The Science of Language (7 page)

NC:
Well, at least bimodal. But we just don't know how many modalities you can use. We don't have well-developed senses of smells, so we probably can't do much with that. You can do it with touch. I don't know if people can learn Braille as a first
language. It's conceivable . . .

No, actually, there is some evidence for this. Not a ton of it, but there have been studies – actually Carol [Chomsky's wife] was working on this
at MIT with people most of whom had had meningitis around age 1 or 2, somewhere around there – and who had lost all modalities except touch. They were blind and deaf – they could speak; they had an articulatory apparatus – but they were blind and deaf. There's a method of teaching them language by putting the hand on the face. So if you're one of those patients, you could put your hand on the face kind of like this – I think the thumb is on the vocal cords and the fingers are around the mouth – and they had an amazing capacity for language.

This is a group at MIT that was working on sensory aids, but Carol was working on [the project] as a linguist to see how much they know. And she had to do pretty sophisticated tests on them – tag questions and things like that – to get to a point where they didn't [seem to] have the whole system [of language] in their heads. They get along fine – nobody would notice that there's a language defect. They have to have constant retraining too, though: they don't get any sensory feedback, so they lose their articulatory capacities, and then they have to be constantly retrained to do that. For example, their prize patient was a tool and die maker in Iowa somewhere. He got here by himself. He had a card which he would show people if he was lost and needed directions – he'd show [it to] them and [it would] say, “May I put my hand on your face,” explaining why. He could get around – got here all right, lived with his wife who was also blind and deaf. The only problem they had was locating each other. So they had a system of vibrators [installed] around the house that they could use to locate each other. But the point is that [he had] a
capacity for language that you really had to test to find deficiencies – you wouldn't notice it in ordinary
interaction.

Now of course these people are like Helen Keller. [Her condition] was not from birth, and nobody really knows what the effects were of that early – say year and a half – of experience. [It is true that] they have never found a successful case of someone blind and deaf from birth. So a lot is obviously going on in the first year even though nothing is being exhibited. [Nevertheless,] it can be done[; language can appear in modalities other than sound and sight]. Helen Keller did it – and she was a terrific writer.

JM:
To go back to another matter we discussed last time, I asked whether canalization could be expressed in terms of
parameters and the possible channels or paths for development that they provide. I take it that canalization for language would involve not just contributions by what we might call the innate biological endowment that gives us language, but also by other, non-linguistic systems
.

NC:
Waddington's point was that there must be architectural constraints and developmental constraints that are independent of the organism, and they function to channel the growth of the organism in particular directions. So, for example, if locality conditions or other efficient computation conditions contributed to the outcome of language – probably it doesn't have anything to do with language, or even humans, perhaps even biological organisms. That's the idea. I don't think that biologists doubt very much that something like that is going on. But how much is hard to determine.

NC:
That's the third factor. The
choice of parameters is either the first [genetic] factor or the third [other constraint] factor; but the setting of them has to be the second
factor.[C]

JM:
OK
.

JM:
Who was the person who did the interesting work on the eye and the PAX-6 gene; I forgot
.

NC:
Walter Gehring.

 

NC:
His work is extremely interesting; and basically, what he shows – I don't have any expert judgment, but it seems to be pretty well accepted – is that all visual systems (maybe even phototropic plants) seem to begin with some stochastic event that got a particular class of molecules into a cell – the rhodopsin molecules that happen to have the property that they transmit light energy in the form of chemical energy. So you have the basis for reacting to light. And after that comes a series of developments which apparently are very restrictive. There's a regulatory gene that seems to show up all over the place, and the further developments, according to his account, are highly restricted by the possibilities of inserting genes into a collection of genes, which probably has only certain physical possibilities . . .

NC:
. . . yes, the third factor, which gives you the variety of eyes. That's very suggestive; it's quite different from the traditional view.

NC:
Only that it suggests that there is another system that seems to have powerful third factor effects.

NC:
Well, some of Eric Lenneberg's
discoveries are even more dramatic, like the work he did on nanocephalic dwarfs, which is really dramatic. They have almost no cortex at all, yet almost perfect language ability.

NC:
And it just shows how crude our understanding is. But that's not too surprising. Language is the last thing we should expect to understand, because it's the one system that – for ethical reasons – you cannot directly investigate. Every other system you can investigate in other animals. Since there are no homologous structures for language, there's no comparative work. The only comparative work is on the precursors – like the sensory-motor system.

And the same is true on the conceptual side. I just don't see how you can – with our current understanding, at least – hope to get any possible insight into the evolution of the elementary concepts with their strange internalist properties. [Again] they're universal – if you go to a New Guinea native, he or she's going to have basically the same concept RIVER that we have. But we have no idea how it got that way.

