Making sense of Chomsky's revolution

Language& Communication, Vol. 1, No. 2/3, pp. 275-287.1981 0271-5309/81/020275-13$02.00/O Printed in Great Britain Pergamon Press Ltd.

MAKING SENSE OF CHOMSKY’S REVOLUTION

NIGEL LOVE

Geoffrey Sampson, Making Sense. Oxford University Press, 1980.

Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson, Modern Linguistics. The Results of Chomsky 3

Revolution., Penguin Books, 1979.

Smith and Wilson’s book presents a sympathetic account of the conceptual underpinnings of the approach to linguistic inquiry associated with the name of Noam Chomsky, plus (or rather, intermingled with) a sketch of how various linguistic topics might be treated from a broadly Chomskyan point of view. The authors observe in their introduction that ‘this book is not designed as a definitive summary of Chomsky’s views. What we have tried to do is present a picture of language as we see it, largely under Chomsky’s influence’ (p. 10). What has emerged from this decision may be set out as follows. A language is defined as a set of rules, or grammar, generating an infinite set of well-formed sentences (Chapter 1). These rules are ‘known’ by the native speaker, and this knowledge (‘linguistic knowledge’) can be distinguished both from ‘knowledge of language’ in a more general sense, and from knowledge of everything else (Chapter 2). Linguistic knowledge is of four types: lexical, phonological, syntactic and semantic (Chapter 3). Chapter 4, with illustration from certain rules of English, discusses how syntactic knowledge might be formally stated. Chapter 5 argues for and against the postulation of a level of ‘deep structure’. Under the heading ‘phonetics and phonology’, Chapter 6 says virtually nothing about the former, and runs through the rudiments of the generativist approach to the latter. There follow chapters on semantics, pragmatics, linguistic change and variation. Chapter 11 deals with the Chomskyan theory of the ‘levels of adequacy’ in terms of which linguists’ grammars may be evaluated. Chapter 12 (‘What is language?‘) is chiefly about linguistic universals. The conclusion is that Chomsky’s achievement has been to make it clear that language is a reflection of the human mind, not just in the sense that humans have produced it, can learn it, and do speak it, but in the much more specific sense that language is as it is because the human mind is as it is. Nor is it just that humans are intelligent enough to construct and learn languages; rather, they are specially designed to construct and learn the sort of languages they do, and this ability is not a reflection of general intelligence at all. The human language faculty is unique and innate . . . (pp. 256-266).

In contrast, Geoffrey Sampson’s book promises on its dustjacket to show up Chomskyan linguistics ‘as a self-created, self-governing, self-directed, self-justifying-though possibly unconscious - academic hoax’. Part of it is concerned specifically to deny the achievement extolled by Smith and Wilson in their conclusion. The remainder is an attack on Chomsky- inspired semantics. What these books have in common is less obvious than what divides them, but ultimately more worthy of comment. An account of what they have in common might start with a consideration of Smith and Wilson’s opening chapter. In so far as it can be pieced together from the exposition in this chapter, their answer to the

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question ‘what is a language?’ runs roughly as follows: a language is a set of sentences defined as grammatical by the unconsciously known rules which constitute its grammar, and is one of a genetically determined set of possible sets of sentences. A language turns out to be an idealised idiolect, the psychological ‘possession’ of the individual. On the other hand, this chapter is full of unexplained references to entities called ‘English’ and ‘French’; and since the reader will know these as the names of what he naively calls ‘languages’, the lack of any explanation of their relationship to what Smith and Wilson propose to call ‘a language’ can only exacerbate any difficulty he might have in understanding that proposal. Let us penetrate a little deeper. The rules which constitute the grammar of a language have two main functions: ‘they separate grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, thus making explicit claims about what is “in the language” and what is not. They also provide a

description of each of the grammatical sentences, saying how it should be pronounced and what it means’ (p. 14). The authors propose to spend their first chapter ‘justifying the claim

that a language is definable in terms of a set of rules, arguing against some alternative conceptions of language, and examining the nature and status of linguistic rules’ (p. 13). The first piece of justification offered is that speakers ‘often behave as if their language were rule-governed’, in as much as they can, and commonly do, correct the faulty utterances of themselves and others. Furthermore, ‘when speakers of two different dialects of English meet, each is likely to feel that the other is making some mistakes’. Recognition of, and willingness to correct, what for speakers of one dialect count as ‘mistakes’ made by speakers of another suggests ‘not just that speakers of a language possess a set of rules, but that not all speakers of a language possess the same set of rules. In fact . . . it is probably quite fair to say that no two speakers of a language possess exactly the same set of rules’ (p. 15). Given the definition as stated, one wonders why in that case they count as speakers of the same language. The concept of a language which encompasses the possibility of counting different dialects as belonging to ‘the same’ language is simply not the concept which this chapter avowedly set out to justify. The authors themselves detect a different deficiency in the argument as its stands. ‘The speaker who is willing to correct himself and others gives evidence that there is, for him, a

right and a wrong way of saying things. However, it does not necessarily follow that in making these corrections he is applying a set of linguistic rules. He might, for example, be applying a set of linguistic conventions, or habits, or customs, which he dislikes seeing disrupted. In claiming that a language is rule-governed, we are also claiming that languages are not definable in terms of linguistic habits, conventions, or customs’ (p. 16). The main argument for treating languages as a set of rules rather than conventions is that ‘conventions are social constructs: it takes two people to establish and operate a system of conventions. Rule-systems, on the other hand, could easily be constructed and operated by a single

