On Understanding Grammar

"This is a fairly technical book. So, Tom Givon—also known as Talmy Givón—had training as a biologist and did his Master’s in biology, but then he went on to do a PhD at UCLA and was hired as a faculty member at UCLA. Chomsky’s most controversial claim is that form is distinct from meaning; the form of a grammar is independent of what it means. Givon said this doesn’t make any sense – we can never understand grammar unless we take meaning to be the core. He was following in the footsteps of several others, as all of us are, but he still came up with this original proposal that the forms of language are driven by the functions they have to perform. So, you get into this form/function controversy that exists across so many disciplines. Exactly. It’s more of an architecture: is the building form totally independent of the function the building has to perform? Basically, these ideas come into language and Givon was the first one to write a book-length treatment that was considered to be a serious challenge to the ruling theory of the day which was Chomskyan theory. And that book, On Understanding Grammar , affected my thought and profoundly affected the thought of many others. By the way I know all of these people quite well except Sapir, and Givon is also a top old-time fiddle player and he and I have played a lot of music together. Yes, I play the guitar. So, Givon launched an entire research programme and became, in my opinion, the most important voice in the research programme known as functional linguistics which was diametrically opposed to formal linguistics which was Chomsky’s theory. It’s not that there is no formalisation of functional linguistics, it’s just that formal linguistics means I take form to be the basis – that’s what I’m trying to explain; it’s a form of structuralism. Chomskyans, of course, get upset when I say this but they’re a continuation of structuralism. Getting back to semantics and meaning as the basis of form was what Givon was advocating. Yes. Everything has meaning in one sense or another. Givon does a pretty good job of explaining why the preposition ‘beyond’ has two syllables and the preposition ‘to’ has one syllable. He explains this in terms of their role and how frequently they’re used and how much information they have. One idea is that the more information something has the longer the word is. Obviously, you can think of exceptions in English; it has so many different words from so many different languages that you have to think about the original language and not English per se . (Laughs) Exactly! But why do we elongate things? Actually, George Zipf argued that the things that are used more frequently are shorter than things which are used less frequently because it takes too much time and too much effort if we’re always saying prepositions like ‘to’ to have it somehow be polysyllabic. In fact, when we hear people talk, it disappears. I don’t say always in American English “I want to go”, I say “I wanna go” and this preposition has been reduced to a vowel. Yes, it’s like a second law of thermodynamics view of language where entropy is a major factor to be considered. But Givon’s book was really pioneering and the reviews of it at the time – even the negative reviews – said for the first time Chomskyans have a sustained, empirical argument that they must respond to because this does provide an alternative. Even the negative reviews, and there were extremely negative reviews as there were extremely positive reviews. To me, a good book should have both. It should really piss people off and all of these books piss people off; every one of them irritated somebody. I think that’s a tremendous characteristic of a book if it’s actually saying clear new things. The stage of this is when a new idea first gets heard and you say that’s crazy or that guy’s a liar , and the next thing is well it’s really redundant, it doesn’t add anything , and the final thing is well, we all knew that anyway . These are the brief stages of the acceptance of ideas."