My Chomsky Critique Page 2

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  In the dark ages of linguistics, it was thought that the acquisition of language was a pretty simple affair. After all, everyone seemed to do it with relative ease. Then Noam Chomsky began to look at syntax, and he decided it was a lot more complicated than previously thought.

  One can see that Chomsky very aptly titled the book in which this diagram first appeared Syntactic Structures, and syntax is really all the theory concerned itself with. Eight years later, however, Chomsky modified his diagram to look like this:

  But the damage had already been done by Chomsky’s paradigmatic disposition towards syntax, and even though this disposition allowed him to see the problems with descriptive linguistics and behaviorist theories, it also prevented him from seeing the importance of semantics. Note that what has really been done in this new diagram is that a semantic component has been plugged into the previous syntactic system, and it has the look of an appendage almost begrudgingly made.

  This model, originally intended as a linguistic one, was soon converted directly into a psychological model. Certainly one of the most difficult anomalies of the behaviorist’s theories was their inability to deal with ambiguous sentences. Chomsky’s model did a marvelous job of accounting for the ambiguity. Fleeing the corner they found themselves back into, Miller and other S-R psychologists clung to Chomsky’s theory without a lot of initial examination because it was the only working alternative they had.

  But when psychologists began to do experiments under the transformational paradigm they fell prey to the inadequacies of a syntactically-based system of language. An example of this would the transformational tag experiments which at first glance looked very promising. The experiments revolved around the belief that all sentences begin as simple, active, declarative statements and that to make a passive or interrogative or negative statement the speaker converts the “kernel sentence” into a new structure. It seems self-evident that if there is no reason for using a passive voice, then in a memory experiment a sentence is likely to shift to an active voice, simply because it is much more commonly used. The experimenters took advantage of this in order to “prove” that the passive sentence contains more transformational tags and therefore since we have a limited short-term memory, a passive sentence will shift after the tag has been lost. The experimenters ignored the fact that it is the context of a sentence that decides whether it is passive or active. It is much more natural to say, “Skinner experimented on rats,” than it is to say, “Rats are experimented on by Skinner.” But, on the other hand, “The boy was hit by the train,” is much more natural than, “The train hit the boy.” The function of the passive in many cases is to provide the listener with the information in the most logical sequence possible. Trains are not as important as boys, at least not when boys are run over.

  Because the tag experiments were constructed around isolated sentences with no context the results have little bearing on real-life situations. Later experiments tend to show that people remember sentences according to their meaning, not because of the transformational tags which have been remembered or lost.

  Another example of psychologists being led astray by an over-indulgence in syntax can be found in language acquisition theories. The pivot system postulated that children have a developed syntax which is different from that which they develop as adults. The theory states that for each two-word utterance there is a deep structure that relates to the adult deep structure, but since the child cannot handle the complex adult syntax he develops a temporary one of his own. There were some advantages to this theory: for example, it could handle the behavioristic anomaly of creativity of language since it was a self-generative system. The problem with it, is that again it completely ignores the problem of semantics.

  It is more valuable to look at what the child is trying to say, what meanings he is trying to communicate, than to try and force a syntactic system on his utterances. When a child begins learning a language he proceeds by learning those things that are most important to him, as well as linguistically and cognitively easiest. Mommy and Daddy are often the first words and first concepts of all children. The child learns to express his states of being in simple terms, to identify objects, and recognize simple relations. There aren’t just words being added to a vocabulary and being placed in one syntactic list or another, they are cognitive processes that are being developed and refined. When a child says, “Big shoe,” he doesn’t say it because he is generating it out of a syntactical system, but because he understands the meanings of the words. If children spend a long time in what can be classified as a “two-word” utterance stage, it is probably because the next step towards developing their language abilities is a very difficult one, not because they have developed a syntax that is separate from their parents.

  Current research is language acquisition is directed more along the lines of recognizing the different cognitive and semantic relationships that a child is able to express and understand.

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