Noam Chomsky in 1977.
Language
Noam Chomsky in 1977.
Noam Chomsky was influential in the cognitive revolution with his proposal that language is not based on learning by reinforcement. He developed the idea of deep structures, of inner rules of grammar that underlie all languages. They enable people to learn the language of their social group, and to generate and transform deep structures into talking and writing. Katherine Nelson found that when infants start to speak they do so in a way that is based on grammatical structures that have a relation to Chomsky’s idea, but differ from it in important respects.
A turning point in the influence of behaviorism occurred in a book review.1 The book was B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. The year was 1959. The book’s reviewer was Noam Chomsky, whose photograph you can see at the head of this chapter.
Before this book review, Chomsky had written mainly technical works such as Syntactic Structures, based on his PhD thesis, which he had completed two years previously. In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky argued that grammar and how it works could be understood independently of how words relate to concepts. Part of his argument was that a sentence could be grammatical without meaning anything. Consider these sentences.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.
Both are nonsense, but the first is grammatical nonsense. Using arguments of this kind, Chomsky went on to show how minds contain inner structures to which we have no conscious access, but which are fundamental for the human use of language.
In Verbal Behavior, Skinner argued that language is learned by principles of stimulus, response, and reinforcement. In his review of the book, Noam Chomsky writes that it is difficult to see how this view affords any insight. He argues that the concept of control by stimuli means that one might listen to a piece of music and say “Mozart” or look at a painting and say “Dutch.” Skinner would say that such verbal responses were due to subtle properties of the musical or visual stimuli. But, says Chomsky, what if one were to say of the painting: “it clashes with the wallpaper”? Skinner could only say that this response, too, derives from properties of the stimulus: “wallpaper-clashfulness.” “The device,” says Chomsky, “is as simple as it is empty.” The idea of control by a “stimulus” is without objectivity.
The difficulty for behaviorists in defending themselves against Chomsky’s arguments was that, with their system of thinking, all they could say about the mind being based on inner structures is that it is of no interest. For them the mind is unnecessary. But inner operations and the working of the mind were, and are, of interest to many. Chomsky’s proposals were influential and they helped unite cognitive psychologists, linguists, and computational theorists in their exploration of mind. Kept out of psychology for two decades, the mind was back, and it is now—once again as it used to be—the principal focus of psychology.
Language, argued Chomsky, depends on a system that has been bequeathed to us by evolution. He called it a “universal grammar.” The word “universal” is important in the way that we reviewed in chapter 3, in discussion of emotional expressions. Of all the human universals in psychology, language has been the most widely accepted. Chomsky emphasized how the ability to speak grammatically and the ability to learn any of Earth’s many languages depend on particular genes that characterize our species. Although the languages of the world are different, they all have a grammar, based on universal principles.
Imagine asking an English-speaking person questions about grammar. You might say: “Please decline the past-perfect tense of the verb ‘to think.’” Or you might ask: “What is a gerund?” The person might not know, but have no difficulty in producing or understanding such a sentence as: “I had thought you didn’t like eating after seven o’clock in the evening.” In this sentence, “I had thought” is the first-person past-perfect tense of the verb “to think.” This tense is used to refer to a completed act that took place in the past. The word “eating” is a gerund derived from the verb “to eat.” The gerund is a form in which a verb works grammatically as a noun. But we don’t need to know about such technical issues consciously to use such forms correctly. Our implicit knowledge enables us to form and understand sentences in which they occur. Chomsky pointed out that for us to talk and understand each other, our mind-brains must contain and use such pieces of grammatical knowledge without knowing consciously how we do it. This was the same kind of argument that Helmholtz had used about how we see.
Chomsky argued that two kinds of rules constitute people’s implicit knowledge of language. One set is generative. Language is innately and continuously creative: generative rules enable us to produce an infinite number of new sentences that are grammatical. The second set of rules is transformational. It’s a set that allows people to do different things with one underlying idea, one underlying structure.
Chomsky called underlying arrangements of sentences “deep structures.” They are different from the surface forms of word orders in sentences. Figure 10 shows a deep structure and surface structure of a sentence. The simplest deep structure of a sentence is a noun phrase plus a verb phrase. A noun phrase can be an article (“the” or “a”) plus a noun. A verb phrase is a verb and a noun phrase.
The surface structure of the sentence in figure 10 is “The student did borrow a book.” With the deep structure, one can make transformations. So, to say that an action was in the past and was completed (the past-perfect), the verb “did borrow” is transformed into “had borrowed” and everything else stays the same. To form a negative, the deep structure is transformed by inserting the word “not” into the verb phrase, to produce the surface structure: “The student did not borrow a book.” To ask a question, the transformation involves keeping the noun phrases and their positions intact, while splitting the verb in two and moving the first part to the front: “Did the student borrow a book?” Other transformations involve elaborating noun phrases by adjectives, “a slim book,” verbs by adverbs, “did previously borrow,” and the addition of other phrases that augment the noun phrase in which the word “book” is contained: “about the psychology of language.” In similar ways, other changes of tense can be made, and forms such as requests, warnings, and so on can be constructed.
