THE TONGUES OF MEN

TO THE PUBLIC at large, Professor Noam Chomsky, of M.I.T., is one of the most eloquent, indefatigable critics of the Vietnam war and of the role of the military-industrial complex in American life. He has marched on the Pentagon; he has supported the most extreme tactics of pacifist and conscientious dissent; he has labored to extricate his own university and the American academic community from what he judges to he its corrosive entanglements with military technology and imperialist expansion; he has run drastic professional risks on behalf of his beliefs and his intimations of catastrophe. His voice was one of the first to pillory what he sees as the injustice and folly of the Vietnam operation, and it has been one of the most influential in altering the mood of educated Americans and in bringing about the present drive for disengagement.

There is a second Noam Chomsky. To epistemologists, to behavioral psychologists, to theoreticians of child development and education, to linguists, Chomsky is one of the most interesting workers now in their field and a source of heated debate. His contributions to the study of language and mental process are highly technical and of considerable intellectual difficulty. But, like the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, with which it shows affinities, Chomskian generative and transformational grammar is one of those specialized conjectures which, by sheer intellectual fascination and range of implication, reach out to the world of the layman. Chomsky himself, moreover, is a fluent expositor and willing publicist of his technical work; at his best, he is an “explainer” in the tradition of Mill and T. H. Huxley. Thus a good deal of his professional argument is accessible in part, at least, to the outsider. The effort at understanding is well worth making, for if Chomsky is right, our general sense of man’s habitation in reality, of the ways in which mind and world interact, will he modified or, more precisely, will join up with modes of feeling that have not had much influence or scientific weight since the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The “Chomskian revolution” predates Chomsky. To a greater degree than recent disciples are always ready to acknowledge, the groundwork was laid by Chomsky’s teacher, Professor Zelig Harris, of the University of Pennsylvania. Harris is himself a linguist of great distinction, and it is in his “Methods in Structural Linguistics,” which appeared in 1951, that certain key notions of grammatical depth and transformation were first set out. Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures,” which is to many the classic and most persuasive statement of his hypotheses, followed six years later. Then, in 1958, came an important paper, “A Transformational Approach to Syntax,” read at the Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English, and “Some Methodological Remarks on Generative Grammar,” published in the journal Word in 1961. In 1963, Chomsky contributed a severely technical and far-reaching chapter on “Formal Properties of Grammars” to Volume II of the “Handbook of Mathematical Psychology.” “Current Issues in Linguistic Theory,” a year later, marked the commanding prestige and wide influence of the whole Chomskian approach. “Cartesian Linguistics” (1966) is an interesting but in certain respects deliberately antiquarian salute to those French grammarians and philosophers whom Chomsky regards as his true forebears. His “Language and Mind” (Harcourt, Brace & World) was first delivered as the Beckman Lectures at Berkeley in January of 1967 and published a year later. (It has more recently been published as a paperback by Harcourt.) It represents both a summary of generative linguistics and a program for future work. Around this core of his professional writing lie explanatory or polemic interviews—notably with the English philosopher Stuart Hampshire, reprinted in B.B.C.’s Listener of May 30, 1968—and a number of recent lectures given in packed halls in Oxford, London, and Cambridge.

The best place to start is Chomsky’s assault on Professor B. F. Skinner, of Harvard. Chomsky tells us that hearing Skinner lecture triggered his own line of thought, and the behavioral sciences, as Skinner represents them, are his constant target. Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” came out in 1957. Chomsky’s attack, a lengthy review in Language, came two years later, but it had already been circulating in manuscript. What Skinner had sought to do was to extrapolate, from his famous work on stimulus-and-response behavior in animals, to human linguistic behavior. He seemed to argue that human beings acquire and make use of language in a far more sophisticated but not essentially different way from that in which rats could be taught to thread a maze. A precise understanding and predictive theory of human speech would, therefore, involve little more than a refinement of those techniques of stimulus, reinforced stimulus, and conditioned response that enable us to teach a rat to press a certain spring in order to reach its reward of food. Concomitantly, the child would learn language skills (what Chomsky was to call “competence”) by some process of stimulus and response within a model fully comparable to that which had proved effective—or at any rate in part—in the “teaching” of lower organisms. The qualification is needed because there is of late some doubt about what Skinner’s rats have in fact “learned.”

