The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (39 page)

Metaphor and humor are useful ways to summarize the two mental performances that go into understanding a sentence. Most of our everyday expressions about language use a “conduit” metaphor that captures the parsing process. In this metaphor, ideas are objects, sentences are containers, and communciation is sending. We “gather” our ideas to “put” them “into” words, and if our verbiage is not “empty” or “hollow,” we might “convey” or “get” these ideas “across” “to” a listener, who can “unpack” our words to “extract” their “content.” But as we have seen, the metaphor is misleading. The complete process of understanding is better characterized by the joke about the two psychoanalysts who meet on the street. One says, “Good morning”; the other thinks, “I wonder what he meant by that.”

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And
it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said to one another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1–9)

In the year of our Lord 1957, the linguist Martin Joos reviewed the preceding three decades of research in linguistics and concluded that God had actually gone much farther in confounding the language of Noah’s descendants. Whereas the God of Genesis was said to be content with mere mutual unintelligibility, Joos declared that “languages could differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways.” That same year, the Chomskyan revolution began with the publication of
Syntactic Structures
, and the next three decades took us back to the literal biblical account. According to Chomsky, a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from their mutually unintelligible vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language.

Even by the standards of theological debates, these interpretations are strikingly different. Where did they come from? The 4,000 to 6,000 languages of the planet do look impressively different from English and from one another. Here are the most conspicuous ways in which languages can differ from what we are used to in English:

English is an “isolating” language, which builds sentences by rearranging immutable word-sized units, like
Dog bites man
and
Man bites dog
. Other languages express who did what to whom by modifying nouns with case affixes, or by modifying the verb with affixes that agree with its role-players in number, gender, and person. One example is Latin, an “inflecting” language in which each affix contains several pieces of information; another is Kivunjo, an “agglutinating” language in which each affix conveys one piece of information and many affixes are strung together, as in the eight-part verb in Chapter 5.


English is a “fixed-word-order” language where each phrase has a fixed position. “Free-word-order” languages allow phrase order to vary. In an extreme case like the Australian aboriginal language Warlpiri, words from different phrases can be scrambled together:
This man speared a kangaroo
can be expressed as
Man this kangaroo speared, Man kangaroo speared this
, and any of the other four orders, all completely synonymous.


English is an “accusative” language, where the subject of an intransitive verb, like
she
in
She ran
, is treated identically to the subject of a transitive verb, like
she
in
She kissed Larry
, and different from the object of the transitive verb, like
her
in
Larry kissed her
. “Ergative” languages like Basque and many Australian languages have a different scheme for collapsing these three roles. The subject of an intransitive verb and the
object
of a transitive verb are identical, and the subject of the transitive is the one that behaves differently. It is as if we were to say
Ran her
to mean “She ran.”


English is a “subject-prominent” language in which all sentences must have a subject (even if there is nothing for the subject to refer to, as in
It is raining
or
There is a unicorn in the garden
). In “topic-prominent” languages like Japanese, sentences have a special position that is filled by the current topic of the conversation, as in
This place, planting wheat is good or California, climate is good
.


English is an “SVO” language, with the order subject-verb-object (
Dog bites man
). Japanese is subject-object-verb (SOV:
Dog man bites
); Modern Irish (Gaelic) is verb-subject-object (VSO:
Bites dog man
).


In English, a noun can name a thing in any construction:
a banana; two bananas; any banana; all the bananas
. In “classifier” languages, nouns fall into gender classes like human, animal, inanimate, one-dimensional, two-dimensional, cluster, tool, food, and so on. In many constructions, the name for the class, not the noun itself, must be used—for example, three hammers would be referred to as
three tools, to wit hammer
.

And, of course, a glance at a grammar for any particular language will reveal dozens or hundreds of idiosyncrasies.

On the other hand, one can also hear striking universals through the babble. In 1963 the linguist Joseph Greenberg examined a sample of 30 far-flung languages from five continents, including Serbian, Italian, Basque, Finnish, Swahili, Nubian, Masaai, Berber, Turkish, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Burmese, Malay, Maori, Mayan, and Quechua (a descendant of the language of the Incas). Greenberg was not working in the Chomskyan school; he just wanted to see if any interesting properties of grammar could be found in all these languages. In his first investigation, which focused on the order of words and morphemes, he found no fewer than forty-five universals.

Since then, many other surveys have been conducted, involving scores of languages from every part of the world, and literally hundreds of universal patterns have been documented. Some hold absolutely. For example, no language forms questions by reversing the order of words within a sentence, like
Built Jack that house the this is?
Some are statistical: subjects normally precede objects in almost all languages, and verbs and their objects tend to be adjacent. Thus most languages have SVO or SOV order; fewer have VSO; VOS and OVS are rare (less than 1%); and OSV may be nonexistent (there are a few candidates, but not all linguists agree that they are OSV). The largest number of universals involve implications: if a language has X, it will also have Y. We came across a typical example of an implicational universal in Chapter 4: if the basic order of a language is SOV, it will usually have question words at the end of the sentence, and postpositions; if it is SVO, it will have question words at the beginning, and prepositions. Universal implications are found in all aspects of language, from phonology (for instance, if a language has nasal vowels, it will have non-nasal vowels) to word meanings (if a language has a word for “purple,” it will have a word for “red”; if a language has a word for “leg,” it will have a word for “arm.”)

