What follows is given in "What's New," dated 1/13/2007. I will make some related remarks under this posting.

1/13/2007
The following is posted at a Kyodai website (http://www.hmn.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/langlogic/index.html).
For further discussion, please visit the other Discussion boards at this HP. I will try to provide remarks directly related to what is given below in the Further Discussion board.

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Hoji Kyodai Lectures (2/14-2/16/2006)
Assessing Hypotheses in Generative Grammar

A fundamental working hypothesis in generative grammar is the existence of the language faculty, understood as an algorithm whose input is a set of items taken from the mental Lexicon of the speaker and whose output is a pair of mental representations - one underlying 'meaning' and the other 'sounds'. The main goal of generative grammar can thus be understood as demonstrating the existence of such an algorithm and discovering its properties. Construed in this way, it is not language as an external 'object' but the language faculty that constitutes the object of inquiry. In the terms of the distinction made by Chomsky in the 1960s, generative grammar is concerned with competence rather than with performance.
　　The data in actual research activities in generative grammar, however, is based on acceptability judgments on a given sentence, whether they are introspective judgments by the researchers or their informants or observation of various other types of reactions by 'subjects' in an experimental setting. I.e., what we deal with in an attempt to discover the properties of the speaker/hearer's competence (the Computational System) is his/her performance (i.e., language use, in a broad sense). This makes it crucial, in the context of generative grammatical inquiry as construed above, to articulate how we can extract from performance data evidence for a hypothesis about the properties of the Computational System. The absence of a minimally satisfactory articulation of how to do this is likely to lead to a situation where different (groups of) researchers base their proposals about the Computational System on different sets of speaker judgments, collected in a variety of ways, that are not necessarily uniform or robust, being subject to a great deal of fluctuation and variation not only among speakers but also within a single speaker. This makes it difficult to evaluate competing proposals in a reliable and objective manner. Recent debates in leading journals (e.g., Language, Lingua and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory) about what should qualify as data, about the use of introspective judgments as crucial evidence for or against a theory, etc. seem to suggest that we have not yet developed a means to evaluate the empirical bases of hypotheses in generative grammar that is compelling enough to the majority of the practitioners. An evaluation of a given hypothesis thus tends to have an arbitrary aspect to it, influenced by such factors as whether or not the terms and concepts utilized are of a theory currently in fashion and whether or not it endorses the standard view concerning the validity of alleged empirical generalizations, regardless of how much 'repeatability' obtains in regard to the predicted speaker judgments on the crucial sentences.
　　In my lectures, I will try to review some of the efforts over the past decade to overcome the problem just noted, including some articulation of a concrete means to evaluate (not to arrive at) hypotheses in generative grammar, making specific reference to Japanese as its empirical basis for an illustration of its methodological point. The methodological aspects of its results should be applicable to research on other languages, as long as it deals with interpretations that are claimed to be based crucially on properties of the Computational System.
　　When one aims at discovering the properties of the language faculty as construed above, one must recognize the following: the Computational System's yielding something as its output does not guarantee that the speaker finds it (more precisely, finds its surface manifestation) to be acceptable; after all, non-grammatical as well as grammatical factors must contribute to the ultimate acceptability judgment by the speaker on a given sentence form under a specified interpretation (e.g., one's knowledge about the world, one's belief system, and the like). The Computational System's failure to yield something as its output, on the other hand, should necessarily mean that the 'sentence form' corresponding to such a 'failed representation' should be judged unacceptable under the specified interpretation. If something is predicted to be impossible due to the hypothesized formal properties of the Computational System under discussion, how can some pragmatic adjustment save it? Only by taking this point to heart and by putting forth a hypothesis so as to yield a negative prediction (the prediction that something is impossible (under a specified interpretation)), do we have a hope of making generative grammar an empirical science or of making it a progressive research program in the sense of Lakatos 1970.
　　The major concerns underlying the research reported here are:

(i)　a. 　How can we try to ensure and measure progress in what we do in generative grammar?
　　b. 　How can we tell whether or not given intuitions of ours are likely to be a reflection of the Computational System?

　　Not every observation qualifies as something that must be accounted for by a theory about the Computational System; it must first be demonstrated that it is most likely a reflection of the Computational System. And, for the reasons briefly noted above and further elaborated elsewhere (e.g., Hoji 2006), to do so would require the recognition of the significance of negative predictions insofar as the research in question is aimed at demonstrating the existence of and discovering properties of the Computational System, which is hypothesized to be at the core of the language faculty. This is the central methodological claim in the research reported here and the lectures are meant to illustrate its content and how it relates to actual empirical materials.