Chomsky found Skinner’s proposals scandalous—in the restrictions they seemed to impose on the complexity and freedom of human consciousness, as well as in their methodological naïveté. Skinner’s alleged scientific approach, said Chomsky, was a mere regression to discredited mentalistic psychology. It could give no true account of how human beings, who differ in this cardinal respect from all other known life forms, can acquire and use the infinitely complex, innovative, and at all levels creative instrument of speech. Chomsky saw—and this has, I believe, been his most penetrating insight—that a valid model of linguistic behavior must account for the extraordinary fact that all of us perpetually and effortlessly use strings and combinations of words which we have never heard before, which we have never been taught specifically, and which quite obviously do not arise in conditioned response to any identifiable stimulus in our environment. Almost from the earliest stages of his linguistic life, a child will be able to construct and to understand a fantastic number of utterances that are quite new to him yet that he somehow knows to be acceptable sentences in his language. Conversely, he will quickly demonstrate his instinctive rejection of (that is, his failure to grasp) word orders and syntactic arrangements that are unacceptable though it may be that none of these have been specifically pointed out to him. At every stage, from earliest childhood on, the human use of language goes far beyond all “taught” or formal precedent, and far beyond the aggregate of individually acquired and stored experience. “These abilities,” say Chomsky, “indicate that there must be fundamental processes at work quite independently of ‘feedback’ from the environment.” The dynamics of human communication arise from within.

These processes, remarks Chomsky, are likely to be of enormous intricacy. They may well be located in that intermediary zone between “mental” and “physical,” between “psychic” and “neurochemical,” that our outmoded vocabulary, with its crude but deeply entrenched mind-body distinctions, is poorly equipped to handle. The child hypothesizes and processes information in a variety of very special and apparently highly complex ways which we cannot yet describe or begin to understand, and which may be largely innate, or may develop through some sort of learning or through maturation of the nervous system.” The brain produces “by an ‘induction’ of apparently fantastic complexity and suddenness” the rules of the relevant grammar. Thus we recognize a new item as a sentence in our language not because it matches some familiar, previously taught item in any simple way “but because it is generated by the grammar that each individual has somehow and in some form internalized.” Human language, as Chomsky was to reaffirm in 1967, is a unique phenomenon, “without significant analogue in the animal world.” It is senseless, contrary to what numerous biolinguists and ethnologists have felt, to theorize about its possible evolution from more primitive, outwardly-conditioned modes of communication, such as the signals apparently conveyed by bird calls. The spontaneous, innovative use of language somehow defines man. It looks as if people are beings “specially designed” to generate rules of immediate linguistic understanding and construction, as if they possess “data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity.”

The vocabulary of the early Chomsky is worth a close look, particularly because its underlying force will be augmented later. “Special design,” “data-handling,” his later references to the key “presetting” of the brain all point to the image of a computer. Chomsky would deny this, but the evidence is strong that the notion, perhaps partly unconscious, of a very powerful computer deep inside the fabric of human consciousness is relevant to much of his argument. In the history of philosophy and of the natural sciences, such buried pictures or metaphors play a large role. It is doubtful whether the most recent breakthrough in molecular biology would have taken place when the Morse code was the ruling image of quick communication. The uses of “code,” “feedback,” “storage,” and “information” in current genetics point to the implicit presence of computer technology and of the electronic processing of data. The same is true of Chomskian linguistics, and this may prove important when one tries to determine whether or not it is valid.

Chomsky’s interpretation of these abilities of “unknown character and complexity” proceeds on two levels. One, highly technical, consists of an attempt to devise and describe a set of rules that will produce, or “generate,” grammatical sentences in English, or any other language, and that will not produce ungrammatical ones. The other level can most fairly be termed philosophic or epistemological. Chomsky’s views on transformational grammars lead to certain inferences about the nature of the human mind and about the relations between being and perception. Except for purposes of study, these two planes of argument cannot really be kept apart. Nor ought they to be. The difficulty is that Chomsky sometimes argues as if they could, and then, at other—and often decisive—points, he buttresses his formal hypotheses with inferences that are philosophic and introspective in the old, loose sense. Formal logic tends to overlap with hunches that are occasionally quite nebulous.