If lists of universals show that languages do not vary freely, do they imply that languages are restricted by the structure of the brain? Not directly. First one must rule out two alternative explanations.

One possibility is that language originated only once, and all existing languages are the descendants of that proto-language and retain some of its features. These features would be similar across the languages for the same reason that alphabetical order is similar across the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic alphabets. There is nothing special about alphabetical order; it was just the order that the Canaanites invented, and all Western alphabets came from theirs. No linguist accepts this as an explanation for language universals. For one thing, there can be radical breaks in language transmission across the generations, the most extreme being creolization, but universals hold of all languages including creoles. Moreover, simple logic shows that a universal implication, like “If a language has SVO order, then it has prepositions, but if it has SOV order, then it has postpositions,” cannot be transmitted from parent to child the way words are. An implication, by its very logic, is not a fact about English: children could learn that English is SVO
and
has prepositions, but nothing could show them that
if
a language is SVO,
then
it must have prepositions. A universal implication is a fact about all languages, visible only from the vantage point of a comparative linguist. If a language changes from SOV to SVO over the course of history and its postpositions flip to prepositions, there has to be some explanation of what keeps these two developments in sync.

Also, if universals were simply what is passed down through the generations, we would expect that the major differences between kinds of language should correlate with the branches of the linguistic family tree, just as the difference between two cultures generally correlates with how long ago they separated. As humanity’s original language differentiated over time, some branches might become SOV and others SVO; within each of these branches some might have agglutinated words, others isolated words. But this is not so. Beyond a time depth of about a thousand years, history and typology often do not correlate well at all. Languages can change from grammatical type to type relatively quickly, and can cycle among a few types over and over; aside from vocabulary, they do not progressively differentiate and diverge. For example, English has changed from a free-word-order, highly inflected, topic-prominent language, as its sister German remains to this day, to a fixed-word-order, poorly inflected, subject-prominent language, all in less than a millennium. Many language families contain close to the full gamut of variations seen across the world in particular aspects of grammar. The absence of a strong correlation between the grammatical properties of languages and their place in the family tree of languages suggests that language universals are not just the properties that happen to have survived from the hypothetical mother of all languages.

The second counterexplanation that one must rule out before attributing a universal of language to a universal language instinct is that languages might reflect universals of thought or of mental information processing that are not specific to language. As we saw in Chapter 3, universals of color vocabulary probably come from universals of color vision. Perhaps subjects precede objects because the subject of an action verb denotes the causal agent (as in
Dog bites man
); putting the subject first mirrors the cause coming before the effect. Perhaps head-first or head-last ordering is consistent across all the phrases in a language because it enforces a consistent branching direction, right or left, in the language’s phrase structure trees, avoiding difficult-to-understand onion constructions. For example, Japanese is SOV and has modifiers to the left; this gives it constructions like “modifier-S O V” with the modifier on the outside rather than “S-modifier O V” with the modifier embedded inside.

But these functional explanations are often tenuous, and for many universals they do not work at all. For example, Greenberg noted that if a language has both derivational suffixes (which create new words from old ones) and inflectional suffixes (which modify a word to fit its role in the sentence), then the derivational suffixes are always closer to the stem than the inflectional ones. In Chapter 5 we saw this principle in English in the difference between the grammatical
Darwinisms
and the ungrammatical
Darwinsism
. It is hard to think of how this law could be a consequence of any universal principle of thought or memory: why would the concept of two ideologies based on one Darwin be thinkable, but the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus) not be thinkable (unless one reasons in a circle and declares that the mind must find -
ism
to be more cognitively basic than the plural, because that’s the order we see in language)? And remember Peter Gordon’s experiments showing that children say
mice-eater
but never
rats-eater
, despite the conceptual similarity of rats and mice and despite the absence of either kind of compound in parents’ speech. His results corroborate the suggestion that this particular universal is caused by the way that morphological rules are computed in the brain, with inflection applying to the products of derivation but not vice versa.

In any case, Greenbergisms are not the best place to look for a neurologically given Universal Grammar that existed before Babel. It is the organization of grammar as a whole, not some laundry list of facts, that we should be looking at. Arguing about the possible causes of something like SVO order misses the forest for the trees. What is most striking of all is that we can look at a randomly picked language and find things that can sensibly be called subjects, objects, and verbs to begin with. After all, if we were asked to look for the order of subject, object, and verb in musical notation, or in the computer programming language
FORTRAN
, or in Morse code, or in arithmetic, we would protest that the very idea is nonsensical. It would be like assembling a representative collection of the world’s cultures from the six continents and trying to survey the colors of their hockey team jerseys or the form of their harakiri rituals. We should be impressed, first and foremost, that research on universals of grammar is even possible!