The Science of Language (35 page)

Page 11, On uses of the word
function

The term “function” has several uses, including those in its everyday commonsense employment and its use in mathematics and natural science. There also appear to be some uses specialized for certain kinds of project in biology. An outline of some of the various uses of this term is found in
Appendix II
.

Page 13, On creative options and their role

These last remarks on the “creative options” that the introduction of language affords us (and us alone) reflect an important strain in Chomsky's thinking. I comment here briefly on the idea that human language use is ‘free’ and gives us humans cognitive advantages unavailable to other creatures that lack language.

Unlike what appears to be the case with animal communication systems, human language production (in the head or externalized) does not depend in any discernible way on causal antecedents, can take unboundedly many forms, and yet generally remains appropriate to discourse circumstances. We can and do produce (usually in our heads alone) any number of sentences and fragments thereof, with no causal explanation to be found in environment or elsewhere in the head, and yet manage to be ‘rational’ in what we produce. As Descartes's follower Cordemoy and others put it, internal and external circumstances can incite or prompt us to say or think what we do, but they do not cause. No doubt when tortured or subjected to threats against life people can often be coerced to confess or utter all sorts of things. Nevertheless, they can and sometimes do choose not to – although at very considerable cost.

Freedom from causal antecedence (“stimulus freedom”), unbounded flexibility in what is produced (“unboundedness,” “innovation”), and coherence and rationality (“appropriateness”) are the three elements in what Chomsky calls the “creative aspect of language use.” In work that goes back to at least his
Cartesian Linguistics
in 1966 (the roots were in place before that,
including his 1959 review of B. F. Skinner's
Verbal Behavior
), Chomsky explores the implications of the fact that everyday language use can be and often is not only uncaused (by either current external or internal circumstance), but also virtually boundless (unbounded) in possible ‘output,’ and yet nevertheless (while uncaused and unbounded) generally appropriate to whatever the circumstances of conversation and thought might happen to be. Speech production or action seems to be a free yet reasonable – not random – form of action. Even in a court of law, where one is supposed to constrain what one says and provide an objective description of a single event, fifty witnesses will come up with fifty different descriptions utilizing many more than fifty different sentences to describe “the same thing” – and they would no doubt do so, no matter what they were asked to describe. All their sentences express the way they see the circumstance, and there appears to be no upper limit on what counts as appropriate for this one event, even where all try to converge in the interests of objectivity.

The impact of the creative aspect of language use on the study of language and, more generally, cognitive science (or better, what that impact should be) is discussed at some length in my introduction to the third edition of
Cartesian Linguistics
(2009). For the moment, it is enough to point out that it was quite likely the introduction of language to the human species that led to what Jared Diamond called the “great leap forward” in human cognitive range, giving humans unique means to “solve
problems.”

Page 14, On what is distinctive about human nature (see also
Appendix III
)

Appendix III
takes up the issue of what is distinctive about human beings and discusses two prominent ways to try to explain it, the rationalist-biolinguistic approach endorsed by Chomsky and supported by his theory of language as a natural object and an empiricist approach adopted by the large majority of contemporary psychologists, philosophers, and social
scientists.

Page 15, How to get elementary mathematics from the operation Merge

Here is one way to express how Merge restricted to an element that is merged again can yield the natural number system. Start with 0; if you merge it, you get {0} [in effect, 1]; merge it again and you get {0,{0}} [2]; merge it again and you get {0,{0,{0}}} [3], and so
on.

Page 16, On external and internal Merge

For a linguistic example of external Merge, with the lexical items
eat
and
apples
you make {eat, apples}, often
represented as