Around the turn of the century, both mathematics and logic went through a phase of rigorous self-examination. Both sought to establish formally consistent and self-contained foundations for the processes of reasoning and calculation that had developed with tremendous force in earlier centuries, but on a somewhat ad-hoc basis. Extraordinary holes and bits of patchwork had been left in the foundations of logical and mathematical proof and analysis. The results of this shoring up, with which one associates thinkers such as Russell, Carnap, Tarski, and Gödel, include combinatorial logic, the theory of sets, and symbolic notations of great refinement. These tools were applied to mathematical propositions and to formal structures of logical argument. Noam Chomsky set out to apply them to the far more recalcitrant and varied material of actual human speech. (Whether he has in fact done so is one of the very difficult problems of the entire Chomskian achievement.) Only the analysis of common speech, he insisted, could lead to a genuine understanding of how language is put together.

Chomsky argued that all possible grammatical sentences in English (or any other tongue) could be derived, or “generated,” from a small number of basic, or “kernel,” sentences, plus a set of rules of operation and transformation. We may think of these rules as in some way comparable to those surprisingly few conventions of addition, subtraction, substitution, and equivalence from which we can build up the enormously manifold and complex structure of arithmetic and algebra. Given the right manipulative rules, few building blocks are needed. The rules of Chomskian grammar “transform” certain primary configurations, such as noun symbol followed by verb symbol, into related configurations, even as algebraic equations will yield other equations if the proper rules of substitution are observed. Thus “John loves Mary” is pivoted, by a transformational rule that is not only specific but also, presumably, of very comprehensive and generalizing power, into “Mary is loved by John.” This particular transformation, from active to passive, allows a human speaker to recognize and manipulate correctly the literally innumerable number of similarly organized and related propositions that he will come up against during a lifetime. The fact that the rules for transformation are “correct” insures that no ungrammatical or randomly ordered sentence is generated. If no such mechanism were operative, each new verbal situation—say, “I cut this loaf,” “this loaf is cut by me”—would offer intractable dilemmas and demand a new, specific act of learning. This, urges Chomsky, is plainly not the case.

A sentence generated in this way has two distinct levels, and it is by virtue of this duality that Chomsky considers himself related to certain grammarians and logicians at work in France in the sixteen-sixties and after. “John loves Mary” is the surface structure of the sentence. It constitutes the sort of “physical signal,” or phonetic articulation, to which we can perfectly well apply the traditional syntax we have learned in school: noun, verb, object, and so on. But this surface structure tells us little and obviously differs for every language. “Far below,” as it were, lies the deep structure, from which our phonetic expression has been generated and of which the spoken, audible sentence is in some respects a projection or mapping.

What is this purported deep structure like? On this point, crucial as it is to his entire theory of language, Chomsky is elusive and not always consistent. It might have been best, though by no means satisfactory, had he said that we cannot adequately describe in words a psychic system that somehow operates before or very far beneath language. In the Kantian sense, there might be a “final skin” of consciousness and self, which we cannot describe because we cannot step outside it. Instead, Chomsky offers suggestions that are often rather obscure and tangential. The deep structure “may be highly abstract.” It may or it may not have a close, “point-by-point correlation to the phonetic realization.” That is, the visible contours of the landscape may or may not simulate or parallel the subterranean geological strata and dynamics from which it has been shaped and thrown up. What is worse, the visible terrain may be thoroughly misleading. Surface structures—the sentences we actually speak and hear—are not “like” the kernels from which they are generated by transformational rules. The deep structure from which, according to Chomsky, our understanding and use of all languages stem involves properties of a hitherto incomprehensible generality, abstraction, and formal power. We are not, obviously, to think of these “kernels” or primal linguistic units as verbal or syntactic in any ordinary sense. It is, if I follow Chomsky’s hints rightly, relations that are involved—formidably simplified yet functional “presettings” that relate subject to object, person to verb. Again, I would suppose, the image of a computer, with its ability to transcribe computer speech into a print-out in English or any other idiom, is involved at some vital though perhaps unacknowledged stage in Chomsky’s argument.

