Chomsky and linguistics
Is it possible to have a linguistics that's separate from eg psychology?
That question was put to me in reference to my previous post, when I posted it on Facebook. This is how I’ve thought about that:
The discussion about Chomsky goes on on a previous post I did on Facebook. One strand of that discussion is about linguistics. One issue being raised is whether linguistics can be studied without reference to psychology. I’ll extend that to a wider question, can linguistics be studied without reference to psychology, sociology (class and the behaviour of groups), power, politics, function or purpose?
Yes! Of course it ‘can’, just as one of the features of intellectual endeavour is that it ‘can’ be separated off from human existence.
In almost any field you think of, intellectuals (academics, scholars etc) have sometimes found ways to not put their studies into a context. In that sense, each discipline has adherents to purified, sealed-off forms of their field. In linguistics, this has grown up in various ways by saying that language is a sign-system, or that it has a deep structure that applies to all languages, or that when we speak and write, we do this according to codes and patterns that we can absract into a system. And so on. This is not as mysterious as it sounds. Anyone who has learned a language may well have ‘conjugated’ a verb: je suis, tu es, il/elle est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils/elles sont. It ‘makes sense’ but in another way it makes no sense at all. No one outside of school and language lessons ever says such a thing. It’s an invention abstracted from what is in effect a form of behaviour - speaking and writing. In fact, as anyone who goes to France finds out very quickly, most people don’t say some of those individual things anyway! ‘t’es’ is much more common than ‘tu es’ and something like ‘zhswee’ is more common than ‘je suis’.
Anyone bedevilled and burdened by the ‘SPaG’ (GPS) test in primary schools will know that this represents an outbreak of the abstract way of talking about language ie as if it’s a system of procedures and structures based on a code kept somewhere in dictionaries and universities, rather than treating language as something that we all ‘do’.
The moment we think of language as something we all ‘do’, we have to face up to difference, variation, change, purpose and function - and the reasons for these differences, variations, changes, purposes and functions. And at that moment all that messy stuff to do with psychology, sociology, power and the like have to come in. And indeed, what are those ologies themselves based on, if not our needs and desires rooted in our daily social existence?
One example: for BBC’s ‘Word of Mouth’ (which itself is based on the social use and purpose of language) I interviewed a man who was a parent of an autistic son, who had virtually no ‘words’. He had gestures and noises. This led him to ask ‘what is his language?’ . That could have ended up as being a narrow ‘pure’ study of the ‘systems’ of the signs he made. However, where it took him was to ‘why?’ Why was his son making these sounds and gestures? And he decided that each ‘sign’ was a way of contributing to the relationship that he had with those around him. Language, he said, is about relationships, making them, affecting them, trying to change them in hundreds of different ways.
I was really interested in that. So instead of the simplified ‘communication’ model (that many linguists have rejected anyway) we have here a model that says language (outside of purified forms like conjugations) is part of how we relate to each other. And, I would add, ‘the way we relate to each’ other is always in the contexts of psychology, sociology, power, purpose and function. In this circumstance, a key part of the man’s relationship with his son was that his family unit had the time, space and relatively good material conditions to be able to spend time with someone who in other societies or in other layers of society could or would be put in an institution and forgotten about.
The evidence that language has a deep structure that applies to all languages is that we (human beings) as babies are ‘wired/pre-programmed’ to learn whatever language we hear/experience in our environment. It isn't dependent on the language our parents speak (except that it's the language we're most likely to be exposed to; I mean in the sense that if a baby is separated from its parents and brought up in an environment where a different language is spoken), doesn't favour one language over another.
A little over fifty years ago, when I was a postgraduate at Oxford studying aesthetics, Noam Chomsky came to give a lecture on linguistics. The lecture hall was packed out – philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, zoologists – and extremely attentive, at least to start with. He began with simple examples but the audience gradually began shaking their heads and fidgeting. After a while, he began to notice their unease, but ploughed on until eventually he interrupted himself apologetically. I realise, he said, that I’m producing examples of what I claim are grammatical sentences, only I’m an East Coast American talking to an Oxford audience, and you don’t think they are. (As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once quipped, the English and the Americans are separated by the same language.)
Afterwards there was a reception at my college, which had hosted the lecture, and I had the opportunity to talk to him. I asked him about his comments about the infinite creativity of language, by which he seemed to mean the capacity of children to utter sentences they had never previously heard, and wondered how generative grammar fitted in with poetry; it was not exactly an innocent question. Chomsky replied in an offhand manner that he wasn’t talking about poetry, which didn’t interest him. I must have said ‘Oh’ and turned away, but what I was thinking was how can you hope to understand how language functions if you ignore poetry? A short while later a poem by Clive James appeared in The Listener called ‘A line and a theme from Chomsky’. The line was his famous example of a sentence that was syntactically correct but semantically meaningless: ‘Colourless green dreams sleep furiously’. The theme was that of a US airman dropping napalm over the Vietnamese countryside, returning to base and having nightmares. Hence, colourless green dreams sleep furiously. He wasn’t the only person to read the line poetically. So did the composer Leonard Bernstein in his Harvard lectures of 1973, where he interprets a slightly different version of the sentence, ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’, in the prosaic form of ‘Last night I slept badly; my usual colorless dreams were invaded by sort of dirty-green ideas, which caused me to sleep fitfully and to toss furiously.’ Some time later, more amusingly, a Green councillor in the West Country quoted the same Chomskian sentence in complaining about a local council’s inaction over environmental improvement.