Internal Merge arises in (and helps constitute) linguistic derivations/computations. Consider a derived question:
what (John) eat what
. Here we find internal Merge yielding what used to be called “movement” or “displacement” of the ‘what’ inside a derived structure to its ‘edge’; the ‘earlier’ merged ‘what’ that appears at the right does not actually move; nor is it ‘erased’ from the position it originally occupied as a result of an external merge. It remains ‘there’ and is “copied” at the ‘edge’ of the constructed set but – for reasons consistent with the Minimalist Program that would require considerable additional explication – it is not pronounced, the copy is. We do not hear it (or see it, if dealing with sign), although ‘
the mind’ does. So internal Merge – Move in an earlier instantiation of the Minimalist Program – is Chomsky's Minimalist Program substitute for a transformation. It does the jobs that transformations in the earliest and middle days of Chomsky's work for the last fifty years were asked to do, but with very much less additional – and now it appears, gratuitous – machinery required. The gain in economy of computational machinery is part of the reason for the label ‘minimalist’ for the new way of proceeding Chomsky outlines (2005), the focus of a large part of our discussion. Internal Merge not only – as suggested – plays a role in making sense of why the derived structure being used in this illustration is ‘sounded out’ in the form
What did John eat
, it also helps explain why the “what” on the left side is treated as a quantifier (
what thing
) which binds a variable x in such a way that the variable x (the residual and unpronounced “what”) is interpreted (understood) as the direct object of the verb
eat
. So while one hears
What did John eat?
one's mind ‘sees’ or understands John as eating something (x), the first-merged “what.” Representation of the relevant structure and the ‘movement’ of the element often takes this form in linguistics:

As indicated,
there is no
actual movement.

There is considerable discussion of internal Merge in the linguistic literature. Some argue that it is faulty and should be abandoned, some that it undermines other assumptions, some that still other forms of Merge should be introduced, including
Chomsky (
2001
), who wants “pair merge” to deal with what linguists call “adjunction.” I do not go into details; there are several technical matters and often quite deep issues in the background, worth exploring if the reader has some understanding of the technical matters.
A search for ‘internal merge: linguistics’ on the internet will give an idea of what various individuals think is at stake. For current purposes, the emphasis is on seeing that for Chomsky, internal Merge and thus transformations have come to be seen as parts of the ‘conceptually necessary’ machinery of linguistic computation. Internal Merge makes movement
and transformations less of a mystery than they had earlier appeared. And if Merge in its various forms is all that is needed for language, assuming that one is given lexical items (‘elements’ in the above) with at least semantic features, perhaps not phonological, it makes it easy to understand how language and complex thought could have been introduced by a single mutation. It also contributes to the idea that language is a ‘
perfect’ solution to the ‘design problem’ that can be conceived of as confronting a biological engineer – that of taking lexical items as sound and meaning features (or perhaps meaning features alone, if we assume that the original mutation did not involve any linkage to production and perception [‘sound’ or ‘sign’] systems) and combining them to yield a potential discrete infinity of sentences (or at the very least, structured sets of semantic features) each of which can be understood.

There is risk in speaking of a biological engineer solving a design problem; it can invite creationist claims. No claims of that sort are supported by Chomsky's proposals. In essence, he holds that the core computational system of language, found in Merge in its available forms, is the result of a biologically transmissible mutation in an individual somewhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand years ago, a mutation that proved advantageous to the mutant and his or her progeny, to the extent that the progeny soon (in evolutionary time) dominated. For Merge provided the means to engage in all-important complex thought and, where/when linked to sound/sign, it offered means to communicate, plan, and organize to carry out
non-kin projects.

Page 18, Galilean science and simplicity

For a good discussion of how Chomsky employs idealization in his work in linguistics, see Norbert Hornstein's new introduction to the second edition of Chomsky's
Rules and
Representations
(1980/2005).

Page 19, On simplification, idealization, and explanation

Chomsky's points concerning the need for simplifying and idealizing are central to naturalistic scientific research of the sort that postulates ‘hidden’ entities in order to (among other things) explain observed phenomena. This topic comes up several times, including the pages where our discussion turns to Chomsky's relationship to a mentor, Nelson Goodman. Goodman emphasized the tight connection between science and simplicity, and Chomsky's efforts to respect idealization and simplification are hallmarks of his approach.
Chomsky's view of natural science is discussed in
Appendix IV
.