In any case, what has been shown is this: the unbounded variety of sentences human beings grasp and make use of upon every occasion in their lives can be derived from a limited set of formal counters and from a body of rules, also presumably limited, for the manipulation and rearrangement of these counters. To have shown this—and I think Chomsky has done so—is of itself a feat of great logical force and elegance. Substantively as well as historically, the exemplary suggestion came from mathematics and mathematical logic. In the binary system of notation, for instance, two symbols, 0 and 1, together with a body of rules about how they are to be put together and “read,” suffice to operate with any number or group of numbers in the universe. Logic strives for a comparable economy and rigor at the base. Chomsky’s hope that human language can be similarly schematized is understandable and intellectually exciting. But there is more to it than that. Chomsky is not arguing a mathematical model, a hypothesis—as Renaissance scientists called any of those formal proposals to which they did not necessarily attach material truth. Chomsky addresses himself to the human fact. He contends that only some such scheme of generation and transformation out of deep structures can account for the way in which Homo sapiens actually acquires language and communicates. He summarized this contention in his first Locke Lecture, at Oxford last April:

A person who knows a language has mastered a set of rules and principles that determine an infinite, discrete set of sentences each of which has a fixed form aid a fixed meaning or meaning-potential. Even at the lowest levels of intelligence, the characteristic use of this knowledge is free and creative . . . in that one can instantaneously interpret an indefinitely large range of utterances, with no feeling of unfamiliarity or strangeness.

The postulate that language is unique to man (with which I entirely concur) and the correlative notion of deep structures have wide philosophic consequences. Of late, Chomsky has been readier than before to examine these and to move outside the confines of formal linguistic analysis. The key question is that of the nature and location of these deep structures and of the process through which human beings have achieved their singular capacity to articulate meaning and express imaginary concepts. In his attack on Skinner, Chomsky stressed the “completely unknown” character of the whole business and admitted that it might result from some form of learning or from a gradual maturation of the nervous system. But as his hypotheses have gained confidence and prestige, Chomsky has come to adopt what he himself calls a Cartesian position but what might more exactly be termed a development of Kant’s theories of perception.

It is innate ideas or innate programs for all potential experience and mappings of experience that Chomsky is inferring. The existence of an “innate mental structure” seems to him indispensable to the generation of language. The “schema of universal grammar,” whereby all men can operate in their own tongue and reasonably acquire another, must be assigned “to the mind as an innate character.” Knowledge of language can be gained only “by an organism that is ‘preset.’ ” Only man is innately equipped or programmed in this immensely specific yet creative fashion. All men being thus organized, there exist between them the bond of universal grammar and the concomitant possibility of translation from any one language into all other languages. It follows as well that no lower organic species will be able to master even rudimentary language forms (which is rather different from saying that certain animals may not be taught to mime human speech sounds). As Chomsky notes, recent studies of animal vision suggest that various species see angle, motion, and other complex properties of the physical world according to the special ways in which their nervous systems are patterned or “hooked up.” These patterns are innate, and unalterable except through artificial lesion. Precisely in the same way, man communicates reality to himself and to others in linguistic forms because he has been uniquely imprinted with the capacity and need to do so.

We are now back with Kant and those a-priori mental structures or categories of space, time, and identity through which man interacts with the “outside” world and which govern both the freedom and the conceptual limits of that interaction. We are also back with the doctrines of the great grammarians of Port Royal in the second half of the seventeenth century regarding the universal grammar from which all human tongues ultimately derive their local forms.

How far can we probe into these deep structures and “settings” of consciousness? What kind of evidence are we looking for? Again, Chomsky is elusive and inclines toward modest disclaimers: “In fact, the processes by which the human mind achieved its present stage of complexity and its particular form of innate organisation are a total mystery, as much so as the analogous questions about the physical or mental organizations of any other complex organism.” Inasmuch as Chomsky has just drawn, and shrewdly so, on the positive results being achieved in the study of animal perception, this rider to the sentence is odd. Elsewhere, moreover, he is less circumspect. Linguistic universals, says Chomsky to Stuart Hampshire, must “be a biological property of the human mind.” He adds, in a move strikingly reminiscent of those made by Freud when be was hoping for neurophysiological confirmation of his model of the subconscious (confirmation that never came), that there will “definitely someday he a physiological explanation for the mental processes that we are now discovering.”

