3.-
COULD CHOMSKY BE WRONG?
Could
Chomsky be Wrong?
Timothy
Mason
Université
de Paris 8
Well, could he? If you trawl the net, you will find
that the majority of material on language acquisition - whether of a first or a
second language - is strongly Nativist and often simply takes it for granted
that Chomsky and Fodor have, between them, swept away all possibility of
opposition. In the English-speaking world - the French, for example, are far
more skeptical - the Universal Grammar or the language module rules supreme.
This page is simply an attempt to redress the balance;
you will find a set of links to pages that offer alternatives to what appears
to be the reigning paradigm. I add material as I find it, trying to give some
indication of the arguments. Although I am neither a linguist nor a
neuroscientist, I have tried to exercise some judgement over what to include,
but you may find you disagree with a number of my calls. So if anyone has any
comments - other than to pooh-pooh the whole idea of questioning Chomsky - I'd
be glad to hear them.
Chomsky
does not believe that human language evolved from any previous animal
communication system, but sprang into being from nowhere. Pinker disagrees with
this, but there are problems for the Nativist view in admitting a Darwinian
origin for human speech. One of the foremost critics of the Chomskian model
from the evolutionary perspective is Terrence Deacon, whose book 'The Symbolic Species'
is an attempt to show how language must have evolved gradually, and how the
underlying rules, far from being too complex to be learned without the aid of a
special module, are, in fact, child's play. You may wish to read William
Calvin's review of the book. James Hurford, reviewing it for the Times Literary
Supplement, is critical but ultimately favourable. Deacon himself has a paper
on 'meme theory' from the Semiotic Review of Books on the web which does expand
on one of his arguments.
While
Calvin, particularly in his conversations with Bickerton, seems sometimes
sympathetic to the idea that language is an innate and specific competence,
other neurologists are less charitable ; Ralph-Axel Mueller, in a paper
entitled 'Innateness, Autonomy, Universality?' makes a point that is often put
by brain-specialists - the specialization of certain regions of the brain for
language processing is an end-result of development rather than being programed
into the genome, and, in general, it cannot be said that any of the higher
brain functions are innate.
It may be that the burgeoning interest in the
evolution of language will prove to be one of the most crucial proving grounds
of Nativism ; see the Paris Conference on Language Evolution web-site, where
you will find abstracts of interventions by both Nativists and anti-Nativists
(You will also find a link to the most recent Conference which is to be held at
Leipzig). The Nativist position on modularity is strongly questioned by one
strand in evolutionary thinking, which claims that our ancestors' first
symbolic communication system was gestural, and that language is intimately
related to kinesis : they make the point that Broca's area is concerned both
with linguistic and with bodily sequencing.
For an intriguing piece on evolution and meme theory
which takes on Chomsky, see Vaneechoutte and Skoyles 'The memetic origin of
language ; Modern humans as musical primates'. They cite Robin Allott, who has
written a critique of Pinker's "The Language Instinct", arguing that
one cannot construct an evolutionary account of language from within the
Chomskyan tradition. Allot has other interesting papers on this page.
For
a Whorfian perspective on the evolution of language see Daniel Moonhawk
Alford's pages, hosted by Don Watson. Alford provides a line-by-line critique
of Chomsky's rebuttal of Whorf. For another critical view from within
anthropology, see Chris Knight's "Noam Chomsky ; Politics or
Science?" , who argues that that Chomsky's anarchist politics are inversely
related to his linguistics paradigm, which was moulded initially by military
and other corporate requirements..
Quartz
and Sejnowski, in their 'Constructivist Manifesto', argue that Chomsky and
Pinker have avoided confronting the problems inherent in modeling a
'non-stationary mechanism'. They argue that :
Two themes emerge from finding a structural measure of
representational complexity: (1) development is a progressive increase in the
structures underlying representational complexity, and (2) this increase
depends on interaction with a structured environment to guide development.
These form the basis of neural constructivism, the developmental theory we
present.
(N.B. Ash Asudeh, of the University of Edinburgh,
disagrees that they have refuted Fodor and Chomsky).
A group of British cognitive scientists ran a
'Constructivist Workshop' for a while. An outline of their meetings, with
useful bibliographical indications, is still on the web, although they announce
a little ruefully that 'the workshop has been temporarily discontinued'.
However, the webmaster, Gert Westermann, has several of his own papers on the constructivist
approach to language available from his home page.
Deacon
sees language as being basically simple in structure - simple enough to be
learned by a two-year-old ; Nativists often claim that it is, in fact, far too
complex to be learned without help. One of the critical moments in any argument
with a Generative Grammarian is when s/he will draw up a list of 'difficult'
sentences and then lean back with a satisfied smile, asking you to show how a
child could have worked them out for herself. I always feel a little nonplussed
at this, for often I am unable to see why it is that the sentences are supposed
to be so obscure ; their difficulty seems to be a product of the linguist's
analytical tools, rather than of the sentence-structures themselves. Richard
Hudson, who is Professor of Linguistics at University College London, seems to
be on to something ; he believes that if you look to the words, the meaning
will out. Have a look at The difficulty of (so-called) self-embedded structures
- you'll have to scroll down the page and then load it down.
In a
similar vein, Thomas Schoenneman (pdf file) argues that the structural
similarities found across languages are of a very simple nature, and that they
are best explained as arising from the fact that "all languages attempt to
communicate the same sorts of semantic information".
Addressing the same argument, some linguists have been
working with computers to see whether they can write programs that will learn
rules of grammar without needing the specialist module that the Nativists
believe in. Although no-one has yet produced a machine that can learn a
fully-fledged language, some specialists do claim to have trained their
computers to deduce rules in such a way as to falsify the Chomskian
impossibility arguments. For one example, have a look at Gerry Wolff's
'Language Learning as Compression' page. (References to other, similar attempts
will be found on other pages to which I shall be pointing).
A model of learning which its authors see as applying
to all forms of knowledge - language as much as any other - is Anderson's ACT*.
At one time, you could access an on-line tutorial from the page, but this seems
to be difficult to reach at the moment.
Martin Redington and Nick Chater are working in a
similar way - although they are not specifically interested in falsifying the
Nativist view. Geoffrey Sampson, one of the participants in the Paris
Conference, working in the same area, is far more dismissive of 'the Language
Instinct', and claims to have countered every one of the Nativist arguments in
his book 'Educating Eve'. His paper "There is No Language Instinct",
given at the Conference, is on-line.
Both Wolff and Hudson see language as consisting of a
network or set of networks. One of the most powerful of anti-modularity voices
is that of Elizabeth Bates ; several of her works can be loaded down from her
home page. She also takes a network view of language - you can look at "On
the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon: Evidence from acquisition,
aphasia and real-time processing", for example (a PDF file) - and she is
particularly good at picking holes in the Nativist arguments advanced on the
basis of the characteristics of 'language-savants' such as Williams syndrome
children : see On language savants and the structure of the mind, another PDF file.
In fact, everything on this site is worth looking at, and a happy life-time
could be spent following up the bibliographical leads. You will also want to
look at Annette Karmiloff-Smith's "Precis of Beyond modularity: A
developmental perspective on cognitive science". (Behavioral and Brain
Sciences - an unedited preprint).
Bates and Karmiloff-Smith's colleague (or
coconspirator?) Jeff Elman also has a number of papers on-line, including
"The emergence of language: A conspiracy theory" (in PDF format). Elman
can be described as a 'connectionist'.
Another important source in this tradition is Brian
MacWhinney's page, where several of his articles - in PDF format again - are
available for down-load. MacWhinney sees linguistics in general, and Chomskyan
linguistics in particular, as having neglected competitive models of grammar.
They fail to see that "Language structure and processing are completely
intertwined: There is no distinction between competence and
performance"(Competition and Teachability, 1986).
(The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a short article on connectionism,
with some useful links). Also well worth looking at is David Plaut's page,
which has a number of links to his essays, including "Language acquisition
in the absence of explicit negative evidence: how important is starting
small?", written with Douglas Rohde, in which the authors argue that
"under a statistical model of the language environment, Gold s theorem and
the possible lack of explicit negative evidence do not implicate innate,
linguistic-specific mechanisms". (I found their discussion of Gold
particularly useful).
One of the main voices in connectionism is that of
William Bechtel ; his article entitled : "What knowledge must be in the
head in order to acquire language" (available as pdf file from his
Publications page) , in which he argues against Fodor that language cannot be
uniquely situated in the mind, is available in PostScript format. Grounds for
skepticism concerning connectivist claims are voiced by the philosopher István
S. N. Berkeley in his essay "Some Myths of Connectionism".)
Fodor
sees Connectionism as a born-again Behaviourism. This characterization is
enthusiastically embraced by
Two
further critiques of Chomsky's position from a behaviourist perspective can be
downloaded in pdf form from the site of the Review 'Analysis of Verbal Behavior
: David Palmer's 'Chomsky's Nativism; a Critical Review' and 'Chomsky's
Nativism Reconsidered' can be downloaded from the 'Select Electronic Reprints'
page. Palmer sees Chomsky's review of Skinner's 'Verbal Behavior' as having
been 'harmful to linguistics'.
Bates
and Karmiloff-Smith do not deny modularity as such - but see it as developing
through learning. William O'Grady, at the University of Hawaii, on the other
hand, may be described as taking a 'nativist' position, but with no need for
such a thing as a grammar module. He writes "the phenomena that lie at the
core of traditional work on syntax (the architecture of phrase structure,
pronominal co-reference, control, agreement, constraints on extraction, and the
like) can be explained by the right theory of sentence processing-a theory that
does not make reference to a grammar at all." You can access several of
his papers from the site, including 'The Radical Middle' (scroll down and load
as pdf).
Another
model of interest is Ezra Van Everbroeck's CLASPnet. This is a web-version of
his M.Sc dissertation, which presents, he says "an original model
illustrating the relevance of connectionist simulations to theoretical
linguistic research."
Another well-known critic of Chomsky's is Roger
Schank, a specialist in Artificial Intelligence. In the page indexed here, he
is interviewed for John Brockman's 'The Third Culture ; Beyond the Scientific
Revolution' (Simon and Schuster, 1995). Chomsky, he says, represents everything
that's bad about academics, (at one point he could not talk about what he
considers to be Chomsky's charlatanism without getting angry). In particular,
he was enraged by Chomsky's deliberate exclusion of meaning. John F. Sowa, in a
detailed comparison of Schank's work with that of Richard Montague, looks at
how a lexicon might be constructed.
Chomsky's
distinction between competence and performance, and his dismissal of the latter
as good evidence for linguists has, it seems, condemned those interested in
language to spend the rest of their lives contemplating such phrases as 'John
promised Bill to leave' or 'John asked Bill for permission to leave' (both from
Chomsky's 'Language and Mind', Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1972). Given the richness
of human expression, this is a self-denial of awesome proportions. Is it
justified? Robert de Beaugrande argues that it is not - he also directs his
argument at Stephen Krashen's attempt to build on Chomsky's work to elaborate a
theory of second-language acquisition. In another paper, de Beaugrande holds
that Chomsky has lead a 'performative campaign to replace real language with
ideal language' which allows him to avoid confronting the social nature of
linguistic processes.
Ngoni Chipere of the University of Cambridge, in his
paper, 'Real Language Users', suggests that if we look at the way people really
use language, instead of exchanging phrases between linguists, we discover that
there are wide variations in the degree to which people can handle grammatical
complexity (and see Huttenlocher, below). He compared skill in the
comprehension of grammatically challenging sentences on the part of educated
and non-educated subjects, finding that that highly educated non-native
speakers may show a greater ability to understand challenging sentences than
less educated native speakers. (It has to be said that the educated speakers
were, in fact, linguists - which may account for their being good at the kind
of games that linguists play).
