The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (11 page)

A third problem is called “co-reference.” Say you start talking about an individual by referring to him as
the tall blond man with one black shoe
. The second time you refer to him in the conversation you are likely to call him
the man;
the third time, just
him
. But the three expressions do not refer to three people or even to three ways of thinking about a single person; the second and third are just ways of saving breath. Something in the brain must treat them as the same thing; English isn’t doing it.

A fourth, related problem comes from those aspects of language that can only be interpreted in the context of a conversation or text—what linguists call “deixis.” Consider articles like
a
and
the
. What is the difference between
killed a policeman
and
killed the policeman?
Only that in the second sentence, it is assumed that some specific policeman was mentioned earlier or is salient in the context. Thus in isolation the two phrases are synonymous, but in the following contexts (the first from an actual newspaper article) their meanings are completely different:

Outside of a particular conversation or text, then, the words
a
and
the
are quite meaningless. They have no place in one’s permanent mental database. Other conversation-specific words like
here, there, this, that, now, then, I, me, my, her, we
, and
you
pose the same problems, as the following old joke illustrates:

refer to the same event and therefore license many of the same inferences. For example, in all four cases, one may conclude that the wall has paint on it. But they are four distinct arrangements of words. You know that they mean the same thing, but no simple processor, crawling over them as marks, would know that. Something else that is not one of those arrangements of words must be representing the single event that you know is common to all four. For example, the event might be represented as something like

—which, assuming we don’t take the English words seriously, is not too far from one of the leading proposals about what mentalese looks like.

These examples (and there are many more) illustrate a single important point. The representations underlying thinking, on the one hand, and the sentences in a language, on the other, are in many ways at cross-purposes. Any particular thought in our head embraces a vast amount of information. But when it comes to communicating a thought to someone else, attention spans are short and mouths are slow. To get information into a listener’s head in a reasonable amount of time, a speaker can encode only a fraction of the message into words and must count on the listener to fill in the rest. But
inside a single head
, the demands are different. Air time is not a limited resource: different parts of the brain are connected to one another directly with thick cables that can transfer huge amounts of information quickly. Nothing can be left to the imagination, though, because the internal representations
are
the imagination.

We end up with the following picture. People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languages; presumably it has symbols for concepts, and arrangements of symbols that correspond to who did what to whom, as in the paint-spraying representation shown above. But compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. It must be richer, for example, in that several concept symbols must correspond to a given English word like
stool
or
stud
. There must be extra paraphernalia that differentiate logically distinct kinds of concepts, like Ralph’s tusks versus tusks in general, and that link different symbols that refer to the same thing, like
the tall blond man with one black shoe
and
the man
. On the other hand, mentalese must be simpler than spoken languages; conversation-specific words and constructions (like
a
and
the
) are absent, and information about pronouncing words, or even ordering them, is unnecessary. Now, it could be that English speakers think in some kind of simplified and annotated quasi-English, with the design I have just described, and that Apache speakers think in a simplified and annotated quasi-Apache. But to get these languages of thought to subserve reasoning properly, they would have to look much more like each other than either one does to its spoken counterpart, and it is likely that they are the same: a universal mentalese.

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.

So where does all this leave Newspeak? Here are my predictions for the year 2050. First, since mental life goes on independently of particular languages, concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable even if they are nameless. Second, since there are far more concepts than there are words, and listeners must always charitably fill in what the speaker leaves unsaid, existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses. Third, since children are not content to reproduce any old input from adults but create a complex grammar that can go beyond it, they would creolize Newspeak into a natural language, possibly in a single generation. The twenty-first-century toddler may be Winston Smith’s revenge.

Journalists say that when a dog bites a man that is not news, but when
a man bites a dog that is news. This is the essence of the language instinct: language conveys news. The streams of words called “sentences” are not just memory prods, reminding you of man and man’s best friend and letting you fill in the rest; they tell you who in fact did what to whom. Thus we get more from most stretches of language than Woody Allen got from
War and Peace
, which he read in two hours after taking speed-reading lessons: “It was about some Russians.” Language allows us to know how octopuses make love and how to remove cherry stains and why Tad was heartbroken, and whether the Red Sox will win the World Series without a good relief pitcher and how to build an atom bomb in your basement and how Catherine the Great died, among other things.

When scientists see some apparent magic trick in nature, like bats homing in on insects in pitch blackness or salmon returning to breed in their natal stream, they look for the engineering principles behind it. For bats, the trick turned out to be sonar; for salmon, it was locking in to a faint scent trail. What is the trick behind the ability of
Homo sapiens
to convey that man bites dog?

In fact there is not one trick but two, and they are associated with the names of two European scholars who wrote in the nineteenth century. The first principle, articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is “the arbitrariness of the sign,” the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word
dog
does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means “dog” just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning. For the price of this standardized memorization, the members of a language community receive an enormous benefit: the ability to convey a concept from mind to mind virtually instantaneously. Sometimes the gunshot marriage between sound and meaning can be amusing. As Richard Lederer points out in
Crazy English
, we drive on a parkway but park in a driveway, there is no ham in hamburger or bread in sweetbreads, and blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. But think about the “sane” alternative of depicting a concept so that receivers can apprehend the meaning in the form. The process is so challenging to the ingenuity, so comically unreliable, that we have made it into party games like Pictionary and charades.