Does this confident assertion signify that generative linguistics is committed to materialism, to a view of consciousness as being purely and simply neurochemical? Some of its adherents seem to believe so. Chomsky’s own formulation is subtler. He rightly points out that the boundaries between “mental” and “physical” are continually shifting. Numerous phenomena once regarded as wholly spiritual and outside the reach of empirical study have now become comprehensible in a physiological and experimental sense. There is beginning to be a chemistry of schizophrenia and a biochemistry of dreams as there has for some time now been a physiology of digestion or procreation. It is by keeping our descriptive categories open and negotiable that we can extend knowledge. “What is at issue,” says Chomsky, “is only whether the physiological processes and physical processes that we now understand are already rich enough in principle—and maybe in fact—to cover the mental phenomena which are beginning to emerge” (again, the phrasing might be Freud’s). The work done in the past fifteen years on the genetic code and on the neurochemistry of nervous impulse goes a long way toward suggesting how fantastically complicated and creative the energies at work in organic molecular processes are. The development of such work may—Chomsky is saying that it must—lead to some understanding of the “anatomy” of innate deep structures and linguistic generation.

In a simplified, obviously abbreviated form, these are the theories Professor Chomsky has put forward over the last twelve years. No one since the great French-Swiss linguist Saussure, in the early part of the century, and I. A. Richards, in the nineteen-thirties, has had more impact on the study of language or done more to suggest that linguistics is indeed a central discipline in the understanding of mind and behavior. But this does not mean that Chomsky’s views have been universally accepted. They have been sharply queried by other linguists, and there are now signs that the Chomskian wave may be receding. That such a recession might occur at a moment when Chomsky’s ideas are receiving their widest public and “journalistic” echo would be a coincidence common in the history of science and of ideas.

A good deal of the controversy in the profession is of an extremely technical nature. It involves differences of approach in regard to combinatorial logic, mathematical psychology, and semantics which are scarcely accessible to the layman. Nevertheless, a number of salient doubts can be made out. These are stated with great penetration by Professor Charles F. Hockett, of Cornell, in “The State of the Art” (Mouton, 1968). Hockett rejects the whole Chomskian model of the generation of grammatical sentences from hidden finite sets and rules. Chomsky’s picture of language, says Hockett, is absurdly over-abstract; it is a fiction patterned not on real human speech but on the artificial propositions and tautologies of formal logic. Hockett’s way of putting this decisive point is arduous but unmistakable: A mathematical linguistics on Chomskian lines is an absurdity because human speech is not a “well-defined subset of the set of all finite strings over a well-defined alphabet.” In simpler terms: When we deal with human speech we are not dealing with a rigorously definable, closed system all of whose variants can be derived from a single set or cluster of unchanging elements; we are not looking at the periodic table of chemical elements all of whose structures and atomic weights can be reduced to combinations of certain primal, strictly defined units. Chomsky’s transformational grammar fails to account for the vital, fascinating ability of human speakers not only to know how to string words together to form a sentence but to know when and how to stop. This is one of those apparently obvious but deep points on which the cogency of a theory of language may well depend. Let me make it as plain as I can. “One plus one equals two” is a completely acceptable English sentence. “One plus one plus one equals three” is already faintly awkward and almost implies a didactic or special context. “One plus one plus one plus one equals four” is intolerable, and so will be all further sentences built on the same pattern. Yet formally all such sentences are transformations of the first by virtue, presumably, of the “additive rule” somehow established in the passage from deep to surface structure. According to Chomsky’s theory, nothing is grammatically wrong with a string of “one”s connected by “and”s or “plus”es, or, as Professor Victor Yngve, of the University of Chicago, has pointed out, with other, more complex sentences that are incomprehensible. Yet we know, and know at an early, precise point, that we are no longer speaking acceptable English, that we are at best aping a computer language. What gives us this definite but extraordinarily subtle, perhaps “musical,” knowledge?

