TheChomsky Challenge
By John Williamson
FrontPageMagazine.com| December 17, 2004

Which of thefollowing statements best describes the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky?

A.     Ground-breaking discoveries which rank withthe greatest discoveries of science?

B.      Solid scholarship and the precise cataloguingof important human knowledge?

C.      The source of much unintended hilarity?

Note: You do not have to possessany knowledge of theoretical linguistics in order to follow this essay. If youpassed high school English, that’ll do.

I refer you to the latest (Winter2004) issue of Linguistic Inquiry,which is a publication of the MIT department of linguistics, and which heavilypromotes Chomskyan theory. (When he is not busy trashing his country, Chomskyis employed by MIT as a professor of linguistics.)

At any rate, there is an articlein this issue which discusses, among other sentences, this one:

Sentence1: Who will be easy for usto get his mother to talk to?

This sentence, among others, hasbeen studied for decades by the Chomskyans, in an attempt to formulate itsgrammatical structure which is, admittedly, somewhat complex. I list below justa few of the terms and concepts which are bandied about in this particulararticle which discusses this sentence, among others. Please do not troubleyourself to try to make sense of these terms. For now, just glance over them sothat you will get a sense of the variety and extent of the terms employed in anattempt to solve this momentous problem:

linking theory…the anti-c-commandrequirement…A-positions…the Bijection Principle…weakest crossover configurations…boundvariable anaphora…asymmetric linking…licensing conditions…the index of apronoun…null operator analysis…variable binding…configurationalconditions…inappropriate and appropriate antecedents…etc….etc….

I should note that Chomsky is citednumerous times in the article, as are other scholars but, more importantly, theentire framework of discussion is Chomskyan linguistics.

You’ll notice that Sentence 1 is aquestion structure. Let’s do this: let’s convert it into an alternate and perfectlystandard form of the same question:

Sentence 2: It will be easy for usto get his mother to talk to whom?

Now let’s look at a couple ofdifferences between Sentences 1 and 2:

In both sentences, the object ofthe preposition to is whom. I show it as whom in Sentence 2, but when whomcomes at the beginning of the sentence, as in Sentence 1, it is acceptablecommon usage to show it as who. Asanother illustration of this point, both of the sentences below are interpretedexactly the same way:

Who did you talkto?   Whom did you talk to?

In both cases, who and whom are both objects of the preposition to.

Sentence 1 could actually be shownas below, to illustrate the point that whois really whom:

Who(m) will be easyfor us to get his mother to talk to?

Now that we understand the factthat, in Sentence 1, who is really whom, the question must be raised:

If, in Sentence 1, who(m) is not a subject, where is thesubject of the verb phrase will be easy?

Notice that in Sentence 2, thesubject of the verb phrase will be easyis the pronoun it:

Sentence 2: It will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to whom?

And so what happened to it in Sentence 1? Shouldn’t Sentence 1instead read like this:

Sentence 3: Who(m) will itbe easy for us to get his mother to talk to?

Of course it should. Sentence 3 isgrammatical. Sentence 1, the subject of so much scrutiny and theoreticaldiscussion by the Chomskyans over a period of decades, is in factungrammatical.

Now don’t get me wrong. There isnothing wrong with the study of ungrammatical structures. It’s a perfectlylegitimate subject of inquiry. However, it seems as though the Chomskyans havecharted hitherto unimagined territory: the attempt to create grammaticalformulations of sentences which they do not realize to be ungrammatical.

This would be like an astronomertraining his telescope on a large luminous object and studying it for years, notrealizing that he is studying a street lamp.

Now I certainly wouldn’t expect aninth grader to know that Sentence 1 is wrong and Sentence 3 is right, butcertainly a good newspaper copy editor would know it, as would many collegeEnglish instructors.

The Chomskyans, on the other hand,are theoretical linguists working in syntax - a rarified world far, far abovethe concerns of ordinary mortals. The ability to be able to piece together thestructural underpinnings of Sentence 1 ought to start with two basic firststeps: the recognition that if the verb phrase will be easy requires a subject in Sentence 2, it requires one inSentence 1; and the recognition that whois an alternate form of whom.

It would be unfair, I think, todisparage in any way the graduate students and assistant professors who seem tobe trying so hard to make sense out of Chomsky’s theoretical musings. Clearly,they are acting out of a sense of conviction that he is leading them in theright direction. But I think it says a lot when someone of Chomsky’s stature isso clearly ignorant of the workings of his own language that he allows not justone but several elementary mistakes to go uncorrected for years and years –mistakes which, if corrected, could allow his acolytes to make strides insolving this and other problems.

Chomsky'sLinguistics Refuted
By John Williamson
FrontPageMagazine.com| January 3, 2005

On the December 17edition of this website, I had an article published which detailed a sentence –“Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?” - I’ll call it SentenceA - which a number of Chomskyan scholars were analyzing, seemingly unaware thatthe sentence was ungrammatical. I saw this as a failure of Chomskyanlinguistics, in that a first rule of linguistic analysis is to determine thegrammatical status of a structure under consideration.

There were quite afew viewer comments to that posting, some of which were favorable, and some ofwhich questioned my motives in attacking Chomsky.

One of those who disagreed with mewas an individual who identified him/herself only as “a Chomskyan linguist.” Iwill refer to this quite knowledgeable person as “Chom Ling”. The point thatChom Ling wanted to make was that my understanding of the issues was incorrect,and so, using the comments section of the FrontPageMag.com website, we engagedin a debate that lasted for well over a week. I thought that Chom Ling fought afair fight, raising objections and challenges which were reasonable andappropriate, and acknowledging that I had scored a few points. I will note thatat no point did Chom Ling ever introduce into the debate any concepts or termsderived from Chomskyan theory. That seemed strange; after all – not to put toofine a point on it – if the tools which are part of one’s espoused theoreticalframework are not useful in order to help one argue or advance one’s ownargument…oh, never mind.

Anyway, after this had gone on fora week or so, Chom Ling suggested a cessation of hostilities – a Christmastruce - on the grounds that the grammaticality of the sentence was ultimately amatter of personal judgment: I viewed the sentence as ungrammatical, and ChomLing and others viewed it as grammatical, and so there was no way to bridge thegap. Or, in the words of Chom Ling: “you…maintain that it's ungrammatical.That's much harder for me to prove false; it's a statement about your ownreaction to the sentence, and that's a domain where you know best.”

Spoken like a true Chomskyite.

I observed the Christmas truce andthen the next day I sent Chom Ling a somewhat more formal proof that showed anumber of grammatical impossibilities in the sentence. (The proof, slightlyrevised, is reproduced below.) I claim, on the basis of that proof, that thegrammatical impossibilities render the sentence demonstrably ungrammatical. TheChomskyan scholars had indeed been studying a sentence which they did notrealize to be ungrammatical.

I never heard back from Chom Ling,and so I have to assume that no flaws in my proof were found. No concession wasoffered but that was not surprising: from my experience, Chomskyans don’tconcede; they simply fall back and regroup. Presumably Chom Ling is still regrouping.

The idea that there was no pointin continuing the battle because ultimately it was a matter of individualjudgment is a notion that is at the heart of Chomskyan linguistic theory. Thescientific methodology upon which Chomskyan linguistics is based is the ideathat whatever a native speaker of a language “feels” to be right isgrammatical. In other words, grammaticality is determined by personalintuition. This doctrine has become so thoroughly ingrained in the dominantschools of modern linguistics that no one questions it, and yet it has got tobe one of the goofiest ideas ever recorded in the long annals of science. Thisidea runs counter to all the hard sciences, which require that evidence beparamount. What would the field of physics, or chemistry, or mathematics looklike if personal intuition trumped considerations of evidence?

No doubt this conviction wasderived from the perfectly apposite notion that all languages are equallycapable of expressing complexity and are equally capable of infinite nuance.But that is a far cry from saying that whatever a speaker says – as long as itseems right to the speaker – is grammatical. People produce ungrammaticalsentences all the time, either because they do not know the rules of theirlanguage, they choose to ignore them, or they simply can’t perceive any logicalcontradiction within the sentence structure. (If you don’t believe me, just askthe president.)

Anyway, Sentence A was looked atby any number of scholars – including Chom Ling - and nobody suspected anyproblem with it in terms of grammaticality. And yet once the sentence was fullyanalyzed it was shown to be grammatically impossible – on three differentcounts. It was ungrammatical because it violated three logical rules of Englishgrammar: 1) A verb can have only one meaning in a sentence. 2) A verb can beeither active or passive, but not both. 3) If the object of a verb is expressedgrammatically, it must be the same as the logical object. In Sentence A, all ofthose rules were violated.

And so Sentence A wasungrammatical, not because I ‘felt’ it to be ungrammatical, but because itviolated various rules of logic in the structure of English. It isungrammatical no matter how many people say otherwise.

This Chomskyan notion of personalintuition as the basis for grammaticality, though long-accepted, isnevertheless highly problematic. For example, what do we say about a child whosays, “Me want cookie”? Surely the child must feel comfortable with thisstructure, and must feel that it will convey the right idea. And we cancertainly extract the meaning out of the utterance. Therefore, using Chomskyanprecepts, the child must be speaking grammatical English. (I leave aside thepoint that, if grammar were innate, as Chomsky claims, the child wouldintuitively know that the case for the pronoun subject ought to be nominative.)

Consider as well a native Russianliving in America who has been speaking English for years and is fullyconversant. The Russian may have heard Americans use definite articles a myriadof times and yet the Russian says, “I have key to apartment.” and he would feelthis to be grammatical, since the Russian language does not use articles, asEnglish does. (The Russian feels no more need to say “the key” or “the apartment”than we do to say “the France”, although if we were speaking French we wouldhave to add the article to be correct.) Since we can easily understand what theRussian means, and since he feels that he is expressing all the necessary ideaswithout the use of articles, then, again by the Chomskyan methodology, theRussian must be speaking grammatical English.

And yet neither the child nor theRussian is speaking grammatical English, because English requires that subjectsbe in the nominative and that specificity be indicated by articles or othermeans.

Or consider the NPR announcer whorecently said, “The Ukrainian government will allow whomever wants to vote…” Nodoubt “whomever” sounded acceptable to the NPR announcer, but he ought to havechecked before inflicting such an excruciating construction on millions oflisteners. (“want” has to have a subject. Thus: allow… those who want/anyonewho wants/whoever wants…to vote.)

Or consider the followingwell-known grammatical phenomenon. There are many people who would never say,“Me went to the races.” but who would nevertheless say, “Me and Larry went tothe races.” According to Chomskyan precepts, both are grammatical because theyboth would seem to be intuitively correct to some speakers. Now if both sentencesare grammatical, then we should be able to extract a rule which governs thissituation. The rule would have to be something like this: ‘A single subjectpronoun must be in the nominative case, but a pair of subject pronouns may bein the accusative case.’ The problem with this rule is that there is no logicalreason that the number of subjects should determine the case of the subjects,and so we are forced to conclude that the scientific methodology of Chomskyantheory leads us to the formulation of grammatical rules which are unsupportedby logic. And so this house of cards must fall.

·          

I should further comment that thisnotion - that any human utterance is grammatical as long as the speaker thinksthat it is - breeds a kind of anti-intellectualism, whereby there is noparticular compulsion to rigorously discern whether a structure is grammatical.We need only discern whether the speaker thinks it is acceptable, and then anattempt is made to create a grammatical framework which incorporates it.

Thus, in Chomskyan linguistics,sentences which violate the rules of the language are lumped in with sentenceswhich don’t, in an attempt to create some overarching theory which explains allhuman utterances. Sentence A in the LinguisticInquiry article is a good example of that: the various scholars twistedthemselves into knots trying to reconcile the properties of the ungrammaticalSentence A with various other sentences, some of which were grammatical andsome of which were not. The catalogue of arcane terms employed in the articlein order to try to reconcile the grammatical with the ungrammatical isextensive: weakest crossover configurations…bound variable anaphora…asymmetriclinking…licensing conditions…etc.; to the contrary, the only concepts I neededin order to show that Sentence A was ungrammatical were: active versus passivevoice, the notion of a logical object versus a grammatical object, and the ideaof semantic content.

And so this anti-intellectualism,which requires that natural human utterances not be looked at too closely inorder to determine whether a given structure comports with the rules of thelanguage, has over time evolved into a kind of pseudo-intellectualism, wherebya grand theory is under perpetual construction and revision – a theory whichwill explain the properties of all natural human utterances. I would suggestthat any such endeavor is a waste of time, as it is impossible to create asystematic description of structures, some of which are themselves systematic,and some of which are not.

If not even the experts can tellwithout careful examination whether a given structure is grammatical or not,then this suggests that it is time to abandon the Chomskyan methodology whichallows personal intuition to be the determiner of grammaticality. The medicalmodel is a good one to follow: the patient describes the symptoms, but it isthe doctor who provides the diagnosis. The first order of business ought to beto determine whether or not a given structure is grammatical. This is done notby taking a vote, or by asking someone’s opinion, but by determining whetherthe elements of the structure are in logical conflict or not. It is not askingtoo much to require that a verb be either active or passive, but not both. Itis not too much to ask that the case of the subject be determined by somethingother than the number of subjects in the sentence.

The Chomskyan goal of creating atheory which incorporates all natural human utterances ought to be abandoned aswell. Once the ungrammatical structures are culled, then the grammaticalstructures can be studied with a view towards developing a coherent theory. Ofcourse, one might find that once the grammatical structures are separated fromthe ungrammatical, theories of grammar will seem to be superfluous. A grammarwhich is complete in itself requires no theory to explain it. And perhaps thatis really the point: if the Chomskyans had spent the past forty years trying tounderstand the difference between a grammatical sentence and an ungrammaticalone, they might have had a great deal more to show for their effort.

·          

Proof: That the following sentenceis ungrammatical: “Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?”

1: The verb phrase “to get S to”means: to cause someone to. The verb phrase “to get X” means: to obtain X or tounderstand X.

2: The adjectival phrase “easy toV” where V is an active verb, is interpreted as a passive: e.g. (1) The planeis easy to see. means (2) The plane is easy to be seen (= The plane is easilyseen.)  Also, (3) An avalanche is easyto cause = (4) An avalanche is easily caused. Thus, the verb takes an activeform but has a passive meaning. This characteristic we can designate: F(a)M(p).

In (3) and (4) “avalanche” is boththe grammatical subject of these sentences and the logical object of “cause”.

In (5) It is easy to cause. and(6) It is easy to be caused., we can allow “it” to take the place of“avalanche”. The subject “it” refers to semantic content: avalanche.

4: We can also render the meaningof (5) as (7) It is easy to cause an avalanche. In (7) the logical object“avalanche” is no longer referred to in the subject of the sentence, but as thegrammatical object of “cause.” Thus, the following differences between (5) and(7) are in effect:

(a)    the subject “it” no longer contains semanticcontent;

(b)    the verb is now active in both form andmeaning: F(a)M(a); and,

(c)    the grammatical object and the logical objectrefer to the same thing.

5. The sentence “Bob is easy toget.” is grammatical in and of itself. It follows the structure: easy to V,where V = to get X. Thus, since the V following “easy to” must be interpretedas a passive, the meaning of the verb is “is gotten”.

Since there is no grammaticalobject expressed, the logical object is "Bob”, which is the same as thesubject. Thus, the meaning of the grammatical sentence “Bob is easy to get”means “Bob is easily gotten.” If we choose to express the grammatical object ofthe verb, then we could say, “It is easy to get Bob.” where the subject losesits semantic content.

6. If we take the sentence “Bobwill be easy to get.” and add “his mother to talk to” then the verb “to get”has an object which is grammatically expressed: his mother. Note, however, thatif the object of “to get” is grammatically expressed, then it must be the sameas the logical object (See 4(c) above.) But “Bob” and “his mother” do not referto the same person, so we have a logical impossibility. The only way to allowthe logical object and the grammatical object to refer to the same thing is tohave the subject become semantically empty, as in (7). But the subject cannotbecome semantically “emptied” of Bob because that semantic content has no placeto go since Bob is not the same person as his mother.

