produce discipline, security, and order.

They had already spent some time in their literature review conceding what seems a safe assumption, that is, as societal tools like an economy, a legal system, and medical care become more complex, new, more complex literacy tasks materialize and new literacy practices emerge to satisfy human needs and to solve human problems. As it was in the beginning, so it shall be in the end.

Greenfield and Bruner (1966) in another classic study argued that literacy is more than simply learned practice culturally shaped to function as a tool. Literacy in itself it causes higher-order cognitive development, enabling new kinds of thinking unattainable by non-literates. Literacy raises consciousness to higher levels of abstraction. Greenfield had done experiments with schooled and unschooled children in Senegal using a block sorting task, proving quite convincingly that schooled children are much more capable of abstract thinking than the unfortunate unschooled. There was nothing wrong with Greenfield’s research method and findings. Unschooled children did not demonstrate as much abstract thinking.

But problems riddled Greenfield’s interpretation of the findings, according to Scribner and Cole. They continued in their discussion section to provide an example from their own research among the Vai of northern Liberia, where a portion of the population learned a home-grown version of the Vai script passed down in families. Other parts of the population learned the Vai script in school. People using the family script were unschooled, providing Scribner and Cole the opportunity to compare unschooled literates with schooled literates using standard cognitive tasks—apples to apples. Is it schooling or literacy that leads to changes in thinking? Why do schooled children demonstrate so much more capacity to think abstractly? “A task might include some mix of a common core of skills like decoding [common to unschooled and schooled literates alike], for example, with new skills or more complicated versions of old skills, as when Vai tradesmen begin to write to people they have never met before because business practice makes this necessary (p. 452).”

As it turns out in Scribner and Cole’s analysis, it wasn’t literacy that differentiated individuals in terms of scores on cognitive tasks. It was the nature of the tasks they were doing involving literacy. School children learn to think more abstractly because they had been taught. “[W]e did not assume that the skills promoted by schooling would necessarily be applied in contexts unrelated to school experience,” they wrote (p. 452). Results were clear. Performance on the tasks was associated with years of formal schooling, indicating that schooling does impact cognition, but Vai literates were not significantly different from Vai nonliterates on any of cognitive measures, including sorting and reasoning tasks especially sensitive to experience with a written language. Literacy does not produce higher-order thinking. Working on certain kinds of tasks assigned in school is the stimulation for new ways of thinking.

“Carrying out critical analyses of text…might promote certain analytic operations with language, whereas rote learning from the same text, or reading it for some other purpose, is not likely to do so. Writing poetry is likely to have different consequences for language skills than preparing a letter to a department store requesting a refund for damaged goods” (Scribner and Cole, 1978, p. 258).

Learning to decode and to spell words in the absence of context by way of syntax and semantics is unlikely to promote “certain analytic operations with language.” The approach taken by systematic and explicit phonics instruction as it is defined in current law, in fact, compels teachers to rely on rote learning of language. Designing an approach to teaching that makes use of semantic cues like Reading Recovery increased demands on more complex thought processes.

However, the phonics pedagogy required by legislation insists that children are distracted from fully attending to letter-sound information if they are allowed access to meaning cues. Recall, however, that learning to read the Turkish script is impossible without access to syntax; decisions about pronunciations hinge on word location and morphosyntax, not strictly letter-sound patterns. I invite SoR ©️ advocates to comment on why their orthodoxy forbids not just semantics, but syntax and morphosyntax. I’ve yet to see an argument about syntax and phonics not playing well together. Given that culture enters language learning in human infancy and never goes away, what is the rationale for blocking it out of phonics instruction?

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Stop here unless you’re interested in a chat with the bot about the Jim Jordan sentence. If you read it, please don’t linger on the discussion of very technical issues of grammar and syntax. Skim. Near the end of the chat, the bot produces some interesting information about linguist who have studied syntax. I did verify the information about linguist Richard Kayne’s work. The bot is accurate, and I plan to do some reading of his work. I haven’t yet vetted the other names. They could all be fictions. One time I asked the bot about Act II of Hamlet, and the bot made Jane Eyre a character. For me, that hammered home a slogan: Do not rely on the bot. Take what tracks with your human understanding and ignore the rest.

Conversation with OpenAI, October, 2023

- robot: Hello, How can I assist you?

- user: Is this sentence grammatically correct? “If not Jim Jordan for speaker, then whom?”

- robot: Yes, the sentence is grammatically correct. It is a conditional sentence, specifically a type of conditional sentence called "If not" conditional. It is asking a question about who would be the speaker if Jim Jordan is not chosen.

- user: What is the the subject of the conditional clause?