The second trick behind the language instinct is captured in a phrase from Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language “makes infinite use of finite media.” We know the difference between the forgettable
Dog bites man
and the newsworthy
Man bites dog
because of the order in which
dog, man
, and
bites
are combined. That is, we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar; as I have mentioned, it should not be confused with the pedagogical and stylistic grammars we encountered in school.

The principle underlying grammar is unusual in the natural world. A grammar is an example of a “discrete combinatorial system.” A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements. For example, the meaning of
Man bites dog
is different from the meaning of any of the three words inside it, and different from the meaning of the same words combined in the reverse order. In a discrete combinatorial system like language, there can be an unlimited number of completely distinct combinations with an infinite range of properties. Another noteworthy discrete combinatorial system in the natural world is the genetic code in DNA, where four kinds of nucleotides are combined into sixty-four kinds of codons, and the codons can be strung into an unlimited number of different genes. Many biologists have capitalized on the close parallel between the principles of grammatical combination and the principles of genetic combination. In the technical language of genetics, sequences of DNA are said to contain “letters” and “punctuation”; may be “palindromic,” “meaningless,” or “synonymous”; are “transcribed” and “translated”; and are even stored in “libraries.” The immunologist Niels Jerne entitled his Nobel Prize address “The Generative Grammar of the Immune System.”

Most of the complicated systems we see in the world, in contrast, are
blending systems
, like geology, paint mixing, cooking, sound, light, and weather. In a blending system the properties of the combination lie
between
the properties of its elements, and the properties of the elements are lost in the average or mixture. For example, combining red paint and white paint results in pink paint. Thus the range of properties that can be found in a blending system are highly circumscribed, and the only way to differentiate large numbers of combinations is to discriminate tinier and tinier differences. It may not be a coincidence that the two systems in the universe that most impress us with their open-ended complex design—life and mind—are based on discrete combinatorial systems. Many biologists believe that if inheritance were not discrete, evolution as we know it could not have taken place.

The way language works, then, is that each person’s brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar). We will explore the world of words in the next chapter; this one is devoted to the design of grammar.

The fact that grammar is a discrete combinational system has two important consequences. The first is the sheer vastness of language. Go into the Library of Congress and pick a sentence at random from any volume, and chances are you would fail to find an exact repetition no matter how long you continued to search. Estimates of the number of sentences that an ordinary person is capable of producing are breathtaking. If a speaker is interrupted at a random point in a sentence, there are on average about ten different words that could be inserted at that point to continue the sentence in a grammatical and meaningful way. (At some points in a sentence, only one word can be inserted, and at others, there is a choice from among thousands; ten is the average.) Let’s assume that a person is capable of producing sentences up to twenty words long. Therefore the number of sentences that a speaker can deal with in principle is at least 10
²⁰
(a one with twenty zeros after it, or a hundred million trillion). At a rate of five seconds a sentence, a person would need a childhood of about a hundred trillion years (with no time for eating or sleeping) to memorize them all. In fact, a twenty-word limitation is far too severe. The following comprehensible sentence from George Bernard Shaw, for example, is 110 words long:

Indeed, if you put aside the fact that the days of our age are threescore and ten, each of us is capable of uttering an
infinite
number of different sentences. By the same logic that shows that there are an infinite number of integers—if you ever think you have the largest integer, just add I to it and you will have another—there must be an infinite number of sentences. The
Guinness Book of World Records
once claimed to recognize the longest English sentence: a 1,300-word stretch in William Faulkner’s novel
Absalom, Absalom!
, that begins:

I am tempted to achieve immortality by submitting the following record-breaker:

But it would be only the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame, for soon I could be bested by:

And that record, too, would fall when someone submitted:

And so on, ad infinitum. The infinite use of finite media distinguishes the human brain from virtually all the artificial language devices we commonly come across, like pull-string dolls, cars that nag you to close the door, and cheery voice-mail instructions (“Press the pound key for more options”), all of which use a fixed list of prefabricated sentences.

The second consequence of the design of grammar is that it is a code that is
autonomous
from cognition. A grammar specifies how words may combine to express meanings; that specification is independent of the particular meanings we typically convey or expect others to convey to us. Thus we all sense that some strings of words that can be given common-sense interpretations do not conform to the grammatical code of English. Here are some strings that we can easily interpret but that we sense are not properly formed:

These sentences are “ungrammatical,” not in the sense of split infinitives, dangling participles, and the other hobgoblins of the schoolmarm, but in the sense that every ordinary speaker of the casual vernacular has a gut feeling that something is wrong with them, despite their interpretability. Ungrammaticality is simply a consequence of our having a fixed code for interpreting sentences. For some strings a meaning can be guessed, but we lack confidence that the speaker has used the same code in producing the sentence as we used in interpreting it. For similar reasons, computers, which are less forgiving of ungrammatical input than human listeners, express their displeasure in all-too-familiar dialogues like this one:

The opposite can happen as well. Sentences can make no sense but can still be recognized as grammatical. The classic example is a sentence from Chomsky, his only entry in
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
:

The sentence was contrived to show that syntax and sense can be independent of each other, but the point was made long before Chomsky; the genre of nonsense verse and prose, popular in the nineteenth century, depends on it. Here is an example from Edward Lear, the acknowledged master of nonsense:

Mark Twain once parodied the romantic description of nature written more for its mellifluousness than its content:

And almost everyone knows the poem in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass
that ends: