Problems with Chomsky

[Sherman Wilcox]

On 12/18/99 1:34 PM, Wallace Chafe said:

> Postscript:  It would be easy to question some of the positive
> contributions listed by Brian, but I'll mention just the notion of
> "creativity", which has always puzzled me.

Hurray! I've always thought that the Chomskyan perspective on linguistic
creativity was just plain bizarre.

For me, language creativity is more akin to musical creativity than it is to
mathematical recursion. So I find the words of a fine jazz musician such as
Clark Terry more insightful than Chomsky on the subject. In an interview on
a recent reissue of an old jazz album (with Oscar Peterson), Terry commented
on his performance of "Mack the Knife" (PP is the interviewer):

*****
CT: Well, all I can say is, I didn't make too many obvious mistakes. I got
through that one okay.

When you give vent to your feelings, playing jazz, some of your better solos
spin off from what could have been catastrophes. This is something that we
learned in the ghetto, where there's varmints -- we used to say, "Damn rat,
I'm going to fix him -- I know where his hole is." So we would chink up the
holes with a lid from a tin can, nail it down. But he finds another way.

If you're attempting to get your idea through one way and it's closed, you
have to get it out, so you take another way. Like a rat going from one rat
hole to the other, if you're trapped, you can't stop and say, "Let's do that
over again." You have to figure out ways and means, through the medium of
your having mastered the instrument. It's not like the classics. It's
extemporaneous composition. ... It's avoiding catastrophe.

PP: But you can always base what you're playing on the standard.

CT: Oh, yes. You're playing the changes, and you do what the old-timers did
before they knew anything about theory or harmony or counterpoint. They used
the melody as a guy wire to extemporaneously superimpose another melody.
That's [still] how cats develop ears, and are able to play by ear. But this
was all that the old-timers had to go by.

PP: ... so they improvised by necessity, because they didn't have or
couldn't read music?

CT: Yes. Just finding a way to get through the song helped to develop their
creativity.
*****

Not only does Clark Terry hint at Wally's "insertion of a vast lexicon into
a relatively small set of patterns" and the "real" language that he
discussed in a previous message, but Terry provides what I'd like to offer
as an alternative definition of linguistic creativity: avoiding catastrophe
in extemporaneous composition.

Sherman Wilcox
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico