Language & Communication, Vol. II. No. l/2, pp. 71-73. 1991. Printed in Great Britain.

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GENERATIVISM, GENES AND GRAMMAR

NIGEL LOVE

The theory of the genetic control of grammar-the idea that the grammaticality or lack of it of a given expression may be at least in part determined by the organization of an innate ‘language faculty’-has to face the fundamental difficulty that it is possible to utter and tomprehend ungrammatical expressions, such as (Section 3.1): *What do you wonder where John put?, which violates the Subjacency principle; *John thinks that himself should be nominated, which violates the Anaphor Binding principle; and *Who do you think that saw John?, which violates the Empty Category principle. All these non-sentences fall foul of the parameters within which the three syntactic principles mentioned operate in English; and these principles are, it is alleged, determined by our genes. Nonetheless it is possible to utter such sentences (as, for instance, in reading Newmeyer’s paper aloud), and to understand them. So the question is: just what is the theory of genetic control claiming in respect of such expressions?

It is undeniable that English-speakers do not or would not ‘normally’ say such things. In almost any communicative context bar the discussion of generative grammar, they play no role in the activity of speaking English. In so far as the theory says that the genetically determined make-up of the language organ is such as to be compatible with this state of affairs, one cannot quarrel with it. But if this is all the theory says, it is redundant. For it might bc that people simply choose not to say such things, or have fallen into the habit of not saying them. In which case we might as well talk directly of choices and habits, rather than of a language organ that permits linguistic choices to be made and linguistic habits to be formed. If it is to have any significant content. the theory must be read as offering. an explanation of the choices and habits. It must be read as claiming that the choices and habits are to some extent imposed by the language organ (or, to put it another way, that the choices and habits are not really choices and habits at all). It is not that we do not say these things, but that we cannot, any more than we can grow fins or a pair of wings.

So interpreted, the theory of genetic control is making quite a remarkable claim. A relatively trivial objection is that it is prima facie not altogether supported by some of the examples commonly adduced. As far as Newmeyer’s discussion is concerned, we might point out that in French, a language whose syntactic structure is similar to that of English at the relevant level of generalization, the word-for-word equivalent of *John thinks that himself should be nominated is perfectly grammatical. This suggests that we are dealing with something more superficial than could be plausibly be attributed to our genetic endowment. The genetic-control theorist has an answer to this. He would invoke the idea that the parameters of the anaphor binding principle vary from language to language (or, alternatively, that what exactly constitutes an anaphor is language-specific). Divergences

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Dr N. Love, Department of Linguistics. University of Cape Town. 7700 Rondebosch. South Africa.

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72 NIGEL LOVE

of this SOR are therefore only to be expected. But parrying objections of this kind by appeal to the idea that the detailed workings of a syntactic principle may be given, so to speak, by nurture rather than nature has the general disadvantage of making it difficult ever to establish the existence of the principles themselves by citing what we cannot say.

If that is so, there is a more far-reaching objection to be entered. Has Newmeyer not refuted his own claim in the course of his paper, by doing what he is supposed to be genetically incapable of doing: namely, producing (and indeed meaning something by) utterances of syntactic-principle-violating expressions?

It is not easy to see how the charge of self-refutation might be convincingly fended off. The obvious response is to invoke a distinction between ‘use’ and ‘mention’, and argue that Newmeyer has not actually said e.g. ‘what do you wonder where John put?‘, but merely cited that form of words-and, moreover, expressly cited it as an example of what cannot be said. And it is true that the expressions in question are set off from the rest of his text,

numbered, tricked out with typographical ornaments such as asterisks and subscript indices. These devices are clearly intended to show that where these non-sentences are concerned we are dealing with something of a different logical order from ‘language itself’: language is not being used; pieces of language (or non-language) are being held up for inspection. As a point of logic, this is unassailable. But what difference can or does it make, given that we are discussing the deliverances of a genetically controlled language faculty?

