The Chomskyan revolution: generative grammar
It is no exaggeration to say that the publication in 1957 of a short volume entitled Syntactic Structures, by a then little-known scholar called Noam Chomsky, marked the start of a revolution which transformed modern linguistics. The approach which this book heralded, now known as generative grammar, set a new agenda for the discipline and remains the dominant paradigm in linguistics today. In this chapter we will consider the intellectual background to Chomsky’s work and notably his rejection of behaviourism, his views on innateness and the generative approach which he launched, before examining some of the challenges he has faced from critics.
Whatever one’s ultimate view of Chomsky’s ideas and the agenda he has set for linguistics, his importance as a thinker cannot be denied. We begin with his critique of the Descriptivists, and his rejection of the prevailing orthodoxies of the first half of the twentieth century.
The influence of Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky was born to a middle-class Askhenazy Jewish family in Philadelphia in 1928. He studied under Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining a PhD in 1955, which formed the basis of his 1975 work The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has worked since 1955. Named as the world’s ‘top public intellectual’ in a 2005 poll, he is as well known for his trenchant views on United States foreign policy as he is for his often equally controversial views on language.
Figure 8.1: Noam Chomsky
Linguistics was originally a form of torture practised upon prisoners languishing in a dungeon (indeed, the word linguistics derives from the verb languish); the method of torture was to continuously recite Oscar Wilde quotations at the prisoner for hours on end. More recently, Noam Chomsky has modified the torture into a science. This science would disclose which exactly one of the quotations attributed to Oscar Wilde on Uncyclopedia is fake. This unsolved problem is the holy grail of modern linguistics, and those who pursue it are called linguists.Uncyclopedia: the Content-Free Encyclopedia: Linguistics (http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Linguistics)
That Noam Chomsky’s name appears in the spoof online encyclopedia entry above for ‘Linguistics’ shows how closely this often-controversial figure has become associated with the discipline.
Chomsky and the North American Descriptivists
Although the influence of his mentor Zellig Harris is evident in much of Chomsky’s early work, his books Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which followed in 1965, marked a decisive break with the Descriptivists in a number of respects. Where the Descriptivists had stressed discovery procedures, data collection methodology and the analysis of corpora, Chomsky saw the linguist’s goal as the production of grammars to ‘generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a language’.
Such a device would describe a potentially infinite number of sentences from finite means, i.e. it had to allow for recursive sentences of the ‘House that Jack built’ kind (‘This is the cat that ate the rat that ate the corn’, etc.), which could in theory, if not in practice, be extended indefinitely. It would also go beyond the Descriptivists’ goal of accounting for a finite corpus of linguistic data, which would reach only the first of three levels of adequacy – observational adequacy – in Chomsky’s eyes. To reach the next level, descriptive adequacy, a grammar would have to account not only for the observed data within a corpus but also for a native speaker’s intuitions about grammaticality, or his/her competence. Native speakers of a language, Chomsky argued, are able to judge the grammaticality of a sentence that they have never heard before, irrespective of whether it is meaningful. His most famous example is cited below:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Furiously sleep ideas green colorless
He claimed that (1) is perfectly grammatical, in spite of the fact that it is nonsensical and had probably not been uttered before. (While that was probably true in 1957, it has been a staple of linguistics textbooks ever since – I’d have felt I was letting you down if I had omitted it here.) An English speaker will read it confidently and with normal sentence intonation, whereas its reverse (2) is ungrammatical, and would be read haltingly as a list of words.
Grammaticality for Chomsky is not, therefore, based on semantics (i.e. meaning): nor, indeed, is it based on statistical probability. Completing the sentence frame ‘I saw a fragile\\\\\\\\\_’ with the word ‘whale’ or ‘of’ results in both cases in sentences with a zero probability of occurrence in English, yet native speakers accept ‘I saw a fragile whale’ as grammatical, while rejecting ‘\*I saw a fragile of’.
