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Authors: Noam Chomsky
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depends on what you know you're talking about, what background information you're using, etc. But that's available to the homunculus; it's not going to be in the language faculty. The language faculty is kind of like the digestive system, it grinds away and produces stuff that we use. So we don't really know what the boundaries are. But you might discover them. You might discover them in ways like these.[C]
In fact, we might discover that the whole idea of an interface is wrong. Take, say, the sound side, which is easier to think about because we have some information about it. It's universally assumed – this goes back to the beginning of the subject – that theinternal language constructs some kind of narrow phonetic representation which is then interpreted by the sensory-motor system; it's said in different ways, but it always comes down to this. Well, it's not a logical necessity. It could be that in the course of generating thesound side of an utterance, you send pieces over to the sensory-motor system long before you send other pieces over. So there won't be a phonetic interface. You can make up a system that works like that, and we don't know that language doesn't. It's just taken for granted that it doesn't because the simplest assumption is that there's one interface. But the fact that it's the first thing that comes to mind doesn't make it true. So it could be that our conception of the architecture is just like a first guess. It is not necessarily wrong, but most first guesses are. Take a look at the history of the advancedsciences. No matter how well established they are, they almost always turned out to be wrong.
JM: True, but their construction has often been guided by the intuition that simplicity of structure is crucial; and you get [at least partial] success when you follow that particular lead .
NC: No one knows why, but that has been a guiding intuition. In fact, that's sort of the core of the Galilean conception of science. That's what guided me. And in biology, that's what guided people like Turing in his effort to place the study of biology in the physics and chemistry departments.
JM: History, free action, and accident mess things up and are beyond the scope of natural science. Did you think when you began all this that linguistics might become more and more like a physicalscience?
NC: I'm kind of torn. I mean, I did believe what I wastaught [by Zellig Harris and my other instructors]; a nicely brought-up Jewish boy does. But it less and less made any sense. By the late forties I was working kind of on my own and thinking maybe it – the idea that the study of language is a natural science – was a personal problem. It wasn't until the early 1950s that I began to think that the personal problem made some sense; and I began to talk about it. So it was kind of a difficult process to go through. And then, of course[, I had a long way to go]. For years, when I thought I was doing generative grammar, I was actually taking stuff over from traditional grammar.
1 Chomsky's point concerning pragmatics seems to be that it is very unlikely to be a naturalistic science (at least, as it is currently understood), even though one might find systematic aspects of the ways in which people use language. See Appendix VI .
6 Parameters, canalization, innateness, Universal Grammar
JM: Still in the vein we've been talking about, I'd like to ask about linguistic development (language growth) in the individual. You've employed the concept of – or at least alluded to the concept of – canalization, C. H. Waddington's term from aboutfifty or sixty years ago, and suggested that the linguistic development of the child is like canalization. Can parameters be understood as a way of capturing canalization?
NC: Canalization sounds like the right idea, but as far as I know, there are not a lot of empirical applications for it in biology.
With regard to parameters, there are some basic questions that have to
In fact, we might discover that the whole idea of an interface is wrong. Take, say, the sound side, which is easier to think about because we have some information about it. It's universally assumed – this goes back to the beginning of the subject – that theinternal language constructs some kind of narrow phonetic representation which is then interpreted by the sensory-motor system; it's said in different ways, but it always comes down to this. Well, it's not a logical necessity. It could be that in the course of generating thesound side of an utterance, you send pieces over to the sensory-motor system long before you send other pieces over. So there won't be a phonetic interface. You can make up a system that works like that, and we don't know that language doesn't. It's just taken for granted that it doesn't because the simplest assumption is that there's one interface. But the fact that it's the first thing that comes to mind doesn't make it true. So it could be that our conception of the architecture is just like a first guess. It is not necessarily wrong, but most first guesses are. Take a look at the history of the advancedsciences. No matter how well established they are, they almost always turned out to be wrong.
JM: True, but their construction has often been guided by the intuition that simplicity of structure is crucial; and you get [at least partial] success when you follow that particular lead .
NC: No one knows why, but that has been a guiding intuition. In fact, that's sort of the core of the Galilean conception of science. That's what guided me. And in biology, that's what guided people like Turing in his effort to place the study of biology in the physics and chemistry departments.
JM: History, free action, and accident mess things up and are beyond the scope of natural science. Did you think when you began all this that linguistics might become more and more like a physicalscience?
NC: I'm kind of torn. I mean, I did believe what I wastaught [by Zellig Harris and my other instructors]; a nicely brought-up Jewish boy does. But it less and less made any sense. By the late forties I was working kind of on my own and thinking maybe it – the idea that the study of language is a natural science – was a personal problem. It wasn't until the early 1950s that I began to think that the personal problem made some sense; and I began to talk about it. So it was kind of a difficult process to go through. And then, of course[, I had a long way to go]. For years, when I thought I was doing generative grammar, I was actually taking stuff over from traditional grammar.
1 Chomsky's point concerning pragmatics seems to be that it is very unlikely to be a naturalistic science (at least, as it is currently understood), even though one might find systematic aspects of the ways in which people use language. See Appendix VI .
6 Parameters, canalization, innateness, Universal Grammar
JM: Still in the vein we've been talking about, I'd like to ask about linguistic development (language growth) in the individual. You've employed the concept of – or at least alluded to the concept of – canalization, C. H. Waddington's term from aboutfifty or sixty years ago, and suggested that the linguistic development of the child is like canalization. Can parameters be understood as a way of capturing canalization?
NC: Canalization sounds like the right idea, but as far as I know, there are not a lot of empirical applications for it in biology.
With regard to parameters, there are some basic questions that have to
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