The Science of Language Read Online Free PDF Page B

has got to be one of the hardest topics to study. Yet somehow we feel that we have got to understand it, or we can't go further. It's a highly irrational approach toinquiry.[C]

2 On a formal theory of language and its accommodation to biology; the distinctive nature of human concepts
     
    JM: Let me pursue some of these points you have been making by asking you a different question. You, in your work in the 1950s, effectively made the study of language into a mathematical, formal science – not mathematical, of course, in the way Markov systems are mathematical, but clearly a formal science that has made very considerable progress. Some of the marks of that progress have been – for the last few years, for example – successive elimination of all sorts of artifacts of earlier theories, such as deep structure, surface structure, and the like. Further, recent theories have shown a remarkable ability to solve problems of both descriptive and explanatory adequacy. There is a considerable increase in degree of simplification. And there also seems to be some progress toward biology – not necessarily biology as typically understood by philosophers and by many others, as a selectional evolutionary story about the gradual introduction of a complex structure, but biology as understood by people likeStuart Kauffman ( 1993 ) and D'Arcy Thompson ( 1917 /1942/1992). I wonder if you would comment on the extent to which that kind of mathematical approach has progressed.[C]
    NC: Ever since this business began in the early fifties – two or three students,Eric Lenneberg, me, Morris Halle, apparently nobody else – the topic we were interested in was, how could you work this into biology? The idea was so exotic, no one else talked about it. Part of the reason was that ethology was just . . .
     
    JM: Excuse me; was that [putting the theory of language into biology] a motivation from the beginning?
    NC: Absolutely: we were starting toread ethology, Lorenz, Tinbergen, comparative psychology; that stuff was just becoming known in the United States. The US tradition was strictly descriptive behaviorism. German and Dutch comparative zoologists were just becoming available; actually, a lot was in German. We were interested, and it looked like this was where linguistics ought to go. The idea was so exotic that practically no one talked about it, except the few of us. But it was the beginning of Eric Lenneberg's work; that's really where all this started.
    The problem was that as soon as you tried to look at language carefully, you'd see that practically nothing was known. You have to remember that it was assumed by most linguists at the time that pretty much everything in the field was known. A common topic when linguistics graduate students talked to one another was: what are we going to do when there's a phonemic analysis for every language? This is obviously a terminating process. You could maybe do a morphological analysis, but that is terminating too. And it was also assumed that languages are so varied that you're never going to find anything general. In fact, one of the few departures from that was found in Prague-styledistinctive features: the distinctive features might be universal, so perhaps much more is universal. If language were biologically based, it would have to be. But as soon as we began to try to formulate the universal rules that were presupposed by such a view, it instantly became obvious that we didn't know anything. As soon as we tried to give the first definitions of words – what does a word mean? etc. – it didn't take us more than five minutes of introspection to realize that the Oxford English Dictionary wasn't telling us anything. So it became immediately obvious that we were starting from zero. The first big question was that of finding something about what was going on. And that sort of put it backwards from the question of how we are going to answer the biological questions.
    Now, the fundamental biological