JM:
There are lots of just-so stories to the effect that it has something to do with evolution in the sense of selection giving advantages
.

NC:
But what's advantageous about having a concept RIVER that has the features we seem to be sensitive to that could have no discernible bearing on survival or selection? We can make up thought experiments about RIVER which you couldn't even imagine if you're a New Guinea native. Imagine a small phase change that turns the Charles River into a hard substance, which is apparently possible. And then you paint a line on it, and you start driving trucks on both sides of the line, so it becomes a highway and not a river. You can't explain that to a New Guinea native; none of the other notions you need to entertain the thought of a river undergoing a phase change and becoming a highway are around; so how could selection have played a role in leading us to acquire the features RIVER has that come into play when we engage in thought experiments like these, ones that lead us to declare that a river has become a highway?

In fact, the native has the same concept; if he or she grows up here or there, he or she's going to have the concept RIVER. So he or she's got it. But how could it possibly be selected? What function does it have in human life, for that matter? And since that's true of every elementary concept – take, say, Paul
Pietroski's example in his recent paper about France being
hexagonal and a republic. Why should we have that notion of France? It can't have any selectional role . . .

JM:
That seems pretty obvious to me. Let me get back to
Laura Petitto just for a moment and what she had to suggest about the way in which the STG (Superior Temporal Gyrus) looks for certain kinds of patterns. Her idea was that, at least in part, the reason we are bimodal – that we could develop without difficulty in either or both of two ways – was because you're using the same system in both cases
.

NC:
I suspect that there are other domains in which it could happen. Maybe you could do it in dance. I don't know, but I presume that infants would be capable of externalizing their language in dance motions – with their legs, let's say. Or perhaps any movements of your head, or eye blinking . . . In fact, people with severe paralysis.

NC:
We can't do it with smell, because we're not developed enough; we can't use taste, because we don't have the sensory range – maybe dogs could, but we can't. So you're stuck with vision and
hearing. Those are the only adequate sensory capacities that we have. So everything is going to use vision and hearing, and some kind of action that we can carry out with our bodies. That's just given. OK, that leaves certain possibilities. But perhaps any possibility that makes use of those capacities will work for externalization. And she could be right; it's all going to have to fall into certain subcategories, because that's all that our brains can process. So whenever externalization comes along, as an aspect of language, it's going to have to make use of these facts about our nature. If dogs suddenly underwent a mutation in which they got Merge, maybe they'd use the sense of smell.

NC:
You could make up different stories. It could be that our hominid ancestors lacked these
brain structures, developed Merge, and then developed the brain structures. But there isn't enough time for that. The brain structures had to have been there for a long period before anything like this explosion took place. And we do know that there hasn't been anything since, because of
the essential identity of people all over the world. So you've got an upper bound and a lower bound, and they seem to be awful close. So unless something entirely new comes along, the only plausible story seems to be that the apparatus was in place, for whatever reason. And maybe special adaptations like these were used for grunts; after all, you can have polysyllabic lexical items, and maybe polysyllabic lexical items were used, and maybe with the complex characteristics of human concepts, for some unexplained and unintelligible reason. But it still requires the ability to
have infinite generative capacity, which apparently comes along in a flash, giving everything else.

NC:
. . . it might affect the development of other things. We don't know enough about neurology to tell. So maybe some
regulatory gene emerged which both gave Merge and permitted [neural systems to embody it].

NC:
. . .
so little is known about the evolution of the brain that no one can tell.

NC:
I don't think so, because the overwhelming assumption is that language evolved slowly through natural selection. Yet that doesn't seem at all consistent with even the most basic facts. If you look at the literature on the evolution of language, it's all about how language could have evolved from gesture, or from throwing, or something like chewing, or whatever. None of which makes any
sense.

NC:
I think that's misleading. That's because of connotations of the word
design
. Design suggests a designer, and a function of the designed thing or operation. But in biology, ‘design’ just means the way it is.