The claim that it dots make a difference amounts to the claim that in mentioning linguistic expressions, or, more generally, in using language metafinguisticalfy rather than linguistically, we arc implementing some faculty of the mind ocher than the language faculty itself. If f say ‘the cat sac on the mat’, at lcast some of the features of the grammatical ~or~figuration of my utterance stand CO be explained with rcfcrcnce CO the Iinguistic endowment of my genes, whereas if i say ‘cat the sat on mat the’, 1 am not using the language organ at all, but some more gcncraf or undiffcrcntiatcd faculty of mind. This seems impfausiblc. Noncthclcss, one might have some confidence in taking the distinction between USC and mention CO be as fundamental as this if it were a distinction that language-users respected more systematically than they do. But in a variety of ways speakers operate as if blind to it. An obvious iIfustration is the treatment of taboo words, which tend CO be taboo irrespective of whether they are used or mentioned. Or consider the difference between My Amsterdam, the Amsterdam I used IO know, has vanished now and ‘My The Hague, the The Hague I used IO know. . . . In The Hague, the article is not being used as such, it is merely part of the name. But this consideration fails to prevent English speakers from feeling uneasy about violating a grammatical rule. The rule may be a syntactic rule of English about permissible sequences of determiners. Or, folIowing Radford (1979), in the fatter case it may be a universal phonological constraint on contiguous occurrences of the same form. The point is chat whichever it is, it appears to matter, in a way that crosses the divide bccween use and mention.

So we may conclude that the family of logical distinctions clustering round such dichotomies as %ISC’ versus ‘mention’ or ‘language’ versus ‘metalanguage’ seems quite irrelevant here: in this context, surely, to use language metafinguisticaIly is to use language. Newmeyer’s language faculty, if he has such a thing, is as much involved in his saying ‘who do you think that saw John?’ as it would bc in his saying ‘who do you chink saw John?‘, or anything else. There seems no escape from the conclusion that, so far as it dcpcnds on saying what cannot be said, the argument destroys itself. The linguistic theory

GENERATIVISM. GENES AND GRAMMAR 73

presented is at best a theory of what language might be like if language users had no linguistic consciousness. It is roughly on a par with an ethnographic theory that undertook to explain human behaviour provided it was allowed to ignore or discount or treat as logically on a different plane certain things that people do in the course of cerebrating about human behaviour.

How has psychobiological generativism got itself into this peculiar position? The most general background factor is a misunderstanding of what was achieved by the shift from prescription to description in grammatical studies. In practice this amounted to no more than a new permissiveness as to what would thenceforth be counted as grammatical. Some of the fustier shibboleths of the pedagogues were abandoned. Lectal idiosyncrasies were admitted (to the point where guor homines tot linguae was seen not as a reduclio but as a valid theoretical stance). But grammatical descriptivism was not a matter of describing something detectable in actual speech events. A distinction between competence and performance was required-which meant that the descriptions were in effect prescriptions, but prescriptions located inside speakers’ heads rather than between the covers of e.g. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. There was no warrant for the idea that descriptivism ushered in a genuine, description-based science of grammar, and hence no warrant for the subsequent idea that pursuing grammatical studies was tantamount to investigating the structure of some part of the mind. A more specific background factor is that, in the early days of generativism, it was made a simple matter of definifion that a language is a set of grammatical sentences. This definition, of course, is no longer adhered to, but its revcrbcrations are with us stil!. It is what makes it possible for Newmeyer to forget that, although there is a sense in which e.g. John lhinks thul himself should be nominated

is not English (that is. if you define ‘English’ as the output of a set of generative rules which do not gcncratc that sequence of words), and thcrcforc, since there is no other natural language to which it could belong, not ‘language’ at all, that sense is not and could not bc rclcvant in the context of an investigation of what in our linguistic behaviour might

be gcnctically given.

The attempt to expel linguistic expressions which are encountered only in the course of mctalinguistic discussions of linguistic expressions from the domain of the linguistic phenomena to be considered is richly ironic. First, it is only by availing ourselves of the possibility of saying what the theory claims cannot be said that the theory can be articulated. More fundamentally, if the boundaries of the linguistic were no wider than the boundaries of the grammatical, it is hard to see how there could be such a thing as ‘grammar’ at all, in any of the several senses of that term. To ascribe grammaticality to a linguistic expression is to imply the possibility of at least contemplating ways in which it might have been ungrammatical. And to contemplate ungrammatical alternatives is to do something both with and in language. The theory that there is a language-specific genetic endowment that takes the form of a device for controlling grammaticality thus purports to explain phenomena that could only have arisen via the exploitation of a linguistic capacity which is either ignored or treated as lying outside its purview.