Download 4th ProZ.com Conferences Buenos Aires, Saturday, 26 August, 2006

4th ProZ.com Conferences
Buenos Aires, Saturday, 26 August, 2006
Session: Grammar Before and After Chomsky
Speaker: Aldo O. Blanco
[email protected]
The official year generally agreed to mark the start of generative grammar is 1957, the
year that witnessed the publication of Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures, the first
of around 30 books published since then – on language. What is new in this recent
development of the study of language viewed as different from traditional grammar?
What is traditional grammar?
What is traditional grammar, to begin with? Traditional grammar is basically a
classification of linguistic data. It is a description of the facts of language. An organized
presentation of what we can observe that people say or write. And the scope or range of
materials presented is basically in the area of morphology. There is very little syntax in
traditional grammar. That’s why Chomsky titled his first book Syntactic Structures.
Syntax is largely hidden in language. It is not as evident as morphology, the form of
words, which is very often quite obvious to the eye. Syntax requires elaboration,
manipulation of the data. In one word, transformations. So it is natural that it should have
taken more time to develop.
The following sentences look quite similar but their syntactic structures and
interpretations are quite distinct:
1) John is eager to please
2) John is easy to please
Johni is eager PROi to please someone
It is easy for someone to please John
Traditional grammar is the description of a language with very little theory, with very
little explanation. Traditional grammar studies grammatical sentences but not
ungrammatical examples, so the question why grammatical sentences are grammatical
and ungrammatical examples are not simply doesn’t arise. The major difference between
the two stages in the history of our discipline is the difference between pre-scientific
studies and science, which is the search for explanation, laws, principles, generalizations.
What is language?
Perhaps the most dramatic progress in linguistics that came about with generative
grammar is the very conception of the nature of language. The answer to the question:
What is language? Today we know that language is not what we say or what is printed on
paper, except metaphorically. The so-called spoken language or the so-called written
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language is not language. It is the use of language. Why isn’t it language? Because
speech necessarily includes air. Without air to carry the sound waves, there cannot be any
speech. And writing necessarily requires ink or chalk. But air and ink are not elements
that constitute language. What is called the medium or the channel is absolutely
necessary for the use of language, but language itself, language proper, does not contain
any such elements. This is the difference between competence and performance.
Language is competence, knowledge, and is in the human mind from which it will not
come out. Performance is the use of language, a manifestation, an example, of language:
utterances, spoken or written or signed, which can be recorded on tape or paper or film,
and heard or read or seen, over and over again.
There is another reason why speech and writing are not language, but uses of language.
Speech and writing are linear phenomena: a succession of sounds and words respectively,
one after another. The structure of the utterance is linear. This linearity is an imposition
on performance by the medium. In speech and writing, there is only one dimension:
length. But the sentence does not have a linear structure. The sentence has a hierarchical
structure. It is not made up of words, but of phrases. That is why sentences are
represented by the so-called trees in generative grammar, or equivalently, bracketings, or
Chinese boxes. There are two dimensions involved: dominance (or inclusion) and
precedence. In the sentence The prisoner ran away, the prisoner is the noun phrase
subject and ran away is the verb phrase predicate. The structure of the sentence is not a
string of four words but a string of two phrases which are in turn made up of two words
each. But this notion of hierarchical structure, of words within phrases, of phrases within
larger phrases, within clauses, within sentences, disappears from oral and written
production. So before the sentence is uttered, its structure has to be flattened down to a
single dimension. This is again one of the differences between competence and
performance.
S
NP
D
The
3)
VP
N
prisoner
V
ran
ADV
away
[S [NP [D The] [N prisoner] ] [VP [V ran] [ADV away] ] ]
Still another difference between knowledge and use is the omission, in the phonological
representation, of elements that are meaningful but not pronounced. In the word books,
there are two morphemes: {book} and {the plural morpheme}. How many morphemes
are there in the word book? If your answer is just one, how do you know that the word is
singular? You know that the word books is plural because of the /s/. And you know that
book is singular because of the absence of the /s/. Book is singular by default. There are
two morphemes in book: {book} and {the singular morpheme}, which is not pronounced,
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but it is somehow represented in the mind. And when we describe a language, we
describe the elements that make up sentences, not utterances.
Where is language?
Language is internal to the mind. A grammar describes an I-language (a language internal
to the human mind). Utterances are the manifestation of sentences. And even sentences
are built up when we use a language. We don’t carry around a list of sentences in the
mind. They have to be constructed on the spur of the moment. Language is not use
(speech or writing or signing) and it is not a set of sentences either. The two notions, use
and sentences, are external to the mind. Language is part of the human brain, and so
small, physically, that it cannot yet be identified. It has to be studied indirectly through its
manifestations.