If the semantic content “Bob” hasno place to be transferred, then it must stay in place within the subject.Since the logical object is the same as the subject, we have a passive meaning,and we have determined that in such a case with “easy to” the verb takes anactive form but has a passive meaning, and is designated: F(a)M(p). And yet thegrammatically expressed object “his mother” which follows “to get” requiresthat the verb be of the F(a)M(a) type. (See 4(c) above.) Since semantic contentin the subject requires F(a)M(p) and a grammatically expressed object following“to get” requires F(a)M(a), we have a second grammatical impossibility.

Also, we noted that the meaning ofthe grammatical sentence “Bob is easy to get” means “Bob is easily gotten.”

But if “his mother” follows “toget”, then the verb means “to cause.” Thus, the verb has two meanings withinthe same sentence, and that is a third grammatical impossibility.

Thus, the sentence isungrammatical on three counts.

7.If “Bob will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to” is ungrammatical,then the sentence “Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?” isalso ungrammatical, since the pronoun “who” stands for “Bob.”

Chomsky:The Theory Unified and Deconstructed
By John Williamson
FrontPageMagazine.com| April 1, 2005

Introduction.

You've no doubt heard this question raised: “Why do people take soseriously the political commentary of a language professor?”

Thestandard answer is that Noam Chomsky is simply taking a page out of Einstein'sbook, using his academic stature or notoriety as a political platform.

However,if you step back and look at his linguistic theories – stepping back far enoughto see the forest, not just the trees – there is something that will becomedimly apparent – and then perhaps obvious: the linguistic theories formthemselves into a cohesive whole which supports not just a scientific theory,but a political one as well.Furthermore, if you look at a competing view of language – one which Chomskysystematically ignores, although there is massive evidence to support it – youwill see that the competing theory supports not just a scientific but a political view which Chomsky findsabhorrent.

Now itis easy enough to revile Chomsky for some of his most blatantmisrepresentations of fact in the arena of historical or political commentary,and I take a back seat to no one in my contempt for many of his perversions ofthe truth. However, today I come not to revile Chomsky, but to deconstruct him.

Therehas always been an assumption that Chomsky’s work in linguistics represents onearena of his intellectual interests, and that his work in political commentaryrepresents another. I mean to show a different view, namely that they are oneand the same. Thus:

·        His ideas in linguistics aresubsumed under a single overarching idea;

·        That overarching idea alignsperfectly with his political views;

·        His ideas in linguistics arenovel and innovative, although flawed and ultimately unpersuasive;

·        There is a competing view oflanguage – and a more powerful approach, I would argue – for which ampleevidence abounds, but which has no place in Chomsky’s philosophy of language;

·        The overarching idea behind thecompeting view is aligned with a political idea that Chomsky abhors.

Inshort, leaving aside his work that is openly political, his linguistics theorydoesn’t merely represent bad science; rather, it happens to be politicsmasquerading as bad science.

I’ll giveChomsky a tip of the hat: to have allowed people to believe all this time thatthe linguistics was separate from the politics was – as the British say –“Fiendishly clever.”

It’s thedamnedest thing you’ve ever seen. And he almost got away with it.

Part One. The age of Aquarius.

If youhad arrived as a student on the campus of one of the elite universities of thenortheastern United States in the 1960s, you would have encountered a campuslife much different from that which students of the 1950s experienced. Youwould have been much more likely to be introduced to casual drug use; the“pill” was breaking down social barriers; the dominant political story of theday would have been the growing involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam, and thegrowing opposition to that war on the university campuses.

One ofthe most controversial figures discussed on those campuses was RobertMacNamara, the General Motors “whiz kid” who, as the new secretary of defense,was going to bring efficiency and order to the prosecution of the war inVietnam. High intellect and supreme self-confidence were the salient qualitiesof those, such as MacNamara, who were deemed the “best and the brightest” andwho had confidence that American technology and a rational approach towarfighting would bring eventual victory in the dark jungles of Southeast Asia.

And ifyou had arrived on campus with the idea of studying linguistics – the scienceof language – a revolution-ary new paradigm would have been awaiting you thereas well. You might have been pleasantly surprised to find that the oldprescriptivism had been jettisoned in favor of the thoroughly modern descriptivism. What this meant  to a linguist was that it was no longerfashionable to say that one naturally-produced speech form was right andanother one wrong.

Accordingto the new thinking, your high school English teacher, old Miss Bunsenburner,had been wrong to prescribe restrictive rules, such as the one thatprepositions were inappropriate to end a sentence with. Well, of course the English language does permit finalprepositions and Miss Bunsenburner was probably being a bit pedantic in some ofher stipulations, but the new mandarins of linguistics were simply illustratinga general principle: all natural speech – that is, any structure which wasdeemed to be intuitively correct by a native speaker – was consideredgrammatical. ‘We describe, we don’t prescribe.’

This newparadigm was associated with the new generativegrammar which arose out of the view that the brain naturally generated all grammatical forms and,well, of course no one who called himself a scientist – certainly not a studentor professor at a place like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – couldpossibly dispute the evident workings of the brain. The paramount goal was tounderstand how the brain generated all grammatical structures; that it did sowas not in doubt.

Yes, ofcourse, there would be a few complications to be worked out: among the speakersof any given language there would be individuals who would say the same thingin contradictory ways. What was grammatical to one native speaker wasungrammatical to another. But that didn’t worry the professional linguists verymuch, since all natural structures had equal standing in the generativeparadigm. Any such difficulties were viewed as manageable; generative grammarwas so powerful and so revolutionary that it would in time resolve all trivialinconsistencies.

So certainof their powers were these new world beaters that, even when, during fieldstudies, native speakers of various languages under study were asked to providesample sentences – otherwise known as data– for analysis, the attitude toward the native speaker was summarized thus:“Accept everything a native speaker tells you in his language, but nothing thathe tells you about his language.” In other words, a graduate student from MIT,through the powers conferred by the new theory, was more capable of discerningthe subtleties of any language, Indo-European or otherwise, than was a nativespeaker, even someone, such as a teacher or storyteller, in possession of anexpert knowledge of his or her own language. It was as if what was being saidwas, “Despite our professed respect for you as equals, we’re not reallyinterested in your insights.”

Suchattitudes would be justified in time, there was no doubt. It was important notto lose sight of the ultimate goal: showing how the brain generated sentenceswould be the key to understanding how the mind worked; and, of course, althoughonly a few realized it, the way the mind worked was a subject which had notjust scientific ramifications, but political ones as well; but I’m jumpingahead.

And so,in this new paradigm of this new age a close observer could have seen the firstinklings of an emergent political philosophy which was very much in keepingwith those revolutionary times. The first element of that philosophy was thatthere was no distinction between good and bad: there was only that which wasnatural. And since there was no good or bad, there was no need for any pettyauthority to mediate between two competing views. Sayonara, Miss Bunsenburner.Generative grammar would resolve any conflicts that came up. Enjoy yourretirement.

Finally,one might have also discerned in their approach the barest glimmerings of anelitist attitude with respect to the non-academic world, but perhaps I’mimagining things there.

I saidthere was no petty authority, didn’t I? Well,actually there was one emerging authority in the world of the new science oflanguage – although it was hardly petty – and that was the department oflinguistics at MIT, which sat like a little Pentagon not too far from the banksof the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was where the orthodoxyemanated from; from here the freshly-minted young lieutenants in the army ofgenerative grammarians were sent out on a regular basis to colonize otheruniversities, to establish and dominate their departments of linguistics, andto recruit and promote those who accepted unquestioningly the views of thecentral authority back in Cambridge. The poet Wordsworth would have understoodwell the heady times those scholars of four decades ago lived through: “Blisswas it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven.”

