The visible output left by this linguist can be easily and briefly enumerated; unpardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by an unknown web administrator in a deceitful catalog that a certain website has inflicted upon its gullible readers - few and indifferent though they be. Yue’s true friends have greeted that catalog with alarm, and even with a degree of sadness. One might note that only yesterday were we gathered before his marmoreal place of rest, and already Error is attempting to tarnish his bright Memory… Most decidely, a brief rectification is imperative.
I have said that the visible output of Yue’s keyboard is easily enumerated. Having examined his laptop with the greatest care, I have established that his body of work consists of the following pieces:
This is the full extent of the visible lifework of Jiayuan Yue, in proper chronological order. I shall turn now to the other, the underlying, the interminably heroic production - the work unpronounced. This work, perhaps the most significant writing of our time, consists of chapters 2, 3, 7 of Syntactic Structures and a fragment of chapter 9. I know that such a claim is on the face of it absurd; justifying that “absurdity” shall be the primary object of this note.
Two texts, of distinctly unequal value, inspired the undertaking. One was that of philological fragment of Novalis, which outlines the notion of total identification with a given author. The other was one of those parasitic pop science articles - “Modern language models disprove Chomsky’s theory!” - which Yue would say were good for nothing but occasioning a plebeian delight in anachronism or (worse yet) captivating us with the elementary notion that all times and places are the same, or are different.
Those who have insinuated that Yue devoted his life to writing a contemporary Syntactic Structures besmirch his illustrious memory. Jiayuan Yue did not want to compose another Syntactic Structures, which surely is easy enough. He wanted to compose the Syntactic Structures. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided - word for word and line for line - with those of Noam Chomsky.
Initially, Yue’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Hebrew and Arabic, embrace anarchism, live in a kibbutz, move to Boston, forget all advancements in linguistics and all world history since 1957 (which, luckily, means no Jeffrey Epstein just yet) - be Noam Chomsky. Jiayuan Yue weighed that course, but he discarded it as too easy. Too impossible, rather!, the reader will say. Quite so, but the undertaking was impossible from the outset, and of all the impossible ways of bringing it about, this was the least interesting. To be an influential linguist of the 20th century in the 21st seemed to Yue to be a diminution, less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Jiayuan Yue and coming to Syntactic Structures through the experiences of Jiayuan Yue. “The task I have undertaken is not in essence difficult,” I read in his letter to me on December 7. “If I could just be immortal, I could do it.” Shall I confess that I often imagine that he did complete it, and that I read Syntactic Structures - the entire Syntactic Structures - as if Yue had conceived it? A few nights ago, as I was leafing through chapter 5 (never atttempted by Yue), I recognized our friend’s style, could almost hear his voice in this marvelous phrase: “We can put this somewhat differently.” That wonderfully reassuring linking of one way of explanation to another to address any remaining confusions of the reader brought to my mind a line from Plato’s Gorgias, which I recall we discussed one afternoon:
Socrates: … Do you understand?
Why Syntactic Structures? My reader may ask. That choice, made by an American syntactician, would not have been incomprehensible, but it no doubt is so when made by a psycholinguist from China, a devotee essentially of Frazier and Tanenhaus. The letter mentioned above throws some light on this point. “Syntactic Structures,” explains Yue,
deeply interests me, but does not seem to me inevitable. I cannot imagine the discipline without Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar, Tanenhaus’ experiments with apples and towels, or Chomsky himself’s later Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, but I know myself able to imagine it without Syntactic Structures. (I am speaking, of course, of my personal ability, not of the historical resonance of those works.) Syntactic Structures is a contingent work; Syntactic Structures is not necessary. I can premeditate commiting it to writing, as it were - I can write it - without falling into a tautology. In college I read it - perhaps from cover to cover, I cannot recall. My general recollection of Syntactic Structures, simplified by forgetfulness, might well be the equivalent of the vague forshadowing of a yet unwritten book.
Yue’s fragmentary Syntactic Structures is more subtle than Chomsky’s. Chomsky crudely imposes transformational rules of English grammar, while Yue chooses as his “rules” transformational grammar during the century that saw Merge-based operations and probabilistic models. In his work, there are no feature checking or Bayesian simulation. He ignores, overlooks - or banishes - recent developments.
No less amazement visits one when the chapters are considered in isolation. As an example, let’s look at chapter 2, which deals with the distinction between grammatical and meaningful and contains the famous sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” In that chapter, “have you a book on modern music?” exemplified a grammatical and meaningful sentence, in contrast to the meaningful but ungrammatical “read you a book on modern music?” Chomsky wrote the book in the 1950s; from his English, this judgment is understandable. But that Jiayuan Yue’s Syntactic Structures - in the era of “do you have a book on modern music?” - should repeat those judgments! Yue follows by arguing that “such examples suggest that any search for a semantically-based definition of grammaticalness will be futile”, while being aware of contemporary analyses of semantic islands. That’s the almost divine modesty of Jiayuan Yue: his resigned or ironic habit of putting forth ideas that were the exact opposite of those he actually held. The Chomsky text and the Yue text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say - but ambiguity is richness.)
It is a revelation to compare the Syntactic Structures of Jiayuan Yue with that of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, for example, wrote the following:
One way to test the adequacy of a grammar proposed for L is to determine whether or not the sentences that it generates are actually grammatical, i.e., acceptable to a native speaker, etc.
This method, written in the 1950s by the “ingenious linguist” Noam Chomsky, is a mere corollary of his definition of what a grammar is. Yue, on the other hand, writes:
One way to test the adequacy of a grammar proposed for L is to determine whether or not the sentences that it generates are actually grammatical, i.e., acceptable to a native speaker, etc.
One way! Are there others? The hint at the possibility of alternatives is breath-taking. Yue proposes this method does not evaluate a grammar but tests its adequacy, almost as a scientific experiment. A grammatical sentence, for Yue, is not simply a good or meaningful sentence; it is what could be generated by the grammar. The final phrases - i.e., acceptable to a native speaker, etc. - offers a bold suggestion of how to implement this method while acknowledging its potential shortcomings.
The contrast in styles is equally striking. The mechanic style of Yue - who is, in addition, not trained in computer science and not a native speaker of the language in which he writes - is clear and down-to-earth. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the computer algorithms and English of his time with complete naturalness.
There is no intellectural exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or proper noun - in the history of philosophy. In science, that “falling by the wayside,” that loss of “relevance,” is even better known. The Syntactic Structures, Yue remarked, was first and foremost a ground-breaking book; it is now an occation for nostalgia, strawman attacks, fanatic tech-bro circles. Fame is a form - perhaps the worst form - of incomprehension.
Those nihilistic observations were not new; what was remarkable was the decision that Jiayuan Yue derived from them. He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights “lit by IKEA TÅGARP” to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed. His drafts were endless; he stubbornly corrected, and he deleted thousands of pages from the recycle bin. He would allow no one to see them, and took care that they not survive him. In vain have I attempted to reconstruct them.
“Thinking, meditating, imagining,” he also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts - they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thought, to recall with incredulous awe what some professor emeritus thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every person should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future they shall be.”
Yue has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of research by means of a new technique - the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to learn Government and Binding Theory as though it came after the Minimalist Program, to read Paul Grice’s “Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon” as though it were written by Paul Grice. This technique fills the oldest theories with adventure. Attributing constructional grammer to John Ross - is that not sufficient renovation of those faint linguistic archetypes?