Princess Grace & Chomsky's Lectures

I woke up only at 3 pm. My eyes opened at an early hour once but I simply went back to sleep. I didn’t feel bad when I woke up but the Soka chant was still sounding in my head. I’m not sure at all if the chant was coming from outside or it was a matter that was occurring only in my head.

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Late last night, I watched “Rear Window,” a Hitchcock classic. In “The Deer Hunter,” there is a scene where Steve, now wheelchair-bound because of the injuries he suffered in Vietnam, mentions a visit of “Princess Grace.” Princess Grace of Monaco appears as the super-beauty actress Grace Kelly playing the role of a rich girl in “Rear Window.” A pure coincidence.

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I finally crossed the mid-point of “Language and Politics.” Professor Chomsky explains his biological and psychological theory toward language and universal grammar (UG) in a far more accessible way in Interviews, “Language as a Key to Human Nature and Society (24 September 1983)” and “Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach (November 1983).”

… The assumption is that physical structures are genetically inherited and intellectual structures are learned.
I think that this assumption is wrong. None of these structures is learned. They all grow, they grow in comparable ways…

… [The] basic structures for our behaviour are innate. The specific details of how they grow would depend on interaction with the environment.

… I don’t think that there is any scientific evidence about the question whether we think only in language or not. But introspection indicates pretty clearly that we don’t think only in language necessarily. We also think in terms of visual images, we think in terms of situations and events, and so on, and many times we can’t even begin to express it in words, it is a common experience to say something and then to recognize that it is not what we meant, that it is something else.

I think that a very important aspect of language has to do with the establishing of social relations and interactions. Often, this is described as communication. But that is very misleading, I think. There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don’t think that is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language. For example, language can be used to express or clarify one’s thoughts with little regard for the social context, if any.

[We] are only one species. You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn’t happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization which, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.

I don’t think [human behaviors and languages] differ so much. I think that as human beings we quite naturally take for granted what is similar among human beings and they pay attention to what differentiates us. That makes perfect sense for us as human beings. I suppose that frogs pay no attention to being a frog. They take it for granted. What interests a frog are differences among frogs. From our point of view they are all more of less the same, from their point of view they are all radically different.

… Imagine an extrahuman observer looking at us. Such an extrahuman observer would be struck by the uniformity of human languages, by the very slight variation from one language to another. And by the remarkable respects in which all languages are the same. And then he would notice observing us that we do not pay attention to that because for the purpose of human life it is quite natural and appropriate just to take for granted that is common. We don’t concern ourselves with that, all we worry about are differences.

… Let’s imagine again an observer looking at us without any preconceptions. I think he would be struck by the fact that although human beings have the capacity to develop scientific knowledge, it must be a very limited capacity because it is done only in very narrow and specific domains. There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences or at least has not done so… (“Language as a Key to Human Nature and Society (24 September 1983)”)

Consider something that everyone agrees to is due to heredity – the fact that humans develop arms rather than wings… [We] assume that heredity must be responsible. In fact, if someone came along and said that a bird embryo is somehow “trained” to grow wings, people would just laugh…

… You have to laugh at claims that heredity plays no significant role in language learning, because exactly the same kinds of genetic arguments hold for language learning as hold for embryological development.
… In fact, language development really ought to be called “language growth” because the language organ grows like any other body organ.

… If someone came along and said, “Kids are trained to undergo puberty because they see other people,” once again everybody would laugh… [We] all assume that puberty is genetically determined.

… Look, all through an organism’s existence, from birth to death, it passes through a series of genetically programmed changes. Plainly language growth is simply one of those predetermined changes. Language depends upon genetic endowment that’s on a par with the ones that specify the structure of our visual or circulatory systems, or determine that we have arms instead of wings.

The best evidence involves those aspects of a language’s grammar that are so obvious, so intuitively self-evident to everyone, that they are quite rightly never mentioned in traditional grammars.

… Some of the oddities of English pronoun behavior illustrate what I mean. Take the sentence, “John believes he is intelligent.” Okay, we all know that “he” can refer to either John or to someone else; so the sentence is ambiguous. It can mean either that John thinks he, John, is intelligent, or that someone else is intelligent. In contrast, consider the sentence, “John believes him to be intelligent.” Here the pronoun “him” can’t refer to John; it can refer only to someone else.
Now, did anyone teach us this peculiarity about English pronouns when we were children? It would be hard to even imagine a training procedure that would convey such information to a person. Nevertheless, everybody knows it – knows it without experience, without training, and at quite an early age…

… [Let] me give you another example. English contains grammatical constructions that are called parasitic gaps. In these constructions, you can drop a pronoun and still understand the sentence in the same way as when the sentence contains a pronoun. Consider the sentence, “Which article did you file without reading it?” Notice that you can drop the pronoun “it” without changing meaning or grammaticality. You can say, “Which file did you file without reading?” But you can’t say, “John was killed by a rock falling on,” when you mean, “John was killed by a rock falling on him.” This time omitting the pronoun destroys both meaning and grammaticality.

Constructions of this type – where you can or cannot drop the pronoun – are very rare. In fact, they are so rare that it is quite likely that during the period a child masters his native language (the first five or six years of life), he never hears any of these constructions, or he hears them very sporadically. Nonetheless, every native speaker of English knows flawlessly when you can and can’t drop pronouns in these kinds of sentences.

… We now know that universal grammar consists of a collection of preprogrammed subsystems that include, for example, on responsible meaning, another responsible for stringing together phrases in a sentence, a third one that deals, among other things, with the kinds of relationships between nouns and pronouns that I discussed earlier. And there are a number of others.

These subsystems are not genetically preprogrammed down to the last detail. If they are, there would be only one human language. But heredity does set rather narrow limits on the possible ways that the rules governing each subsystem’s function can vary. Languages like English and Italian, for example, differ in their choice of genetically permitted variations that exist as options in the universal grammar. You can think of these options as a kind of linguistic menu containing mutually exclusive grammatical possibilities.

For example, languages like Italian have chosen the “null subject” option from the universal grammar menu: in Italian you can say “left” when you mean “he left” or “she left.” English and French have passed up this option and chosen instead the rule that requires explicit mention of the subject.

In English the most important element in every major grammatical category comes first in its phrase. In simple sentences, for example, we say “John hit Bill,” not “John Bill hit.” With adjectives we say “proud of John” not “John of proud”; with nouns we say “habit of drinking wine,” not “drinking wine of habit”; and with prepositions we say “to John,” not “John to.” Because heads of grammatical categories always come first, English is called a head-initial language.

Japanese is a head-final language. In Japanese you say “John Bill hit.” And instead of prepositions, there are postpositions that follow nouns: “John to,” rather than “to John.” So here’s another parameter the child’s got to learn from experience: Is the language head-initial or head-final?

… A slight change in just one of the universal grammar’s parameters can have enormous repercussions throughout the language. It can produce an entirely different language. (“Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach (November 1983)”)