The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (24 page)

Since the whole word, represented by its topmost label, is a verb, but the element it is made out of one level down is a noun,
to fly out
, like
low-life
, must be headless—if the noun
fly
were its head,
fly out
would have to be a noun, too, which it is not. Lacking a head and its associated data pipeline, the irregular forms of the original verb
to fly
, namely
flew
and
flown
, are trapped at the bottommost level and cannot bubble up to attach to the whole word. The regular -
ed
rule rushes in in its usual role as the last resort, and thus we say that Wade Boggs
flied out
. What kills the irregularity of
to fly out
, then, is not its specialized meaning, but its being a verb based on a word that is not a verb. By the same logic, we say
They ringed the city with artillery
(“formed a ring around it”), not
They rang the city with artillery
, and
He grandstanded to the crowd
(“played to the grandstand”), not
He grandstood to the crowd
.

This principle works every time. Remember Sally Ride, the astronaut? She received a lot of publicity because she was America’s first woman in space. But recently Mae Jemison did her one better. Not only is Jemison America’s first
black
woman in space, but she appeared in
People
magazine in 1993 in their list of the fifty most beautiful people in the world. Publicity-wise, she has out-Sally-Bided Sally Ride (not
has out-Sally-Ridden Sally Ride
). For many years New York State’s most infamous prison was Sing Sing. But since the riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971, Attica has become even more infamous: it has out-Sing-Singed Sing Sing (not
has out-Sing-Sung Sing Sing
).

As for the Maple Leafs, the noun being pluralized is not
leaf
, the unit of foliage, but a noun based on the
name
Maple Leaf, Canada’s national symbol. A name is not the same thing as a noun. (For example, whereas a noun may be preceded by an article like
the
, a name may not be: you cannot refer to someone as
the Donald
, unless you are Ivana Trump, whose first language is Czech.) Therefore, the noun
a Maple Leaf
(referring to, say, the goalie) must be headless, because it is a noun based on a word that is not a noun. And a noun that does not get its nounhood from one of its components cannot get an irregular plural from that component either; hence it defaults to the regular form
Maple Leafs
. This explanation also answers a question that kept bothering David Letterman thoughout one of his recent
Late Night
shows: why is the new major league baseball team in Miami called the Florida Marlins rather than the Florida Marlin, given that those fish are referred to in the plural as
marlin?
. Indeed, the explanation applies to all nouns based on names:

Irregular forms, then, live at the bottom of word structure trees, where roots and stems from the mental dictionary are inserted. The developmental psycholinguist Peter Gordon has capitalized on this effect in an ingenious experiment that shows how children’s minds seem to be designed with the logic of word structure built in.

Gordon focused on a seeming oddity first noticed by the linguist Paul Kiparsky: compounds can be formed out of irregular plurals but not out of regular plurals. For example, a house infested with mice can be described as
mice-infested
, but it sounds awkward to describe a house infested with rats as
rats-infested
. We say that it is
rat-infested
, even though by definition one rat does not make an infestation. Similarly, there has been much talk about
men-bashing
but no talk about gays-bashing (only gay-bashing), and there are
teethmarks
, but no
clawsmarks
. Once there was a song about a
purple-people-eater
, but it would be ungrammatical to sing about a
purple-babies-eater
. Since the licit irregular plurals and the illicit regular plurals have similar meanings, it must be the grammar of irregularity that makes the difference.

The theory of word structure explains the effect easily. Irregular plurals, because they are quirky, have to be stored in the mental dictionary as roots or stems; they cannot be generated by a rule. Because of this storage, they can be fed into the compounding rule that joins an existing stem to another existing stem to yield a new stem. But regular plurals are not stems stored in the mental dictionary; they are complex words that are assembled on the fly by inflectional rules whenever they are needed. They are put together too late in the root-to-stem-to-word assembly process to be available to the compounding rule, whose inputs can only come out of the dictionary.

Gordon found that three- to five-year-old children obey this restriction fastidiously. Showing the children a puppet, he first asked them, “Here is a monster who likes to eat mud. What do you call him?” He then gave them the answer,
a mud-eater
, to get them started. Children like to play along, and the more gruesome the meal, the more eagerly they fill in the blank, often to the dismay of their onlooking parents. The crucial parts came next. A “monster who likes to eat mice,” the children said, was a
mice-eater
. But a “monster who likes to eat rats” was never called a
rats-eater
, only a
rat-eater
. (Even the children who made the error
mouses
in their spontaneous speech never called the puppet a
mouses-eater
.) The children, in other words, respected the subtle restrictions on combining plurals and compounds inherent in the word structure rules. This suggests that the rules take the same form in the unconscious mind of the child as they do in the unconscious mind of the adult.

