The false prophet's promise of apples

As linguists prepare for their annual conference, Neil Smith and Ian Robinson do battle over the verbal high ground, debating the legacy of a linguistic icon

In 1975, I published The New Grammarians' Funeral , a book assessing the then state of the Chomskyan school of grammar, known collectively as transformational-generative grammar. I warned that Chomsky wanted to reduce grammar to a genetic mechanism for acquiring language, the Language Acquisition Device, which he says children are born with. However, I judged transformational-generative grammar itself, with its emphasis on the syntax of the sentence, an elegant and then timely restatement of traditional grammar. I thought at that point I was being complimentary.

A few years later Chomsky took this judgment, whether from my book I do not know, as a challenge to be more original. He calls the more recent phase of his work on grammar "the minimalist programme", but the claims he makes for it are not minimal. In On Nature and Language (2002), he states: "The way of looking at things was totally different from anything that had come before. In fact, I think it is fair to say that more has been learnt about language in the past 20 years than the preceding 2,000 years."

In the The Minimalist Program (1995), Chomsky says of his work that it "constituted a radical break from the rich tradition of thousands of years of linguistic inquiry, far more so than early generative grammar, which could be seen... as a revival of traditional concerns and approaches to them". He adds that his "principles and parameters" approach (which posits the idea that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed) "maintains that the basic ideas of the tradition, incorporated without great change in early generative grammar, are misguided in principle - in particular, the idea that a language consists of rules for forming grammatical constructions (relative clauses, passives and so on)".

Chomsky's minimalist programme concentrates on universal grammar - the idea that children learn language innately, by way of principles and parameters.

In The Architecture of Language (2001), he states: "What there is, it seems, is just general principles, which are properties of the language faculty as such and slight options of variation, which are called 'parameters'."

What I took to be a wrong direction in his earlier work, the pursuit of the Language Acquisition Device, has become the exclusive concern of his later work; for now the Language Acquisition Device and "principles" are both indistinguishable from universal grammar, Chomsky's later preoccupation. In Architecture , Chomsky first declares that universal grammar and the Language Acquisition Device are one and the same thing; then he says in answer to the question "What is the nature of the language acquisition device?", "Well, whatever the nature of language is, that is what it is. According to one model, presumably oversimplified, if we understand the principles and the parameters of language, we will know what the language acquisition device is."

This Language Acquisition Device is the genetically determined universal grammar developed in the brain of every normal child. "The child has," Chomsky writes in Architecture , "a repertoire of concepts as part of its biological endowment and simply has to learn that a particular concept is realised in a particular way in the language. There is overwhelming reason to believe that concepts like, say, climb, chase, run, tree and book and so on are fundamentally fixed." The tree concept will be found even in the brains of children who live in places where there are no trees, and the book concept where there is no written language. There must surely then be a universal concept of television, and liberalism and feudalism.

Chomsky continues: "It turns out that the concepts are very complex, which means that they've got to basically be there and then they get kind of triggered and you find out what sounds are associated with them." The concepts in universal grammar are available to all languages, but by "slight variation", different languages allot different sounds to them.

My first objection to this programme remains what it was in 1975. There is no biological evidence for the existence of the Language Acquisition Device. Chomsky thinks it must exist because the acquisition of language from a child's disconnected and incomplete experiences of language cannot possibly be explained without it, but that is hardly a scientific demonstration.

He says in Architecture : "To say that 'language is not innate' is to say that there is no difference between my granddaughter, a rock and a rabbit. In other words, if you take a rock, a rabbit and my granddaughter and put them in a community where people are talking English, they'll all learn English. If people believe that, they believe that language is not innate."

Well, unlike rabbits, we have the capacity to acquire language, but where is the evidence that that capacity is a ready-made universal grammar? Chomsky seeks to treat grammar as a branch of biology, as he says in The Minimalist Program , "a part of the natural world". So language is like apples on trees, but growing in the head of Homo sapiens . But grammatical terms are not replaceable by biological terms.

I cannot see that in grammar (the only context in which the discussion has any sense) universal grammar means any more than that a skeleton grammar can be adapted to all "natural" languages. That is very remarkable, but it is not a new idea. Some such universal grammar is always assumed when anyone tries to state the rules of a hitherto unstudied language. The classical grammarians defined parts of speech, attributing one more to Greek than to Latin. In principle, their classifications could have been applied to any language. Then came the discovery that the grammar of Latin does not fit every language well. In Hebrew, there is no tense system of the Latin sort. That is, we have a Latin-based universal grammar notion, tense, and then find a language to which it will only clumsily apply. But to get from universal grammar terminology to saying that the physical Language Acquisition Device is universal grammar is a great incoherent leap.

It is not my contention that, in the era of universal grammar and principles and parameters, no work of interest in grammar is being done, only that the biological fixation much impedes and sometimes confuses it.

It is said that there are only a very few ways of forming questions in all languages. "Human languages generally take one of two options to form constituent questions," says Chomsky in On Nature and Language . He explains this through the neurological layout of universal grammar. It is probably true that, in all languages, questions can be asked, and if the grammatical ways of forming them are so restricted that is a surprising and interesting part of universal grammar. But the invocation of the Language Acquisition Device adds nothing to grammatical understanding: which lies, I still think, in the formulation of the rules of languages.

My second objection - so elementary that I am embarrassed to have to point it out - is that even if Chomsky's neurology is right, the Language Acquisition Device could still only be understood by way of grammar, and not vice versa. Can a bodily organ be meaningfully called principles? Drop all mention of the Language Acquisition Device and nothing in grammar changes. The concentration on the Language Acquisition Device, however, has become so exclusive in Architecture as to replace grammar altogether; which from the point of view of the grammarian is a reductio ad absurdum .

Whether or not the Language Acquisition Device exists makes no difference to this objection. The question is irrelevant to grammar. Similarly, the human vocal apparatus certainly does exist, but to understand the sounds we make as language, the study of the vocal cords, the mouth-positions and so on, gets you nowhere.

The real status of the Language Acquisition Device within linguistics is as an exclamation of wonder. Children do begin to talk. But the Language Acquisition Device is not Wordsworthian enough to fulfil this role and is debilitated by offering itself as explanation.

The Language Acquisition Device has led Chomsky to become a sort of mind-brain-identity prophet (he habitually writes of mind-brain as if the terms are interchangeable) and to fall into the prevalent fallacy that if we study brains intently enough we shall somehow understand the mind. When Chomsky began, there were linguists who thought that by staring scientifically enough at the sounds of language we might get at last to their sense. He seems now to be falling himself into a fallacy of the same order.

I think he would have done better to stick to grammar.

Ian Robinson is author of The New Grammarians' Funeral , published by Cambridge University Press.

Linguistics Association of Great Britain conference, Newcastle, August 30 to September 2.