Behaviourism
That speakers can make judgements concerning the grammaticality of sentences they have never heard reflects the creativity of the language system, which had been largely overlooked by the Descriptivists. Bloomfield, in particular, had been a strong advocate of behaviourism, which held abstractions such as the mind to be irrelevant in explaining the rational activities of human beings, whose behaviour could be explained purely in terms of responses to environmental stimuli. Laboratory rats, for example, could be taught to depress a lever (response) to obtain food (stimulus) and, in similar vein, Bloomfield, in his almost obsessive concern to limit the field of linguistics to the strictly observable, viewed language in the same stimulus-response terms. He offers the example of Jack and Jill:
Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue and lips. Jack vaults the fence, climbs the tree, takes the apple, brings it to Jill, and places it in her hand. Jill eats the apple.(Bloomfield 1933: 22):
In behaviourist terms, the apple provides a stimulus, to which Jill’s speech is a response, which in turn serves a stimulus to Jack upon which he acts, bringing her the apple (reinforcement). But, as Chomsky pointed out in a devastating critique of leading behaviourist B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, behaviourist notions of stimulus and response leave many questions unanswered. Firstly, the central concepts of stimulus, response and reinforcement as used in behaviourism appear well defined in the particular and artificial circumstances of laboratory rats in experimental conditions, but hopelessly ill defined or even circular in respect of normal human behaviour.
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. Suppose instead of saying Dutch we had said 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 (in Skinnerian translation, whatever other responses exist in sufficient strength). Skinner could only say that each of these responses is under the control of some other stimulus property of the physical object. If we look at a red chair and say red, the response is under the control of the stimulus redness; if we say chair, it is under the control of the collection of properties (for Skinner, the object) chairness, and similarly for any other response. This device is as simple as it is empty. (…) We cannot predict verbal behavior in terms of the stimuli in the speaker’s environment, since we do not know what the current stimuli are until he responds. Furthermore, since we cannot control the property of a physical object to which an individual will respond, except in highly artificial cases, Skinner’s claim that his system, as opposed to the traditional one, permits the control of verbal behavior is quite false.(Chomsky1959: III, pp. 31–2)
Worse, the behaviourist model fails to account for the linguistic creativity we alluded to above. If the child’s ‘want milk’ is a response to feeling hungry, is reinforced by its mother and consequently stored as an effective utterance, how is it that children rapidly learn to use and understand sentences that they have never actually heard before? How is it, as Pinker puts it (2002: 21–2), that human beings are smarter than rats?
Spotlight: The blank slate
The metaphor of the tabula rasa or blank slate, generally attributed to the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), represents the empiricist view of a human mind without innate ideas or programming, and moulded entirely from experience. The blank slate denied innate or ‘God-given’ talents, and placed all human beings equal at birth. For critics of empiricism, however, its egalitarian promise degenerated all to easily into tyranny. These comments made in 1924 by the founder of behaviourism, John B. Watson (cited by Pinker 2002: 19), for example, were offered as a critique of an unequal social order, but their overtones of social engineering have a chilling ring in the aftermath of twentieth-century totalitarianism:
‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee you to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-in-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.’
Innateness
While Chomsky’s critique of behaviourism was persuasive, not everyone was prepared to join him in what he saw as the next logical leap. Where the behaviourists started from the assumption of the mind as an infinitely malleable ‘blank slate’ (see Spotlight above), Chomsky argued instead for an innate predisposition to learn language. Only this, he claimed, would account for children’s remarkable ability to learn languages at an early stage of development and on the basis of ‘meagre and degenerate data’ (the ‘cootchy coo!’ of stereotypical parent-to-baby talk), and to use it creatively. If humans are innately predisposed to learn language, Chomsky argued, then it followed that at an underlying level – which he called deep structure – languages were fundamentally similar in important respects. The innate language blueprint with which the child is born, and which facilitates the task of language learning, he termed universal grammar (UG).
The ultimate goal of linguistics, in that case, was therefore to go beyond descriptive adequacy and achieve explanatory adequacy for grammars of natural language. Where two descriptively adequate grammars account for the same phenomenon, the one that should be selected, he argued, is the one most compatible with universal grammar (see Case study below). A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the advantage of simplicity, because it strips away those rules which are already specified in universal grammar, and which a child does not therefore need to learn.
Key idea: Levels of adequacy
Grammars can achieve three levels of adequacy:
• Observational adequacy provides an accurate description of well-formed sentences in a corpus.• Descriptive adequacy accounts for native-speaker intuitions.• Explanatory adequacy selects the best available grammar in terms of its compatibility with universal principles.
