Chomskian Linguistics

 

Chomsky's deep grammar and its various offspring are the best known of current linguistic theories. Developed to explain the ease with which children learn a language, and adults produce correct sentences, the theory envisages a common underlying structure to all languages, and a complex set of rules to generate individual utterances. But the school was never without its critics, and matters have lately become very complicated.

Chomsky's linguistics is a "top down" approach, starting from syntax and competent speech rather than individual phonemes. Bloomfield and his fellow behaviourists held that the sign (which for Saussureans was a concept) meant simply the non-verbal activity that it substituted for. We couldn't say more. The activities of the brain were inaccessible to us, and we shouldn't theorize about what we can't observe. Phonemes (the elemental, recognizable sound unit) were neither an acoustic entity nor a determinate of meaning, but simply how we divide up language.

Chomsky, in contrast, argued that our astonishing creativity with words, and the phenomenal ease with which children learn a language, meant that language users employed and intuitively recognized an underlying structure. Not a structure, moreover, resting on phonemes or individual words as Ramon Jakobson would have it, but a sort of fundamental, proto-syntax. Any well-formed sentence, for example, contains a noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VB). From this we could create all possible sentences: The old tutor well described the difficulties. Or: The difficulties were well described by the old tutor. By transformation rules the deep structure can be converted to surface sentences with the correct syntax. But what of: The old tutor elaborated the difficulties? The meaning is practically the same: we might chose either. But is this a different transformation or a different deep structure? And how do we make the choice or substitution? Critics say that Chomsky's grammar is simply formalizing what is still a mystery.

Deep structure is the abstract underlying form, which determines the meaning of a sentence. Surface structure is what we write or speak. The two are connected by transformations like combination, addition and deletion. Or so Chomsky first argued. But in his Reflections on Language, Chomsky drew up something much more complicated. There were two structures or trees: one for deep and one for surface sentences. Transformation rules linked the two. Ambiguous sentences had two deep structures. Now the sequence was: The base tree was constructed with building rules and a lexicon. The transformation component mapped deep structures onto surface structures. A phonological component intervened to convert surface structures to surface sentences.

Thereafter matters grew more complicated still. Grammarians needed a further subsystem to convert deep structures via semantic component to semantic representation. Further problems arose over quantifiers, negation and movement rules. Leaving aside such professional disputes, what exactly can we say of these structures and procedures? In what sense are they real, existing in our brains, our innate behaviour, our social training?

Several points need to be made. Firstly that an enormous amount of effort has gone into Chomskian grammar: thirty years of work by thousands of linguists. Some of their approaches are open to criticism — the introspection, and the emphasis on model-building rather than model-testing. There is also doubt among some linguists whether languages like Chinese really fit the Chomskian model. But no one should underestimate its achievements, which belong to a league quite different from the flimsy works of the continental Structuralists. Chomskian documentation is extensive, and the reasoning carefully argued through.

Notwithstanding, the connection of language with meaning has proved more complicated and elusive than was originally hoped. Agreement is as difficult to reach as in linguistic philosophy. Difficulties continue to appear the deeper one looks.

What constraints does Chomskian grammar place on what we can do with language? Literary theorists of many persuasions see language as mediating between ourselves and reality, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposed that language actually shaped our perceptions. Do the innate structures of language, to the extent that they exist, place filters on our understanding in the way argued by Kant? Is perhaps Chomskian linguistics a brake on creativity even, telling us that there are limits to what we can think or imagine, limits just as powerful as those imposed by society, and arising from the same reasons: social activities reflecting our basic makeup?

Realist, who believe that language develops and adjusts to our interactions with real things in the world, argue that there can be no language that allows us to see the world in radically different outlines. Chomsky's work in this case is simply concerned with syntax, correct grammar. Poststructuralists, in contrast, who argue against the view that language is constituted by its external relations, and believe that meaning is isomorphous with language, make strenuous efforts to escape the "prison bars of language": the playful anti-rationalism of Foucault and Derrida. The more widely read among them might even argue that the nonliterary arts each have their own language, not readily inter-translated (the problems of hermeneutics) and that Kuhn and others have shown that scientific revolutions not only change our view of the world, but the very meaning of our terms. Debate continues, though more within disciplines than across this fundamental philosophical divide.

A fuller article, with references and other views, is to be found on TextEtc.

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Chomskian Linguistics

 

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