In theE-ring of this Pentagon-on-the-Charles sat the pre-eminent figure in this newwar on language, the best and the brightest himself, the Robert MacNamara oflinguistics, Professor Noam Chomsky. Like those of any high official, his everypronouncement was analyzed, his every utterance scoured for meaning. He wouldbe leading the troops in one direction only: straight ahead and directly to thefront lines. Conquering the mysteries of language – specifically the syntax ofthe English language and, after English, all the languages of the world – wouldbe Noam Chomsky’s campaign – a campaign of Alexandrian proportions.

Ofcourse, in those days it would have been impossible to look ahead forty yearsand see how things would actually turn out. And how did things turn out?

Althoughhe did not realize it at the time, Noam Chomsky was in the process of leadinghis troops into their own linguistic version of the quagmires of Vietnam.

Part Two. It’s all in your mind.

Thegrand strategy of Chomsky’s linguistics revolution was embodied in generativegrammar. But it was going to take some time to work out all the details andresolve all discrepancies so that the grand theory would encompass alllanguages. In the meantime, Chomsky realized that a grand strategy was notenough; powerful intellectual weaponry would need to be developed in order tosmash through the vast jungles of language and tame them.

All ofthe tools he created over the next several decades could be subsumed under oneoverarching theme: language exists in the brain; language happens in the brain.The idea that an individual’s intuition was paramount – his personal reflectionas to how he or she would structure a linguistic utterance – meant that grammarwas simply there in the mind’s eye, or the mind’s ear, as it were. One had onlyto consider one’s own speech patterns and recall them from memory.

Fromthere, it hardly seemed more than a modest step to suggest that the rules oflanguage were a permanent part of the brain’s structure. They were hard-wired in. Let me be clear: I amnot saying that Chomsky was merely suggesting that the human ability to produceand understand language was neurologically or genetically encoded; that wouldhardly have been a revelation. He went far beyond that: it was the grammaritself that was encoded in the brain. Chomsky eventually took to calling thisidea the biolinguistic view.

Now, acountervailing view of grammar is to see it as a set of ideas: the idea of thesimple past tense, for example, is expressed by each language in its owninternally consistent way, although of course the details of the expressiondiffer from language to language. But what Chomsky was saying was that theideas of grammar were hard-wired into the brain, not as ideas but as circuitry.

Tochallenge Chomsky’s theory, an obvious rejoinder might be this: suppose youtook a Chinese couple – husband and wife both descendants of Chinese forebearsgoing back fifty generations – and you brought this couple to Brooklyn, wherethe wife gives birth to their child. The child looks Chinese in every way, butlearns to speak English just as readily as the American kids of English descentliving next door. If the Chinese language is so deeply wired into the brain,how can this be?

Chomskyhad an answer for that. Actually, he had several answers. The first answer wasthat there is a fundamental grammar which underlies all grammars – a universal grammar – and that there weresetting switches – parameters, in the parlance – which activated Chinese for achild of parents born to Chinese parents, if the parents were speaking Chinese.All that was needed was a minimal amount of verbal and visual stimuli – thisidea, by the way, is called poverty of the stimulus – and the settings would beset to ON for Chinese and OFF for all other languages. However, if the Chineseparents happened to be speaking English to their Chinese baby, the settingswould be set to ON for English and OFF for Chinese and every other language.

Thesecond idea was that – again, referring to the universal structure which theyshare – all languages are fundamentally the same anyway, with only superficialdifferences to distinguish them.

Nifty-keenas these all ideas are, there are a couple of minor problems with them.

I’llstart first with the idea that all languages are fundamentally the same.Actually, this is true, but only in the most banal manner of speaking. Alllanguages have words which express action or being (verbs); all languages havewords which describe substantives or abstract ideas (nouns); all languagesexpress color, and time, and size, and shape. All languages have words thatexpress relationships between nouns and other words, verbs and other words, andso on. But beyond that, pretty much all bets are off. When talking aboutfeatures that are universal, it’s hard to get very specific. Chinese uses anelaborate tone system; English doesn’t. Which is part of the universality –having tones or not? The Chomskyan troops who marched out to find the universalgrammar returned to report that no such thing existed. Or if it does, they haveyet to figure out what it looks like.

Harvardlinguistics professor Steven Pinker, in his essay “Natural Selection andNatural Language,” noted a number ofcommonly accepted linguistic universals which have been amassed by thebiolinguists over the years, but when you look at them closely, they are allquite general and quite logical. To give one of the more specific examples,Pinker notes that when verbs have endings for tense and aspect, they are in auniversally preferred order, i.e. the aspect ending is closer to the root-verb.(Aspect just tells us information such as, when I say, “I walk”, I mean “I walkevery day” as opposed to “I am walking now”. Some languages use verbal affixes(“add-ons”) to make those distinctions; English uses extra words, as in myexample.) But of course since aspect tends to color – that is, modify somewhat– the meaning of the verb, whereas the tense does not, it seems logical thatpeople all over the world would tend to put the aspect marker closer to theverb. It’s just common sense.

And soall that the so-called universals really show us is that people all over theworld think logically when they create their languages. If these vagueuniversals are intended to show that there is some fundamentally universal language, then what theChomskyans have come up with so far doesn’t even come close. You could withoutdoubt find some commonalities in musical works, in various sports, in novelsand plays, in legal systems and so forth, but that would hardly prove thatthere is a universal symphony or sport or legal code, except in the most banalsense.

Anotherargument which I would advance against the idea of universal grammar invokesthe parallel idea of universal morphology (UM). No one tries to argue for‘universality of vocabulary’ simply because the notion is absurd: the Samoanword for fish (i’a) could not possibly be related to the English word fish orthe Swahili word for it (samaki). And yet all of these languages have a wordfor fish. Thus, we can easily see that commonality of experience produces thesame idea – the idea of fish – in all languages without any necessity forcommonality of morphology. We ought to be able to postulate, then, thatcommonality of experience ought to be able to produce in all languages the sameidea of the past tense, or plurality, or other grammatical ideas, and that whatthe Chomskyans insist is a common universal genetic encoding of grammar is inactuality a commonality of experience in the perception and expression ofideas. However, that’s just a hypothesis. I’ll say more about it in a sectionbelow.

As forthe notion of parameters orsettings to be turned on and off, what the Chomskyans found out was that – geewhiz, a language certainly did have a lot of settings, didn’t it? If everygrammatical feature of a given language required a setting, what about theexception to the rule? That had to be represented by a setting, too, didn’t it?And what about the exception to the exception? Another setting? This started toremind people of the old transformational grammar – another Chomsky idea – thatseemed very promising until the Chomskyans found that in order to describe anygiven language one had to create an enormous number of transformations, many ofwhich contradicted one another.

And so,with the failure to find universality and the impossibility of taming languagewith a succinct set of parameter settings or transformations, the Chomskyanswere finding themselves bogged down in a quagmire of their own making, with noexit strategy. The powerful weaponry was breaking down and rusting in thefield.

Meanwhile,how were things going with the overall strategy, the generative grammar?

Nobetter, actually. Those pesky little contradictions weren’t so easy to get ridof. If one person says that “Larry and I went to the races” is intuitivelycorrect, and the other person says that “Me and Larry went to the races” isintuitively correct, how do you resolve it? How do you create a principle whichencompasses both structures and makes them both right?

Toillustrate the problem another way, suppose that one person said that shebelieved that two plus two equaled four but someone else declared his ownbelief that two plus two equaled five. Imagine the creativity it would requirein order to describe a mathematical system that would accommodate thosecontradictory ideas. Or suppose I say that E=(m) x (c-squared) and you happento feel that E=(m) x (c-cubed). How does a physicist create a theory that wouldreconcile both ideas? The task would be enormous or – more accurately –impossible.

What theChomskyans found they had to do – in order to be true to their dogma – was tocreate ever more complex and sophisticated explanations that might encompassall the contradictions found in natural speech.

Giventhat analytical ability and judgment go hand in hand, then by refusing to bejudgmental about what was grammatically correct and what wasn’t, the analyticalabilities of the Chomskyans atrophied at the same time their creativity soared.