Another
linguist whose main work is constructing grammar with the aid of the computer
is Remko Scha of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the
University of Amsterdam. In "Language theory and language technology;
competence and performance", first published in Dutch in 1990, he argues
that : "The current generation of language processing systems is based on
linguistically motivated competence models of natural languages. The problems
encountered with these systems suggest the need for performance-models of
language processing, which take into account the statistical properties of
actual lanuage use".
While
some construct computer programs to learn languages, others are actually
looking at the ways in which real flesh-and-blood children do it. (For an idea
of what is going on in this field, see the Standford "Child Language
Research Forum" page. You can also go to the 'Language Science Research
Group" page, which has a rich set of resources, including several articles
and some recordings - with transcripts - of children's speech).
Although
a number of workers in this field - such as Boysson-Bardies, whose excellent
'Comment la langue vient aux enfants' has now been translated into English -
take a Nativist stance, not all of them do. One interesting approach is that of
Janellen Huttenlocher, whose investigations indicate that mothers' verbal
behaviour towards their children is crucial not only to their acquisition of
vocabulary, but also to their mastery of grammar - children whose mothers talk
to them a lot are better able to decode and encode complex sentences than are
those who receive little stimulation ("With respect to syntax", she
writes, "the studies show that the mastery of complex syntax forms
(recursive devices) is highly related to the proportion of complex speech used
by their parents". Chomsky believes that there are no significant differences
in the degree to which individual native-speakers acquire competence). Although
her work is not web-available, a journalistic summary may be found here -
scroll down the page a little to find that part of the article.
Other
researchers into language acquisition - Melissa Bowerman, for example - can be
found from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics home page.
Michael
Gasser and Eliana Colunga, in "Playpen : Towards an Architecture for
Modeling the Development of Spatial Cognition", argue that "the study
of the acquisition of word meaning requires taking seriously non-linguistic
cognition, in particular human vision and the pre-linguistic development of
concepts". "Playpen" itself is a connectionist modeling of what
they characterize as a radical grounded conception of language acquisition.
On
vocabulary acquisition, Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale, has recently
published 'How Children Learn the Meanings of Words'. Bloom, who takes neither
a nativist nor a connectivist position, argues that "word learning is the
product of a set of cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability
to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich
understanding of the mental states of other people". An article setting
out the main arguments of the book will be found at the BBS Online site.
Another
specialist in child-development (and primatology), Michael Tomasello, is also
skeptical of nativist claims ; he says that children are great imitators,
compared with our chimpanzee cousins. They model their behaviour on that of the
adults around them - they learn - for language as well as for other behaviours.
Some indications of Tomasello's thought can be found in an article written with
Christophe Boesch, published in Current Anthropology, although this is more
concerned with primates in general than the human animal in particular. (My
thanks to Tim Dougherty for the reference).
One
beef I have with Chomsky is the way he airily declares out of court any work
which is not within his own domain. Working from first principles, he is able
to dismiss investigations - such as those of Basil Bernstein - without having
taken the trouble to read the papers. To the extent that American linguistics
has come under the thrall of Nativism, other ways of working have been
marginalised - so that, for example, we hear little of Functionalist
Linguistics (or of its French equivalent 'enunciative grammar'). Could it be
that the victory of the Nativist perspective is largely a matter of rhetorical
power - both Chomsky and Fodor are formidable in argument, as Piaget discovered
to his cost - rather than of substance? Konrad Koerner, of the University of
Ottowa, sees the Chomskian revolution as being due to factors other than its
adequacy, elegance or economy ; he offers a socio-historical outline of the
rise of Generative Linguistics. Rather more gently, Keith Allan, of
The most often cited alternative to Chomsky's model is
that of Halliday's Systemic Functional approach. The Systemic Meaning Modelling
Group at
Some of Chomsky's own students became dissatisfied
with certain features of his model, and were instrumental in forging a distinct
brand of language study - Cognitive Linguistics. An interview with George
Lakoff by John Brockman gives some background into how the break came about.The
International Cognitive Linguistics Association has its own site, which is not,
at the moment, particularly exciting. An introductory bibliography for the
field has been compiled by Dick Hudson.
