Evolution
of revolution:
Chomsky’s minimalism
Domenico
Pacitti interviews Noam Chomsky
DP:
Your first classic work Syntactic
Structures transformed the study of linguistics back in 1957. Prior to that,
traditional grammars had presupposed the intelligence of the reader in their
explanations. But as soon as the attempt was made to account for this
intelligence, a number of serious problems arose. Almost two and a half decades
of subsequent inquiry tried to solve these problems by extracting rules to
account for one’s innate knowledge of grammar. All of this came to a head in
1981 with your “principles and parameters” approach based on lectures you
gave in Pisa. And this rather cut the Gordian knot and paved the way for your
current and equally revolutionary “minimalist” programme. Is this correct?
NC:
Yes. The principles and parameters approach said: Look, there are no rules –
earlier theory was wrong. There are no constructions. There’s no passive
construction in Italian or verb phrase in Hungarian: these are taxonomic
artefacts. There are no rules for forming relative clauses: that’s not the
case. But what we actually have is quite general principles which are fixed and
part of the genetic endowment. We have certain options – or parameters –
which have to be set, so that the child comes into the world having incorporated
principles and knowing that these are the choices and when he has to set the
choices. So, do I speak a language where the verb precedes the noun or where the
verb follows the noun? Well, those kinds of choices you can make simply on the
basis of elementary data. If the choices are fixed, the language is in place.
It’s as if the genetic instructions determine a fixed network of principles
and a certain few switches that aren’t set yet, and the child has to set the
switches on the basis of simple data. Once the switches are set, the whole
system operates. And the lexicon works the same way. Roughly in this framework,
more has been learned about language in the last 20 years than in the preceding
two thousand. There’s been an enormous amount of research in depth and across
extremely varied languages to try to show the fine system of this sort.
That framework also allows you to think about some new questions. For the
first time in history you have what you might call a genuine theory of language,
something that can deal with both the problem of accurate description and the
problem of acquisition (known technically as descriptive and explanatory
adequacy respectively). You can deal with both without contradiction and you can
now ask lots of questions that you couldn’t contemplate before. One question
has to do with optimal design. No matter what you’re discussing, you’re
going to have the worst, most complicated and impossible badly designed system
there is. You always want to construct the best theory of it. But there’s
another question: How well designed is the object itself? How well does the
object itself satisfy the minimal conditions that it must satisfy to function?
That’s a different question. You might be able to raise that question about
language. So, to what extent is the language organ optimally designed to serve
minimal functions? That’s a new question.
And
we can give an answer. The language faculty has to interact with other
components of the person and we know what some of those components are. We also
have thought systems, conceptual systems, and the expressions of the language
faculty have to be accessible to those, otherwise we can’t express out
thoughts. We can call these ‘interfaces’ between the language faculty and
other systems. To a non-trivial extent we can specify the properties of the
interfaces and we can then ask a concrete question. The minimal condition the
language condition must meet
is what we can call the ‘interface condition’. The information it presents
must be accessible to the external system. The question is: Is that also a
maximal condition? That is, is the language faculty optimally constructed to
satisfy that minimal condition? When you pursue this question, you’re pursuing
the minimalist programme.
A
few years ago it seemed hopelessly crazy, but now there’s already been enough
work to indicate to a rather surprising extent that it may be correct that the
language faculty is an optimal
solution to the minimal conditions. It’s as if an engineer inserted a language
faculty into a brain that didn’t have one and did it in an optimal way so that
it would be accessible to the other systems. When you try to spell this out,
then we get back to the first challenge: the accuracy of the complex descriptive
devices that are used in successful accounts of language, because they’re not
optimal, so you have to try to show that they don’t exist and that if you
eliminate them, you’ll get as good results or maybe better results. And that
is what the work over the past few years has been – to try to take point by
point the devices that are used in linguistic description and explanation and to
show that they’re unnecessary, superfluous or incorrect, and that we can get
better results by eliminating them. That’s a very hard research programme, but
I think it’s had some interesting consequences and a lot of indication that
it’s true.