 

NC:
How is the galaxy designed? Because the laws of physics say that that's the way it's designed. It's not for anything, and nobody did it. It's just what happens under certain physical circumstances. I wish there were a better word to use, because it does carry these unfortunate connotations. In a sense – a negative sense – there's a function. If the structure were dysfunctional, it wouldn't survive. And OK, in that sense, it's designed for something. It doesn't mean it's well designed for survival. So take language and
communication. Language is poorly designed for communication, but we get by with it, so it's not dysfunctional enough to disappear [or at least, disappear with regard to its use for communication, which isn't its only use, by any means]. Take, for example, trace erasure [or in the more recent terminology of copies, non-pronunciation of copies]. It's good for efficiency of structure, but it's very bad for communication. Anyone who tries to write a parsing program [encounters it] . . . most of the program is about how to find the gaps. Where are the gaps, and what's in them? If you just repeated – if you spelled out [or pronounced or otherwise exhibited] copies – the problem would be gone. But from a computational point of view, that would be poor design, because it's extra computation, so there's no point in it. So you cut it out. And there's case after case like that. So take garden path sentences and
islands, for example. Islands prevent you from saying things you would like to say. You can't say, “who did you wonder why visited yesterday.” It's a
thought; you know what it means. But the design of language on computational grounds doesn't allow it. To the extent that we understand them, at least, these things follow from efficient computational structure. But computational structure has no function. It's like cells breaking up into spheres instead of cubes: it just works; but if it broke up into cubes, it would work too, it just can't [because of third factor constraints on possible shapes – in this case, physical ones]. Here too I think that what you find more and more is just efficient design from a computational point of view independent of any use you might want to put it to. And I think that from an evolutionary point of view, that is exactly what should be expected. That's what these papers are about that I probably forgot to send you.

We know almost nothing about the evolution of language, which is why people fill libraries with speculation about it. But we do know something. You can roughly fix the time span. You can argue fifty thousand years more or less, but that doesn't matter; it's basically instantaneous [from an evolutionary point of view]. Something suddenly happened, and then there's this huge explosion of artifacts and everything else. Well, what happened? The only thing that could have happened – it's hard to think of an alternative – is that suddenly the capacity for
recursive enumeration developed. That allows you to take whatever simple thoughts are that a chimpanzee may have, like act or action or something and turn it into an infinite array of thoughts. Well, that carries advantages. But even that is not so
trivial, because Haldane, I think it was, proved – eighty years or so ago now, I guess – that beneficial
mutations almost never survive. The probability of a beneficial mutation surviving is almost minuscule. It does, of course, happen sometimes, so you get some changes. But that suggests that whatever it was that gave this may have happened many times and just died out. But at some point, by some accident, the beneficial mutation survived. But it survived in an individual; mutation doesn't take place in a group. So the individual that had this property – which does carry advantages: you can talk to yourself, at least, and you can plan, you can imagine, things like that. That partially gets transmitted to offspring. By enough accidents, it could dominate a small breeding group. And at that point, there becomes some reason to
communicate. And so you develop ancillary systems. You know, morphology, phonology, and all the externalization systems. And they are messy. There's no reason for them to be computationally good. You're taking two completely independent systems. The sensory-motor system has apparently been
around for hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't seem to have adapted to language, or only marginally. So it's just sitting there. You've got this other system – whatever developed internally – and there's every reason to expect that it might be close to computationally perfect, for there are no forces acting on it. So it
would be like cell division. So then, when you're going to map them together, it's going to be a mess.

NC:
In English, yes. But that's when you think to yourself consciously. And of course, we don't know what's going on unconsciously. So consciously, yes, because that is our mode of externalization, and we reinternalize it. Here, I think, is where a lot of the experimentation going on is very misleading. There's a lot of work recently that's showing that before people make a
decision, something is going on in the brain that is related to it. So if it's a decision to pick up a cup, something is going on in the motor areas before you make the decision. I think it's misinterpretation. It's before the decision becomes conscious. But lots of things are going on unconsciously. There's this philosophical dogma that everything has to be accessible to consciousness. That's just religious belief. Take mice. I don't know whether they're conscious or not, but I assume that they make decisions that are unconscious. So when we talk to ourselves, the part that is reaching consciousness is reconstructed in terms of the form of externalization that we use. But I don't think that tells you much about the internal use of
language. It's evidence for it, just like speech is evidence for it.[C]

Anyhow, whatever this first person was who had the mutation, maybe the mutation just gave Merge. That's the simplest
assumption. If that happened, that person would not be conscious of thinking; he or she would just be doing it. He or she would be able to make decisions on the basis of internal planning, observations and expectations, and whatever. Now if enough people in the community had the same mutation, there would come a point where someone had the bright idea of externalizing it, so that they could contact somebody else. This may not have involved any evolutionary step at all. It may have [just been a matter of] using other cognitive faculties to figure out a hard problem. If you look at language – one of the things that we know about it is that most of the
complexity is in the externalization. It is in phonology and morphology, and they're a mess. They don't work by simple rules. Almost everything that's been studied for thousands of years is externalization. When you teach a language, you mostly teach the externalization. Whatever is going on internally, it's not something that we're conscious of. And it's probably very simple. It almost has to be, given the evolutionary conditions.

