Relativity versus Reality 2

[Geoff Nathan]

At 06:39 AM 6/18/2004, Rob Freeman wrote:
>That's why I'd like to hear more about what the arguments were when Chomsky
>decided language could not be universally learned. Exactly why was it he
>decided it could not be universally learned? Is my information right that it
>was (at least partially) because such learning resulted in "inconsistent or
>incoherent representations"?

Perhaps it's because I'm very old, or perhaps because I had a very eclectic
linguistic education (having been born an American Structuralist, raised a
generative semanticist and converted to some kind of Cognitive Grammar in
my old age) but it seems that nobody remembers what Chomsky originally said
(and continues to say).

There are things about language that relatively young children know, and
certainly adult speakers know, that they could not have acquired through
exposure to the speech of those around them.  Many of these things are
about what you cannot do under certain circumstances that you can do under
others.  The classic example, of course, is a series of constraints on
movement (or whatever current metaphor you prefer).  For example, you can
form a WH-question in English (and most languages) by placing the WH-word
at the front and leaving a gap in the sentence where it is understood (to
use a traditional grammar term):

What did Mary say John was looking at ___?

but if the embedded clause is an indirect question the result is
ungrammatical in English and in virtually all other languages (although not
absolutely all):

*What did Mary ask whether John was looking at ___?

This sentence is crashingly bad, in fact almost incomprehensible, despite
the fact that a sentence with all the same ingredients is just fine if the
WH-word is left in place:

Mary asked whether John was looking at WHAT?

Chomsky's point was that he could imagine no way that this restriction on
how questions are constructed could be learned from positive data (i.e.
from the real sentences produced around the child), since he believed that
children do not get negative data (i.e. sentences are not pronounced with
asterisks intact, and the kinds of corrections children experience from
their interlocutors deal with content, not form, or with a few prescriptive
shibboleths).  Now since then there have been proposals for
non-linguistically-specific sources for 'movement' constraints, and I
suspect they are correct, but we do need to recognize that this is a hard
question, and Chomsky was not just blowing smoke here.  I suspect he would
ask at this point, for example, what aspect of our perceptual system, or of
our interaction with objects around us leads to this constraint.  Although
I am not a 'Chomskyan' I still think it's a good question.

Geoff
Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnathan at wayne.edu>
Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology,
         and Associate Professor of English
Linguistics Program                     Phone Numbers
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Wayne State University                  Linguistics (English):  (313) 577-8621
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