individual’. For example, ‘children learning their first language seem to construct rules for themselves - but they often get them wrong: they produce utterances which are ungrammatical from the adult point of view’ (p. 17). The point here is that children’s linguistic mistakes are commonly systematic. The child who says what that was? for what was that? and Zcomed for Zcame will also say where it is? for where is it? and she teached me for she taught me; and it is reasonable to treat these non-random errors as evidence that the child is operating with idiosyncractic rules. To the extent that his rules differ from those underlying adult speech, we are committed by Smith and Wilson’s definition to counting him as speaking a different language. But there is apparently more to it than this. The child’s rules are not only different, they are also wrong. The child is not, it turns out, to be taken as

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speaking a different language from his elders, but a defective version of the same language. Clearly, such a judgement implies a different concept of a language from the one which this chapter set out to justify. No sooner has the notion of a grammar as a set of rules defining the well-formed sentences of a language been announced than these rules are being taken as ‘possessed’ by speakers. The next part of the argument is an elaboration of this point. Speakers possess the grammar of their language in the sense that they have unconscious knowledge of its rules. Unconscious knowledge is the kind of knowledge involved in exercising the faculty of memory: ‘to remember something is to bring to consciousness an item of unconscious, stored knowledge’ (p. 22). ‘Speakers are able to produce, understand and form judgements about utterances that they have never heard before’ (p. 22); and this ability is explained by the postulation of an unconsciously known grammar which governs the production, comprehension, etc., of infinitely many such utterances. By way of disposing of an alternative account of this ability, the authors continue: ‘Sometimes those who object to the idea of unconscious knowledge and the notion of linguistic rules argue that novel utterances are produced and understood “by analogy” to sentences one has already heard and understood. This does not, of course,

solve the problem of how these latter sentences themselves were produced and understood; but it also raises the much more serious question of how speakers know which is the correct

analogy to draw’ (pp. 22-23). For example, although one can grammatically say it is likely that John will leave and John is likely to leave, one cannot, from it isprobable that John will leave, nalogously produce John isprobable to leave. ‘This raises the whole question of how the correct analogy is determined; now the notion of “correct analogy” seems to presuppose the existence of a set of rules distinguishing the correct from the incorrect analogies, thus returning us, by a slightly different route, to the idea of a grammar as a set of rules or principles for correct sentence-formation’ (p. 23). The problem with this argument is that the rules which distinguish correct from incorrect analogies are simply not the kind of rules which this chapter is concerned to ‘justify’. A few pages earlier, we learned that one reason for seeing linguistic abilities as governed by rules rather than social conventions was, precisely, the propensity of children to construct analogies. We are now told that it would be a mistake to accept what at that point seemed to be the authors’ argument: that novel utterances are produced and understood by analogy. Different speakers may be expected to analogise differently; after all, ‘since each speaker will have heard a different set of utterances, it is not surprising that he comes to possess a slightly different grammar from those of people round him . . . we cannot talk of the grammar of English, but only of thegrammars of different speakers of English’ (p. 26). And the slightly different grammars of different speakers define, in the technical sense with which we are here supposed to be concerned, slightly different ‘languages’. We may well want to say that some of these languages are more ‘correct’ than others, in that some violate ‘a set of rules or principles for correct sentence formation’. But this, ‘higher-level’ set of rules belongs to a concept of a language quite different from that supposedly in question. Once again, we are distracted from the exposition of the Chomskyan answer to the question ‘what is a language?’ by the introduction of a prescriptive notion of ‘correctness’ whose provenance is never made clear. Having established to their satisfaction ’ the ‘psychological reality’ of the rules of a grammar, Smith and Wilson then turn to ‘the assumption that children are innately equipped to learn only certain types of language, and that the form their linguistic

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development takes is genetically determined’ (p. 27). One kind of support for this assumption is the fact that languages ‘do exhibit remarkable similarities’. To illustrate this

one might cite the two main strategies used in forming relative clauses. Certain languages, like English and French, use relative clause constructions like those italicised below: (28)a. The man that I saw was your brother

b. I read the book thut you read (29)a. L’homme que j’ui vu etait ton frere

b. J’ai lu Ie livre que tu as lu Other languages, for example Hebrew, use relative clauses which contain an extra pronoun: translated into English, these sentences would look as follows: (30)a. *The man that Isaw him was your brother

b. *I read the book that you read it The fact that most languages tend to adopt one of these two strategies is itself quite striking: logically speaking, there are thousands of alternative possibilities (pp. 27-28).

At this point Smith and Wilson embark on another attempt to justify one conception of a

language by appeal to another: What is even more striking is that languages which have opted for the same strategy as English and French usually turn out, on closer investigation, to possess traces of the Hebrew strategy too. So, for example, though standard French forms its relative clauses as in (29), many regional dialects of French adopt the Hebrew strategy. In these dialects, sentences like the following are perfectly grammatical: (30)a. L’homme que je I’ai vu etait ton frere

b. J’ai lu le Iivre que tu I’as lu Moreover, although so far as we know there are no regional dialects of English which adopt this same strategy, there are certain complicated (and strictly ungrammatical) sentences of English in which it sounds fairly natural: for example, the following: (31)a. *That’s the kind of answer that, when you come to think about it, you find you’ve forgotten it

b. *This is the sort of book that, having once read it, you feel you want to give it to all your friends To see that these sentences are indeed ungrammatical, one simply has to omit the parenthetical clauses: (32)a. *That’s the kind of answer that you find you’ve forgotten it

b. *This is the sort of book that you feel you want to give it to all yourfriends Clearly (32a) and (32b) are ungrammatical, and we would not want to incorporate into English grammar the principles of relative clause formation that they share with (3 1). However, it seems that this strategy of forming relative clauses by leaving in an extra pronoun is so powerful that even those languages, like English and French, which do not explicitly adopt it, nonetheless show traces of it in certain ways: in regional dialects of French, and in long and complex constructions of English. In other words, relative clauses seem to be formed on broadly similar lines in many entirely unrelated languages. The assumption that human beings are predisposed to construct relative clauses along these lines would explain this striking similarlity among languages (pp. 28-29).

In assessing this argument it should be recalled that we have just been told (p.26) that ‘strictly

speaking . . . we cannot talk of the grammar of English, but only of the grammars of

individual speakers of English’. Yet here we are, three pages later, talking about the grammar of English for all we are worth. What happens if we try to make sense of the argument in terms of the authors’ own notion of a language as the psychological possession of an individual speaker? It falls apart. If ‘French’ is the language of those speakers for whom the pleonastic pronominal reference to the antecedent is ungrammatical, then regional dialects which have such a pronoun are pro tanto different languages from ‘French’. ‘French’, in this sense, no more ‘shows traces’ of a relative clause construction found only in regional dialects than it shows traces of a two-case system found only in historical dialects. In the case of English the argument is still more bizarre. For Smith and Wilson’s own point about the comparable English construction is that it is ‘clearly ungrammatical’. In other words, sentences exhibiting this construction simply do not belong to the sets which make up those languages we can for convenience label ‘English’. It is only by tacitly invoking something quite different from that concept of a language which readers of Modern Linguistics might be forgiven for having by this point forgotten that they were supposed to be learning about that one can talk of a language ‘showing traces’ of a


construction which never actually figures in any of the grammatical sentences which

constitute it. The concept of a language which the authors feel obliged by their terms of reference to ‘justify’ is simply not that with which they want to work in practice. This latter turns out to be a very familiar notion, according to which English and French, for example, are languages comprising many regional, historical and personal variants, according to which it is neither false nor meaningless to say that English is a language which is often spoken ungrammatically; and so on. Given the answer to the question ‘what is a language?’ outlined in these pages, ‘languages’ in this latter sense have no systematic theoretical status at all. There is nothing in Smith and Wilson’s theory between the idealised idiolect and what all idiolects have in common, ‘as a result of genetic constraints on the ability of human beings to learn languages’ (p.3 1). One consequence of this position can be illustrated as follows. The difference between your idiolect and mine is rather small. The difference between your idiolect and that of the Emperor of Japan, is, doubtless, rather greater. But, according to Smith and Wilson, the difference between these differences is one of degree, not of kind. Explaining it with reference to the fact that whereas you and I speak English, the Emperor of Japan’s native tongue is Japanese, simply has no place in a theoretical framework organised around the concept of a language as a set of sentences defined by the rules of an individual’s grammar. The awkwardness of this theoretical burden is at its most obvious in the opening chapter, where the authors’ justification of their concept of a language is undermined by a series of arguments which implicitly deny its relevance. But the boot pinches elsewhere as well. For instance, we are told (p.45) that there are utterances which, although ‘acceptable’, could never be grammatical sentences, because they ‘cross the bounds of particular grammars and incorporate words or constructions from many different languages or from no language at all’. (The example is John’s being a real idiot - I suppose cela va sans dire.) This is a perfectly sensible remark, if ‘different languages’ and ‘grammars’ are understood in their normal, everyday senses. But if a language is essentially an idiolect, it is rather harder to appreciate its force. Elsewhere, whole chapters of the book testify to the strain of a strict adherence to its own self-imposed principles. It is difficult to understand, for example, how those principles can accommodate the notions of language variation and language change, in the sense in which these are understood in Chapters 9 and 10 respectively; while the chapter on ‘pragmatics and communication’ is explicitly devoted to ‘aspects of communication [which] involve non-linguistic knowledge and non-grammatical principles’ (p. 172). The decision to include this will disconcert any reader who remembers having been told (p.38) that ‘the remainder of this book will be devoted to giving further examples of strictly linguistic knowledge and to discussing techniques for studying it’. In short, what the ‘picture of language as [Smith and Wilson1 see it’ illustrates is the inadvisability of portraiture as an occupation for those who see double.

What has gone wrong here? In attempting an answer, one might start by noting the oddity, in an introduction to Chomskyan linguistics, of giving pride of theoretical place to the question ‘what is a language?’ For it is far from clear that Chomsky attaches any theoretical importance to this question at all. Consider the following: If the study of human language is to be pursued in a serious way, it is necessary to undertake a series of abstractions and idealisations. Consider the concept ‘language’ itself. The term is hardly clear; ‘language’ is no well-defined concept of linguistic science. In colloquial usage we say that German is one language and Dutch another, but some dialects of German are more similar to Dutch dialects than to other, more remote dialects of German. We say that Chinese is a language with many dialects, and that French, Italian and Spanish are different languages. But the

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diversity of the Chinese ‘dialects’ is roughly comparable to that of the Romance languages. A linguist knowing nothing of political boundaries or institutions would not distinguish ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ as we do in normal discourse. Nor would he have any clear alternative concepts to propose, with anything like the same function . In the natural sciences, it is common to adopt what has sometimes been called ‘the Galilean style’ that is, to construct ‘abstract mathematical models of the universe to which at least the physicists give a higher degree of reality than they accord the ordinary world of sensations’ (Weinberg 1976). A comparable approach is particularly appropriate in the study of an organism whose behaviour, we have every reason to believe, is determined by the interaction of numerous internal systems operating under conditions of great variety and complexity. Progress in such an inquiry is unlikely unless we are willing to entertain radical idealisation, to construct abstract systems and to study their special properties, hoping to account for observed phenomena indirectly in terms of properties of the systems postulated and their interaction (Chomsky 1980, pp. 217-218; emphasis added).

One source of the confusions in Smith and Wilson’s account of Chomsky’s revolution is their insufficient willingness to entertain ‘radical idealisation’. They write as though they

supdose that to define a language as the set of sentences generated by the rules of a grammar is to say something descriptive of a language, as the term is understood in ‘colloquial usage’ (albeit something unusual and superficially unlikely, whence the need for ‘justification’). But Chomsky’s term ‘language’ has nothing to do with languages in this sense. It is not that sets of sentences are what languages are, so much as that, given the abstract and ‘radically ideal’ concept of a set of sentences, a label is required for referring to it, and the term

‘language’ will serve here as well as any. Entanglement with the problems that arise from equivocation as to whether the Chomskyan definition of a language is descriptive or stipulative could have been avoided by starting with the idealisation which Chomsky first stated in 1965, and which has since survived in his thought unrevised. It is that ‘linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker- listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly, and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance’ (Chomsky 1965, p. 3). The usefulness of this statement as a starting-point for an account of Chomsky’s linguistics is that it removes any obligation to treat as empirical questions what are more sensibly to be seen as a priori assumptions. Consider, for example, the question of ‘linguistic knowledge’, discussed in Chapter 2 of Modern Linguistics. Linguistic knowledge is, we are told, to be distinguished not merely from knowledge of non-language, but also from knowledge of language. ‘The principle behind this [latter] decision is as follows: knowledge about language which is merely a special case of some wider generalisation about human beings does not count as linguistic knowledge. Knowledge of language which does not emerge as a special case of some wider generalisation about human beings is the only knowledge we are prepared to call linguistic. This of course makes the theoretical distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge - the claim that language is sui generis - true by definition; however it still leaves open the empirical question whether anything actually satisfies our definition of linguistic knowledge’ (p.36). Presumably, the empirical question is: is there any knowledge of language which does not emerge as a special case of some wider generalisation about human beings? Bypassing the onerous task of explaining what the question means, Smith and Wilson assume an affirmative answer, leaving the reader to deduce the principle underlying the distinction from examples. Thus, an instance of non-linguistic knowledge is ‘the ability to tell whether a particular remark is socially or factually appropriate, literally, sarcastically, humorously or otherwise figuratively intended’ (p.37). On the other hand, it is linguistic knowledge that is displayed by the native speaker of English who is able to tell


‘when two words rhyme’ or ‘when sentences are paraphrases’ (p.38). The naive reader is left

to wonder what difference it would make if the speaker were a non-native speaker of English, or not a speaker of English at all, or a native speaker of English who was able to tell when two French sentences were paraphrases. He is likely to wonder, further, whether disagreement in a particular case between speakers (native or otherwise) would imply that one had linguistic knowledge that the other lacked, or that both had linguistic knowledge, but of slightly different languages. Moreover, how may well be in doubt as to how to operate the distinction in respect of items of knowledge other than those chosen by Smith and Wilson to illustrate it. For example, knowledge of the rule forbidding split infinitives in English is commonly treated as an instance of knowledge about language rather than linguistic knowledge, in as much as it is explicitly taught rather than unconsciously learned. But there may well be speakers for whom it is unconsciously learned - perhaps through exposure to speakers to whom it was taught with sufficient thoroughness to make it an invariable feature of their speech. Given Chomsky’s idealisation, these difficulties do not arise. First, there is no need to pose ‘the empirical question whether anything actually satisfies our definition’, for the idealisation simply assumes a distinguishable dimension of ‘linguistic knowledge’. Second, it is clear that linguistic knowledge, in this sense, is the knowledge that one has in virtue of being a speaker of one’s own language. This disposes of the possibility that one might have ‘linguistic knowledge’ of languages other than one’s own. Moreover, there is only one such speaker (or, to put it another way, his speech community is ‘completely homogeneous’). This disposes of the possibility of discrepancies between individual speakers. Similar points are relevant to another unenlightening passage in Smith and Wilson’s book: 1977 in Great Britain was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year. The last Silver Jubilee was in 1935, and between these two dates younger speakers of English had acquired a phonological rule of stress-shift which applied tojubilee. In 1935, the standard pronunciation was j’ubilee, with stress on the first syllable. However, in the earliest broadcasts of 1977, the jubilee was largely referred to as thejubil’ee, with stress on the last syllable. Over the next few months. the BBC reverted to the older pronunciation. What had gone on in individual grammars in these few months? Clearly, not everyone had the same initial pronunciation of jubilee, and not everyone had the same final pronunciation. Presumably, many older speakers started and ended with the form j’ubilee, while many younger speakers started with the form jubil’ee and ended with the form j’ubilee. Others might have started with a single form and ended with two free variants. Still others might have ended up with register-variants, the one used with older people or on more formal occasions, the other used with younger people, or on more informal occasions How do we tell which speakers have free variants in their grammars; how do we decide which speakers have no entry for j’ubilee, or which have non for jubil’ee? The claim that grammars are psychologically real, and that there is a strict separation between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge, means that there should in principle besome way of answering these questions (pp. 195-196).

But if there is, Smith and Wilson do not divulge it. Nor is this very surprising. What is surprising, however, is the misrepresentation of Chomsky’s position implied by their even being raised. In the first place, the ‘strict separation between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge’ is not an empirical hypothesis to be confirmed or refuted (in some undisclosed way) with reference to real speakers in the real world. It is, rather, the postulated attribute of an ideal speaker in an ideal world. And - secondly - one of the features of that ideal world is that it is linguistically uniform. Since, as Chomsky recognises, ‘no clear principles are known that determine the range and character of possible variation for a particular individual’ (1980, p. 218), what is required is a theoretical stance from which the question of how to handle variation does not arise. Just such a stance is the one Smith and Wilson are supposed to be expounding. Occasionally, the authors show a tendency to take Chomsky’s ‘radical idealisation’ more seriously. Their account of semantics, for example, is based firmly on the assumption that something called the ‘literal meaning’ of an utterance is to be distinguished sharply from

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the information that it might on occasion be used to convey. The scope of semantics is thus restricted to such meaning as can be attached to linguistic expressions considered in the abstract - that is, to the semantic part of the ideal speaker-listener’s linguistic knowledge. (In practice there seems to be a further, drastic, restriction as to the types of expression susceptible of treatment in these terms: one is put in mind here of Austin’s complaint about philosophers’ accounts of the plain man’s perception of ‘material things’. Smith and

Wilson’s ‘moderate-sized specimens of dry goods’ are English declarative sentences of no great length or complexity. Nothing which is not one such is so much as even mentioned.) Semantic knowledge is treated as the set of prepositions entailed by declarative sentences (sic): ‘those propositions which can be inferred from [them 1 in isolation from any context’ (p. 150). One rught be willing to suspend one’s disbelief in the possibility of doing any such thing if the examples chosen to establish the point were less unreliable. But we are told, for instance, that among the entailments of my son threw a brick at the window are ‘I have a child’ and ‘my child threw a brick’ (p. 148) - which will be less than obvious to most

English-speakers in the case where the son in question happens, say, to be pushing forty. A different aspect of the same problem is illustrated by the oddity of the notion that Johnstole three horses entails that ‘John did something to three horses’ (p. 159). The response to an objection along the lines that one can imagine horses being stolen merely by, say, illegitimately altering the terms of a will, would presumably be that ‘doing something to’ three horses is not here to be taken as necessarily implying some kind of activity directed at them physically, but understood in some wider sense - the sense in question being, one supposes, just that in which it has to be taken in order for there to be no difficulty in accepting the necessity of the entailment. In any particular case, the sense in which one is required to take the form of words expressing a proposition held to be entailed by a sentence in order to see that it is indeed entailed by it will depend on the context. Thus the absurdity of the assumption underlying this treatment of meaning - that the proposition expressed by a declarative form of words is deducible, in the abstract, directly from the form of words used to express it - holds not only for those declarative forms of words which Smith and Wilson call ‘sentences’, but also for those which they call ‘propositions’. What emerges from the attempt to base semantics on the assumption that expressions have contextless ‘literal’ meaning is thus ultimately unconvincing; but at least there is no nonsense here about whether there is anything that actually answers to this aspect of ‘linguistic knowledge’. This question is - rightly, in the context of a presentation of Chomskyan semantics - overlooked as irrelevant. There is a contrast here with the semantic part of Sampson’s Making Sense. Taking as his epigraph von Humboldt’s dictum that ‘language is not a finished product but an activity’,2 Sampson offers an entertainingly detailed account of the reasons for holding that natural languages are not semantically determinate, and that any attempt to treat the meanings of their expressions in terms of stateable rules is fundamentally ill-conceived. Sampson starts by arguing against the ‘notion that a scientific account of meaning in a natural language will involve a system of translation between that language and another language which has to be discovered by theoretical inquiry’ (p.20). Translational semantics has in practice involved a componential interpretation of word-meaning: Sampson objects to the implication that ‘the word-concepts potentially available to a human are exhaustively defined by specifying the list of atomic semantic features and the principles governing their combination into semantic ‘molecules’, (p.22). He then considers at length ‘a typical question of the kind which would have to be given some answer in a semantic description of