And sonow – thirty years after the last Americans choppered out of Saigon – theChomskyans are as deeply bogged down in the syntactic swamps as they ever were.And it’s not just these contradictions between two opposing views of what isgrammatical which has them stymied. There are also numerous basic Englishstructures which they can’t seem to figure out. To name some of the mostnotorious: the there isconstruction, as in There is talk of asnowstorm; the for construction, as in For him to arrive on time would behelpful; and, of course, seems. Every issue of Linguistic Inquiry – the housepublication of the MIT department of linguistics – arrives on my doorstepbringing with it yet another young Chomskyite springing eternal with yetanother fresh theory about how Chomsky’s now ancient ideas can be twisted inyet another direction in order to squeeze some sense out of English, or Italianor Tagalog. And inevitably these new theoretical frontal assaults get boggeddown in complications – often involving there is or for or seems.

In fact,if you made up a sentence which included all three, i.e. “For there to be asnowstorm seems likely” and you gave it, along with a couple hundred reams ofpaper, to a Chomskyite, locked him in a cell and told him he had a reasonableamount time to solve it – thirty years, let’s just say – I’m fully convincedyou would find him hanging by his bedsheets the very next morning.

In sum,an awful lot of intellectual weaponry created an awful lot of powerfulexplosions of creativity, and yet nearly half a century later and the junglehas reclaimed it all: the universal grammar was never found, transformationalgrammar became hopelessly tangled up, the parameters are an artifact, and allthe myriad contradictions of natural language never got tied together by generativetheory.

War ishell.

So whatam I saying…that maybe language isn’t generatedexclusively by the brain? Before I move on to the patently heretical view oflanguage – which Chomsky never talks about – I want to say a bit about thequintessentially Chomskyan idea called povertyof the stimulus. I am fully sympathetic to the notion that the moreludicrous an idea is, the easier it is for Chomsky’s followers to get suckeredin by it; nevertheless, among the many ludicrous ideas in the armory ofChomskyan theoretical can(n)on – and there is a battery of them to choose from– this one has to take the grand prize.

Povertyof the stimulus asks, in effect, ‘Isn’t it amazing how it is that youngchildren need to be exposed to so little verbal stimulation before they arerunning around speaking in complete sentences?’

Now, ofcourse most parents love to brag about how smart their kids are and I supposeit should go without saying – but probably never does – that the offspring oflinguistics faculty members and graduate students are in the very uppermosttier of kids in terms of verbal precocity. Nevertheless, your Average Kid sayshis first word at about ten months of age or so. How many words do you supposeit is that Average Kid hears – spoken by parents, siblings, relatives – spokento him, near him, in front of him, etc. – before Average Kid coughs up thehistoric Coherent Word Number One? A million? A couple million? Let’s just say,for argument’s sake, that it’s a million heard to one spoken. How can this bepoverty of the stimulus in any meaningful sense?

And ofcourse, once Average Kid spits out the first word, he’s going to be underconstant pressure to crank out a few more. He’s just been entered into the“I’ve Got the Smartest Kid in the World” Sweepstakes, and there’s a whole lotof people who need to be impressed. The coaching and encouragement is non-stop.In short, this cardinal Chomskyan precept called poverty of the stimulus is a myth; there is no person on theplanet – excluding the profoundly deaf, of course – who hasn’t – at any pointin his lifetime – heard far more words than he or she has spoken.

Moreover,the Chomskyans are apparently unaware of the multiplicative power of languagestructure, whereby if you take the structure Put the book on the table (six words) and you learn a few more verbs:lay, set, place; a few more nouns: chair, floor, book, box, etc. and a couplemore prepositions: in, under, beside, before you know it your twentyword vocabulary can produce hundreds of sentences. A language limited to just acouple of dozen structures and a couple of hundred words of vocabulary canproduce millions of sentence possibilities. That’s how kids learn to speak somany sentences so quickly. Well, that and the total immersion program.

OK, youget the picture. None of this stuff adds up. In fact, the more you think aboutit, the more problems you can find with it:

·        If Chomsky is correct, then whyis it so difficult for an adult – with all those extra years of additional stimulusenrichment – to learn a second language? It ought to be much easier. Why isn’tit?

·        If there is a universal grammarhard-wired into the brain, and it’s the same for all languages, it must bynecessity be very spare. But if poverty of the stimulus holds for all childrenspeaking all languages – in other words, if the settings are set with just aminimum of stimulus – then where do the myriad superficial features which makeChinese uniquely Chinese – its vocabulary, its tones, its grammatical quirks,its idioms – come from?

Movealong, folks. There’s nothing to see here.

Butperhaps I should add one clarification: I’m not saying that there isn’t acertain element of truth in each of his theories. There is. You can look at anyof his ideas and find some applicability somewhere in the vastness of humanlanguage. You can also see patterns in the stars – Orion’s Belt, for example,the Big Dipper, or the Southern Cross, but that knowledge doesn’t tell you verymuch about how the universe is constructed. For theories to be accepted asimportant, they have to be general and unexceptionable, and these propertiessimply do not describe Chomskyan theory. To accept the truth of his theories,you would have to operate under the assumption that six half-truths(generative, universal, and transformational grammar; poverty of the stimulus;hard-wiring; parameters) add up to three truths.

To giveone more example along these lines, Chomskyans like to make a big deal out ofthe fact that kids sometimes say things that they haven’t been taught. I wouldsubmit that what kids say falls into two categories: what they have alreadylearned, or what they derive in their own logical way from what they have beentaught. Their logical derivations many times do not accord with how adultstalk, either because the established language is full of inconsistencies, orbecause meanings are not always obvious in every context. As an example, one ofmy sisters, when she was young, learned to say, “Pick me up!” She apparentlydecided that if she wanted to get down, she should say, “Pick me down.”

Ofcourse we would all laugh at this, because it was funny; but it is easy toforget that she was simply using what she knew and drawing logical conclusions fromit. Her brain obviously did not automatically know, as Chomsky’s theorypredicts, that put is associated with motion away from an agent (down) and thatpick is associated with motion toward an agent (up). These distinctions have tobe learned. And so each time she said something that happened to be correct, wewould accept it; each time she said something which to her was logical butwhich did not accord with the actual workings of the language, she would becorrected. This is how children learn languages; it’s the same way adults learnlanguages in a total immersion environment.

Ofcourse, many times a child’s logical derivations do coincide with how adultstalk, in which case the Chomskyan researchers are fooled into thinking thatthis means that the language is hard-wired into the brain. Unfortunately, thefact that children think logically is no proof that the grammar is alreadythere.

(Chomskyanswill also argue that the fact that pre-coherent children babble quite a bitstands as evidence that children are speaking some sort of universal language.To the contrary, this makes much more sense: children learn to get attention bymaking noise – any kind of noise. Children learn to get sympathy by crying.Getting adults to respond to these actions is important for their survival. Ashumans are social animals, children add to their repertoire of socialinteraction skills when they realize that talking – whatever talking is – is away by which adults socialize. And so they socialize by imitating the sounds ofadult conversation. That doesn’t mean they are speaking real language. I couldlisten to people speaking Chinese for a few minutes and I am quite certain thatI could do a pretty good imitation of someone speaking Chinese. That doesn’tmean that I have absorbed the rules of Chinese grammar as I was listening.)

And sowhat role does the brain play in language acquisition and development? Thebrain provides memory. The brain provides logic. The brain provides associativecapabilities between meaning and sound, meaning and symbol, and symbol andsound. (Except for the deaf, who associate only symbol and meaning.)

Thebrain perceives forms through the eyes – formulaic symbols which it associateswith meaning. (The blind perceive these forms through the fingertips, usingBraille.) The brain perceives sound through the ears – sound patterns which italso associates with meaning. The brain creates ideas which it encodes intolanguage, which is transmitted by speech or by writing (or by signing, or by Morsecode, etc).

