Vernaculars as object languages

Tarski's distinction between metalanguages and the object languages they "talk about" raises an interesting question about vernacular speech.

Suppose we think of a variety of a natural language--say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)--as an object language, in the Tarskian sense. The metalanguage we use to state Tarskian truth schemas (following convention T) would presumably be AAVE plus whatever logic we need for those schemas. So far, pretty routine.

But what if we stretch out the time dimension really far? Suppose we allow for time enough to get syntactic change to occur in AAVE? If AAVE as object language has syntactic feature f, while AAVE as metalanguage is alike in every respect except for its logical "richness" and feature f, then the semantic openness Tarski insists is needed to avoid liar paradoxes would be monkey-wrenched, no?

In fact, if syntactic change stood between any object language and its metalanguage, wouldn't those two languages stand with respect to each other just as any two (distinct) languages stood with respect to each other? Suppose, for instance, that AAVE is the object language and standard English is the metalanguage, differing in the syntactic features associated with negation. AAVE possesses such features as are required to license negative concord phenomena, while standard English lacks them. Wouldn't liar antinomies be unresolvable in such a situation?

To withstand this, we need to distinguish logical richness from logical difference in the metalanguage (presumably in the proof theory and model theory of such language).

I realize this is dense. I'll try to unpack it later.

Wittgenstein versus Chomsky

Perhaps it is meant as a teaching device, but I'm always thrown off by the attempt to pit Wittgenstein and Chomsky as competitors in philosophy of language. 

From the Investigations (para. 498) (I guess it's Elizabeth Anscombe's translation): "When I say that the orders 'Bring me sugar' and 'Bring me milk' make sense, but not the combination 'Milk me sugar,' that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don't on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect I wanted to produce."

Nothing Chomsky says preempts that story. More to the point, W is urging a long look at how language is playful, undetermined by its formalizable rule structure. C starts with that rule structure, and attempts robust description of it.

This goes to something that's bothered me for a while (see my earlier post about the state of the philosophy of language). What is philosophy of language about, and what should be its ongoing impact? 

Clearly the W versus C pairing (most recently in the student-friendly collection by Nuccetelli and Seay (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008)) is intended to get rival intuitions about the subject matter going, which is great, pedagogically. But why are we pretending that anyone thinks C is possibly wrong or incomplete? Why not begin with Chomsky, finding the clearest recent statement of the principles and parameters approach he is famous for, and then spend time--as philosophers of language--asking the rich theoretical questions it generates: what counts as syntactic change? what kind of phenomena are syntactic phenomena (licensing, for instance, or movement), and what do they share with other logical objects and their phenomena? is it possible, at least in principle, to achieve an exhaustive logical reduction (so to speak) of the syntax of some L, or would there be some residue? 

I simply don't hear enough discussion by philosophers of language about the enormously interesting (and subtle) theoretical problems in syntax. I think we're too enamored with replaying the battles of old for their own sake. 

(Punchline: let the pragmatists have Wittgenstein...)