English: the question whether possession of a handle is a criteria1 feature for the application of the word “cup” to an object’ (p. 46), and concludes that such questions are unanswerable: ‘we all spend our time guessing what sets of criteria1 features would explain the application of given words to given things in the speech we hear around us (and in the writing we read), while trying to conform our own usage to our conjectural reconstructions of each other’s criteria in order to be understood. It is not clear what it could mean in such a context to talk of a standard of correctness which a given speaker has or has not achieved with respect to his use of a given word’ (p. 48)... ‘What I am arguing is that the set of properties that speakers may use to justify the application of a word is not determinate, because objects do not come to our attention labelled with a fixed set of properties, and our minds do not impose a fixed set of categories on our experience.. . we create ways of seeing things as similar’ (pp. 54-55). He illustrates the thesis that semantic change in the lexicon is a matter of drift, rather than ‘the sharp transition corresponding to the acquisition or

dropping of a semantic feature’ (p. 58), with a reconstruction of how the adjectivegay might have moved from meaning something like ‘happy or enjoyable in a carefree or witty way’ to something like ‘homosexual, but with connotations of allegiance to a style of life deemed to be as honourable as others rather than in a clinical sense’ (pp. 56-57). Changes in our beliefs can lead to surprising changes in the meaning of quite basic words: the example is what has happened tofather, given the possibility of changing one’s sex (from A is B’sfather one can no longer reliably infer ‘A is male’). There is a routine instance of a non-anomalous interpretation of a linguist’s would-be anomalous sentence [Katz and Fodor’s (1963) he painted the wall with silentpaint is the example: it would leave Sampson ‘quite unstunned to learn that, say, when sprayguns are used for applying paint, certain types of paint make a noise on leaving the nozzle, and in that case I should expect sentences like Katz and Fodor’s to occur in the speech of paint-sprayers’]; and an interesting assault on the dichotomy of synthetic and analytic truths, based on an investigation of speakers’ intuitions of analyticity. Sampson further points out that the ‘creative view of mind’ which he advocates implies that there is no sharp distinction between figurative language and literal usage, and offers ‘solid empirical evidence against the view that recognisably figurative usage is a special activity of literary men, alien to the ordinary speaker in the street’ (p. 77). Furthermore, Sampson claims, the ways in which a given word can be used metaphorically are themselves unpredictable; and he argues against contrary evidence from interlingual comparisons of

figurative usage. In short, ‘people’s semantic behaviour cannot be predicted by rules, because it is determined by creative thought’ (p. 68). This is all well urged. But as an attack on Chomsky it misses, or perhaps ignores, the point. Like Smith and Wilson, Sampson refuses to confront the fact that Chomsky’s object of study is the ideal speaker-listener in his ideal world. And one of the features which make this world ideal is that the meanings of the expressions of its languages are fixed and determinable. If semantic determinacy is simply postulated for the entity that Chomsky is studying, it is in the last resort idle to object that this is not a feature of something else -real languages in the real world - that Chomsky is not studying. The remainder of Making Sense is concerned primarily with syntax, in connection with which Sampson adopts what is in the context a rather odd theoretical position. Syntactically, it seems, language is not so much an activity as a finished product. One obvious objection to this is that, like the semantics, the syntax of a language is liable to change. As Sampson has pointed out elsewhere (1975, p. 59), ‘the [syntactic] rules of a language must change occasionally, or we would still be speaking Chaucerian English’. And if this is so, then the

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conclusion must surely be that the syntactic rules of a language are ‘creatively indeterminate’. And indeed, Sampson concedes that this view is ‘entirely coherent’ (p. 107), although he does not himself ‘believe it is correct’ (p. 108). In the course of the well- chronicled intellectual odyssey that has taken Sampson from writing a book (1975) that ‘strongly supports Chomsky’s novel way of looking at language’ (p. 9) to one which concludes, five years later, that Chomskyan linguistics is a ‘mirage’ (p. 210) and its aims ‘mare’s nests’ (p. 21 I), he has successively jettisoned virtually all aspects of the Chomskyan position save the determinacy of syntax; and it is to be suspected that there is more to the survival of this doctrine than the sketchy or irrelevant arguments offered in its support either here [e.g. that ‘when people speak more deliberately or practice a speech to themselves before delivering it, their output contains far fewer syntactic unconventionalities’ (p. 108)lor elsewhere [e.g. that syntactic change is a ‘quite infrequent occurrence’ (1975 p. 59)l. The overt reason for its survival is this. In the latter part of Making Sense, Sampson wishes to offer an argument against Chomsky’s claim that the existence of syntactic universals lends support to the view that the acquisition of linguistic knowledge is the genetically determined maturation, under environmental influence, of a distinct mental ‘faculty of language’. In order to do this, Sampson supposes, he needs first to claim that the syntax of a language is in principle determinable, and that ‘a grammar [i.e. syntax] can be just as much a predictive scientific theory as can a theory in physics or meteorology’. With this point established,3 the argument continues: ‘to say that a phenomenon is an appropriate subject for scientific theorising is to say that the various instances of that phenomenon all obey some general laws, so that they resemble one another more than, logically, they need’ (p. 110). The point of this manoeuvre is that it opens the way to an argument to the effect that such general syntactic laws as can be established may be explained in evolutionary terms, and do not therefore offer evidence for the view that ‘humans.. . are specially designed to construct and learn the sort of languages they do’ (Smith and Wilson, p. 266). Thus, in order to attack Chomsky’s doctrine at this point, Sampson seems to feel obliged to adopt the Chomskyan stance on the determinacy of syntax. But it is not obvious that in fact he needs to adopt it - not, at least, for purposes of the argument against innateness: there may well be universal truths about syntactic structures, whether the set of such structures is determinable or not. On the other hand - and this is the covert reason - it is obvious that he needs to adopt it if his ultimate advocacy of a return to the post-Bloomfieldian ‘scientific description of the various and fascinating phonological and syntactic structures of different individual languages’ (p. 211) is to sound convincing. For if these aspects of language were not taken to be ‘finished products’, Sampson’s arguments against the possibility of a ‘scientific’ semantics would apply to them too. With the aid of an argument borrowed from the mathematics of evolution, Sampson advances the view that such syntactic universals as have been reasonably well established - essentially, that the grammatical word-sequences of all languages have an internal hierarchical structure - can be explained in terms of the greater fitness for survival of internally structured complex organisms. There is thus no reason to suppose that the existence of limitations to the diversity of possible syntactic structures is evidence for the innateness of a disposition to learn languages exhibiting only structures which fall within those limitations: on the reasonable assumption that the history of language from its origins shows a movement from syntactic simplicity to syntactic complexity, there are grounds for supposing that the only syntactically complex structures that could have evolved and survived are those which show an internal hierarchical ordering of substructures.


