Linguistic theory in the NY Times

[Shannon West]

Well, damn. I'm out of a job.  :)

Shannon
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'Hard-Wired' Grammar Rules Found for All Languages

January 15, 2002

By BRENDA FOWLER

In 1981 the linguist Noam Chomsky, who had already proposed
that language was not learned but innate, made an even
bolder claim.

The grammars of all languages, he said, can be described by
a set of universal rules or principles, and the differences
among those grammars are due to a finite set of options
that are also innate.

If grammar were bread, then flour and liquid would be the
universal rules; the options - parameters, Dr. Chomsky
called them - would be things like yeast, eggs, sugar and
jalapeÒos, any of which yield a substantially different
product when added to the universals. The theory would
explain why grammars vary only within a narrow range,
despite the tremendous number and diversity of languages.

While most linguists would now agree that language is
innate, Dr. Chomsky's ideas about principles and parameters
have remained bitterly controversial. Even his supporters
could not claim to have tested his theory with the really
tough cases, the languages considered most different from
those the linguists typically know well.

But in a new book, Dr. Mark C. Baker, a linguist at Rutgers
University whose dissertation was supervised by Dr.
Chomsky, says he has discerned the parameters for a
remarkably diverse set of languages, especially
American-Indian and African tongues.

In the book, "The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden
Rules of Grammar" (Basic Books, 2001), Dr. Baker sets forth
a hierarchy of parameters that sorts them according to
their power to affect and potentially nullify one another.

Just as the periodic table of elements illustrates the
discrete units of the physical world, Dr. Baker's hierarchy
charts the finite set of discrete factors that create
differences in grammars.

That these parameters can be organized in a logical and
systematic way, Dr. Baker says, suggests that there may be
some deeper theory underlying them, and that the hierarchy
may even guide language acquisition in children.

The hierarchy is not the same as a family tree, which
illustrates the historical relations among languages - for
example, Italian, French, Spanish and their mother tongue,
Latin. Nor does it have anything to do with the way words
vary from language to language. Instead, Dr. Baker analyzes
grammar - the set of principles that describe the order in
which words and phrases are strung together, tenses added
and questions formed. Dr. Baker, like Dr. Chomsky, believes
these instructions are hard-wired into humans' brains.

His most spectacular discovery is that the grammars of
English and Mohawk, which appear radically different, are
distinguished by just a single powerful parameter whose
position at the top of the hierarchy creates an enormous
effect.

Mohawk is a polysynthetic language: its verbs may be long
and complicated, made up of many different parts. It can
express in one word what English must express in many
words. For example, "Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se' "
means, "He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly
for her" - meaning, he uglified her dress.

In that statement, "hetkv" is the root of the verb "to be
ugly." Many of the other bits are prefixes that specify the
pronouns of the subject and object. Every verb includes
"each of the main participants in the event described by
the verb," Dr. Baker writes. In all, Mohawk has 58
prefixes, one for each possible combination of subject,
object and indirect object.

Dr. Baker says the polysynthesis parameter is the most
fundamental difference that languages can have, and it
cleaves off Mohawk and a few other languages - for example,
Mayali, spoken in northern Australia - from all others.
That two such far- flung languages operate in the same way
is more evidence for the idea that languages do not simply
evolve in a gradual or unconstrained fashion, Dr. Baker
says.

At the next junction in the hierarchy, two parameters are
at work: "optional polysynthesis" (in which polysynthetic
prefixes are possible, but not required) and "head
directionality," which dictates whether modifiers and other
new words are added before or after existing phrases. In
English, new words are at the front. For example, to make a
prepositional phrase "with her sister," the preposition
goes before the noun. In Lakota, a Sioux language, the
reverse is true. The English sentence "I will put the book
on the table" reads like this in Lakota: "I table the on
book the put will." Japanese, Turkish and Greenlandic are
other languages that opt for new words at the end of
phrases, while Khmer and Welsh have the same setting as
English.

In all, Dr. Baker and others have identified about 14
parameters, and he believes that there may be 16 more.

Dr. Baker's work is by no means universally accepted. Dr.
Robert Van Valin, a professor of linguistics at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, says the findings rest
on a questionable assumption: that there is a universal
grammar.

"What they're doing in that whole program is taking
English-like structures and putting the words or parts of
words of other languages in those structures and then
discovering that they're just like English," he said.

Dr. Karin E. Michelson, an associate professor of
linguistics at SUNY Buffalo, who also disagrees with the
Chomskyan approach, said after reviewing Dr. Baker's Mohawk
work that some of the sentences he selected seemed
artificial.

Dr. Baker acknowledged that some of the longer words in his
study were "carefully engineered," but he said the
parameter still held up using more common examples of
Mohawk. He said using only examples from real discourse
restricted the kind of analysis that linguists could do.

"It would be like constraining a physicist to learn about
gravity without ever building a vacuum tube," Dr. Baker
said.

Other linguists, however, say they are excited by Dr.
Baker's work. "He's a very influential linguist, and my
guess is that this will provide insights and will spawn
research for the next few years," said Dr. Stephen Crain, a
professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland.

If Dr. Baker's theory is correct, a further question is how
the parameters of grammar are set as a child learns
language. Does a child in an English-speaking environment
start at the top of the hierarchy, somehow grasp that
polysynthesis is not at work, and then move on to the next
level in the hierarchy?

Dr. Baker also wonders why, if the brain is hard-wired for
grammar, it leaves the parameter settings unspecified. Why
aren't they hard- wired, too?

Humans are assumed to have language in the first place
because it allows them to communicate useful information to
others. But perhaps, Dr. Baker speculates, language is also
a tool of cryptography - a way of concealing information
from competitors.

In that case, he went on, "the parameters would be the
scrambling procedures."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/15/health/anatomy/15LANG.html?ex=1012055275&e
i=1&en=3575888daaf8dd03

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company