Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

"Chomsky started his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania with Zellig Harris who was one of the leading structural linguists of the time – still unsurpassed in many ways. Chomsky is unusual among linguists in that he had the same advisor for BA, Master’s, and PhD. One could say so. There are interesting historical reasons for this, but Chomsky started with Zellig when he was nineteen and finished his PhD when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. In 1965, after Chomsky had already been well-established, he published two completely different landmark books. American Power and the New Mandarins is a deeply well-thought-out and insightful criticism of US foreign policy in Vietnam and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is by any measurement an absolutely beautiful, astounding work of genius. It has made Chomsky, in most people’s minds – not in mine but in most – the most important linguist of probably all time. I would say Sapir. The essence of the book has these brilliant ideas of deep structure. Every sentence in every language starts off at one level in which the literal meaning is represented, and then gets transformed by operations at that basic phrase-structure. When a phrase like “John saw Bill” is derived for a particular purpose you might get “Bill was seen by John”, so you’ve gone from an active to a passive. In the early days, the passive was derived from the active in a sense. This deep structure idea was hugely influential – Chomsky doesn’t believe in it any more but it was hugely influential at the time. The concept of transformation looked like it worked; it looked like not only did it work but it had psychological implications. One hypothesis that emerged from this that was heavily tested in psychology was: the longer the derivation takes to get from deep structure to surface structure, the more difficult it should be for a native speaker to process the sentence. If you go back to the simple active-passive pair, the passive ought to be more difficult for people to understand – “Bill was seen by John” – than the active – “John saw Bill” – because the passive requires an additional transformation that is not required by the active. A lot of the earlier results seemed to support this so it was incredibly exciting. Psychologists got involved and Chomsky laid out – prior to this book but he referenced it in this book – what is now known as the ‘Chomsky hierarchy of grammars’ showing where languages fall along a scale from finite-state to context-sensitive without countenancing the possibility that a language could be finite. Well, actually, that’s the result that we’re getting in the new paper: we have found human languages that are finite. Well, no. What it means is that there’s an upper-bound; you can say this language does have a longest sentence. In English, there is no longest sentence. Any sentence you can think of, you can make larger by preceding it with something like “Mary said…” That’s right. I mean, you can make new sentences but you can’t make a given sentence longer than a certain limit. That’s highly unusual, and that was exactly what Chomsky said no language can be. That was a fascinating result because nobody had ever thought of languages in these mathematical terms. Nobody had ever thought about language as a computational system and a grammar as the underlying computational system of thought. This work was incredibly rich. My view of it, in retrospect, is that in the intervening fifty years – we’re now fifty years from the publication of that book – it doesn’t seem to have panned out. One cannot criticise it for that. To me, in some ways, this book is like Freud’s first book on the unconscious. I don’t buy the ego, the id, and the superego any more, and I don’t buy the Oedipus complex, but I think that Freud was the most marvellous writer on the unconscious that ever lived. That fact that he was wrong is almost irrelevant because he got people thinking about things they never thought about before. To me, Chomsky is the same; I think he’s wrong on a lot of this stuff but nobody thought about language in this way before he came along. Yes. Interestingly enough, it didn’t come out in the earlier writings. It came out later and around the time of the publication of Aspects , Chomsky was talking about it much more – this idea that language is acquired so quickly and is so similar across the world’s languages that it must come from a common genetic core: the ‘universal grammar’. I don’t think that’s panned out either; I think there are a lot of arguments against. Still, it’s a beautiful, plausible idea and it’s a wonderful hypothesis. So like Freud’s unconscious, Chomsky’s universal grammar was an important idea in the history of thought. The fact that it’s wrong – that’s just the way things turn out sometimes. No, he doesn’t at all. He defines it in different ways according to the kinds of criticism that come. I have a number of articles in which I have ongoing discussions about this stuff. Sometimes I am cast as this person that hates Chomsky because I am disagreeing with him so strongly and my answer to that is that this debate is only possible because he laid out the terms on which we can have this debate. I have learnt tremendously about Pirahã because I’ve had to think about it in Chomskyan terms. I think Sapir is more important because his ideas are less startling and headline-grabbing – although Sapir-Whorf is pretty exciting – they are basically just right. They seem to be working out really well. On the one hand, you have these great ideas that are extremely well-expressed that didn’t turn out and on the other, you have other great ideas that are well-expressed that did turn out. That’s why I choose Sapir. I actually think Pike is much greater than people give him credit for and I think he’s criticised and not given enough credit because a) he was a strong Christian and b) he didn’t write very well. Those counted against him but the people who’ve worked with him and who knew him understood that his knowledge of language was astounding and his ideas, once you get through the verbiage, are actually pretty good. That’s another reason that the book is so important to me. Yes, I spent a year as a visiting scholar at MIT and sat in on Chomsky’s classes. My office was next to his and he and I met several times during the course of the year. He wrote a letter of recommendation for my first job and he wrote a letter of recommendation for my tenure-case at the University of Pittsburgh. So, he was very supportive of me and I used to get all of his papers, in the days before the internet, when it was quite a coup to be getting Chomsky’s unpublished manuscripts for comments. Even though I lived in Brazil, I would go to the post office once in a while and there would be a big manila envelope from MIT with Chomsky’s most recent stuff in it. Yes, he would mail it to me in Brazil and I would get in at the local post office and sit and read. Very few people would have access to it and there I was in the jungle reading his newest stuff."