But the most interesting discovery came when Gordon examined how children might have acquired this constraint. Perhaps, he reasoned, they learned it from their parents by listening for whether the plurals that occur inside the parents’ compounds are irregular, regular, or both, and then duplicate whatever kinds of compounds they hear. This would be impossible, he discovered. Motherese just doesn’t have any compounds containing plurals. Most compounds are like
toothbrush
, with singular nouns inside them; compounds like
mice-infested
, though grammatically possible, are seldom used. The children produced
mice-eater
but never
rats-eater
, even though they had no evidence from adult speech that this is how languages work. We have another demonstration of knowledge despite “poverty of the input,” and it suggests that another basic aspect of grammar may be innate. Just as Crain and Nakayama’s Jabba experiment showed that in syntax children automatically distinguish between word strings and phrase structures, Gordon’s mice-eater experiment shows that in morphology children automatically distinguish between roots stored in the mental dictionary and inflected words created by a rule.

A word, in a word, is complicated. But then what in the world
is
a word? We have just seen that “words” can be built out of parts by morphological rules. But then what makes them different from phrases or sentences? Shouldn’t we reserve the word “word” for a thing that has to be rote-memorized, the arbitrary Saussurean sign that exemplifies the first of the two principles of how language works (the other being the discrete combinatorial system)? The puzzlement comes from the fact that the everyday word “word” is not scientifically precise. It can refer to two things.

The concept of a word that I have used so far in this chapter is a linguistic object that, even if built out of parts by the rules of morphology, behaves as the indivisible, smallest unit with respect to the rules of syntax—a “syntactic atom,” in
atom
’s original sense of something that cannot be split. The rules of syntax can look inside a sentence or phrase and cut and paste the smaller phrases inside it. For example, the rule for producing questions can look inside the sentence
This monster eats mice
and move the phrase corresponding to
mice
to the front, yielding
What did this monster eat?
But the rules of syntax halt at the boundary between a phrase and a word; even if the word is built out of parts, the rules cannot look “inside” the word and fiddle with those parts. For example, the question rule cannot look inside the word
mice-eater
in the sentence
This monster is a mice-eater
and move the morpheme corresponding to
mice
to the front; the resulting question is virtually unintelligible:
What is this monster an -eater?
(Answer: mice.) Similarly, the rules of syntax can stick an adverb inside a phrase, as in
This monster eats mice quickly
. But they cannot stick an adverb inside a word, as in
This monster is a mice-quickly-eater
. For these reasons, we say that words, even if they are generated out of parts by one set of rules, are not the same thing as phrases, which are generated out of parts by a different set of rules. Thus one precise sense of our everyday term “word” refers to the units of language that are the products of morphological rules, and which are unsplittable by syntactic rules.

The second, very different sense of “word” refers to a rote-memorized chunk: a string of linguistic stuff that is arbitrarily associated with a particular meaning, one item from the long list we call the mental dictionary. The grammarians Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin Williams coined the term “listeme,” the unit of a memorized list, to refer to this sense of “word” (their term is a play on “morpheme,” the unit of morphology, and “phoneme,” the unit of sound). Note that a listeme need not coincide with the first precise sense of “word,” a syntactic atom. A listeme can be a tree branch any size, as long as it cannot be produced mechanically by rules and therefore has to be memorized. Take idioms. There is no way to predict the meaning of
kick the bucket, buy the farm, spill the beans, bite the bullet, screw the pooch, give up the ghost, hit the fan
, or
go bananas
from the meanings of their components using the usual rules of heads and role-players.
Kicking the bucket
is not a kind of kicking, and buckets have nothing to do with it. The meanings of these phrase-sized units have to be memorized as listemes, just as if they were simple word-sized units, and so they are really “words” in this second sense. Di Sciullo and Williams, speaking as grammatical chauvinists, describe the mental dictionary (lexicon) as follows: “If conceived of as the set of listemes, the lexicon is incredibly boring by its very nature…. The lexicon is like a prison—it contains only the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in common is their lawlessness.”

In the rest of this chapter I turn to the second sense of “word,” the listeme. It will be a kind of prison reform: I want to show that the lexicon, though a repository of lawless listemes, is deserving of respect and appreciation. What seems to a grammarian like an act of brute force incarceration—a child hears a parent use a word and thenceforth retains that word in memory—is actually an inspiring feat.