There are several papers written in this tradition
that you can load down from Zouhair Maalej's page - such as "Metaphoric
Discourse in the Age of Cognitive Linguistics (with special reference to Tunisian
Arabic).
Out of the same stable is Fillmore's Construction
Grammar. There is a page dedicated to this on the
In a similar vein, a web-page put up from
Other dissatisfied Chomskans can be found at the HPSG
Server at Stanford. This has a good set of links, and interviews with Ivan Sag,
Bob Carpenter, Dan Flickinger and Hans Uszkoreit (Note - this has been shifted
from the University of Ohio server, losing some items in the process, it
seems).
There is also a 'Beyond Chomsky' Website run by
Bernard Paul Sypniewski out of Rowan University, hosting a number of papers by
linguists such as Victor Yngve ('Human Linguistics - the Hard Science
Alternative'). Its 'statement of purpose', written by Bruce Richman opens
:"The main obstacle that we have today to clearly understanding the nature
and origin of language is the overly formalistic, anti-empirical,
anti-historical influence of Chomsky's paradigm for doing linguistics."
Bernard Sypniewski encourages contributions. (I can't seem to access this site
using Mozilla on OSX. Bruce Richman tells me that there is a site menu on the
left hand side, but I can't see it. I can't see it using Opera on Linux either.
Perhaps it's just for Windows people).
For an early call to go "Beyond Chomsky",
see Leon James' "Prolegomena to a Theory of Communicative
Competence", written in 1969, and which takes on the task of evaluating
the Chomsky revolution 'ten years after'.
On a rather different tack, James Cooke Brown, who has
spent many years teaching people to speak the logical language Loglan, argues
that it is his experience that the extension and change in world-view and
thinking-patterns his students report is good evidence for the Sapir/Whorf
hypothesis - the latter is, of course, decried by Nativists, such as Pinker,
who see in it a denial of the unicity of language. (There seem to be at least
two languages going by the name of Loglan, one of which is a programming
language developed by a Polish group of computer specialists in the late 70s
(now supported by the University of Pau), while the other, developed by Cooke
Brown, was, it seems, specially devised to test the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis. A
breakaway version called Lobjan, also exists, and may even have more support
than Brown's original version. (This page is sometimes difficult to access, but
does seem to be still active).
Finally, I will mention a page by Alex Gross, who is a
specialist in translation. This has lead him to question both the basic theory
of the Nativists, and their use of languages which they have no real knowledge
of, such as Chinese, to make their points. You will find other leads from there.
Pages en français
Le philosophe Paul Ghils (Haute Ecole de Bruxelles) voit
Chomsky comme représentant d'une pensée linguistique prisonnière de la logique
formelle, et suggère qu'une voie davantage 'héraclitienne' serait plus
fructueuse.
L'université de Laval nous fournit un site sur l'oeuvre
du linguiste Gustave Guillaume. Le site s'est enrichi récemment d'articles
divers.
Ailleurs que, plutôt que contre, Chomsky - comme, à vrai
dire, la majorité des linguistes francophones - Gilles Bernard, linguiste et
informaticien à Paris VIII, met à notre disposition un grand nombre de ses
articles dans lesquels la linguistique énonciative rencontre l'intelligence
artificielle. (Depuis sa page personnelle, on peut facilement atteindre la page
du Groupe CSAR, (Catégorisation Sémantique Automatique par Réseau
neuromimétique).
Pierre Bourdieu s'est souvent montré critique à l'égard
de la linguistique Chomskyenne - sans vraiment élaborer là-dessus. Pour ma
part, je le soupçonne de ne pas avoir pris le temps d'entrer suffisamment dans
le champs pour formuler une opposition intéressante, et j'ai l'impression qu'il
ne saisit pas très bien ce que Chomsky veut dire. J'inclus néanmoins un lien
vers son Intervention au Congrès de l'AFEF, (Limoges, 30 octobre 1977), où il
expose certaines des idées qui nourrissent son livre 'Ce que parler veut dire'.
© 2011 by Timothy
Mason