The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (40 page)

When linguists claim to find the same kinds of linguistic gadgets in language after language, it is not just because they expect languages to have subjects and so they label as a “subject” the first kind of phrase they see that resembles an English subject. Rather, if a linguist examining a language for the first time calls a phrase a “subject” using one criterion based on English subjects—say, denoting the agent role of action verbs—the linguist soon discovers that other criteria, like agreeing with the verb in person and number and occurring before the object, will be true of that phrase as well. It is these
correlations
among the properties of a linguistic thingamabob across languages that make it scientifically meaningful to talk about subjects and objects and nouns and verbs and auxiliaries and inflections—and not just Word Class #2,783 and Word Class #1,491—in languages from Abaza to Zyrian.

Chomsky’s claim that from a Martian’s-eye-view all humans speak a single language is based on the discovery that the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the world’s languages. Linguists have long known that the basic design features of language are found everywhere. Many were documented in 1960 by the non-Chomskyan linguist C. F. Hockett in a comparison between human languages and animal communication systems (Hockett was not acquainted with Martian). Languages use the mouth-to-ear channel as long as the users have intact hearing (manual and facial gestures, of course, are the substitute channel used by the deaf). A common grammatical code, neutral between production and comprehension, allows speakers to produce any linguistic message they can understand, and vice versa. Words have stable meanings, linked to them by arbitrary convention. Speech sounds are treated discontinuously; a sound that is acoustically halfway between
bat
and
pat
does not mean something halfway between batting and patting. Languages can convey meanings that are abstract and remote in time or space from the speaker. Linguistic forms are infinite in number, because they are created by a discrete combinatorial system. Languages all show a duality of patterning in which one rule system is used to order phonemes within morphemes, independent of meaning, and another is used to order morphemes within words and phrases, specifying their meaning.

Chomskyan linguistics, in combination with Greenbergian surveys, allows us to go well beyond this basic spec sheet. It is safe to say that the grammatical machinery we used for English in Chapters 4–6 is used in all the world’s languages. All languages have a vocabulary in the thousands or tens of thousands, sorted into part-of-speech categories including noun and verb. Words are organized into phrases according to the X-bar system (nouns are found inside N-bars, which are found inside noun phrases, and so on). The higher levels of phrase structure include auxiliaries (
INFL
), which signify tense, modality, aspect, and negation. Nouns are marked for case and assigned semantic roles by the mental dictionary entry of the verb or other predicate. Phrases can be moved from their deep-structure positions, leaving a gap or “trace,” by a structure-dependent movement rule, thereby forming questions, relative clauses, passives, and other widespread constructions. New word structures can be created and modified by derivational and inflectional rules. Inflectional rules primarily mark nouns for case and number, and mark verbs for tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation, and agreement with subjects and objects in number, gender, and person. The phonological forms of words are defined by metrical and syllable trees and separate tiers of features like voicing, tone, and manner and place of articulation, and are subsequently adjusted by ordered phonological rules. Though many of these arrangements are in some sense useful, their details, found in language after language but not in any artificial system like
FORTRAN
or musical notation, give a strong impression that a Universal Grammar, not reducible to history or cognition, underlies the human language instinct.

God did not have to do much to confound the language of Noah’s descendants. In addition to vocabulary—whether the word for “mouse” is
mouse
or
souris
—a few properties of language are simply not specified in Universal Grammar and can vary as parameters. For example, it is up to each language to choose whether the order of elements within a phrase is head-first or head-last (
eat sushi
and
to Chicago
versus
sushi eat
and
Chicago to
) and whether a subject is mandatory in all sentences or can be omitted when the speaker desires. Furthermore, a particular grammatical widget often does a great deal of important work in one language and hums away unobtrusively in the corner of another. The overall impression is that Universal Grammar is like an archetypal body plan found across vast numbers of animals in a phylum. For example, among all the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, there is a common body architecture, with a segmented backbone, four jointed limbs, a tail, a skull, and so on. The various parts can be grotesquely distorted or stunted across animals: a bat’s wing is a hand, a horse trots on its middle toes, whales’ forelimbs have become flippers and their hindlimbs have shrunken to invisible nubs, and the tiny hammer, anvil, and stirrup of the mammalian middle ear are jaw parts of reptiles. But from newts to elephants, a common topology of the body plan—the shin bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the hip bone—can be discerned. Many of the differences are caused by minor variations in the relative timing and rate of growth of the parts during embryonic development. Differences among languages are similar. There seems to be a common plan of syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules and principles, with a small set of varying parameters, like a checklist of options. Once set, a parameter can have far-reaching changes on the superficial appearance of the language.

If there is a single plan just beneath the surfaces of the world’s languages, then any basic property of one language should be found in all the others. Let’s reexamine the six supposedly un-English language traits that opened the chapter. A closer look shows that all of them can be found right here in English, and that the supposedly distinctive traits of English can be found in the other languages.

English, like the inflecting languages it supposedly differs from, has an agreement marker, the third person singular -
s
in
He walks
. It also has case distinctions in the pronouns, such as
he
versus
him
. And like agglutinating languages, it has machinery that can glue many bits together into a long word, like the derivational rules and affixes that create
sensationalization
and
Darwinianisms
. Chinese is supposed to be an even more extreme example of an isolating language than English, but it, too, contains rules that create multipart words such as compounds and derivatives.