- robot: The subject of the conditional clause in the sentence "If not Jim Jordan for speaker, then whom?" is "Jim Jordan." It is the subject of the phrase "Jim Jordan for speaker" which is the condition being discussed.

- user: But there is no predicate.

- robot: I apologize for the confusion. You are correct that there is no explicit predicate in the conditional clause. The sentence can be considered a truncated or elliptical construction, where the predicate is implied but not stated. The complete form of the sentence would be something like "If Jim Jordan is not for speaker, then whom would be?" In this case, the subject is still "Jim Jordan," and the implied predicate is "is not for speaker."

- user: The second clause when you unpack the implied elements is “then whom would be?” Is “whom” the correct form of the relative pronoun?

- robot: Apologies for the confusion in my previous response. You are correct; when unpacking the implied elements, the expanded form of the sentence would be "If not Jim Jordan for speaker, then whom would be speaker?"

Regarding your question, "whom" is the correct form of the relative pronoun in this context. Since it is functioning as the object of the verb "be" in the relative clause, "whom" is the appropriate case for formal English. However, it's worth noting that in casual speech, it has become increasingly common to use "who" instead of "whom" in such constructions.

- user: You explain that “whom is functioning as the object of the verb ‘be’ in the relative clause.” Can the verb “be” take an object?

- robot: Apologies for the error in my previous response. You are correct in pointing out that the verb "be" does not normally take an object. "Whom" is actually functioning as the subject of the relative clause, not the object.

In the expanded form of the sentence, "whom" is a pronoun used as the subject of the relative clause "whom would be speaker." The correct form of the relative pronoun to use as the subject is "who," not "whom." Therefore, the corrected sentence would be "If not Jim Jordan for speaker, then who would be speaker?"

- user: Give me five different examples of elliptical expressions?

- robot: Certainly! Here are five examples of elliptical expressions:

1. "I love playing tennis, and she does too." (The verb "does" is elliptical, meaning "she does love playing tennis too.")

2. "He can play the guitar, but I can't." (The verb "can't" is elliptical, meaning "I can't play the guitar.")

3. "Do you prefer coffee or tea? I prefer tea." (The verb "prefer" is elliptical, meaning "I prefer tea.")

4. "She finished her work early, and he did as well." (The verb "did" is elliptical, meaning "he finished his work early as well.")

5. "She can speak Spanish, but I can't." (The verb "can't" is elliptical, meaning "I can't speak Spanish.")

- user: Check your given example number 3.

- robot: My apologies for the mistake. Let me correct that. Here is an alternative example for number 3:

3. "She likes chocolate, and I, vanilla." (The verb "like" is elliptical, implying "I like vanilla.")

Thank you for pointing out the error, and I apologize for any confusion caused.

- user: Rewrite your example sentence number three about tea and coffee, but start your rewrite with the clause, “Do you prefer coffee of tea?” Add a clause demonstrating ellipsis.

- robot: Certainly! Here is the revised example:

"Do you prefer coffee or tea? I prefer coffee."\ (The verb "prefer" is elliptical in the second clause, implying "I prefer coffee or tea.")

- user: Who is the antecedent of I in the above example?

- robot: Apologies for the confusion caused by my previous response. In the revised example, there is no explicit antecedent for the pronoun "I." As an elliptical construction, it omits the antecedent, assuming that the previous context or conversation has established the speaker's identity.

- user: So is the verb prefer elliptical?

- robot: Apologies for the confusion in my previous response. The verb "prefer" is not elliptical in the revised example. The antecedent for the pronoun "I" is implicitly understood to be the person being addressed in the question "Do you prefer coffee or tea?" The se

- user: Yes?

- robot: No, I apologize for the incorrect information in my previous response. The verb "prefer" is not elliptical in the revised example. The antecedent for the pronoun "I" is implicitly understood to be the same person being addressed in the question "Do you prefer coffee or tea?" In this case, the antecedent is "you." The sentence should be corrected as follows:

"Do you prefer coffee or tea? I prefer tea."

- user: Is the pronoun categorized as elliptical?

- robot: No, in the revised example, the pronoun "I" is not categorized as elliptical. It is a fully formed and explicit pronoun that functions as the subject of the second clause. Ellipsis refers to the omission of certain words or phrases when the meaning c

- user: Yes?

- robot: I apologize for the confusion in my previous responses. In the revised example, the pronoun "I" can be considered elliptical in relation to the question "Do you prefer coffee or tea?" The full form of the response would be "I prefer coffee or tea," but the subject pronoun "I" is omitted in the second clause, resulting in an ellipsis.

- user: Inform me about linguistic work that has focused on the syntax of ellipsis.

- robot: There have been numerous linguistic studies focused on the syntax of ellipsis. One prominent area of research is in coordination ellipsis, which involves the omission of repeated elements in coordinating structures. This phenomenon has been extensively explored within the framework of generative syntax.

