Hardcore Linguistics

I’m too busy to say too much about it, but I was happy to see Tom defend Chomsky. A hardcore advocate of Chomsky taught the first course in linguistics I ever took. While he just was not able to answer most of the questions I had, eventually, I figured out why. It’s because Chomsky’s transformational grammar does not address the question of how we make meaning. It is not linguistic reductionism in the sense that many people think it is. It is purely a syntactic reduction (universal grammar, not universal world view!).

Chomsky’s approach to linguistics is mathematical, precise, and limited. It draws the line at making any conjecture about meaning. It describes the way that ambiguity creeps into language amazingly well, but it offers no real way of dealing with that ambiguity. Chomsky fought to fix linguistics as a science, and sought to separate it completely from hermeneutic analysis. We were specifically instructed not to talk about meaning in this class. It was all about the math. I don’t know much about Pinker, because I am more interested in other things now. One class in transformational grammar was enough.

The linguist I am working with now is primarily focused on discourse pragmatics. This isn’t about the math, it’s about the meaning. According to Chomsky, this isn’t linguistics at all. We’ve never discussed Sapir-Whorf. Instead, we’ve discussed Lev Vygotsky at length. It amounts to a similar thing, approached from a different field—developmental psychology. But it has profound implications for sociolinguistics. Even if the underlying deep structure (grammar) of languages is universal, this does not mean that the value systems of languages are universal. This is not a leap that Chomsky would make. Language is more than grammar, but in Chomsky’s view assigning value (or meaning) cannot be explained scientifically. This area of study belongs to psychology and sociology, which to Chomsky are arts rather than sciences. As far as I can tell, when Sapir-Whorf proposes that language determines culture or Vygotsky proposes that language becomes thought, they are speaking about far more than grammar. They are talking about value systems.

While structure is a big part of creating meaning, Chomsky’s hardcore scientific approach to linguistics does not address that part. That is a matter for linguistic philosophy (not science), and sociology. It is possible to agree both with Chomsky, and Sapir-Whorf. It just depends, as Tom pointed out, on your definitions of language and linguistics— how hardcore your view of the role of science in linguistics is.