Case study: Chomsky’s three levels of adequacy
Smith and Wilson (1979: 241–2) provide a good example of Chomsky’s three levels of adequacy. In the case of what is known as WH-movement, a noun following a WH- word can be moved to the front of a sentence:
1 Mary met some tourist on the street.
1b Which tourist did Mary meet on the street?
But this movement is not possible for a noun in a co-ordinated NP of the form ‘X and Y’:
2 Mary met a policeman and some tourist on the street.
2b \*Which tourist did Mary meet a policeman and on the street?
An observationally adequate grammar would merely state that WH-movement does not allow extraction of a noun or noun-phrase from a co-ordinated structure, but in doing so it might miss a more important generalization, namely that the same constraint also applies elsewhere. Movement from a conjoined NP is similarly ruled out in topicalization, for example:
3 I want to invite that boy to my party
3b That boy, I want to invite to my party.
4 I want to invite this girl and that boy to my party
4b This girl and that boy, I want to invite to my party
4c \*That boy, I want to invite this girl and to my party.
A descriptively adequate grammar of English would therefore state that no rule of English – and, equally importantly, no possible rule of English – allows movement out of a co-ordinated NP. But an explanatorily adequate grammar of English would not specify the rule at all, because it seems to be a feature of universal grammar. Movement from co-ordinated NPs appears to be ruled out in other languages, with no known counter-examples:
French:
J’aime beaucoup ton frère et ta sœur ‘I like your brother and your sister’
\Ta sœur, j’aime beaucoup ton frère et \‘Your sister, I like your sister and’
Russian:
Ja vidjel Pavla i Sonju ‘I saw Pavel and Sonya’
\Sonju ja vidjel Pavla i \‘Sonya I saw Pavel and’
Nupe (Nigeria):
egi-zì gí yikã tò n\`â? ‘(The) children ate fish and meat’
\nāk\`â kíci egi-zì gí yikã tò o? \‘meat which children eat fish and’ (\*‘Which meat did the children eat fish and’?)
The evolution of generative grammar
Unlike the Descriptivists, who built their grammars ‘upwards’ from phonemes to sentences, Chomsky put syntax at the centre of his formal model, providing rules to generate well-formed sequences from abstract syntactic units of the kind we saw in the previous chapter. The essential components of a sentence (S) of traditional grammar, namely subject and predicate, were reframed in these terms as NP and VP:
S <Image src="OPS/images/arrow-1.jpg" alt="image" /> NP VP
These two constituents might then be rewritten as follows:
NP <Image src="OPS/images/arrow-1.jpg" alt="image" /> (Det) (Adj) N
VP <Image src="OPS/images/arrow-1.jpg" alt="image" /> V (NP)
In this rule notation, the bracketed items are optional but the non-bracketed ones are not, for the reasons outlined in Chapter 7: a noun phrase and a verb phrase must be headed by a noun and a verb respectively. Our simple NP rewrite rule generates such phrases as the old man, this house and girls, and our sentence rule generates a very large number of sentences, including Chomsky’s own example from Syntactic Structures:
The man hit the ball.
which we can present either as a labelled bracket structure S\[NP\[Det\[The] N\[Man]] VP\[V\[hit] NP \[Det\[the] N\[ball]] or, more commonly, for ease of exposition, as a tree diagram:
Figure 8.2: Phrase marker for ‘The man hit the ball’
To generate an infinite number of grammatical sentences from finite means, the model has to allow for recursion, which is achieved by allowing constituents to occur within constituents of the same kind. In the example below, for example, S recurs as a daughter node of VP:
Figure 8.3: Recursion of embedded sentences
Recursions of this kind illustrate an important difference between what Chomsky calls competence, an individual’s internalized grammar, and performance, its realization in speech. The capacity to produce infinitely long recursive sentences is a matter of competence, but limits are imposed by real world considerations of performance: overlong sentences are boring and difficult to process, you have a finite amount of breath, and your interlocutor may do you an injury if you do not stop after a reasonable amount of time.
Key idea: Recursion
Early generative grammars were framed in terms of rewrite rules of the kind:
S 
 NP VP
VP 
 V (NP)
Recursion was made possible by allowing constituents to occur within constituents of the same kind, e.g.:
S 
 NP VP
VP 
 V (S)
The partial grammar of English above rules out sentences that do not conform to its phrase-structure (PS) rules, for example:
\*Clever girl the questions answered
\*Exists house
\*The brown cat ate yellow
It would, however, require some refinement in order not to generate ungrammatical sentences like the following:
This green cats eat a mice
John exists a banana
Modifications to the grammar, for example agreement rules in (4) and a specification in the lexicon that exist cannot take an object NP in (5), are easily introduced. But Chomsky draws our attention to a more fundamental problem of phrase-structure grammars, namely that they fail to account for relationships between sentences, for example this active/passive pair:
The cat ate the mouse
The mouse was eaten by the cat
The relatedness of the this pair is not evident from their structural description, but Chomsky argues that the passive (7) is derived from the active (6) by what at this stage he calls a transformation, which he sets out thus:
‘If S1 is a grammatical sentence of the form
NP1 – Aux – V – NP2
then the corresponding string of the form
NP2- Aux + be + en^^ – V – by + NP1
is also a grammatical sentence.’
Notes
- 1en (as in hidden) denotes the past participle marker, and was chosen conventionally in preference to the more common -ed, which also marks past tense.
By positing a transformational component allowing constructions in surface structure to be derived from others in deep structure, Chomsky accounts for complex structural ambiguities. In (1) below, for example, the structural ambiguity comes from the different constructions in deep structure (2) and (3) from which (1) is derived:
The shooting of the hunters
The hunters shot (someone/something)
(Someone/something) shot the hunters
Note that, in early models of generative grammar, surface structure is not to be equated with output: the latter is generated from surface structure by the phonological component.
<Image src="OPS/images/common2.jpg" alt="image" />
Key idea: Transformations
In early generative models, constructions in deep structure can be transformed in surface structure. For example, deep structure active sentences become passive in surface structure via the passivization transformation.
For all its theoretical attractions, a major problem with the transformational component of the model was that it was largely unconstrained. Transformations could not introduce new meaning-bearing elements, but they could move constituents (for example both NP2 and NP1 move in the passivization transformation), add elements (by) or, on occasions, delete them. In other words, they could do practically anything, which sat awkwardly in the context of a research programme aiming to capture the universal principles of grammar acquisition, which are purportedly simple and restricted in number. Later models have therefore set out to specify the constraints on transformations.
Transformations initially gave way to movement rules, and the label ‘Transformational-generative grammar’ (or ‘TG’) of the 1970s had become simply ‘Generative grammar’ by the 1980s. Deep and surface structure were renamed D- and S-structure respectively, and generativists talked of i-language (‘internal language’) and e-language (‘external language’) rather than competence and performance. Rules specifying grammaticality in individual constructions gave way to principles, which set out conditions on grammaticality applicable to all constructions in human language, and parameters which constrain their application according to their setting in a given language. As an example, the generalization that all phrases have a head (see Chapter 7) is a principle, while the head parameter or head-directionality parameter (see Spotlight below) determines the position of that head with respect to complements within its phrase.
Key idea: Principles and parameters
Principles are conditions on grammaticality that are universally applicable. Parameters have a restricted choice of settings that a language may select, e.g. Japanese selects head-final for the head-directionality parameter.
Spotlight: The head parameter
A good example of a parameter within Principles and Parameters Theory is the head parameter, which determines the position of heads in a phrase. In a head-initial language like English, the head noun (N) of an NP comes before its complements:
• leader of the gang• cards on the table
This is not just true for NPs: the head preposition of a PP also precedes its complements (in the bag, under the bridge), and verbs precede object complements in a VP (read a book, answered the question). The ‘head-first’ setting for this parameter therefore captures a number of independent facts about the syntax of English and of other languages with the same setting.
