I Speak, Therefore I Am by Andrea C. Moro

Author:Andrea C. Moro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN009000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Linguistics, PHI038000, Philosophy/Language
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

12 MARTIN JOOS

(born Wisconsin 1907; died Madison 1978)

Languages can differ from one another unpredictably and without limit.

—Hamp, Joos, Householder, and Austerlitz, eds., Readings in Linguistics

Bad luck is sometimes invited. In the sciences, this happens whenever a match, or rather a championship, is declared over. For example, toward the end of the nineteenth century, all that was left for physics was to refine the values of certain natural constants to more decimal places. A few years later, the same models were about as useful as a sundial at night. Relativity and quantum mechanics changed everything. General relativity didn’t destroy Newton’s theory of gravity, but it demoted it to a special case of a more general theory. Bold assertions of this kind aren’t really appropriate in science, although it’s difficult to avoid them once you get really involved. A similar fate was in store for this quotation from Joos, only here Fortune was even more brazen, in that in exactly the same year a slim volume was published that was to change the way we see language and take linguistics in exactly the opposite direction: Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. In this little book—a summary of a much greater body of work, Chomsky’s doctoral thesis, which was only published twenty-five years later (Chomsky 1975)—essentially three points were made. First, linguistic theory should be subjected to the same methodological criteria as any other science; that is, it should proceed on an empirical, not a deductive, basis. Second, the rules for combining words (syntax) could not be captured in terms of statistics, but more sophisticated mathematical tools were needed that took into account long-distance relations between words and brought natural languages under a much more general hierarchy of grammars (Hopcroft et al. 2006). Third, these tools were too complex to be spontaneously learned by children, especially given the relative lack of errors made by children, and above all, the fact that those errors tend to all be of the same type. Actually, this last point wasn’t made in the book in question, but rather in an article published two years later, in which Chomsky openly claimed that “The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammar of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or ‘hypothesis-formulating’ ability of unknown character and complexity” (Chomsky 1959).

If we think that the complexity of language reflects a blueprint for language, then that blueprint must be the same for everyone. Nobody would think that, for example, there’s a genetic blueprint for the structure of the human eye and claim at the same time that the eye can differ substantially from one individual to the next. Of course there are individual or ethnic differences in eyes (for example, the color of the iris or the shape of the eyelid), and group differences (for example, the form of the eyelid), but nobody would say that eyes can vary “unpredictably and without limits.”

Thus Joos got it spectacularly wrong. But he couldn’t

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