Day 1 (2/14) (Bungakubu Higashikan Lecture Room 4)
Session 1
How (I think) we should proceed if the aim of our research is to demonstrate the existence of and discover the properties of the Computational System that is hypothesized at the core of the language faculty. I will try to provide a brief overview of how we have proceeded to isolate certain linguistic intuitions that are likely based on the Computational System. Coreference to BVA (bound variable anaphora) and any BVA to FD-based BVA (i.e., BVA that is based on a c-command relation at LF), and how we have come to identify FD-based BVA, what problems we have faced and are still facing in doing so, how we have tested our hypotheses, and how the FD-based-BVA-related discussion has been related to other phenomena (such as FD-sloppy readings and local disjointness effects).

Session 2
How one could fail to do what should be done, according to the discussion in Session 1. I will also address general issues of the failure to pay (serious) attention to negative predictions, falsifiability, repeatability, etc., and its consequences (as observed in the field). I will try to go over some correlations among different types of research practice, which seem to me to stem from different types of research orientations and goals.

Day 2 (2/15) (Bungakubu Shinkan Lecture Room 1)
Session 3
Concrete illustration of the methodological points made in Sessions 1 and 2, including how to assess hypotheses in generative grammar -- given that the research goal is as described in Sessions 1 and 2 -- by making reference to two competing analyses of the so-called scrambling construction in Japanese (Ueyama 1998 and Saito 2003). Attempts will also be made to illustrate how one might proceed when one faces apparent disconfirmation of one's negative prediction. The audience will be asked, but not forced, to participate in a series of experiments in class and also on-line afterwards.

Session 4
Questions and comments from the audience, their articulation and responses.
Potential topics to cover, if the time remains, include: (i) attempts to 'apply' the binding theory to Japanese, (ii) quantifier scope, (iii) negation, and (iv) ellipsis, and (v) the Subjacency effects and anaphoric dependency. Depending upon how the discussion goes, I may go over some of these topics in relation to the methodological and empirical points made in Sessions 1-3.

Day 3 (2/16) (Bungakubu Shinkan Lecture Room 1)
Session 5
The topics to be chosen from what is listed above for Session 4.

Session 6
Concluding remarks. Reiterating the main concerns and the proposals.

Readings:
General: Hoji 2003.
Day One: The handouts by Ueyama and Hoji for the 2006 Hokudai Kagaku tetsugakkai workshop, Hoji 1997/2006, and Hoji 2006.
Day Two: Ueyama 2002, Saito 2003, Hoji et al. 1999.
Day Three: (It is not clear what will actually be covered in the lectures.) Hayashishita 2004: Chap. 2, 2.2.1, Kataoka 2007 (to appear in Gengokenkyuu).

Hoji 1997/2006, 2003, 2006, Hoji et al 1999, Ueyama 2002, and Hayashishita 2004 are available on-line. Please visit http://www.gges.xyz/hoji/research/hp-papers.cgi for the first four, and for Ueyama 2002 and Hayashishita 2004, please go to http://www.gges.xyz/hoji/research/hp-Ayumi.cgi and http://enteroflora.com/linguistics/dissertation.html, respectively. For Kataoka 2007, please email me at hoji@usc.edu.

Hayashishita, J.-R. 2004. Syntactic and Non-Syntactic Scope, Doctoral dissertation. Los Angeles: University of Southern California.
Hoji, H. 1997/2006 "Otagai," Ms. Los Angeles: University of Southern California. [Presented at WCCFL 16, University of Washington, March 1997.] Published in A. Ueyama (ed.), 2006. Theoretical and empirical studies of reference and anaphora-Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, Kyushu University, pp. 126-138.
Hoji, H. 2003. "Falsifiability and Repeatability in Generative Grammar: A Case Study of Anaphora and Scope Dependency in Japanese." Lingua 113/4-6, pp. 377-446.
Hoji, H. 2006. "Two Hypotheses about Scrambling in Japanese," in A. Ueyama (ed)., Theoretical and empirical studies of reference and anaphora-Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, Kyushu University, pp. 139-185.
Hoji, H., S. Kinsui, Y. Takubo, and A. Ueyama 1999. "Demonstratives, Bound Variables, and Reconstruction Effects." in Proceedings of the Nanzan GLOW, The Second GLOW Meeting in Asia, September 19-22, 1999. pp. 141-158.
Kataoka, K. 2007. "Negをc-統御する不定語+モ," 『言語研究』131 号 (2007年 3 月刊行予定).
Lakatos, I. 1970. "Falsification and Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes," in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press. pp. 91-195.
Saito, M. 2003. "A Derivational Approach to the Interpretation of Scrambling Chains," Lingua 113/4-6, pp.481-518.
Ueyama, A. 1998. Two Types of Dependency. Doctoral dissertation. Los Angeles: University of Southern California. (Distributed by GSIL publications. Los Angeles: University of Southern California.)
Ueyama, A. 2002. "Two Types of Scrambling Constructions," in A. Barss (ed.), Anaphora: A Reference Guide, Blackwell.