The study of language in a biological setting

Dominant linguistics paradigms in the first half of the twentieth century had centered their attention on Saussurean “Langue,” a social object of which individual speakers have only a partial mastery. Ever since the 1950s, generative grammar shifted the focus of linguistic research onto the systems of linguistic knowledge possessed by individual speakers, and onto the “Language Faculty,” the species-specific capacity to master and use a natural language (Chomsky 1959). In this perspective, language is a natural object, a component of the human mind, physically represented in the brain and part of the biological endowment of the species. Within such guidelines, linguistics is part of individual psychology and of the cognitive sciences;its ultimate aim is to characterize a central component of human nature, defined in a biological setting.

The idea of focusing on the Language Faculty was not new; it had its roots in the classical rationalist perspective of studying language as a “mirror of the mind,” as a domain offering a privileged access to the study of human cognition. In order to stress such roots, Chomsky refers to the change of perspective in the 1950s as “the second cognitive revolution,” thus paying a tribute to the innovative ideas on language and mind in the philosophy of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the Cartesian tradition.

The roots of the Minimalist Program

ab&lr: To start from a personal note, let us take the Pisa Lectures as a point of departure. You have often characterized the approach that emerged from your Pisa seminars, twenty years ago, as a major change of direction in the history of our field. How would you characterize that shift today?

nc: Well, I don't think it was clear at once, but in retrospect there was a period, of maybe twenty years preceding that, in which there had been an attempt to come to terms with a kind of a paradox that emerged as soon as the first efforts were made to study the structure of language very seriously, with more or less rigorous rules, an effort to give a precise account for the infinite range of structures of language. The paradox was that in order to give an accurate descriptive account it seemed necessary to have a huge proliferation of rule systems of a great variety, different rules for different grammatical constructions. For instance, relative clauses look different from interrogative clauses and the VP in Hungarian is different from the NP and they are all different from English; so the system exploded in complexity. On the other hand, at the same time, for the first time really, an effort was made to deal with what has later come to be called the logical problem of language acquisition. Plainly, children acquiring this knowledge do not have that much data. In fact you can estimate the amount of data they have quite closely, and it's very limited;still, somehow children are reaching these states of knowledge which have apparently great complexity, and differentiation and diversity – and that can't be.

It would only be appropriate to begin with some of the thoughts of the master, who does not disappoint us, even though the topics I want to discuss are remote from his primary concerns. Galileo may have been the first to recognize clearly the significance of the core property of human language, and one of its most distinctive properties: the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts. In his Dialogo, he describes with wonder the discovery of a means to communicate one's “most secret thoughts to any other person … with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper.” This is the greatest of all human inventions, he writes, comparable to the creations of a Michelangelo– of whom Galileo himself was a virtual reincarnation according to the mythology constructed by his student and biographer Viviani, memorialized in Kant's image of the reincarnation of Michelangelo in Newton through the intermediary of Galileo.

Galileo was referring to alphabetic writing, but the invention succeeds because it reflects the nature of the language that the little characters are used to represent. Shortly after his death, the philosopher-grammarians of Port Royal took that further step, referring to the “marvelous invention” of a means to construct “from 25 or 30 sounds that infinity of expressions, which bear no resemblance to what takes place in our minds, yet enable us to reveal [to others] everything that we think, and all the various movements of our soul.”

The term “secular priesthood” I am borrowing from the distinguished British philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin. He was referring to Communist intellectuals who defended the state religion and the crimes of power. To be sure, not all Soviet intellectuals joined the secular priesthood. There were the commissars, who defended and administered power, and the dissidents, who challenged power and its crimes.

We honor the dissidents and condemn the commissars, rightly of course. Within the Soviet tyranny, however, quite the opposite was true – also of course.

The distinction between “commissars” and “dissidents” traces back to the earliest recorded history, as does the fact that, internally, the commissars are commonly respected and privileged, and the dissidents despised and often punished.

Consider the Old Testament. There is an obscure Hebrew word that is translated as “prophet” in English (and, similarly, other Western languages). It means something like “intellectual.” The prophets offered critical geopolitical analysis and moral critique and counsel. Many centuries later, they were honored; at the time, they were not exactly welcomed. There were also “intellectuals” who were honored: the flatterers at the courts of the kings. Centuries later, they were denounced as “false prophets.” The prophets were the dissidents, the false prophets the commissars.

There have been innumerable examples in the same era and since. That raises a useful question for us: Are our own societies an exception to the historical rule? I think not: they conform to the rule rather closely.

Invited by the University of Siena, Noam Chomsky spent the month of November 1999 at the Certosa di Pontignano, a fourteenth-century monastery and now a research facility of the University. It was an extraordinarily intense and exciting month, in which faculty and students of the University of Siena had a unique opportunity to come in close contact with different aspects of Chomsky's work, discuss science and politics with him, exchange and sharpen ideas and projects, and interact with him in many ways. The texts collected in this volume are related to activities that took place in connection with this visit.

The first chapter provides an introduction to some basic concepts of linguistic theory and to some elements of the history of the field which are crucial for understanding certain theoretical questions addressed in the following chapters.

The second chapter is related to a particular occasion. Chomsky's sojourn in Siena was organized twenty years after his visit to the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, an event which, through the memorable Pisa Lectures, has profoundly influenced the field of theoretical linguistics ever since. In connection with this anniversary, Chomsky received, on October 27, 1999, the “Perfezionamento honoris causa,” the honorary degree delivered by the Scuola Normale Superiore. In that occasion, he gave the Galileo Lecture “Perspectives on Language and Mind,” which traces central ideas of current scientific linguistics and of the modern cognitive sciences to their roots in classical thought, starting with Galileo Galilei's famous praise of the “marvelous invention,”alphabetic writing, which allows us to communicate with other people, no matter how distant in space and time.