Page 20, On biology as more than selectional evolution

Kauffman, D’Arcy Thompson, and Turing (in his work on morphogenesis) all emphasize that there is a lot more to evolution and development than can be explained by Darwinian (or neo-Darwinian) selection. (In fact, Darwin himself acknowledged as much, although this is often forgotten.) Each uses mathematics in studying biological systems in different ways. Some of Kauffman's more surprising suggestions concern self-organizing systems and the use of statistical modeling in trying to get a grip on how timing of gene protein expression can influence cell specialization during
growth.

Page 22, On Plato's Problem and its explanation

The term “I-language” is explained – along with “I-belief” and “I-concept” – in
Appendix I
. For discussion, see Chomsky (
1986
) and (2000).

“Plato's Problem” labels an issue that any linguist constructing a science of language must speak to: saying (by offering a theory that constrains language growth and thus explains the relevant poverty of the stimulus phenomena) how any child given minimal input can acquire a natural language (or several) quickly, going through approximately the same developmental stages as other children acquiring a language, and without apparent training or “negative evidence.” It is called “Plato's Problem” because it is a bit like that faced by Plato/Socrates in Plato's dialogue
Meno
: a slave boy without training and given only prompting (not being told what the answers are) manages to come up in short order with the basic principles of the Pythagorean Theorem. He does not state the formula, of course; he does not have the tools. However, with what he has, he can go on to produce correct solutions to the length of the hypotenuse of various right triangles. So too the child with language: the child gets no training and is exposed to a limited data set, but has no difficulty displaying adult linguistic competence by around 4. The child cannot state the principles by which he or she speaks either, of course; that would require the child to have a science of language available. But lack of an articulate way to say what he or she knows by no means gives a reason to hold that therefore language must be a kind of know-how, gained by intensive training and familiarization.

Plato's ‘explanation’ of the slave boy's capacity consisted in appealing to a myth of recollection, one in which the ‘soul’ had received knowledge before birth, and this knowledge came to be recollected as a result of experiential input of the relevant sort. Chomsky's explanation is, of course, a quite different naturalistic one that appeals to efforts to understand how automatic and ‘channeled’ development
proceeds.

Page 24, On recursion and its forms

Marcus Tomalin correctly points out (
2007
) that there are various formal ways (lambda calculus, computability, general recursion, Peano-Dedekind [arithmetical] induction . . .) to define recursion, and it is important to say precisely what kind, for not all functions are definable in each. He argues that the preferable one is induction, for it yields what is needed for what is claimed in Chomsky's work, it is the least tied to a specific formalism, and it emphasizes a connection between linguistic recursion and mathematics. So he recommends speaking of (mathematical) induction, not recursion. While his point would be a reasonable one if the issue were that of defining recursion, that is not the case. The issue when dealing with Merge and its introduction to the human species focuses on an extremely simple subset of recursive functions that appear in the inductive and all other approaches to offering a general definition of recursive functions. One would need empirical evidence that indicates that more complex approaches to recursion such as those Tomalin considers are relevant.
¹

Keep in mind that the issue of how to define recursion of the sort needed in the study of language (and perhaps ‘native’ parts of mathematics) is a matter for empirical research, not convenience or
stipulation.

Page 24, On human concepts

There are several central points here. One is that our concepts (RIVER, HOUSE, PERSON . . .) do not seem to have – as Locke might have put it – “resemblances” in the natures of things in the world. They seem to be constructed – not by persons, but by their minds. Locke, an
empiricist, had little of value to contribute to saying how the construction took place. A better answer, offered by a rationalist working at the
same time, came from Ralph Cudworth, who said that the concepts we have available are provided by an “
innate cognoscitive power” that takes ‘occasions’ of input to put together concepts that happen to serve our cognitive interests. While he offered no specific proposal for a mechanism, he did at least recognize that concept-acquisition is virtually instantaneous and cannot be explained in the empiricist manner, so that it demands a devoted internal “power.” In effect, our minds yield concepts, and they in turn can shape the ways we experience and understand, without being shaped by them.

Another is that our concepts do not seem to be tied by some kind of one-to-one correspondence to events or states of the world outside, nor to inner states. Gallistel calls
these correspondences “functioning homomorphisms,” which are partial ‘samenesses’ in abstract mathematical form; environmental maps employed in insect navigation are examples. See Gallistel (
1990
) and (
2008
).