What do translators do when they translate from one language to another? Do you
translate from one utterance to another, directly? Or do you supply the missing elements
in the utterance (i.e. in the pronunciation or written manifestation) before you find an
equivalent? Do you translate utterances or sentences? The first thing you do is interpret
the utterance. What does that mean? It means you convert the utterance into a sentence by
providing the missing elements or by disambiguating the utterance (by discovering the
two sentences underlying the ambiguous utterance). The utterances are the end-points of
the process: one utterance is what you hear or read and the other utterance is what you
speak or write. And you go from one utterance to the other through a number of steps
which include the representation of sentences, the hierarchical structures:
SL utterance → SL sentence → Find equivalent → TL sentence → TL utterance
Translation is a process that goes from the use of one language to the use of another
language, but in between these two end-points, you are engaged in the analysis and
construction of sentences, of hierarchical structures.
4) Ship sails soon
a) The ship is sailing soon
b) Ship the sails soon!
(declarative)
(imperative)
After you have read this utterance, you disambiguate it, and then translate one of the two
underlying sentences: the one that suits the context.
Some linguists claim that they study ‘language in use’. The circumlocution doesn’t make
any sense. There is no ‘language in use’. Language is in the brain and it’s impossible to
extract it from there. It cannot be transplanted. Not yet anyhow. Those who talk about
‘language in use’ just pretend that they are studying language when they are really
describing the use of language, or the data – something quite different (Smith, 1999: 12).
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How many languages are there?
Another crucial new concept derived from the fact that language is in the mind is that
language is a property, a possession, of the individual, not of a society, as is so commonly
believed. And because language is in the human mind/brain, we can now answer the
question: how many languages are there? The answer is: as many as there are individuals.
If you concentrate on the differences there are as many languages as there are people. If
you consider the similarities, then language is only one. There is only one human nature,
but thousands of millions of human beings.
And the next question could well be: What is English? Is it a language? English is usually
considered a language, but it is not in the mind of a single individual nor is it the one
human language! Then what is it? English is a big abstraction from a large number of
individual languages, that’s why many people today talk about Englishes. Physically
speaking, English does not exist. Very many Englishes do. Are they variations of the one
and only? This term has to be qualified. If we look at the scale that goes from language
through dialect to idiolect, we will notice that the real scale should start at the idiolect,
then dialect and finally language. An idiolect is concrete: it exists physically in the brain
of a speaker. An idiolect is what we are calling the language of an individual. A dialect is
an abstraction from a large number of idiolects. And a language is a still greater
abstraction from dialects.
Abstraction
Language
Dialect
Idiolect
The usual criterion to define dialects is the possibility of communication. But it is a very
poor criterion, a very inefficient guide, extremely variable. Some dialects are very
similar, very close to each other. Others are quite distant. So which linguistic systems we
consider dialects and which we consider languages is a matter of degrees.
The big difference between Chomsky and many sociolinguists is that to the latter
language is a cultural institution whereas to Chomsky language is an aspect of nature.
Chomsky studies language as a natural object. In that sense linguistics is a hard science
along with chemistry, physics, astronomy and geology. It is a branch of biology, of
cognitive psychology. Language is a cognitive structure. It is a set of principles and
parameters and the parameters are binary options which account for the differences
among languages and are set through experience.
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How are languages learned?
Before Chomsky there were several theories of language development. Krashen (1981)
became well-known through his distinction between acquisition and learning. Acquisition
was a natural, unconscious, process whereas learning was a conscious process.
Apparently, the truth is that the development of language in the child (ontogeny) is
neither acquisition nor learning. You cannot acquire something that you possess already
nor can you learn something that you know already. Language is inherited by every
single human being through a genetic program. Language comes in the genes (not jeans,
as a student of mine misunderstood once). The faculty of language is universal across the
human species and its development into a particular language is not something that
children do but rather something that happens to them, whether they like it or not. The
only condition for language development (or growth, or maturation) is exposure:
somebody has to talk to the child in a particular language. Children develop language
through the interaction of the linguistic universals, or universal grammar, which they
inherit from their parents, and a little exposure to a particular language. This process is
called the setting of parameters because languages differ parametrically. Every sentence
in every language must have a subject. In English the subject is obligatory. In Spanish it
is optional. That’s a parameter (of variation). With a little exposure, the child sets or fixes
the parameter, i.e. makes a choice. Language development consists of a number of
choices that every child makes unconsciously.