DP: EFL
teachers may be wondering why it is that the results of your research programmes
in linguistics haven’t filtered through to language teaching as much as one
might have expected. Somehow the considerable insights achieved in theoretical
linguistics still seem far removed from the concrete business of teaching
foreigners a language.
NC: How
much have the results of the very interesting studies in the cognitive sciences,
for example object perception, penetrated? How much do they extend? Not much.
How much does the study of physiology enter into teaching people how to swim? I
mean, it’s probably a good idea for a swimming coach to know something about
the body, but not much.
DP: So
people can do things and even do them very efficiently without being able to
give an adequate theory of what it is that they are doing?
NC:
What we do is so far beyond what we understand that the understanding is useful
but it’s rarely going to be helpful in the applied world. I mean, take even
the hard sciences. Until the mid-19th century physics and chemistry
had almost nothing to say to engineers. And these are subjects that have a rich,
deep history of achievement. It takes a long time for them to begin to get to
the point where they teach people things.
DP:
Then it will take some time before your linguistic theories filter down to EFL
teaching?
NC:
I mean, what we know intuitively is far beyond what we can understand
intellectually.
DP:
There are some language purists at Florence’s authoritative Accademia della
Crusca who fear that linguistic degeneration has set in owing to the
infiltration into Italian of anglicisms such as “fast food”, “trust”,
“trend”, “spot”, “spray”, etc. The fear has even been vented that
within a hundred years English will quite literally have eliminated Italian
altogether. How does this strike you?
NC:
Well, it’s rather curious for Italian scholars to say this. Just look at
what’s happening in Italy. A hundred years ago, fifty years ago, Italian
wasn’t the language. Everybody’s grandmother spoke some other language, but
what happened to all those languages? They were eliminated by Italian, which was
the language of Dante. And that has essentially wiped out a whole complex range
of languages in Italy. Just in our lifetimes there has been a huge destruction
of languages right here in Italy. Well, I don’t think it’s a good thing.
They’re dying because they’ve been taken over by Italian, which became a
national language. Italian has just wiped out these languages from the
peninsula. The disappearance of languages and cultures is like the destruction
of bio-diversity, except more important to us because it is human diversity.
It’s cultural diversity and is being destroyed, and that’s a bad thing.
DP:
I believe your parents emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States and
was wondering where exactly they came from.
NC:
My father came from the Ukraine and my mother came from what’s now
Byelorussia.
DP:
I myself am third generation Italian and have come to feel that I still have
some marked Italian characteristics. Don’t you think, setting aside questions
of genetic preprogramming or philosophical determinism, that it’s natural to
feel this? Do you ever feel this yourself with regard to your own Russian
background?
NC:
You’re not Jewish, I take it?
DP:
No, I’m not.
NC:
It’s quite different. Jews are a tribe, and the place where they are
historically doesn’t matter very much, like my parents, who were immigrants,
who would never talk about Eastern Europe. They just didn’t want to talk about
it. They wanted to forget Russia forever.
DP:
Really?
NC:
They didn’t want to know about it, they didn’t want me to know about it.
Later, when I was older, I got interested and I would ask my father, but it was
just not part of our childhood. Their native language was Yiddish, but they
never let us hear a word of Yiddish. My wife was the same, same background, and
neither she nor I know a word of Yiddish except what we learnt through our
grandparents. Until very recently Jews were outsiders. There’s a famous Jewish
joke that asks why there are so many Jewish violinists and not many Jewish
pianists. Well the answer is: You can pick up your violin and run.
DP:
Yes, that certainly makes the point.
NC: It
kind of captures the thing. Look, when I got to Harvard in the early 1950s, it
was very anti-Semitic. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that these barriers
fell. It’s a very recent phenomenon. And the same applies to Britain and also
to continental Europe. Jews were respected, but they weren’t really part of the
elite culture until very recently.
DP:
I think it requires some effort for non-Jews to understand all of this.
NC:
It’s just kind of part of your background, you know. That I could become a
Russian is for me simply quite foreign and unimaginable.
Note: This
interview took place at the Certosa di Pontignano on November 9 1999 and was
published by JUST Response on May 20 2002. A
shortened version appeared in the January 2000 issue of EL Gazette
(London). It was first published in full by JUST Response on May 20 2002.
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