English, like free-word-order languages, has free ordering in strings of prepositional phrases, where each preposition marks the semantic role of its noun phrase as if it were a case marker:
The package was sent from Chicago to Boston by Mary; The package was sent by Mary to Boston from Chicago; The package was sent to Boston from Chicago by Mary
, and so on. Conversely, in so-called scrambling languages at the other extreme, like Warlpiri, word order is never completely free; auxiliaries, for example, must go in the second position in a sentence, which is rather like their positioning in English.


English, like ergative languages, marks a similarity between the objects of transitive verbs and the subjects of intransitive verbs. Just compare
John broke the glass
(
glass
= object) with
The glass broke
(
glass
= subject of intransitive), or
Three men arrived
with
There arrived three men
.


English, like topic-prominent languages, has a topic constituent in constructions like
As for fish, I eat salmon
and
John I never really liked
.


Like SOV languages, not too long ago English availed itself of an SOV order, which is still interpretable in archaic expressions like
Till death do us part
and
With this ring I thee wed
.


Like classifier languages, English insists upon classifiers for many nouns: you can’t refer to a single square as
a paper
but must say
a sheet of paper
. Similarly, English speakers say
a piece of fruit
(which refers to an apple, not a piece of an apple),
a blade of grass, a stick of wood, fifty head of cattle
, and so on.

If a Martian scientist concludes that humans speak a single language, that scientist might well wonder why Earthspeak has those thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects (assuming that the Martian has not read Genesis 11; perhaps Mars is beyond the reach of the Gideon Society). If the basic plan of language is innate and fixed across the species, why not the whole banana? Why the head-first parameter, the different-sized color vocabularies, the Boston accent?

Terrestrial scientists have no conclusive answer. The theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that linguistic diversity is here for a reason: “it was nature’s way to make it possible for us to evolve rapidly,” by creating isolated ethnic groups in which undiluted biological and cultural evolution can proceed swiftly. But Dyson’s evolutionary reasoning is defective. Lacking foresight, lineages try to be the best that they can be,
now;
they do not initiate change for change’s sake on the chance that one of the changes might come in handy in some ice age ten thousand years in the future. Dyson is not the first to ascribe a purpose to linguistic diversity. A Colombian Bará Indian, a member of an outbreeding set of tribes, when asked by a linguist why there were so many languages, explained, “If we were all Tukano speakers, where would we get our women?”

As a native of Quebec, I can testify that differences in language lead to differences in ethnic identification, with widespread effects, good and bad. But the suggestions of Dyson and the Bará put the causal arrow backwards. Surely head-first parameters and all the rest represent massive overkill in some design to distinguish among ethnic groups, assuming that that was even evolutionary desirable. Humans are ingenious at sniffing out minor differences to figure out whom they should despise. All it takes is that European-Americans have light skin and African-Americans have dark skin, that Hindus make a point of not eating beef and Moslems make a point of not eating pork, or, in the Dr. Seuss story, that the Star-Bellied Sneetches have bellies with stars and the Plain-Bellied Sneetches have none upon thars. Once there is more than one language, ethnocentrism can do the rest; we need to understand why there is more than one language.

Darwin himself expressed the key insight:

That is, English is similar though not identical to German for the same reason that foxes are similar though not identical to wolves: English and German are modifications of a common ancestor language spoken in the past, and foxes and wolves are modifications of a common ancestor species that lived in the past. Indeed, Darwin claimed to have taken some of his ideas about biological evolution from the linguistics of his time, which we will encounter later in this chapter.

Differences among languages, like differences among species, are the effects of three processes acting over long spans of time. One process is variation—mutation, in the case of species; linguistic innovation, in the case of languages. The second is heredity, so that descendants resemble their progenitors in these variations—genetic inheritance, in the case of species; the ability to learn, in the case of languages. The third is isolation—by geography, breeding season, or reproductive anatomy, in the case of species; by migration or social barriers, in the case of languages. In both cases, isolated populations accumulate separate sets of variations and hence diverge over time. To understand why there is more than one language, then, we must understand the effects of innovation, learning, and migration.

Let me begin with the ability to learn, and by convincing you that there is something to explain. Many social scientists believe that learning is some pinnacle of evolution that humans have scaled from the lowlands of instinct, so that our ability to learn can be explained by our exalted braininess. But biology says otherwise. Learning is found in organisms as simple as bacteria, and, as James and Chomsky pointed out, human intelligence may depend on our having
more
innate instincts, not fewer. Learning is an option, like camouflage or horns, that nature gives organisms as needed—when some aspect of the organisms’ environmental niche is so unpredictable that anticipation of its contingencies cannot be wired in. For example, birds that nest on small cliff ledges do not learn to recognize their offspring. They do not need to, for any blob of the right size and shape in their nest is sure to be one. Birds that nest in large colonies, in contrast, are in danger of feeding some neighbor’s offspring that sneaks in, and they have evolved a mechanism that allows them to learn the particular nuances of their own babies.