On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume by Noam Chomsky & Mitsou Ronat

Author:Noam Chomsky & Mitsou Ronat [Chomsky, Noam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781595587619
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2011-07-25T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 2

The Object of Inquiry

I hope it will not be too repetitive if I begin by summarizing briefly what I have said so far, elaborating here and there along the way.

The theory of language is simply that part of human psychology that is concerned with one particular “mental organ,” human language. Stimulated by appropriate and continuing experience, the language faculty creates a grammar that generates sentences with formal and semantic properties. We say that a person knows the language generated by this grammar. Employing other related faculties of mind and the structures they produce, he can then proceed to use the language that he now knows.1

With the progress of science, we may come to know something of the physical representation of the grammar and the language faculty—correspondingly, the cognitive state attained in language learning and the initial state in which there is a representation of UG (universal grammar) but of no specific grammar conforming to UG. For the present, we can only characterize the properties of grammars and of the language faculty in abstract terms.

It is sometimes argued that this contingency, inescapable for the present, deprives the theory of language of empirical content. The conclusion is incorrect. Thus, the single example I have so far given, the principle of structure-dependence, can easily be falsified if false, and the same is true of other proposals within UG or particular grammars. Similarly, it is possible to imagine discoveries in neurophysiology or in the study of behavior and learning that might lead us to revise or abandon a given theory of language or particular grammar, with its hypotheses about the components of the system and their interaction. The abstract nature of these theories permits some latitude in interpretation of particular results, especially insofar as we do not have a clear picture of how cognitive structures are embedded within the theory of performance. Latitude is not total license, however. The theoretical psychologist (in this case, the linguist), the experimental psychologist, and the neurophysiologist are engaged in a common enterprise, and each should exploit as fully as possible the insights derived from all approaches that seek to determine the initial state of the organism, the cognitive structures attained, and the manner in which these cognitive structures are employed. Care is necessary, however. Not infrequently in the psycholinguistic literature we read that particular conclusions about the nature of grammar, or about UG, or about the role of grammar in language use, must be rejected because they are inconsistent with what is known about the organization of memory, behavior, and so on. But what is actually known or even plausibly surmised about these matters is limited and generally still quite remote from the questions that arise in the theoretical study of language. There are some suggestive relations between sentence complexity and processing difficulty, and some other matters. Such evidence should be seriously considered for its possible bearing on the nature of the cognitive state attained and the mechanisms for attaining it.2 But the evidence available does not

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