There is no genuine evidence, argues Hockett, for anything like the deep structures that Chomsky postulates. There is, on the contrary, plenty of evidence that different languages handle the world in very different ways and that all languages have in them “sources of openness” that Chomsky ignores. His fundamental error, urges Hockett, is the belief that a study of semantics can ever be separated from a study of the actual grammar and lexicon of the relevant language or family of languages. By patient comparison of languages as they are in fact spoken, and by careful induction, we may come to discover “cross-language generalizations.” Joseph H. Greenberg’s “Universals of Language,” published in 1962, and comparative analyses of Southwest American Indian languages, now in progress, are steps in the proper direction. The empirically located and verified common traits or language habits that emerge from this kind of ethnolinguistic study may have nothing to do with universal deep structures. A universal grammar in Chomsky’s sense is, according to Hockett, a pipe dream. It is not universal kernel sentences and transformational rules but a manifold context of specific political history and social sensibility that makes a man “stand” for office in English English and “run” for it in American.

Hockett’s charge that Chomsky leaves out the spontaneous, altering genius of actual speech touches on a larger philosophic dissent. This is well put by Dr. Yorick Wilks in a recent review of “Language and Mind.” Dr. Wilks, it may be worth noting, is a sometime associate of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, a group whose philosophic approach to linguistics may be more searching than Chomsky’s and whose “thesaurus method” attempts to deal with units of speed more complex and realistic than those usually cited in generative grammar. Wilks suggests that despite all its acerbity and conviction Chomsky’s quarrel with Skinner is quite spurious. The dispute is not between a mechanistic model and a free or idealistic vision of the production of human speech but “between two alternative mechanistic theories: Skinner’s the simple one, and Chomsky’s the more complicated.” In the terms I have been using, the quarrel would be between a model based on an old-fashioned adding machine and one founded on a super-computer. Wilks then argues, in a subtle and incisive critique, that the kind of mechanistic scheme devised by the behaviorists would, if sufficiently refined, produce the types of basic sentences and transformations posited by Chomskian grammar. That is—and this is a penetrating observation—the language picture postulated by Chomsky does not depend necessarily or uniquely on the theory of generation from deep structures. What were called “finite-state” and “phrase-structure” rules of grammar could also do the job: “If anyone came in and watched the two machines chugging away, he could never tell that they had been programmed with quite different rules.”

How can we ever hope to look “inside the machine” (an image as Cartesian as it is Chomskian)? Chomsky’s “innate structures,” says Dr. Wilks, may well represent a “retreat from the facts,” a refusal to submit his formal design to any possibility of experimental investigation. How can we expect to find out what is innate in the mind? “We can’t look; external behavior is no guide at all, and, of course, it’s no help to ask what people think.” In view of this impenetrability of “innate presettings,” it is a very odd step, suggests Wilks, to pass from categories of grammatical description that may be “natural” and “deep” in Western languages to the assertion that there are universal mental patterns underlying all languages. Classical Chinese (and what other evidence have we?) seems to have no need of our noun-and-verb structure. How, then, can we assign to it innate grammatical properties obviously patterned on our own habits of syntax? Chomsky may, almost inadvertently, be tending toward a mechanistic doctrine of his own, all the more disturbing in that it would be culturally as well as formally deterministic. Though Wilks does not make the point, the radical humanism of Chomsky’s politics would render such a position deeply ironic.

Dr. Wilks’ point about Chinese relates immediately to my own main difficulties in regard to Chomsky’s theory of language. Some four thousand languages are in current use on our crowded planet. There are numerous territories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (not to mention corners of Switzerland) that are splintered by distinct, mutually incomprehensible tongues, though these territories are uniform in climate, way of life, and economic needs. These four thousand languages, moreover, are almost certainly the remnants of an even greater number. So-called rare languages disappear every year from active usage and the recollection of aged or isolated informants. This proliferation of human idiom is an immensely exciting but also scandalous fact. Few linguists since Wilhelm von Humboldt, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, have thought hard enough about its enigmatic implications. Today, the professional divisions between formal, mathematical linguistics (if such really exists), on the one hand, and the comparative and anthropological study of actual languages, on the other, have further blurred the issue. I myself am unable to consider intellectually satisfactory or adequate to the truth any model or formula of human verbal behavior that does not in some way account for this fantastic multiplicity. Why four thousand or more languages? Why, by a factor of a thousand, more languages than, say, there are human races or blood types? No Darwinian analogy of variation through natural selection and adaptation will do. The vast variety of fauna and flora represents a wonder of specific adjustment to local conditions and to the requirements of competitive survival. The contrary is true of the proliferation of neighboring tongues. That proliferation has been one of the most evident and intractable barriers to human collaboration and economic progress. It has left major areas of human habitation internally riven and largely isolated from history. Many cultures that have come to stagnation or ruin may have been linguistic dropouts—which is not to say that we have any solid evidence that one language is better suited than another to the realization of individual or social achievement. We know of no people that does not have in its mythology some variant on the story of the Tower of Babel. This is eloquent proof of men’s bewilderment in the face of the multiplicity of tongues that has set between them constant walls of seeming gibberish and silence. Translation is not a victory but a perpetual, often baffling necessity.