In Japanese, which is a head-final language, exactly the reverse pattern applies (data from Cook & Newson 2007: 44). It has postpositions, not prepositions, as heads of PPs:
• kabe ni ‘on the wall’ wall on
Similarly, verbs come after their complements:
• Nihonjin desu ‘I am Japanese’ Japanese am• E wa kabe ni kakatte imasu ‘The picture is hanging on the wall’. picture wall on is hanging
Principles and parameters were incorporated in the 1980s in modules in government and binding (GB) theory, which set out universal structural conditions, and placed constraints on the one remaining transformation ‘move-α’ (move alpha), which essentially meant ‘move anything anywhere’. One of the GB modules, bounding theory, ruled out, for example, movement of elements outside certain constructions called islands (see Cook & Newson 2007: 73 & 138–41). The minimalist programme aimed for still greater economy in the apparatus of generative theory by removing D- and S-structure altogether and allowing only very general constraints to interact with the abstract feature specifications of lexical items.
Chomsky’s generative paradigm has dominated theoretical linguistics and set the agenda for the subject for nearly six decades. But although it has been constantly updated and refined, it has never been uncontroversial, as we shall see in the next section.
Controversies
I have no time for Chomskyan theorizing and its associated dogmas of ‘universal grammar’. This stuff is so much half-baked twaddle, more akin to a religious movement than to a scholarly enterprise. I am confident that our successors will look back on UG as a huge waste of time. I deeply regret the fact that this sludge attracts so much attention outside linguistics, so much so that many non-linguists believe that Chomskyan theory simply is linguistics, that this is what linguistics has to offer, and that UG is now an established piece of truth, beyond criticism or discussion. The truth is entirely otherwise.(Larry Trask, The Guardian, 6.6.2003, p. 32)
Chomsky has never been without his dissenters. Some, like Charles Hockett, whose 1968 critique, The State of the Art marked a break with generativism, have initially been sympathetic to Chomsky’s approach and goals. For others, such as Geoffrey Sampson and Larry Trask, Chomsky’s own break with the Descriptivists simply represented a wrong turn from which the subject has never recovered. While we cannot do justice to all the controversies here, we will highlight some areas in which generativism has faced persistent criticism, and some of the responses its supporters have offered.
A recurrent strain of criticism focuses, unsurprisingly, on Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis and the question of whether language learning is qualitatively different from other kinds of cognitive development. In particular, Chomsky has faced the accusation that his persuasive critique of behaviourism does not amount to evidence in favour of his own theory of a universal grammar. Generativists would counter that language acquisition is difficult to explain without some innate mental blueprint. It proceeds rapidly and at an early stage in development, irrespective of the child’s cognitive abilities in other areas. And while children do make errors, these are generally of an ‘intelligent’ kind, involving overgeneralization of rules which they have deduced for themselves – for example, those of plural and past tense formation as shown here:
I saw some sheeps on the hill.
Mummy readed my book.
Equally important are the kinds of mistake that children appear not to make. Imagine, for example, a robot attempting to make sense of pronoun use in the English language. It might notice, for example, that in a sentence like ‘Paul goes to London on Wednesdays’, the first word ‘Paul’ can be replaced by ‘he’. It might also learn that ‘he’ refers to male animates and ‘she’ to female ones. Applying a normal ‘trial and error’ approach to understanding the functioning of these two pronouns, it might then draw the obvious conclusion that the first word in a sentence can be replaced by a pronoun, a strategy which works well with proper names like John, Mary, David and so on in sentence frames like the one just quoted. But what if the subject is a noun phrase, as here?
The man goes to London on Wednesdays.
Our teacher goes to London on Wednesdays.
The tall man with a long beard and an umbrella goes to London on Wednesdays.
A similar approach would lead the robot, perfectly logically, to produce the following, ungrammatical sentences:
\*He man goes to London on Wednesdays.
\*He teacher goes to London on Wednesdays.
\*He tall man with a long beard and an umbrella goes to London on Wednesdays.
Human children do not, however, behave like robots. They do not seem to make the ‘trial and error’ mistakes one might expect, quickly deducing instead that the underlined noun phrase in each case can be replaced by he. This suggests an early grasp of the complex notion of structure dependency, which for Chomsky is explicable only in terms of an innate understanding of how natural languages are organized. Evidence for the innateness hypothesis was provided by a famous experiment in which Neil Smith, Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli and Jamal Ouhalla (1993) worked with Christopher, a man whose development had been delayed with respect to normal cognitive abilities such as learning to walk, but who had shown a remarkable aptitude for language acquistion. The researchers presented him with unfamiliar natural languages, which he learned without difficulty. But an invented language, Epun, which displayed structure-independent operations not found in natural languages, proved beyond his capabilities.