If weneed to know how the brain does all these things, we can ask a neurobiologist.But if we want to fully understand language acquisition and development, thenwe need to look beyond the confines of the cranium. 

Aye, there’s the rub: the prohibition against looking outside thebrain has always been based, for Chomsky, not on science, but on politics.

Part Three. Inconvenient facts.

Chomsky’s theories dealing with the acquisition and development oflanguage, by restricting these processes to the confines of the brain, eitherminimize or exclude altogether a number of vital aspects of human interaction.We can easily see these aspects of interaction in our daily lives, and we canverify them by a study of history. Below are some examples. For the benefit ofthose Chomskyans who have been waiting for forty years or more to see some trueuniversals in language, here are a few to consider:

Universal1: Languagechoice, acquisition, and development is heavily influenced by inequalities in relationships,such that the less powerful person tends to learn the language of the morepowerful person:

·        Infants thrive, in part, bylearning the language of those upon whom they are totally dependent for theirsurvival;

·        Students succeed by conforming tothe language standards set by teachers and others in authority;

·        Those who wish to rise incorporations, military organizations or in general society learn the vernacularacceptable to and understood by those who are higher up in those hierarchies;

·        A slave learns the language ofhis master; rarely does the master learn the language of the slave;

·        Those who wish to do businesswith the wealthy and the powerful learn to attune their grammar, pronunciation,style and usage to conform to the language of the wealthy and the powerful;

·        Conquering nations impose theirlanguages on the conquered, and not vice-versa.

Thus,inequality in power, wealth and status are forces which are vital in shapinglanguage use in the daily lives of each person, as well as in the historicallives of nations, as well as in population subgroups within nations. 

Universal2: As acorollary to the above, it is also true that less powerful groups tend to uselanguage as a unifying element as they gain power and increase their resistanceto the more powerful:

·        Adolescents bond with their peergroups and develop an argot in order to communicate in an exclusive way;

·        Alienated political groups withina country’s borders may try to keep a minority language alive, or may maintaina distinctive accent.

Universal3: Those in agiven cohort of the less powerful – a group of slaves, or students, or juniorofficers, or new employees – can often gain power over those within their owncohort by learning the language of the powerful more quickly than their peers.Indeed, they often compete to do so.

Universal4: Languagestability is maintained by teachers, editors, and writers, all of who haveaccess to long-standing language resources, such as grammar books,dictionaries, and works of literature.

There isso much evidence that supports the ideas listed above that a library would berequired to do justice to it all. Indeed, the universals listed above are sopervasive – so general and unexceptionable, in other words – that we can positthe existence of a super-universal:

If we take language to be the communication of ideas by wayof ideas, and if we assume that allhuman relationships contain a political component, then we can understandlanguage acquisition, language change and language stability to be both theconsequence and the expression of political ideation. Thus, among its severalfunctions, language enables Hierarchical Man to acquire or maintain power.

However,if you know anything about the political ideas of Noam Chomsky, you willunderstand instantly why these inconvenient facts involving power relationshipsplay no part in his linguistics. His stated political view isanarcho-syndicalism, which advocates the elimination of all political, social,and corporate structures; in other words, the elimination of all of the ways bywhich humans organize themselves hierarchically. The adoption of this politicalmodel would mean the end of large corporations as well as military andgovernmental organizations at all levels, and so forth.

Chomskyargues for this approach in two ways: first, by arguing – quite openly – thatthe ultimate practitioner of the hierarchical model, the United States, withits globe-spanning corporations, its labyrinthine governmental organizations,and its vast military-industrial complex, is the most evil and vile force onthe face of the earth.

Hissecond means of arguing against the hierarchical model – arguing not openly,but surreptitiously – takes place through his linguistics theories. Histheories of linguistic acquisition and development discount almost completelythe importance – indeed, the existence – of human interaction. If you considerthe idea that his theories of language argue strongly for the notion ofAutonomous Man, as opposed to Hierarchical Man, and couple this with the ideathat language is among the most important features of humanity which demarcatesour existence from that of all other species, (all of the other ‘most importantfeatures’ being intellectual capabilities as well), then it would be very easyto see how he is in effect aligning his notions of the natural state oflanguage with his notions of what is, for him, the natural political state ofman. And to argue for anarcho-syndicalism is to argue against the Americanmodel, which is democratic capitalism.

And sothere you have it. What I have described is not very abstract, nor is it verydifficult to see. Indeed, in order to somehow believe that Chomsky’slinguistics theories are not merely extensions of his political views, youwould have to believe the following:

·        That all of his variouslinguistics ideas, with all of their flaws, still somehow add up to a valid andcoherent theory;

·        That the vast amount of evidencein support of the importance of human interaction ought justifiably to beexcluded from the study of theoretical syntax;

·        That it is merely a coincidencethat Chomsky’s linguistics theories dovetail so perfectly with his politicaltheories.

It canhardly be a wonder to anybody, then, that many of the people who choose to lookwith an uncritical eye at Chomsky’s linguistics theories are enamored of his politicalviews as well. However, the subject under discussion is the science oflinguistics, not political science, and for the Chomskyans to simply ignorevast tracts of evidence because it doesn’t fit their political views means thatscience has been abandoned for the “higher purpose” of social engineering. Ifthe scientific question to be asked is “How does the mind work?” then there isno reason that the corollary question – “How does the brain interact with thehuman environment?” – shouldn’t be explored as well. No reason at all, unless –for political reasons – one does not wish to deal with inconvenient facts.

[I wantto stop right here and note carefully that I am not saying that unequal powerrelationships explain everything about language. That is certainly not thecase. The universals noted above explain an enormous amount about languagechoice, language acquisition, language change and language stability. Howeverthere are other problems in language – which Chomskyan theory cannot resolve – whichcan be understood in terms of human relationships of other kinds – and I willdiscuss that in more detail below. Finally, there are still other types ofproblems which are decidedly not solved by an understanding of humaninteraction – nor or they explained by Chomskyan theory – but that class ofproblems is not the primary focus of this section of the article.]

Inconclusion, I stated above that Chomsky is opposed to all forms of hierarchy.Actually, there is one specific hierarchy that he is rather partial to. It isthe hierarchy made up of linguistics and psychology students, as well as of anynumber of professors in linguistics and in other fields, of politicalactivists, and of intellectuals with a decidedly anti-American bent – in otherwords, the hierarchy atop which he sits. This hierarchy allows him to do allthe things that he frowns upon when they take place within all the otherhierarchies of the world:

·        to create a specializedvernacular which his supporters readily adopt;

·        to accept and acknowledge theobeisance and tributes of the true believers;

·        to reward with verbal approbationthose who echo his ideas.

In otherwords, he uses language to maintain the political power structure that supportshim, just like all rulers of hierarchies do. (See Randy Harris’ fascinatingbook, The Linguistics Wars, for anaccount of Chomsky’s suppression of a rival school of linguistics that promoteda theory called generative semantics.)

Ofcourse, it goes without saying that all of these power-maintaining activitiesinvolve – dare I say it? – human interaction. And if there’s anybody on theplanet who knows more than Noam Chomsky does about communicating incessantlywith his target audience, I don’t know who that would be. Maybe North Koreanpremier Kim Jong Il, with his loudspeakers blaring in every public space at allhours of the day.

And soin addition to using language in order to maintain his own personal and quiteuseful hierarchy – a notion which he is politically opposed to on a theoreticallevel – by so doing Chomsky disproves the validity of his own theories oflinguistics by demonstrating the essential importance of human interaction inthe workings of language.

Thiswould be the equivalent, in chess, of checkmating yourself.

Part Four. A failure ofimagination.

It’s theeasiest thing in the world to see how all of Chomsky’s ideas work together: byclaiming that the fundamental elements of languages are the same, and that thebrain contains coding for key parametric settings for all languages, codingwhich can be triggered by a minimal amount of external stimulation, then it isclear and obvious that Chomsky aims to minimize the importance of humaninteraction as an element in the creation and transmission of language. 

