The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (4 page)

H
oused in the modern, gabled, jarringly chrome, brick, and mustard yellow Stata Center at MIT is the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Noam Chomsky has had an office in the department for forty-five years. His room is full of shelves with books, five rubbery office plants, and a small table in the center facing a poster of Bertrand Russell. Under Russell’s looming face is the quotation: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” Across Chomsky’s desk stretch piles and piles of books and unbound manuscripts. They look like a small mountain range.

Prior to an office interview, Chomsky spoke at the 2005 Morris Symposium on the Evolution of Language at Stony Brook, New York. There, his speech seemed flat, almost without affect. He stood at a lectern and read directly from a paper, speaking in such low tones that it was sometimes hard to make out what he was saying. Today, in person, he accompanies his greeting with a puckish grin but is otherwise grave. He takes a seat at the table and sits very still, talking in such a forceful stream that it is virtually impossible to get a word in edgewise. The sense that he cares deeply about what he is saying is unmistakable and compelling.

Chomsky’s style of exposition in person is almost exactly the same as in his writings—he takes no prisoners. Depending on whether you disagree or agree with him, you will probably experience his manner as one of airless conviction or the just impatience of a man who knows the truth and is weary of waiting for others to get it. Debating him is a high-stakes venture—he shows little respect for the intelligence of those who don’t accept his views.

Chomsky has served as a geographical constant in the minds of generations of scientists and linguists since the early 1960s. It was as if, on the publication of his first book, he thumped down a flag and said, “This is the North Pole,” and the rest of the scientific world mapped itself accordingly.

Anyone who has studied language or the mind since then has had to engage at some level with Chomsky’s definition of language. Chomsky’s signature claim is that all humans share a “universal grammar,” otherwise known as UG, a set of rules that can generate the syntax of every human language. This means that apart from the difference in a few mental settings, English and Mohawk, for example, are essentially the same language. Traditionally researchers committed to Chomskyan linguistics believed that universal grammar exists in some part of our brain in a language organ that all humans possess but no other animals have. For Chomsky, syntactic structure is the core of human language, and a decades-long quest for the universal grammar—the linguistic holy grail—has shaped linguistics since he first presented his ideas.

Around the time of the Stony Brook conference, the British magazine
Prospect
published the results of a poll in which Chomsky was voted the world’s top intellectual. (He beat Umberto Eco, who took second place, and Richard Dawkins, in third.) Twenty thousand voters, mainly from Britain and the United States, had been canvassed, and a flurry of media about Chomsky had accompanied the poll’s announcement.
Prospect
published two articles about the world’s top intellectual: a “for” and an “against” Chomsky. On the “for” side Robin Blackburn wrote that Chomsky had transformed an entire field of inquiry and likened him to the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. On the “against” side Oliver Kamm spoke of Chomsky’s “dubious arguments leavened with extravagant rhetoric.”
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This latest burst of attention is merely one of many. Chomsky has been famous in several worlds for a long time. Within the university there are apocryphal Chomsky stories. It’s said that graduate students would sometimes come to their meetings with him in pairs, so they could take turns, trying to keep up. His weekly seminars are legendary. Over the decades, they have been attended not just by MIT graduates but also by an ever-changing cast of unfamiliar students, whom none of the regulars knew. Time and again, so the story goes, the outsiders would try to beard the lion in his den, and Chomsky would swat them one by one. By now, it has to have become tiresome.

Until 2002, and in some ways even since then, Chomsky’s exact position on the evolution of language was hotly contested, but both sides in the debate would at least agree on this: for many years Chomsky deemed language evolution unworthy of investigation, and given the extraordinary nature of his influence, his pronouncement was as deadening as any formal ban. Now, he has decided, it is feasible to study the topic.

Before Chomsky, most linguists were field linguists, researchers who journeyed into uncharted territory and broke bread with the inhabitants. They had no dictionary or phrase book but learned the local language, working out how verbs connect with objects and subjects, and how all types of meaning are conveyed. They have always been seen as adventurers, but the soul of a field linguist is really that of a botanist. When they transcribe a language for the first time, they create a rigorous catalog of sounds, words, and parts of speech, called the grammar of the language. Once this is completed, they match one catalog to another—finding evidence of family relationships between languages. Grammar writers are meticulous and diligent, arranging and rearranging the specimens of language into a lucid system.
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In the early 1950s, Chomsky submitted a grammar of Hebrew for his master’s thesis at MIT. At the same time he was also at work on a huge manuscript titled
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory,
in which he wrote about grammar in the abstract.
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Instead of describing an actual language, Chomsky discussed the different ways that a language
can
be described. He submitted one chapter of this effort for his Ph.D. thesis, but it was so different from the way linguists typically thought and worked that many academics who read it didn’t really know what to do with it.
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In 1954 Morris Halle, an MIT professor famous for his work on the sounds of language, wrote to Roman Jakobson, another famous linguist: “I am very impressed with Noam’s ability as a linguist; he has a wonderful head on his shoulders, if only he did not want to do all things in the most difficult way possible.”
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With his next project Chomsky moved even further away from the concerns of his colleagues. After receiving his doctorate, he got a part-time job at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.
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He carried on with his work, taught linguistics, and, in order to make enough money, also taught German, French, philosophy, and logic. In 1957 Chomsky published the notes from his first linguistics course as
Syntactic Structures
.

