The Articulate Mammal (6 page)

So far, then, language can be said to be structure-dependent – and the types of structure-dependent operations involved seem to be complex.

Creativity is another fundamental aspect of language which is stressed repeatedly by Chomsky. By this, he seems to mean two things. First, and primarily he means the fact that humans have the ability to understand and produce novel utterances. Even quite strange sentences, which are unlikely to have been uttered before, cause no problems for speakers and hearers:

THE ELEPHANT DRANK SEVENTEEN BOTTLES OF SHAMPOO, THEN SKIPPED DRUNKENLY ROUND THE ROOM.

THE AARDVARK CLEANED ITS TEETH WITH A PURPLE TOOTHBRUSH.

This means that it is quite impossible to assume that a person gradually accumulates strings of utterances throughout their life and stores them ready for use on an appropriate occasion. And as well as producing new grammatical sequences, anyone who has mastered a language is automatically able to discard deviant utterances which they may never have met before. Sequences such as:

*HE WILL HAD BEEN SINGING

or:

*GIRAFFE UNDER IN WALKS GORILLA THE

will be rejected instantaneously by any normal speaker of English.

Chomsky also used ‘creativity’ in a second, subsidiary sense to mean that utterances are not controlled by external happenings. The appearance of a daffodil does not force humans to shriek ‘Daffodil’. They can say whatever they like: ‘What a lovely colour’, ‘It’s spring, I must remember to clean my car’, or ‘Why do flowers always give me hay fever?’

Most humans are so used to these properties of language that they no longer seem odd – but they have not yet been fully explained. Chomsky spoke of ‘this still mysterious ability’ when referring to the creative nature of human speech:

Having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions that are new to one’s experience, that bear no simple physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one’s linguistic experience; and one is able with greater or less facility to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty and independently of detachable stimulus configurations, and to be understood by others who share this still mysterious ability. The normal use of language is, in this sense, a creative activity. This creative aspect of normal language is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.

(Chomsky 1972a: 100)

Chomsky stressed that the creative aspect of language is
normal
. Humans produce novel utterances all the time, and anybody who does not is likely to be brain damaged:

It is important to bear in mind that the creation of linguistic expressions that are novel but appropriate is the normal mode of language use. If some individual were to restrict himself largely to a definite set of linguistic patterns, to a set of habitual responses to stimulus configurations … we would regard him as mentally defective, as being less human than animal. He would immediately be set apart from normal humans by his inability to understand normal discourse, or to take part in it in the normal way – the normal way being innovative, free from control by external stimuli, and appropriate to a new and ever-changing situation.

(Chomsky 1972a: 100)

It becomes clear that there is much more to language than merely stringing together words. In order to speak, a human possesses a highly complex internalized set of instructions or ‘rules’ which enables him or her to utter any of the permissible sequences of English – though they are unlikely to have any conscious knowledge of these ‘rules’. The rules are both complex and stringent, as Mr Knipe discovered (a character in
The Great Automatic Grammatizator
by Roald Dahl):

Then suddenly he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! … Therefore, it stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words in their right order according to the rules of grammar … There was no stopping Knipe now. He went to work immediately. After fifteen days of continuous labour, Knipe had finished building his ‘Great Automatic Grammatizator’.

But Mr Knipe is a character in a science-fiction story. As already noted, in real life no linguist, no computer expert has yet managed to build an ‘automatic grammatizator’ – a device which will account for all and only the permissible sequences of English.

Yet children do it all the time: in a remarkably short period, they acquire a complex set of internalized rules. And children have considerably less data to work from than the linguists who have failed to produce ‘automatic grammatizators’. They are often restricted to hearing their parents and relatives talking – and, according to Chomsky, this speech is likely to be full of unfinished sentences, mistakes and slips of the tongue. We must therefore ‘explain how we know so much, given that the evidence available to us is so sparse’ (Chomsky 1986: xxvii). Furthermore, according to him, the acquisition of one’s native language seems to be largely independent of intelligence. The language ability of dim children is not noticeably inferior to that of bright children – yet in most other areas of human activity – such as roller-skating or playing the piano – the gap between different children is enormous.

Although Chomsky is now generally thought to exaggerate the rapidity of acquisition, the substandard nature of the data, and the uniformity of ability, the great mystery remains: how do children construct ‘automatic grammatizators’ for themselves?

At the moment, the issue is still argued about. Two (main) possibilities exist:

Possibility 1
Human infants ‘know’ in advance what languages are like. This is the possibility preferred by Chomsky:

Given the richness and complexity of the system of grammar for a human language and the uniformity of its acquisition on the basis of limited and often degenerate evidence, there can be little doubt that highly restrictive universal principles must exist determining the general framework of each human language and perhaps much of its specific structure as well.

(Chomsky 1980: 232)

Possibility 2
No special advance knowledge is needed, because children are highly efficient puzzle-solvers in all areas of human behaviour. Language is just one type of puzzle which their high level of general intelligence enables them to solve fast and well. In the words of the linguist Geoffrey Sampson:

Individual humans inherit no ‘knowledge of language’ … they succeed in mastering the language spoken in their environment only by applying the same general intelligence which they use to grapple with all the other diverse and unpredictable problems that come their way.