A third is that they (along with a capacity to produce sounds/signs) might well have been – and probably were – in place before the introduction of
language, at least where language is conceived of as a capacity to take associations of sound and concepts (‘words’ or lexical items) and, starting with a finite cluster of these, combine/concatenate them with others to
yield, in principle, an unlimited number of those forms that we call “sentences,” and that Chomsky calls “expressions” consisting of paired sound and meaning instruction sets.

A warning is in order for those who have read Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch's “The Faculty of Language” in
Science
(2002) and who might have developed the impression from it that Chomsky entirely endorses the idea that human conceptual resources are quite like those found in other organisms – probably primates, in particular. Apparently, the difference was discussed in earlier versions of the paper, but a lot was cut out by the editor, including the discussion of concepts and almost everything about linguistics. In comments on the MS for this volume, Chomsky remarks: “About all that remained [on concepts in the article] was ‘Even for the simplest words, there is typically no straightforward word–thing relationship, if “thing” is to be understood in mind-independent terms.’”

One possible way of making sense of how there might be some overlap (as it appeared in the article) but also very considerable difference is to begin by noting that so far as one can tell, human conceptual resources differ little from those of other primates until about age 1, but after that diverge.
Some claims made by Elizabeth Spelke (
2003
,
2004
,
2007
) and her colleagues suggest this. If such a suggestion is on the right track, we must ask just how human conceptual resources come to diverge – what mechanisms are at work and what triggers or activates them. I doubt anyone has a really good idea, but here is one possibility:
perhaps a distinctively human conceptual acquisition mechanism of some sort comes ‘online’ at this age, perhaps sooner. Perhaps that system incorporates a version of Merge, which we have seen on independent grounds to be distinctively human. Perhaps Merge assembles more primitive ‘parts’ that are shared with other creatures. Or perhaps a mechanism that ‘manufactures’ distinctive human concepts was in place before the introduction of language; that would suit Cudworth, among others. But this is speculation.

Independently of a specific hypothesis, however, it is plausible to speak of mechanisms and not something like acculturation as a way to make sense of divergence because there is good reason to think that uniquely human conceptual resources are
shared across the whole population of humans, without regard to culture and environment, and that word acquisition (that is, pairing of sounds and meanings in lexical items in a way that makes them available for the computational system to operate) is both effortless and automatic – requiring that the conceptual and ‘sound’ resources are operational before association, and even before speech production (to explain comprehension
before production). In effect, the sound and meaning (conceptual) resources relevant to language (its articulation and understanding) must be innate, and all that is required for lexical acquisition is pairing of readily activated concepts and sounds. The issues are taken up in more detail in
Appendix V
.

Page 26, On reference; limiting the study (including meaning) to syntax

Chomsky sees the study of linguistically expressed meaning and sound as a form of syntax. The basic idea is that syntax is the study of the ‘intrinsic’ properties and combinatory principles of ‘signs.’ If you think, as he does, of words and sentences not as what comes from people's mouths (not sounds at all, but frequency- and amplitude-modulated ‘signals’) or marks on a piece of paper or other medium (orthographic marks, for example, and surely irrelevant), but as mental states or events, the study of linguistic syntax becomes the study of the intrinsic
properties of what a mentalistic theory of language takes as its subject matter. Syntax becomes, then, a study of linguistic mental states/events in the mind – their properties, how they are ‘computed,’ and what they do at interfaces. Chomsky's approach to language is not just syntactic, but internalist.
Granting that, it is still useful to keep in mind that much of the study of language in linguistics so far, and the primary focus of much of Chomsky's own work, is syntax in a narrower sense, where it is understood as the study of the basic (or core) computational (lexical + combinatorial) mechanism. To distinguish this kind of study from other forms of syntactic study, it is
often called “narrow syntax”; it includes the study of morphology, phonology, and linguistic meaning where these are thought to be included in the core language computational system and what it yields at its ‘interfaces’ with other mental systems. Core syntax corresponds to what in Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (
2002
) is called
the “FLN” (“faculty of language, narrow”). “FLB” (faculty of language, broad) includes FLN and the various ‘performance’ systems that constitute the perceptual, articulatory, and “conceptual-intentional” systems on the other side of the core system's interfaces.

Just how far does linguistic syntax extend? One way to answer is to point out – reasonably, given the areas where naturalistic/scientific research into language has proven successful so far – that one reaches a point in investigating a phenomenon where, while it remains focused on the mind, it ceases to be a study of what is occurring in the language faculty itself (in that mental system, narrowly or broadly conceived). Fodor's study of
meaning passes that point; he places a substantial part of the study of linguistically expressed meaning in what he calls a “
Language of Thought” (LOT). His concepts go even further afield; they go outside the mind too, taking them out of the reach of syntax, however broadly conceived; see
Appendix VI
. Chomsky does not take even the first of Fodor's steps, and for good reason: fobbing off the work of the study of
linguistically
expressed meaning/semantics onto other systems in the head (relations to things ‘outside’ are excluded from the subject matter of theories by the internalist for other reasons) complicates matters, and apparently unnecessarily. They require adding to such a theory a detailed account of another system, and of the precise relations (element to element, presumably) between the language system and the other. That is one of Chomsky's points in the discussion immediately below this. Chomsky's much more austere account of linguistically expressed meanings includes it in the states, elements, operations, and growth of the core language faculty. And as it happens, that kind of study is possible; see Appendices V and VI. As for studies of the rest of the mind and of relations between the components of mind: that can be included in syntax in a still broader sense, so long as that kind of study excludes from its subject matter things ‘outside’ (whether abstract as Frege's senses and numbers were or ‘concrete’), and relations to these,
if any.

Page 27, On Chomsky's view of meaning and interpretation

The analogy between phonology/phonetics and (internalist) semantics is developed in detail in
Chomsky (
2000
: 175–183). There and elsewhere, he speaks of the language faculty offering through its ‘meaning’ (semantic) information at SEM and the complex of resources it brings to that interface ways of understanding or configuring how human minds can understand and – where this is an issue (such as cases of perception and thought about the world – understand and configure our experience and thought about the world. Specifically, he says that “the
weakest plausible assumption about the LF [SEM] interface is that the semantic properties of the interface focus attention on selected aspects of the world as it is taken to be by other cognitive systems, and provide intricate and highly specialized perspectives from which to view them, crucially involving human interests and concerns even in the simplest cases” (
2000
: 125). By “other cognitive systems,” he presumably means – for perception – vision, facial configuration, taste, audition, and the like and – more generally – imagination, and other auxiliary systems. The precise status and role of the semantic ‘information’ provided at
SEM is unclear. He offers an example that helps a bit, one where the linguistically expressed concept HOUSE (which we can think of as a component of the complex of semantic information offered in a sentence at SEM) plays a role. He continues, “In the case of ‘I painted my house brown’ the semantic features impose an analysis in terms of specific properties of intended design and use, a designated exterior, and indeed far more intricacy.” His point can be put in terms of the kinds of assumptions humans are likely to develop, and the coherence of the discourse and stories that they would be likely to accept, given the conceptual resources that this sentence brings to bear. We would assume that the brown paint went on the outside of the house, for example, and if the sentence appeared in a
longish story about how to get to my house, we would be entitled to be upset if the brown paint went on the inside walls because we would be expecting the outside to be brown. Moreover, with the exception of the realtor's “Do you want to see this house?” (where ‘see’ is read as inspect/take a look at), one cannot see a house while on the inside.
House
– sometimes called a “container word” – in sentential complexes like the one here focuses attention on exterior surfaces, not interior. Another illustration is found in Locke's discussion of the concept of a person, which is mentioned as the discussion continues immediately below: in effect, the concept PERSON assigns to persons to which it is used to refer a notion of personal identity of a complex and legally and morally relevant sort. It includes psychic continuity, and
underwrites assigning responsibility to people for acts committed and promises made – and so on. In this connection, Locke says that the concept of a person is a “forensic” one: it is one that is designed for understanding people as agents with commitments (promises and contracts) and responsibilities to meet them.