In that book he continued his examination of language in the abstract, discussing the grammars of languages in a wholly new way. Instead of simply being a catalog of all the words and sounds in a language, with instructions for how to put them together, a grammar, he argued, was really a theory of that language.

As a theory, a grammar should be judged in the same way all scientific theories are: it should explain as much as it can with as little as possible. It should be simple and elegant. Viewed this way, possible grammars of a language can be compared in the same way that different theories in science are: the successful one more fully explains the phenomena in question in as economical terms as possible.

Syntactic Structures,
for example, contrasted two methods for writing a grammar. The best method, said Chomsky, collapsed all of language into a set of rules. And in much the same way that software generates output in a computer, those rules can generate an entire language. For example, an English sentence can be described as “S goes to NP VP,” meaning that a sentence (S) consists of a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). “NP goes to Det N” means that a noun phrase consists of an “a,” the determiner (Det), and a noun (N).
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Chomsky also pointed out that the set of language rules could be made smaller and simpler if you included ways to relate certain sentences to each other. “The man read the book” and “The book was read by the man,” for example, have a striking similarity. Instead of having separate rules for each of them, Chomsky suggested that the more complicated second sentence was derived from the first. He called this a transformation.
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If the phrase structure analysis of “The man read the book” is “S goes to NP
₁
VP NP
₂
,” then “The book was read by the man” can be represented as “S goes to NP
₂
VP by NP
₁
.” In this way, the relationship between all the simple active sentences of English and their passive versions can be described by just these two simple structures and the transformational rule that links them.

Language, in this view, is basically a set of sentences. And the job of a grammar, or theory of language, is to generate all of the language’s allowable sentences (“The cat sat on the mat”; “The plane was rocked by turbulence”) but none of the bad ones (“Cat mat the on sat”; “Turbulence plane by the rocked was”). A grammar generates all possible utterances of a language, Chomsky said, “in the same way that chemical theory generates all possible compounds.”
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Syntactic Structures
got Chomsky some attention, but at the time of publication it wasn’t especially well known. Two years later Chomsky made a much larger splash when he published a review of B. F. Skinner’s
Verbal Behavior
. The review appeared in what was at the time the premier journal of linguistics,
Language
. Skinner, a psychologist, was already well known for his theory of behaviorism. In its simplest form, behaviorism says that all animals, humans included, are like machines—if you press their buttons in the right way, they’ll respond automatically. The appearance of emotion or thought is irrelevant, because everything can be reduced to behavior. As long as you know what kind of machine you are dealing with—human, feline, avian—you can control its behavior. Even very complicated behavior can be reduced to a series of depressed buttons.

At the time, people spoke about Skinner in the terms they would later use to describe Chomsky. In her book
Animals in Translation,
Temple Grandin wrote about the behaviorist’s influence when she was a college student. “Dr. Skinner was so famous,” she remembered, “just about every college kid in the country had a copy of
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
on his bookshelf.” Of behaviorism she added, “It’s probably hard for people to imagine [the power] this idea had back then. It was almost a religion. To me—to lots of people—B. F. Skinner was a god. He was a god of psychology.”
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Chomsky’s review was published two years after Skinner’s book came out, oddly late in the day for a book review, even in academia. Nevertheless, it had an immediate impact. Skinner suggested that language was a simple behavior, a notion Chomsky dismissed as absurd. Skinner was used to dealing with lab rats, but pressing a pellet for food is no analogy for producing language. In order to speak, people use great creativity while obeying many complicated rules.

Chomsky argued: “A typical example of stimulus control for Skinner would be the response to a piece of music with the utterance
Mozart
or to a painting with the response
Dutch
. These responses are asserted to be ‘under the control of extremely subtle properties’ of the physical object or event.” But, argued Chomsky, what if we don’t say “
Dutch
”? What if we say, “
Clashes with the wallpaper
,
I thought you liked abstract work
,
Never saw it before
,
Tilted
,
Hanging too low
,
Beautiful
,
Hideous
,
Remember our camping trip last summer?
or whatever else might come into our minds when looking at a picture”? People are not controlled by some unknown aspect of a painting, he said. Their response comes from inside them and is facilitated by the infinite creativity of language.
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The key idea in Skinner’s behaviorism—if you push someone or something in the right way, it will respond in a predictable manner—was called stimulus-response. But when it comes to language, Chomsky said, particularly when children learn language for the first time, stimulus-response is not a relevant model. What is fundamentally interesting about language is the incredible speed with which children learn thousands and thousands of words and the many rules that combine them. In fact, there just isn’t enough information in the language children hear in their day-to-day lives for them to divine all the rules that they come to know how to use. Chomsky called this phenomenon “poverty of stimulus.” So how do children learn how to speak if language is so incredibly complicated? They must come to the task somehow prepared, he concluded. They must be born with a mental component that helps them learn language.

It was as if Chomsky had delivered unto Skinner and behaviorism a knockout punch.
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The review garnered enormous amounts of attention from people in all sorts of disciplines. For many academics, this was the moment at which Chomsky seized their attention and would hold them riveted from then on.

The young professor was propelled into the limelight, and even though his review was widely criticized as glib, biting, and angry, it was these very qualities that seemed to thrill people. As much a polemic as a review, the article was described as “devastating,” “electric,” and a superb job of “constructive destruction.” Chomsky the linguistic freedom fighter was born.
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