This argument is pursued through four chapters of Makipg Sense. It was heralded in the

introductory chapter with the claim that ‘not merely do [Chomskyanl syntactic universals fail to support the view that linguistic structure is inherited.. . on the contrary, they turn out to constitute decisive evidence against the genetic inheritance of language and in favour of the creative-mind supposition that individuals learn their mother tongue from scratch as a feat of intellect’ (p. 18). But Sampson has here promised more than he can ultimately deliver, which turns out to be merely that the evolutionary explanation of syntactic universals is better than the genetic account, in that the former explains why languages have the universals that they have;

whereas ‘although the hypothesis of innate mental structuring leads to the prediction that there will be some structural universals of language, it gives no way of predicting what the universal features will be’ (p. 175), and ‘it is a cliche of the philosophy of science... that stronger theories, i.e. theories which make relatively specific predictions are preferred to weaker alternatives’ (p. 176). Thus, the claim that languages have the syntactic universals that they have because these are the only syntactic universals which could have evolved is not held to be incompatible with the claim that infants are genetically programmed to acquire languages with just those universals. It is merely that, given the truth of the former, the latter

is unnecessary. But the question whether or not infants are genetically disposed to acquire a language exhibiting certain features is in principle independent of the role of an affirmative answer to that question as provider of an explanation of the universality of those features. In any case, Chomsky’s radical idealisation of the subject matter of linguistic theory remains

fundamentally untouched by this argument against innateness. ‘The assumption that children are innately equipped to learn only certain types of language, and that the form their linguistic development takes is genetically determined’ (Smith and Wilson, p. 27) is not destroyed even if Sampson’s argument is successful. It is merely left bereft of supporting evidence. But since it is an assumption, this may not matter much. The most that Sampson’s argument could in principle show is that real-life speaker-listeners, in their heterogeneous speech communities, acquire their imperfect knowledge4 of language ‘from scratch as a feat of intellect’. But Chomsky’s linguistic theory is not primarily concerned with real-life speaker-listeners at all. On thecontrary, Chomsky’s ideal speaker-listener, in his completely homogeneous speech community, is taken from the outset as ‘knowing its language perfectly’. How he comes by his perfect knowledge is a difficult question. But since it is not one to whose answer any real-world evidence could in principle contribute, there seems no reason to deny that his ideal mind is innately equipped to acquire it. What these works have in common is a failure to come to terms with Chomsky’s stipulative

definition of the subject matter of linguistic theory. If we are to be convinced by the claim that Chomsky has ‘constructed a complete picture of the nature of language and of the language-user’ (Smith and Wilson, p. lo), we need to understand how to bridge the gap between the world of the ideal speaker-listener and the world we actually live in. If, on the other hand, we are to see Chomskyan linguistics as an ‘academic hoax’, then the attack will have to be based on something other than the fact that real speech communities are not homogeneous - for that, Chomsky insists, is ‘as obvious as it is irrelevant’ (1980, p. 25) - and the mere possibility that ‘the study of the biologically necessary properties of language is misguided’ in that ‘there is no language faculty, but only some general modes of learning applied to language or anything else’ - for these, in fact, are Chomsky’s own sentiments (1980, p. 29). Of course, we may suspect that Smith and Wilson ignore the ideal speaker-listener as an