<Image src="OPS/images/common2.jpg" alt="image" />
Key idea: Universal grammar?
Children’s early grasp of structure-dependency has been advanced as evidence for an innate language faculty, or universal grammar.
Chomsky has also been criticized for ignoring semantics because it does not lend itself to the formalization his theory requires. Commentators have challenged notably the assumption that native speakers can judge grammaticality without reference to meaning. Chomsky’s claim, for example, that ‘Furiously sleep ideas green colorless’ is not accepted by English speakers seems to rest, as Moore and Carling (1982: 81) point out, on the assumption that strings of the kind
adv V N adj adj
are ill-formed. However, a structurally identical sequence such as ‘Always dye shirts greenish blue’ is likely to be accepted, suggesting that acceptability is not judged solely on the basis of grammar. Chomsky’s assumption that native speaker intuitions are based on competence has also been challenged. As Palmer (1971: 159) has pointed out, some speakers reject sentences like the following:
He will have been being beaten.
It is not clear, however, on what basis this is rejected: competence or performance? In other words, are informants rejecting the combination of future marker will with perfect, progressive and passive on the grounds that the sentence is ungrammatical with respect to their internalized rule system (competence), or merely because the resulting sentence is complex and difficult to process (performance)? The basis for native speaker intuitions is certainly not as self-evident as Chomsky’s model suggests.
‘There are three things in life you must never run after: a woman, a bus, and a theory of transformational grammar – there will be another one along in a moment’, remarked one well-known linguist.(Aitchison 1978: 124)
The regularity with which Chomsky has proposed and then abandoned generative frameworks has frustrated many, as have his sometimes opaque style and shifting terminology. It is certainly true that Chomsky’s own work is not always an easy read, but his ideas do have powerful and articulate champions such as Stephen Pinker, who bring them persuasively to a wider audience, and a number of good, accessible introductions to Chomsky’s work are available. Nor is it necessarily a fair criticism that the model has changed so often: it is reasonable to expect any scientific endeavour to refine its assumptions in the light of new discoveries. Nonetheless, objections that the generative programme has become lost in its own obscure formalisms cannot lightly be dismissed.
As we saw above, the 1980s saw a decisive shift away from rules, and in favour of principles and parameters with greater explanatory power. By the early 2000s, however, as Newmeyer argued in an important article in 2004, the number of postulated ‘language parameters’ had mushroomed, and many were little more than ‘rules’ in disguise. Even the head-directionality parameter to which we alluded above turned out to be more problematical than first thought, as many languages are far from consistently ‘head-initial’ or ‘head-final’. Newmeyer concluded that parameters – an essential part of the generative framework for two decades – were in fact an unnecessary and unilluminating construct.
Critics have long argued that Chomsky was too quick to move to the deductive from the empirical phase of enquiry, i.e. that speculative theoretical edifices were built on knowledge of a few languages and that the staggering diversity of human language was ignored or dismissed as unimportant.
Some linguists believe that they will be able to discover in deep structure the universal features of language. My own view is that this is rather like the alchemists’ search for the philosopher’s stone and that just as chemistry turned away from this kind of speculation to the detailed examination of chemical substances, so too linguistics will concentrate in greater detail upon the phenomenon of language itself.(Palmer 1971: 188)
Syntactic Structures in particular, which refers only to English, has been compared unfavourably to Bloomfield’s Language, which draws on a vast range of natural languages for exemplification. As typologists have consistently identified exceptions to putative linguistic universals, an obsession with formal models is seen to have diverted attention from the real business of linguistics, namely the study of languages:
And certainly nothing in Chomsky’s argument for rationalist theory justifies the way in which, for a decade or more, the energies not just of a few enthusiasts but of almost an entire discipline have been diverted away from the task of recording and describing the various facets of the diverse languages of the world, each in its own terms, towards that of fitting every language into a single, sterile formal framework, which often distorts those aspects of a language to which it is at all relevant, and encourages the practitioner to overlook completely the many aspects of language with which it is not concerned. This has simply been a wrong track taken by linguistics.(Sampson 1980: 164–5)
A widely quoted 2009 article by Evans and Levinson attempted to refocus linguistic inquiry on the diversity, rather than the supposed universality, of language structure, arguing that there are ‘vanishingly few’ linguistic universals in the sense of features shared by all languages, and that those that can be found are not particularly illuminating:
Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. (…) Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.(Evans and Levinson 2009)
Alternatives to universal grammar have also been advanced as explanations for Evans and Levinson’s ‘vanishingly few’ universals, among them the concept of convergent evolution, i.e. a common adaptation to similar conditions in unrelated languages, comparable to the independent development of flight in insects, bats and birds which secured an evolutionary advantage for all three species.