Chomskywas invited to give the keynote address at the annual conference of theLinguistic Society of America in Boston in January of 2004. “Three Factors in Language Design” was an interesting speech. Many of ourold friends from the past are still on his dance card: poverty of the stimulus,universal grammar, generative theory – all of which are now subsumed under thegeneral rubric of biolinguistic theory, by which Chomsky declares the languagefaculty to be comparable to such other brain functions as mammalian vision or –interestingly – insect navigation. For those who do not care to read the speechin its entirety, I’ll paraphrase it for you:

1.      ‘A lot of the ideas we used topropound as flashes of genius have now been thoroughly discredited and so wehave scrapped them;

2.      ‘Not to worry; there’s plentymore ideas where those came from;

3.      ‘None of the long-standingproblems which we have worked on for decades have been solved;

4.      ‘Nevertheless, I am clearly onthe right track and my critics are wrong.’

(Thedistinguished theoretical linguist Paul Postal noted in his chapter of The Anti-Chomsky Reader thatChomsky never credits those who first point out the flaws in his theories.Critics! Who needs ‘em?)

Just togive you a flavor of the new ideas being worked on by the Chomskyans, there’sone concept called uninterpretablefeatures which has to do with the notion that the latest theory won’t work ifyou actually read meaning into certain grammatical characteristics of words –meaning which is actually there but which must be ignored! Another idea issomething called probes and goals, which is the idea that there is an invisibleentity – the probe – which travels the length of the sentence and finds thegoal so that there can be some sort of grammatical connectivity.

It’s allperfectly inane and the only reason the Chomskyans actually buy into this isthat they are under the mind control of their leader and they are programmed tobelieve whatever they are…oh, sorry, that’s the American public, isn’t it?Never mind.

At anyrate, Chomsky’s position has hardened rather sclerotically: language isgenerated by the brain, as an organic function of the central nervous system.Just like insect navigation, in other words. That’s his story, and he’ssticking to it, claiming even this:

“[My] basic assumptionsare tacitly adopted even by those who strenuously reject [my arguments].”

To whichI say: Not so fast there, Bubba. Not everybody is bowled over by your basic assumptions.

Indeed,Chomsky had the arrogance to throw down the gauntlet and defy anyone to provehim wrong:

“The arguments advanced against the legitimacy of [my] approachhave little force…”

Now, Ifor one do enjoy a challenge now and again. Those of us who merely criticizeare subject to the reasonable response: Well, can you do any better?

And so Iwill take up this challenge because, well, all it takes in order to pop ahighly inflated balloon is one little prick; and so if Chomsky’s theory is theballoon, I shall be honored to play the role of the little prick.

I referyou to last page of his triumphal speech in Boston. He refers to “the annoyinglack of [examples]” of sentences of this type:

*There seems a man to be in the room.                                                                                    

Annoying? That would be the understatement of thecentury, I would think. I’m sure that Chomsky finds this problem more thanmerely annoying. Infuriating would be more like it. After all, if he can’tunderstand why the sentence above is ungrammatical, then it stands to reasonthat he can’t understand why the sentence below is good:

There seems to be a man in theroom.

Remember there is? Remember seems? Remember “For thereto be a snowstorm seems likely”?

Imentioned them in Part Two. Theseproblems are to Chomskyan linguists what kryptonite is to Superman. Theseproblems drive the Chomskyans up the proverbial wall. They twist themselvesinto knots trying to work their solutions to these problems into theirtheories. Alas, to no avail.

It’smore than merely annoying: all of the theories Chomsky has concocted over theyears have failed to make a dent in the problems noted above and others likethem. It’s like throwing eggs against a brick wall: it makes quite a mess, butthe wall never moves. And so I might as well just come out and break the badnews to the Chomskyans: you folks will never solve:

For there to be a snowstorm seems likely.

usingbiolinguistic theory. Never. Can’t be done. You can send your little probes allthe way to Uranus and back and you still won’t get anywhere.

I’lltell you why: the seems structuredescribes a human relationship – that of a third party observer. Therelationship between the observer and that which he observes is built into thestructure; it is the purpose of the seems structure to acknowledge thisrelationship. Thus, the structure was consciously created by humans in order tosolve a problem: the problem of how to indicate within a sentence the notionthat what is being described is not absolute fact, but merely the observationof a third party. It’s a useful construct. It serves a purpose. It wasn’t wiredinto the brain by evolutionary forces; it was invented. It was created from anidea – just as the verb tense called conditional future perfect was createdfrom an idea. (And for those who wish to understand the structure of seems in more depth I’ll give you a hint: allseems sentences contain three mandatory elements, one of which may beellipticized.)

You say,“Oh, well, this just cannot be. How can grammatical structures acknowledgehuman relationships?”

I reply:“Well, haven’t you noticed how commonplace this is in ordinary vocabulary? Whynot in grammatical constructs as well?” Take the word coronation. It refers toan act – the placing of the crown on the head of a monarch, of course, but infact it refers to much more than that: the relationship of the monarch to hissubjects, separated from them by divine right, that right conferred byreligious authority, with the existence of a deity implicit in the deal;implicit as well is the idea that the deity approves the monarchicalappointment, with the further implication that the peasants better think twicebefore revolting.

There’san awful lot of meaning in a single word such as coronation. Why can’t seems similarly convey the structure of humanrelationships? Seems is a word, and coronation is a word; one is a noun; theother a verbal construct; but what difference does that make, if language isconstructed out of ideas, as I suggest that it is?

Theimportant thing is this: you can solve the problem of seems if you look at itas an idea that denotes a way in which humans relate to one another. Usingbiolinguistic theory, you can’t get anywhere. So Chomsky needs to put his partyhat away: one cannot celebrate the supremacy of one’s theory if other theoriescan point the way to solving problems that one’s own theories can’t resolve.

As a wayof further illustrating this point, consider the following complex grammaticalidea: the above-mentioned conditional future perfect structure: would have beenas in I would have been X. where X = successful, mayor, defeated, etc. What isthe idea communicated by this grammatical structure? It is the notion that:

from the point of view of some future moment, a givenstate, which had been expected to come about, did not in fact come about, dueto the fact that some condition had not been met.

That’s acomplex idea that, by the precepts of Chomskyan theory, is encoded in thebrain. Since all languages have this structure, Chomsky would say that thisstructure is encoded universally. Now let’s take the word disappointment. Thisword refers to

the response to the failure of an expectation to be met, anexpectation placed on the achievement of a certain condition at some futurepoint in time, which was not achieved due to some unexpected factor.

Doesthat complex idea sound familiar? Of course it does: what we see is that the worddisappointment conveys morphologically almost the identical complex of ideasthat would have been conveys syntactically!

It canreasonably be assumed that speakers of all languages experience disappointment,and therefore this word exists in some form in every language as therepresentation of common experience – just as the idea of fish does. (Seeabove.) In fact, let’s consider the number and variety of complex ideas,expressed morphologically (as vocabulary), which depict the variety of humanrelationships: dependence, independence, terrorism, solipsism, agreement,enmity, constitution, monarchy, democracy, autocracy, anarcho-syndicalism,conflict, repudiation, inquisition, reconciliation, confirmation, approval, we,you, y’all, they, to rely, to disavow, to pontificate, to respond, to join, togovern, to rebel, to placate, to promote, to defer, to refer, to confer, and onand on and on. The English language has many thousands of such words.

Since,as we can see, a complex idea which can be expressed morphologically can alsoin some instances be expressed syntactically, and since – as we can also see –we can express a vast array of complex ideas morphologically – many of themdescribing various human relationships – it should stand to reason that ideationalone – or the representation of grammar as a set of complex ideas – ought tobe able to provide for the entire complexity of grammar in all languages.

This isan argument which by itself suggests that Chomskyan theory is inadequate toexplain language, since there are many problems which biolinguistics famouslycannot explain – (See above and below.) – and there are no grammatical conceptswhich ideation cannot explain. Is there really any grammatical concept whichcannot be shown to be the representation of an idea, however complex? I can’tthink of one.