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embarrassment, or a point of doctrine on which they remain immune from Chomsky’s influence; while Sampson perhaps dismisses him as self-evidently ridiculous. But it seems

that an attempt must be made to understand him. So long as he is ignored, Chomsky will be misrepresented by his sympathisers and unconvinced by his detractors: I once presented what I thought was an innocent and uncontroversial statement of an idealisation that seems to me of critical importance... namely that ‘linguistic theory is concerned primarily...’ The formulation seems to me innocent, but it is obviously far from uncontroversial. It has aroused quite a storm of protest, focusing primarily on the notion ‘homogeneous speech community’... Exactly what is the source of the objection? Obviously, it cannot be that real speech communities are not homogeneous... Nor can the objection be that this idealisation necessarily impedes the study of matters that do not fall within it, say, linguistic variation.. On the contrary, what is implicitly claimed by someone who adopts the idealisation is that these further questions are properly studied within a framework that makes use of the results of the idealisation. If the idealisation does make it possible to unearth real and significant properties of the language faculty, this conclusion would seem to be justified, indeed inescapable. So we are left with what must be the crucial question: does the idealisation so falsify the real world that it will lead to no significant insight into the nature of the language faculty? In short, is the idealisation legitimate? Suppose that someone takes the negative stand on this question. Such a person is committed to one of the following beliefs: 1. People are so constituted that they would be incapable of learning language in a homogeneous speech

community; variability or inconsistency of presented evidence is a necessary condition for language learning. 2. Though people could learn language in a homogeneous speech community; the properties of the mind that

make this achievement possible do not enter into normal language acquisition in the real world of diversity, conflict of dialects, etc.

I cannot believe that anyone who thinks the matter through would really maintain either of these beliefs. In fact, each seems hopelessly implausible. Suppose then, that we reject them. Thus we accept that humans have some property of mind which would enable them to learn the language of a homogeneous speech community were they to be placed in one, and that this property of mind plays a role in language acquisition. But then the idealisation is legitimate; it opens the way to the study of a fundamental property of mind, namely, the one in question. Furthermore, one who rejects the idealisation and the results obtained by pursuing it to the point where we discover this fundamental property of mind is impeding the study of other aspects of language, say, the acquisition and use of language under conditions of diversity.. . Once the issues are clarified, it is hard to see how anyone could reject the idealisation... (Chomsky 1980, pp. 25-26).

Of the many difficulties with this ‘clarification’, the greatest is that it is simply irrelevant to those most sorely in need of it - namely, those who fail to understand the idealisation at all.

Let us concentrate, as Chomsky does, on the phrase ‘homogeneous speech community’. Dismissing the straw men Chomsky has chosen as putative objectors to the phrase, we can

ask a more fundamental question. What does it mean. 3 In other words, how can we understand ‘speech community’ so as to allow for the meaningful prefixation of

‘(completely) homogeneous’? Or conversely, given ‘homogeneous’ how do we make sense of ‘community’? We may wish to pose further questions. Does its homogeneity extend, for instance, to phonetic indistinguishability of tokens of the same type? Is it to be envisaged as a community in which everyone uses exactfy the same expressions as everyone else, and means exactly the same things by them on all occasions of their utterance? Is it then a community in which everyone has had exactly the same experiences (linguistic or otherwise) as everyone else? Chomsky’s ‘clarification’ is so conducted as to suggest that he supposes that the grammaticality of homogeneousspeech community guarantees the correspondence to it of a coherent concept, but is it not prima facie a text-book example of a semantic anomaly, no more obviously perspicuous than square circle? What, precisely, are we supposed to imagine that we are left with, once those aspects of the human condition which cause real speech communities to be unhomogeneous have been theoretically abstracted? Both sympathisers and detractors might be expected to recognise the importance of such questions. Nobody who fails even to raise - let alone answer - them can claim to be

making sense of Chomsky’s revolution.


NOTES

‘But to nobody else’s, one imagines. ‘Although the claim that the rules of grammar are psychologically real is a strong, and seemingly unprovable one, it does allow for a considerable expansion of the range and type of data that become relevant to their formulation’ (p. 26). Doubtless so, but what Smith and Wilson appear to think is at issue is whether or not the rules of grammar are psychologically real. Cf: although the claim that the disposition of certain heavenly bodies at the time of one’s birth influences the events of one’s life is a strong and seemingly unprovable one, it does allow for a considerable expansion of the range and type of data that become relevant to their prediction.

*‘Die Sprache... ist ein Werk (Ergon), sondern eine Tatigkeit (Energeiu)‘(von Humboldt 1836, p. 57). Sampson again quotes this (approvingly) in his text (p. 65).

%ee Itkonen (1978) for a sceptical treatment of this doctrine.

%ampson insists on this point, even for the syntactic domain: ‘is every adult English-speaker familiar - to give just one instance - with the construction exemplified by an adverbial clause such as surprising as it muyseem?‘(A more striking instance might be the construction exemplified by the standard translation of the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.)

REFERENCES

CHOMSKY, A. N. 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge.

CHOMSKY, A. N. 1980 Rules and Representations. Blackwell, Oxford.

VON HUMBOLDT, K. W. 1836 iiber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues. Dtimmler, Berlin.

ITKONEN, E. 1978 Grammatical Theory and Metascience. Benjamins, Amsterdam.

KATZ J. J. and FODOR, J. A. 1963 The structure of a semantic theory. Language 39, 170-210

SAMPSON, G. R. 1975 The Form of Language. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

WEINBERG, S. 1976 The forces of nature. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Making sense of Chomsky's revolution