NC:
It's not for anything . . .

NC:
It has to relate to the interfaces, for otherwise it would die out. It would be a
lethal mutation. But lethal mutations are no different from beneficial mutations from nature's point of view; they just die out. And in fact many of them remain. Why do we have an appendix?

NC:
If it weren't adaptable to thought, it probably would just have died out. But functioning for something is a remote
contingency; that was Haldane's point. If it's beneficial, it'll probably die out anyway, because statistically that's just what happens. But something may survive. And if it survives, it may be for physical reasons. The more that's being learned about evolution and development, the more it looks like most things happen because they have to; there's no other way. Speculations in the 1970s that suggested – at least for me – the principles and
parameters approach to the study of language, such as [François] Jacob's speculations about the proliferation of organisms – well, they turned out to be pretty solid. The idea that basically there's one organism, that the difference – as he put it poetically – the difference between an elephant and a fly is just the rearrangement of the timing of some fixed regulatory mechanisms. It looks more and more like it. There's deep conservation; you find the same thing in bacteria that you find in humans. There's even a theory now that's taken seriously that there's a
universal genome. Around the Cambrian explosion, that one genome developed and every organism's a modification of it.

NC:
Yes, so it doesn't sound as crazy as it used to. They've found in the kinds of things that they've studied, like bacteria, that the way that evolutionary development takes place seems to be surprisingly uniform, fixed by physical law. If anything like that applies to language, you'd expect that the
internal, unconscious system that is probably mapping linguistic expressions into thought systems at an interface ought to be close to perfect.

NC:
In fact, the human line may have had the accident many times, and it just never took off. And the accident could have been – no one knows enough about the brain to say anything – but there was an explosion of brain
size around a
hundred thousand years ago which may have had something to do with it. It might be a consequence of some change in brain configuration about which people know nothing. And it's almost impossible to study it because there's no comparative evidence – other animals don't have it – and you can't do direct experimentation on humans in the way they used to do at McGill [University] . . .

NC:
Maybe it's even true. Of course, it would have to be pared down to apply just to the
cognitive [conceptual-intentional, or SEM] interface, and the mapping to the sensory-motor interface may not even be a part – strictly speaking, may not even be a part of language in substantial respects – in this technical sense of
language
. It's just part of the effort to connect these two systems that have nothing to do with each other, and so it could be very messy, not meet any nice computational properties. It's very variable; the Norman invasion changes it radically, it changes from generation to generation so you get dialects and splits, and so on. And it's the kind of thing you have to learn; a child has to learn that stuff; when you study a language, you have to learn it. And a lot of it is probably pretty rigid. It's not that everything goes; there are certain constraints on the mapping. I think that there's a research project there, to try to figure out [just what they are]. That's what
serious phonology and morphology ought to be – to find out the constraints in which this mapping operates and ask where they come from. Are they computational constraints? I think it opens up new questions. And the same for
syntax. You can find some cases where you can give an argument that computational efficiency explains the principles, but . . .

It's interesting that people have
expectations for language that they never have in biology. I've been working on Universal
Grammar for all these years; can anyone tell you precisely how it works [– how it develops into a specific language, not to mention how that language that develops is used]? It's hopelessly complicated. Can anyone tell you how an insect works? They've been working on a project at MIT for thirty years on nematodes. You know the very few [302] neurons; you know the wiring diagram. But how does the animal work? We don't know that.

JM:
OK. But now what happens to
parameters? I guess you're pretty much committed to saying that all of the research on them should shift to focus on the mapping to the sensory-motor interface, PHON
.

NC:
I guess that most of the parameters, maybe all, have to do with the
mappings [to the sensory-motor interface]. It might even turn out that there isn't a finite number of parameters, if there are lots of ways of solving this
mapping problem. In the field, people try to distinguish
roughly between macroparameters and microparameters. So you get Janet Fodor's serious work on this. You get these kinds of things that
Mark Baker is talking about – head-final, polysynthesis [which Baker
suggests are among the best candidates for macroparameters]. It's probable that there's some small store that just may go back to computational issues [hence, mapping to the SEM interface]. But then you get into the microparameters. When you really try to study a language, any two speakers are different. You get into a massive proliferation of parametric differences – the kinds of stuff that
Richard Kayne does when you study dialects really seriously. Very small changes sometimes have big effects. Well, that could turn out to be one of the ways of solving the cognitive problem of how to connect these unrelated systems. And they vary; they could change easily.