On Nature and Language

"I needed to have a Chomsky. I chose it because I looked at which books were in the Five Books archive , and wanted to choose something different and maybe a bit more readable. This is the best I could do. Chomsky’s linguistics work is technical, and where it’s not technical, it’s highly philosophical. There are three other books by Chomsky I could have chosen. Syntactic Structures (1957) was the first book of his I read and it was totally the thing that made me go, ‘Oh, this is cool. I want to do this.’ In my second year of university I read Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and thought, ‘My God this is fascinating.’ Then there’s Knowledge of Language (1986) which I read as a graduate student and made me go, ‘Oh! This is how it all works.’ I chose On Nature and Language because it’s more modern. It’s quite speculative and a bit rhetorical, it must be said. I like it because it does two things. It poses, very clearly, a general question. Chomsky focuses on the cognitive-psychological side of linguistics and has always said that language has a biological part to it, that’s it part of our being as humans and other animals don’t have it. If you focus on that, what is it? If it’s really like a piece of biology, should we study it like the liver or the heart? Or is it more like a computer, like Fodor is saying, in which case we should study it as we do the natural laws of physical things? “ On Language and Nature asks the question, ‘What is it that makes language like language and lightning like lightning and ferns like ferns?’ ” One of the things I argued in my book, Language Unlimited , is that language works through a principle of self-similarity. If you have a fern leaf, it’s built up out of smaller fern leaves and each of those is built out of yet smaller fern leaves and each of those has got a tiny, tiny little fern leaf in it. Or if you think about the way that lightning forks when it comes from the sky: It forks in this very binary way, it comes down and goes into 2 goes into 2 goes into 2 and you end up with the classic forked lightning pattern. Many, many other things are also organized through this principle of self-similarity: X is similar to part of X. Chomsky’s point is that language works like that as well. As I said earlier, you take two things and put them together—you have ‘that’ and ‘cup’ and you put it together and get a new thing ‘that cup.’ When I say, ‘I broke that cup’ I’ve taken ‘that cup’ and put it together with ‘broke’ to make a bigger thing, ‘broke that cup.’ That’s the same notion, that the larger thing has got a similar shape to the things inside it. All languages we know of, all human languages that we’ve ever studied, are organized around this principle of hierarchical structure. On Language and Nature asks the question, ‘What is it that makes language like language and lightning like lightning and ferns like ferns?’ He doesn’t put it as simply as that, but one of the lectures in the book is basically asking that question. How can you understand language as a purely natural, physical type of object? Does it have the same principles governing it as ferns and lightning and the turning of galaxies and the horns of narwhals and nautilus shells, this self-similarity principle? This book is from the late 1990s. There was still a technical problem in it. It looked to Chomsky at the time as if this idea of a hierarchical structure of sentences required two separate mechanisms to build up, two separate things. Later on, Chomsky came up with another idea. It’s in a technical paper and I think it’s his best idea for a long time, which is that you can actually combine these two different sources of the hierarchy in human language into one, if you understand it from a particular perspective. So it’s interesting to look at this book as a snapshot of where we were. 20 years later, we’re in an improved place. We have a deeper understanding of how that set of questions can be answered and that’s a really neat thing. Everyone’s always saying, ‘Chomsky said this, he’s wrong.’ That’s fine. But he always poses totally fascinating questions. Now, we can look back and say, ‘It didn’t work out this way, but actually we’ve now got a good answer or a better answer to that question.’ People often don’t like reading Chomsky’s more rhetorical, more speculative stuff. I quite like it because I always find in it a perspective on something which is very helpful for me in thinking about what issues I want to investigate or I want to push."