FEW disciplines are so strongly associated with a
single figure: Einstein in physics and Freud in psychology, perhaps. But Noam
Chomsky is the man who revolutionised linguistics. Since he wrote “Syntactic
Structures” in 1957, Mr Chomsky has argued that human language is fundamentally
different from any other kind of communication, that a “linguist from Mars”
would agree that all human languages are variations on a single language, and
that children’s incredibly quick and successful learning (despite often messy
and inattentive parental input) points to an innate language faculty in the
brain. These ideas are now widely accepted.
Over the past 60 years, Mr Chomsky has repeatedly
stripped down his theory. Some aspects of human language are shared with
animals, and others are part of more general human thinking. He has focused
ever more narrowly on the features of language that he reckons are unique to
humans. All this has led to a remarkable little book, published late last year
with Robert Berwick, a computer scientist. “Why Only Us” purports to explain
the evolution of human language.
Other biologists, linguists and psychologists have
probed the same question and have reached little consensus. But there is even
less consensus around the world’s most eminent linguist’s idea: that a single
genetic mutation created an ability called “Merge”, in a single human whom Mr
Chomsky has called “Prometheus”, some time before the human exodus from Africa.
That mutation was so advantageous that it survived and thrived, producing
today’s 7,000 languages from Albanian to Zulu. But the vast differences among
the world’s languages, Mr Chomsky argues, are mere differences in
“externalisation”. The key is Merge.
But what is it? Merge simply says that two mental
objects can be merged into a bigger one, and mental operations can be performed
on that as if it were a single one. The can be merged with cat to give a noun
phrase, which other grammar rules can operate on as if it were a bare noun like
water. So can the and hat. Once there, you can further merge, making the cat in
the hat. The cat in the hat can be merged with a verb phrase to create a new
object, a sentence: The cat in the hat came back. And that sentence can be
merged into bigger sentences: You think the cat in the hat came back. And so
on.
Why would this be of any use? No one else had Merge.
Whom did Prometheus talk to? Nobody, at least not using Merge. (Humans may
already have been using cries and gestures, as many animals do.) But
Merge-enabled, hierarchically structured language, according to Mr Chomsky, did
not evolve for talking at all. Rather, it let Prometheus take simple concepts
and combine them in sentence-like ways in his own head. The resulting complex
thoughts gave him a survival advantage. If he then passed the mutant Merge gene
on to several surviving children, who thrived and passed on the Merge gene to
their children, Messrs Chomsky and Berwick believe that they must have then
come to dominate the population of humans in Africa. Only later, as Merge came
to work with the vocal and hearing organs, did human language emerge.
Many scholars find this to be somewhere between
insufficient, improbable and preposterous. The emergence of a single mutation
that gives such a big advantage is derided by biologists as a “hopeful monster”
theory; most evolution is gradual, operating on many genes, not one. Some
ability like Merge may exist, but this does not explain why some words may
merge and others don’t, much less why the world’s languages merge so
differently. (Not a single non-English example appears in “Why Only Us”, nor a
single foreign language in its index.)
Mr Chomsky says those who disagree with his ever-more
contentious ideas are either blind or hucksters. Critics refer to a “cult” of
“acolytes” around a “Great Leader”, unwilling to challenge him or engage
seriously with the work of non-Chomskyan scholars. (One critic has said “to be
savaged by Chomsky is a badge of honour.”) Linguistics is now divided into a
Chomskyan camp, a large number of critics and many more still for whom the
founder of the modern discipline is simply irrelevant. He is unlikely to end up
like Freud, a marginal figure in modern psychology whose lasting influence has
been on the humanities. Mr Chomsky’s career is more likely to end up like
Einstein’s—at least in the sense that his best and most influential work came
early on.
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