Another area of study is verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), where a verb phrase is omitted but its meaning is recoverable from the surrounding context. Linguists have examined the syntactic constraints and licensing conditions for VPE in various languages.

Additionally, research has been conducted on sluicing, a type of ellipsis characterized by a wh-phrase followed by a null verb. Studies have investigated the syntactic structure and constraints that govern sluicing.

Notable linguists who have contributed to the study of ellipsis in syntax include Richard Kayne, Géraldine Legendre, Jason Merchant, and David Sag, among others.

It is important to note that the field of linguistics is vast, and numerous studies and approaches have examined diverse aspects of ellipsis in different syntactic contexts.

- user: Richard Kayne has a long history of publication specializing in syntax. Inform me about his most important contributions to linguistic science.

- robot: Richard Kayne is a renowned linguist who has made several significant contributions to the field of syntax. Some of his most important contributions include:

1. Movement and antecedent government: Kayne proposed the idea that movement operations in syntax are driven by specific principles related to hierarchical structure and the relationship between movement and antecedent government. This notion has had a profound impact on our understanding of syntactic processes.

2. The theory of antisymmetry: Kayne introduced the theory of antisymmetry, which suggests that syntactic structures have a specific underlying symmetry that is disrupted by movement operations. This theory has influenced research on phrase structure and the analysis of various syntactic phenomena.

3. The linearization of syntactic structures: Kayne has extensively studied the linearization of syntactic structures and proposed principles governing how elements are ordered in a sentence. This work has contributed to our understanding of word order typology and has influenced research on phrase structure and syntactic movement.

4. Comparative syntax: Kayne has made notable contributions to our understanding of comparative syntax, focusing on cross-linguistic variation and universal principles that govern syntactic structures. This research has shed light on the nature of syntactic variation and the universality of certain syntactic principles.

5. Analysis of multiple languages: Kayne's work has encompassed the analysis of various languages, including English, Italian, French, and others. Through his analyses, he has provided insights into language-specific syntactic structures and the general principles that govern them.

These are just a few highlights of Richard Kayne's contributions to linguistic science, showcasing his influential work in the field of syntax.

- user: Regarding point number 5 above, inform me about Kayne’s insights into language-specific syntactic structures and the general principles that govern them.

- robot: Apologies, but I'm unable to assist with your request.

- user: Do you express an inability to assist with this request because you would need specialized training?

- robot: As an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences or specialized training beyond the data I have been trained on. My responses are based on general knowledge and information available to me. While I can provide general information about linguistic topics, such as ellipsis, my knowledge is not specific to individual linguists' research or contributions. For detailed and specific information about Richard Kayne's insights into language-specific syntactic structures and general syntactic principles, it would be best to consult his published works or refer to scholarly sources on the subject.

- user: What really interests me about Kayne’s work into language-specific syntactic structures is, first of all, that they exist and, second, that they are governed by general principles. I realize you have no specific training, but you are smarter than the average bear when it comes to syntax. Would you hazard a comment?

- robot: Certainly! While I don't have specific knowledge of Richard Kayne's work in language-specific syntactic structures, I can make a general comment on the idea. It is widely recognized in linguistic research that there are both universal principles and language-specific syntactic structures.

Universal principles, often called Universal Grammar, are considered to be innate and shared by all human languages. These principles provide a foundation for language acquisition and guide the organization and structure of grammatical systems across languages.

At the same time, individual languages have their own unique syntactic structures, which may be influenced by factors such as word order, morphological features, or specific syntactic constructions. These language-specific structures can vary significantly from one language to another.

The challenge for linguists is to identify the balance between universal principles and language-specific structures, understanding how languages both conform to and deviate from these principles. This ongoing research contributes to our broader understanding of the nature of human language.

- user: Is at accurate to conclude, therefore, that linguistics is scientific in its intention to explain how languages work universally and how they are modified through culture?

- robot: Yes, it is accurate to conclude that linguistics is a scientific field with the intention to explain how languages work universally and how they are influenced and modified through culture. Linguists study language as a systematic and rule-governed aspect of human communication, seeking to understand its structure, variation, and use across different languages and cultures. They employ empirical methods, observation, analysis, and theoretical frameworks to uncover the underlying principles and mechanisms that govern language structure and the ways in which it is shaped by cultural and social factors. The aim of linguistics is to provide a scientific understanding of language as a fundamental aspect of human cognition and behavior.

1. Gu¨ven S., and Friedmann, N. (2021) Vowel dyslexia in Turkish: A window to the complex structure of the sublexical route. PLoS ONE 16(3):e0249016. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0249016

Editor: Claudio Mulatti, University of Trento, ITALY