Noam Chomsky in 1969

by Richard Kostelanetz (May 2016)

(This article was was commissioned by the NYTimes Magazine in 1969, but not used and has not been published since. it will appear as is in my MORE MASTER MINDS, which is a sequel to my MASTER MINDS (Macmillan, 1969).)

These display what all scientific revolutions are about. Each of them necessitated the community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific scrutiny and in the standards by which the profession determined what should count as an admissible problem or as a legitimate problem-solution.
–Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Noam Chomsky’s recent reputation as a political polemicist has obscured the fact that another revolution, this one more successful, has been tied to his name. The academic discipline of linguistics has changed drastically since Chomsky and his “Transformational Generative Grammar” invaded it less than fifteen years ago. His radically new way of looking at language, especially English, has won increasing influence and respect within his own and other professions around the world. No other Anglo-American professor just over forty, notes the British philosopher Ernest Gellner, “can calmly refer, without immodesty and with full justification, to his own work of a decade ago as ‘classical’ or ‘standard’ and then contrast it with not one but two intellectual generations of subsequent revisionists of it.”

Nelson Goodman, a philosophy professor at Penn, nominated Chomsky for the junior fellowship of Harvard’s Society of Fellows. This became the first of two crucially fortunate breaks in Chomsky’s professional career, as the appointment offered the young scholar, and his even younger wife, three years of modestly supported leisure. The first year he largely spent following Harris’ cue about the application of mechanical counting procedures to a corpus of linguistic data, such as the incidence of phonemes, and even wrote his first published paper on “Systems of Syntactic Analysis” (1953). His elders in the field then thought that the newly developed computer could process all this information with stunning results. “It was and is impossible,” he declared, chuckling uncomfortably at this sole confession of failure. “There is no set of analytic inductive procedures for language, because the nature of language is too abstract. At the time it never occurred to me that this was wrong, so for a year I beat my head against a wall.”

“The first real linguist who was enthusiastic about the work I was doing on my own was Morris Halle,” a linguist in the old style who grew up speaking five languages and later learned many more (including those bogeys, ancient Greek and Latin). At the time he was a promising protégé of Roman Jakobson, the doyen of refugee linguists in America and then a Professor at Harvard. It was Halle, already teaching languages at M.I.T., who persuaded Jerome Weisner, then head of the Research Laboratory in Electronics, to hire Chomsky as a research associate in a government-funded machine-translation project (which Chomsky, then as today, regarded as hopelessly unfeasible). As a concession to convention, he agreed also to teach elementary French and German to scientists.

His linguistics thought, in contrast, is so remarkably innovative that not only do Chomsky’s political colleagues largely ignore it, but established scholars in his academic field could, only a few years ago, piously dismiss it as “not linguistics,” whatever or wherever that institutional hell might be. His theories also run contrary to the established empiricism of contemporary academic philosophy and psychology by rejecting hard-line naturalism for a consideration of mysteries beyond the verification of strictly empirical procedures.

Furthermore, not only do even educated people rarely think profoundly about something as common and intimate as language, but the conceptual originality of Chomsky’s abstractions make them quite unlike current ideas in any other field, as well as resistant to useful metaphors. Explanations customarily begin with these simple sentences:

I persuaded John to leave.

I expected John to leave.

I told John to leave.

Most of us learned, in seventh grade or so, that since all these sentences take the same form of diagram, they are structurally identical: but Chomsky replies that those diagrams merely document their surface structure. A more insightful diagrammatic scheme would demonstrate more subtle syntactical differences in their deep structure. “That the sentences differ in syntactic structure,” he writes, “is evident from a consideration of their behavior under certain formal operations. For example, in normal conversational English the sentence ‘I told John to leave’ can be roughly paraphrased as: ‘What I told John was to leave.’ But we cannot say: ‘What I persuaded John was to leave.’ ”What I expected John was to leave.’ Furthermore, the sentence ‘I expected John to leave’ differs from the other two in that it can be paraphrased by ‘it was expected by me that John would leave.’ But we cannot say: ‘It was persuaded by me that John would leave’ or “It was told by me that John would leave.’

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Furiously sleep ideas green colorless

a native speaker all but instinctively recognizes that the first, and not the second, is grammatically feasible. In short, upon syntactical puzzles and explanations like these were Chomsky’s subsequent hypotheses built.

“There was a natural progression,” he told me, “from studying the observable facts of a language and perhaps giving a description of this data, as the structural linguists did, to formulating the systems of rules and the deep structures that explain this data, and much other data not observed, such as sentences not known before. Remember that normal experience includes many new sentences which we simply have not heard or read before. If you want to convince yourself of this last remark, the easiest way is to coin an arbitrary sentence and wait until you hear it, or read the New York Times until you find it.” The point is that since a human being can quickly produce, as well as understand, an infinite number of comprehensible sentences he has not heard before, then our use of language is in practice less habitual than thoroughly creative. This extremely shrewd observation underlies his further thinking.

NP1 + Aux + VT + NP2 = NP2 + Aux + be + VT + (by + NP1)

Among the “issues still to be considered,” Chomsky lists as most crucial further research into the physical bases in the human body for linguistic competence. “Ultimately, I think that there will be a physiological explanation for the mental processes we are discovering. If we found them, we would know how the acquisition of knowledge is rooted in the nature of man. My own suspicion is that our current knowledge of physical systems may not be sufficiently rich to account for the nature of mind. If you look over the history of modern science, what you discover is that the concept ‘physical’ has been extended step by step to cover anything that we understand.” And so by now has the concept, or discipline, of “linguistics” been extended to incorporate an approach that originally seemed a hybrid between mathematics and psychology, with a dash of logic.

The Sound Structure of English (1968), a compendious volume co-authored with Halle, grew out of a scholarly paper they published over a decade before. Ingeniously plotting the body of previously hidden rules internalized by native-speakers of English, it promises to become the definitive text in one of Chomsky’s other interests, phonology, of the study of the pronunciation of words. (It also abandons entirely the “phoneme,” or the basic concept upon which the earlier linguistics based its phonology.) Halle divides his younger colleague’s linguistic work into five distinct areas: syntax, phonology, semantics (the meaning of words), the logical foundations of linguistic theory, and the history of linguistic thought. It is in the third field, in particular the relevance of semantic evidence to syntactic organization, that Chomsky himself is currently doing his most promising professional research.

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz’s work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

 

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