This theory explains why language acquisition is a uniform experience. It has the same
features everywhere. And there are no exceptions. Language growth takes place in the
early years of a child’s life. When a child is three years old he can use almost the entire
grammar of his language. He knows nearly all the complex linguistic structures of his
language. The vocabulary is a different matter. The vocabulary is learned cumulatively
throughout our lives. But the grammar is appears explosively before three: all the tenses,
the interrogative structures, the causative patterns, nearly everything.
How has the description of language changed?
The main feature of the change in grammar is the search for principles. The goal of
grammar is not just description but explanation: the answer to the question why. Why are
things the way they are and not some other way? Let me exemplify this.
There is a kind of noun phrase which has no reference of its own and must have an
antecedent from which it gets its reference. I am talking about anaphors such as reflexive
and reciprocal expressions:
5) They admire themselves
6) They love each other
Themselves and each other are anaphoric noun phrases. They can only be understood
through their antecedents, from which they derive their reference.
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There is a type of structure in English and other languages in which the grammatical
subject is not the logical subject of the sentence:
7) (a) He seems to be happy
8) (a) He is sure to win
9) (a) He happened to fall
10) (a) He is likely to come today
(b) It seems that he is happy
(b) It is sure that he will win
(b) It so happened that he fell
(b) It is likely that he will come today
In the (a) sentences, the subject is not really the logical subject of the main verb but of the
subordinate verb, as the (b) sentences show. This type of structure is said to be a
movement structure and it is called a subject-raising structure. He is first generated as the
subject of the subordinate verb, which appears in the infinitive form: _____ seems he to
be happy. He cannot stay in that position because it doesn’t receive nominative case there
from any inflection. So it moves to the position of subject of the main clause and receives
nominative case there from the inflection on seems:
11) He seems he to be happy
↑_______│
This movement of the subject leaves a silent copy of it (i.e. in the mental representation)
which is struck through to indicate that it is not pronounced in its original position
although it is understood in that position, as the subject of the infinitival construction to
be happy. This movement is called argument movement and is described as taking place
in search of case. There are other alternative analyses of this structure but they are all
similar in the sense that they all try to account for the movement, or rather, the fact that
the subject is pronounced in one position but understood in another.
This kind of movement is also observed in the passive construction:
12) He was arrested he
↑____________│
He is pronounced at the beginning of the sentence but it is understood as the object of the
verb arrest. So this is also movement of an argument: in this case from object to subject.
These two structures are similar in that they show movement in search of case, of
nominative case. As the argument moves, it leaves behind a silent copy of itself,
traditionally called a trace. This trace, now considered as an unpronounced copy of the
moved element, is an anaphor, i.e. a noun phrase which must have an antecedent nearby.
The two structures, subject-raising and passive (or object raising), are movement
structures in which an anaphor is understood as bound by an antecedent which is very
close to it. The theory is called binding theory, precisely because a noun phrase is bound
by an antecedent (i.e. acquires its reference from it).
One important discovery made by Chomsky is that all three structures (overt anaphors
such as reflexives and reciprocals, and covert or silent anaphors such as we find in
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subject raising and passive sentences express this same relationship with a local
antecedent. They all present the same fact: an anaphoric noun phrase is bound by an
antecedent which is nearby and from which it borrows its reference. In the movement
structure, this anaphor is not pronounced in its position of origin. In the reflexive and
reciprocal sentences, it is. But the relationship with the antecedent is the same.
The parallelism between these three structures was not even suspected in traditional
grammar. Chomsky’s theory has made a discovery just like any other discovery of the
hard sciences. The parallelism is dramatic. Let me repeat the sentences:
13) They1 admire themselves1
14) They1 love each other1
15) He1 seems he1 to be happy
16) He1 was arrested he1
The index 1 shows the co-reference that is established between the anaphor and the
antecedent.
The principle that has been discovered which determines the interpretation of these
sentences is called the Principle A of the Binding Theory and it claims that an anaphor
must be bound by an antecedent in a local domain. An anaphor is a noun phrase that lacks
reference of its own and a local domain is defined in a precise way, which I am now
going to save you from having to suffer.
We have seen structures which look different on the surface but fall under the same
general structural principle. This is an outstanding feature of grammar after Chomsky.
Grammar, in both senses of theory and description, has undergone a revolutionary change
in the past fifty years. The theory may be easier to present. The description, of which I
have given just one example, is much more technical, and requires time and study, two
factors which unfortunately do not make it very popular.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam (1957) Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Krashen, Stephen D (1981) Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Smith, Neil (1999) Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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