To my mind, it is now the main job of linguistics, working with anthropology and ethnography, to get our actual language condition into clear focus. (We do not even have a truly exhaustive language atlas as yet. We must learn to ask the right questions about the deeply puzzling phenomenon of linguistic diversity. There are clues. But they do not, I think, point in Chomsky’s direction.

The fundamental matter of language proliferation hardly turns up in the theory of generative and transformational grammar. A cryptic remark occurs toward the close of “Language and Mind”: “The empirical study of linguistic universals has led to the formulation of highly restrictive and, I believe, quite plausible hypotheses concerning the possible variety of human languages.” First of all, is a moot point whither this is so. The preliminary investigation of what certain linguists provisionally assume to be syntactic universals has until now been limited to but a few languages, and the results obtained have been at an almost intangible level of generality (i.e., “in all known languages there are verbs or parts of speech that indicate action”). But let us suppose that the kind of empirical study that Greenberg, Hockett, and others are pursuing does in fact produce verifiable “cross-language generalizations.” These would not necessarily support Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar and innate deep structures. The point is crucial and must be put carefully.

Chomsky postulates “innate presettings” deeply embedded or imprinted in the human mind. They “must simply be a biological property.” Now, such settings could lead to the production, through transformational rules, of thousands of human languages. They could, but there is absolutely no obvious reason for them to do so. On the contrary: given a scheme of kernel sentences and functional rules, complex but certainly finite, we would expect the generation of a very restricted, clearly interrelated number of human tongues. What we should find, if the Chomskian theory of innate biological universals is true, is the order of diversity shown by human pigmentation and bone structure. The degree of variety here is totally different, both qualitatively and quantitatively, from that which we find in language. Let me go further: The linguistics of Noam Chomsky could account, and could account with beautiful economy and depth, for a world in which men would all be speaking one language, diversified at most by a moderate range of dialects. The fact that generative and transformational grammar would be beautifully concordant with such a result, that such a result is in some manner both natural and obvious to Chomsky’s postulates, seems to me to cast serious doubts on the whole model. Like the great language mystics, who extend from Nicholas of Cusa to Jakob Böhme, Chomsky often seems to conjure up the radiant fiction of that single tongue spoken by Adam and his sons but forever lost and pulverized at Babel. In short, key features of the Chomskian language revolution appear to go against the grain of the linguistic situation in which the human race actually finds itself and in which it has existed as far as history and conjecture can reach back.

The controversies initiated by Chomsky’s own polemics against behaviorism are only in their early phase. It may be that the arguments urged against universal grammar will he met and that the notion of deep structures will acquire better philosophic or physiological support. Recently, claims have been put forward suggesting that children between the ages of eighteen months and two years formulate sentences in a way that exhibits deep structures not yet overlaid by any particular language. Notably, it has been claimed that there are Chomskian analogues in the way in which Russian and Japanese children acquire their respective languages. I wonder. But, obviously, time and investigation will tell. One thing is clear: Chomsky is an exhilarating thinker, possessed, as was Spinoza before him, by a passionate appetite for unity, for complete logic and explanation. There is a strong streak of monism in Chomsky’s desire to get to the root of things, be they political or linguistic. But it might be, to advance a cautionary platitude, that neither politics nor language is quite like that. Unreason and the obstinate disorder of particular facts may prove resistant to the claims of either political justice or formal logic. It is part of the stature of Chomsky’s work that the issues of disagreement raised by it are basic. To me, man looks a queerer, more diverse beast than Chomsky would have him. And Nimrod’s tower lies broken still.