(Sampson 1980: 178)

It may not be necessary to choose between these possibilities. As this book will suggest, the answer may well lie somewhere between these two extremes. In this controversy, it is important to keep an open mind, and not be swayed by the fashion of the moment. In the 1960s, it was fashionable to follow Chomsky. In the 1970s it was equally fashionable to hold the view of his opponents. Both views were found in the 1990s, and are still found in the twenty-first century.

Chomsky’s claim that children are pre-programmed to speak requires serious attention. As the nineteenth-century American philosopher C.S. Peirce pointed out: ‘If men had not come … with special aptitudes for guessing right, it may well be doubted whether … the greatest mind would have attained the amount of knowledge which is actually possessed by the lowest idiot’ (Peirce 1932: 476). And as the psychologist Steven Pinker noted in his book
The Language Instinct
:

Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale.

(Pinker 1994: 19)

Chomsky’s belief that humans are genetically imprinted with knowledge about language is often referred to as ‘the innateness hypothesis’. Unfortunately, the word ‘innate’ has given rise to a considerable amount of confusion. Misunderstandings have arisen in two ways. First, to call Chomsky an ‘innatist’ wrongly implies that those who disagree with him are ‘noninnatists’. Yet his opponents have never asserted that
nothing
is innate. All human skills, even apparently unnatural ones, make use of innate predispositions. For example, driving a car is an ‘unnatural’ acquired skill, yet it makes use of innate propensities, such as the ability to see, and to co-ordinate arm and leg movements. The issue under discussion is whether an inbuilt language acquisition skill exists independently of other innate inabilities. The point is expressed well by two philosophers:

It is beyond dispute that some innate equipment figures in the acquisition of language (otherwise the baby’s rattle would learn language as well as the baby, since they have comparable linguistic environments). The only question at issue is whether this innate structure has significant components that subserve the development of no other faculty than language.

(Osherson and Wasow 1976: 208)

Chomsky claims that the mind is ‘constituted of “mental organs” just as specialized and differentiated as those of the body’ (1979: 83), and that ‘Language is a system … easy to isolate among the various mental faculties’ (1979: 46). This is the claim which we are trying to evaluate.

The second misunderstanding involves a mistaken belief by some people that ‘innate’ means ‘ready-made for use’. By innate, Chomsky simply means ‘genetically programmed’. He does not literally think that children are born with language in their heads ready to be spoken. He merely claims that a ‘blueprint’ is there, which is brought into use when the child reaches a certain point in her general development. With the help of this blueprint, she analyses the language she hears around her more readily than she would if she were totally unprepared for the strange gabbling sounds which emerge from human mouths.

Or perhaps a better metaphor would be that of a seed, which contains within itself the intrinsic ability to become a dahlia or rose, provided it is
planted and tended. Chomsky argues that ‘language grows in the mind/brain’ (Chomsky 1988: 55). He explains the situation by quoting the eighteenthcentury thinker James Harris: ‘The growth of knowledge … [rather resembles] … the growth of Fruit; however external causes may in some degree cooperate, it is the internal vigour, and virtue of the tree, that must ripen the juices to their maturity’ (Chomsky 1986: 2).

In this book, the suggestion that language is a special, pre-programmed activity will be explored further. As Chomsky noted (1979: 84):

No one finds it outlandish to ask the question: what genetic information accounts for the growth of arms instead of wings?

Why should it be shocking to raise similar questions with regard to the brain and mental facilities?

Or, as a more recent researcher pointed out (Anderson 2004: 307):

Language as we know it is a uniquely human capacity, determined by our biological nature, just as the ability to detect prey on the basis of radiated heat is a biological property of (some) snakes.

But we will also be looking at the alternative viewpoint, that humans are intelligent animals, endowed with talented analytic abilities, which enable them to sort out the puzzle of language via their general intelligence.

In the next few chapters, the evidence in favour of each of these viewpoints will be assessed. The next chapter will look at the ability – or non-ability – of animals to communicate with one another in language-like ways.

2

____________________________

ANIMALS THAT TRY TO TALK

Is language restricted to humans?

An ant who can speak

French, Javanese and Greek

Doesn’t exist.

Why ever not?

Robert Desnos

Judging by newspapers and popular books, there appear to be a vast number of animals which ‘talk’ – talking budgerigars, talking dolphins – even a talking fish:

Anne, Anne, come quick as you can

There’s a fish that talks in the frying pan.

Walter de la Mare

Clearly, the word ‘talk’ can be used in two totally different senses. On the one hand, it can mean simply ‘to utter words’, as in ‘Archibald’s got a talking parrot which says
Damn
if you poke it.’ On the other hand, it can mean ‘to use language in a meaningful way’. We already know that animals such as budgerigars can ‘talk’ in the first sense of the word. Psycholinguists would like to find out whether animals can ‘talk’ in the second sense also. They are interested in this problem because they want to know the answer to the following question: are we the only species which possesses language? If so, are we the only species capable of acquiring it?