This is grammar at work. There are no languages in the world, says Chomsky, that change tenses or make negatives, or ask questions, by operating on surface structures of words. For instance, there are no languages in which a question is generated by any operation such as interchanging the order of the first and last words of the surface structure to produce such forms as: “Book student did borrow a the?” The mind, therefore, contains deep structures, of the kind illustrated in figure 10, and works to perform transformations that are involved in making sentences, and generating meaning.
Larissa MacFarquhar begins the biography of Noam Chomsky that she published in the New Yorker in 2003 by saying that on Thursday evenings Chomsky, “one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century,” would teach a class on politics to two hundred students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Though she says he is not an activist by nature, he is outraged by injustice. He is also a very determined arguer, so he has spent a good deal of the second part of his life on political issues, and has become a public intellectual by denouncing immoral actions of governments, including the government of the United States. He argues that although people are free and self-determining, states behave in their own selfish interests. In doing so, they often disregard others and hence act very badly indeed.
Chomsky’s university office, wrote MacFarquhar in 2003, was a narrow room with two windows that looked out onto an alley. It had many bookshelves and two desks, both piled high with books. He would sit at one of the desks with his feet in an open drawer. It was typical of him, she said, to have created a space with nowhere comfortable to work. MacFarquhar wrote that Chomsky and his wife Carol had a companionable marriage with three children: Aviva, who taught at Salem State College; Diane, who had moved to Nicaragua and fallen in love with a Sandinista activist; and Harry, an aspiring violinist.
MacFarquhar wrote about how Chomsky’s students felt they were in the vanguard of a revolution. For half a century the mind had been seen as murky and amorphous. Now, with his universal grammar, the operations of which he would spell out, Chomsky declared that the mind was a beautiful system, and that it is possible to understand some of its workings. Rather than the mind being a non-place as the behaviorists supposed, it is a place that contains complex structures, a place where transformations and other procedures take place that can in principle be understood.
Part of Chomsky’s argument against Skinner’s supposition that children learned languages by reinforcement was that, although some parents may instruct their children on how to talk, many children learn languages without anyone systematically reinforcing them. Children of immigrants, for instance, whose parents can’t speak the language of their adopted country, learn to speak the language by being exposed to it in a rather haphazard way. Of course, growing into a language requires learning. We learn the language of the community in which we grow up, and not some other language. But, argued Chomsky, the very fact of being able to learn a language at all means that we must be innately provided with grammatical structures into which words can be assimilated, so that an inborn proclivity to operate on them by means of grammatical rules can get to work. We need to postulate, said Chomsky, that being able to learn language is based on an inherited language acquisition device.2
Case Grammars, Verb Islands, Cooperation
Charles Fillmore took up Chomsky’s idea of grammar that is generative and transformational, to suggest Case Grammar. He proposed that the most basic deep structure of sentences across a range of languages is a Verb (an Action) with a set of slots around it, which include Agent (who does the action), Object (on which the action is done), Location (where it happened), Recipient (to whom it is done), Means (how it is done). This deep structure based on verbs can then generate a set of surface structures, in which specific Agents, Objects, Recipients, and so on could then fit in the slots. Here is an example: “Chomsky (Agent) gave (Verb) the world (Recipient) transformational grammar (Object).”
How do children learn a language? Some recent research indicates that they learn it in terms of something close to case grammars. Michael Tomasello and his collaborators have shown that as children progress beyond one-word utterances, they take an early interest in actions and the verbs that represent them, like “eat” and “go.” Tomasello calls the structures “verb islands.”3 Like case grammars, these islands are verbs with slots for Agent, Object, Means, Location, and so on.
Children concentrate at first on a fairly small set of verbs. Katherine Nelson asked the parents of a child named Emily to put a tape recorder by her bed before she went to sleep, to record what she said to herself before she fell asleep. At age twenty-one months, Emily said: “The broke. Car broke, the … Emmy can’t go in the car. Go in green car.”
Emily here illustrates Tomasello’s proposal that children first learn to speak by learning and using a small number of verbs, which stand for actions in the world, and that these verbs are islands with slots around them to depict particular actions, in particular ways. The verb “broke” has its slot for the agent, which was the car. The verb “go” has slots for Agent, “Emmy,” and Means, “in the car.”
Language is not just abstract, it’s cooperative, and we come to the principle of cooperation in chapter 14.