The criticism that generativism ignores linguistic diversity (or, worse, is exclusively anglocentric), however, is no longer a fair one: its proponents draw increasingly on a wide range of languages, of vastly different genetic make-up. In fact, as the world’s languages die at an alarming rate, the need to study and document linguistic diversity is taking on a new urgency, keenly felt by generativists and non-generativists alike. This opens up new and fascinating questions for research: why, for example, does linguistic diversity appear to mirror biodiversity, with more languages spoken around the equator than in more temperate regions? (Papua New Guinea alone is home to some one in seven of the world’s languages.) Why do some languages have highly inflected grammars while others have apparently simpler systems and, indeed, is linguistic complexity in one area of the grammar always balanced by simplicity in another, as has traditionally been assumed (the equi-complexity hypothesis: see Chapter 13)? These are questions to which, at present, we can only offer partial answers.
Fact-check
[1](answers.mdx#rfn8-1) What did ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ prove for Chomsky?
That native speakers reject meaningless sentences as ungrammatical
That Americans can’t spell ‘colourless’
That judgements of grammaticality are not based on meaning
That semantics is central to judgements of grammaticality
[2](answers.mdx#rfn8-2) What had behaviourism seen language acquisition in terms of?
Responses to the environment
Innate ideas
Universal grammar
Linguistic creativity
[3](answers.mdx#rfn8-3) What is competence?
A gift for learning foreign languages
Awareness of good grammar
A native speaker’s internalized grammar
Realization of a speaker’s internalized grammar in speech
[4](answers.mdx#rfn8-4) Which of these noun phrases is not generated by the rewrite rule below?
NP <Image src="OPS/images/arrow-1.jpg" alt="image" /> (Det) (Adj) N
Little children
The clever girl
Little green martians
This sceptred isle
[5](answers.mdx#rfn8-5) Why were behaviourist conceptions of language problematical?
Language users are creative
The stimuli are poorly defined or understood
Human beings are smarter than laboratory rats
All of the above
[6](answers.mdx#rfn8-6) What is universal grammar?
A basic vocabulary with which children are born
An innate predisposition to learn language
Esperanto
Child language in its early stages
[7](answers.mdx#rfn8-7) What is the difference between a principle and a parameter?
Parameters only affect head position in a noun phrase
Parameters are unavailable in some languages
Unlike parameters, principles do not apply to all constructions
Principles apply to all natural language constructions, but parameters have language-specific settings
[8](answers.mdx#rfn8-8) In the earliest generative models, what characterized transformations?
They only allowed movement rules
They could add meaningful elements
They explained relations between sentences in terms of deep and surface structure
They were tightly constrained and few in number
[9](answers.mdx#rfn8-9) What is a grammar that accounts for native speaker intuitions?
Descriptively adequate
Observationally adequate
Inadequate
Explanatorily adequate
[10](answers.mdx#rfn8-10) What have later generative frameworks aimed to do?
Rename rules as ‘parameters’
Introduce levels between deep and surface structure
Allow for greater language specificity in phrase markers
Constrain or remove the transformational component
Dig deeper
A. Carnie, Modern Syntax – A Coursebook (Oxford University Press, 2011), Parts 1 & 2
V. Cook & M. Newson, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (3rd edition, Blackwell, 2007), Chapters 1, 2 & 5
S. Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (HarperCollins, 1994), esp. Chapters 1–4
A. Radford, M. Atkinson, D. Britain, H. Clahsen & A. Spenser, Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2009), Part 3
A. Radford, Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chapters 1–4