Thegreat failure of Chomskyan linguistics, then, is not that there are not toolssophisticated enough to measure brain waves and see the hard-wiring or theprobes or the parameters inside the brain.

Thegreat failure of Chomskyan linguistics is a failure of imagination.

Indeed,when we consider how so many aspects of the imaginative use of language addresshuman concerns and the human condition – poetry, drama, and every other form ofliterature, including song lyrics and rap music, not to mention so many nouns,pronouns, verbs and other parts of speech – then how can it be that theChomskyans simply exclude the notion that grammatical constructs can be used todepict in an imaginative way certain aspects of human relationships, consigninggrammar instead to the organic level of insect navigation?

‘Tisstrange, ‘tis passing strange.

As forthe there is problem, that is a problem of an entirely different class. It is aproblem of pure logic, not of human relationships. The for problem is one ofmeaning. Thus, the Chomskyan biolinguistic approach is wholly inadequate to thesolution of  “For there to be asnowstorm seems likely” because the Chomskyans do not recognize that there areseveral problems involved, each of a different class, none of which issusceptible to explanation through their methods. It would be the same astrying to use musical theory to solve a problem which involved algebra,trigonometry and calculus.

Insummation, then, we can say this much about the place of Chomskyan theory inthe grand scheme of things:

·        Neurolinguistics can tell usimportant facts about how the brain processes language;

·        Unequal power relationshipsexplain an enormous amount about language choice, acquisition, and stability.Scholars of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics amass much data whichsupport this notion;

·        Complex ideas – some depictinghuman relationships and some not – exist within languages as grammaticalconstructs;

·        Pure logic can be used to solvemany problems of linguistics;

·        Biolinguistics supports thepolitical views of Noam Chomsky. 

Part Five.  Why language is not like insect navigation.

Chomsky’scomplaint about the annoying lack of examples of the sentence type:

There a man seems to be in theroom.

tells ussomething quite interesting about biolinguistics, which is that the hard wiringof the brain is capable of producing end-products which are rejected as notemployable in normal speech. The sentence above is comprehensible, although itis not a structure that is employed in speech. Indeed, we can create a kind ofscale in which we can rank sentences for grammaticality, comprehensibility, andemployability:

·        Grammatical: Larry and I went tothe races.   There seems to be a man inthe room.

·        Ungrammatical but employable: Meand Larry went to the races.

·        Comprehensible but unemployable:Me went to the races.   There a manseems to be in the room.

·        Syntactically correct butsemantically contradictory: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Chomsky)

·        Syntactically correct butsemantically incomprehensible: Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre andgimble in the wabe. (Lewis Carroll)

·        Ungrammatical gibberish: The isnavigation laughable idea language to insect that comparable is.

As acomparison to another hard science, consider that any product which is theend-result of a chemical reaction must be regarded as a chemical compound,regardless of whether the compound was expected to be produced or whether it isuseful. If it is a product of a chemical reaction, it is a chemical compound.So too with biolinguistics: if we accept Chomsky’s contention that thecapacitors for language production are hard-wired into the brain, then we mustaccept that any representation of meaning which the brain produces is language.

Thus,there can be no question that all of the structures above – even theungrammatical gibberish – are products of the hardwiring of the brain. Thus,all of these are the end-products of biolinguistics. That has to be true, if wefollow Chomsky’s theory to its logical conclusion.

However,in normal everyday language we would likely use only the first two types ofsentences (grammatical or employable), and some people would use only the firsttype. And so we must use other intellectual mechanisms in order to filter outsentences that we do not want to employ: the ungrammatical, the semanticallycontradictory or the incomprehensible. Therefore if we must use other filteringmechanisms in order to look at various end products of the biolinguisticmechanism and distinguish usable from unusable, this means that Chomsky’sbiolinguistics cannot be the correct answer to the question “How is languageprocessed?”

I findit interesting that the entire focus of Chomskyan research is the set of mechanismswhich work together inside the brain in order to produce language: deepstructure, merge, copy, parameters, probes, and all the rest.

If allof these hard-wiring mechanisms worked together to produce structures that werenothing other than consistently grammatical, then there might be some point toall of that. However, if a perfectly functioning human brain can produceperfectly metered poetry and incomprehensible gibberish and everything inbetween, and if other types of brain functions are required in order todetermine which end-products of the biolinguistical process are useful andwhich are not, then it seems to me that the language function is somethingaltogether different from other organic functions such as mammalian vision orinsect navigation, which do not require reasoned judgment or the benefit ofexperience.

Insectsdo not live long enough in order to gain the experience that might allow themto make reasoned judgments about what they are doing. If they did, theywouldn’t fly around in the open air like a bunch of idiots where birds cangobble them up; rather, if they had capabilities anywhere close to the humancapability of speech, they would communicate intelligently regarding thepresence of certain winged dangers. Alas, dragonflies, moths and beetles dependnot on individual intellectual capabilities in order to survive but on sheernumbers and the evolutionary process.

And asfor mammalian vision: regardless of age or experience, we all see the sky asblue. But mastery of language to the point where one can detect semanticambiguity or contradiction, or in order to be able to distinguish grammaticalsubtleties and inconsistencies, requires capabilities far beyond mere organicfunctioning. 

And so the only thing that makes sense to me is that humans arepossessed of an infinite capability in the formulation of ideas, but that allthat we can say for sure about language production is that it combines theabilities to associate meaning and sound, sound and symbol, symbol and meaning,as well as memory and logic and that these capabilities can produce everythingfrom gibberish to fine literature. From logic and memory come the ability tomake ever more subtle and sophisticated judgments about language. Developingthese skills takes a great deal of time as well as a great deal of experiencein language use, a fact which is a further refutation of the notion of povertyof the stimulus.

Part Six.  Grammar versus usage.

Suppose you had created world-wide fame for yourself withproclamations about how you were going to do what no one had ever done before:explain how language works. Suppose you had dramatically swept away all theprinciples of the past and replaced them with new and revolutionary theories.Suppose you had dismissed the then-dominant theory of behaviorism and restoredrationalism to its place as the driving force of this new science oflinguistics. Suppose you had swept up along with you many people who were eagerto be a part of the revolution, eager to take their places alongside you as thenew mandarins.

And thensuppose that you just couldn’t do it.

Supposethat nothing you tried actually worked out. Suppose that in no matter whatdirection you turned, your path was eventually blocked by inconsistencies andcontradictions found in your theories. 

Whatthen? What do you, as the leader of an intellectual school of thought, do inorder to keep your followers in thrall?

Simpleenough: you do what anyone would do when faced with the unexplainable unknown:you turn to mysticism.

You saythis: The brain contains many mysteries and therefore language works in waysthat we simply don’t understand. You point to the fact that we intuitively knowthat some grammatical constructs are usable and some aren’t. You stop trying toexplain rationally why this is so: that’s just the way the brain works.

Fromthere you invent the original (and some would say astonishing) argument thatcommunication never was the primary purpose of language in the first place! Yousay that the original purpose of language was to map and understand ideasinside the mind – in other words, a language of thought – and thatcommunication came later – an afterthought in the sands of evolutionary time,you might say. You say that the language of communication is sometimes at oddswith the language of thought, and therefore the former is what we call usageand the latter is the real grammar.

If youhappen to be a nationally visible senior professor in the Chomskyan tradition,you publish a paper in a very prestigious journal of linguistics, in which youprovide a couple of dozen examples which support this theory, evidence of thedichotomy between usage and grammar.

You hopethat, by amassing a large number of examples, and claiming that none of themcan be rationally explained, that even the less difficult examples, which seemquestionable, will be accepted as supporting your theory.

You hopethat no one reads your paper and tears your arguments to shreds. You hope thatno one could possibly step forward and provide rational explanations for thesemysteries of the brain, as to do so would show that all grammatical constructsare logical and that there are clear and understandable reasons why we say whatwe say. This, in turn, would destroy the dichotomy between grammar and usageand would be further proof of the decidedly anti-Chomskyan idea that languageis created by humans using logical processes.

Unfortunately,your hopes do not materialize. I’ve read the paper. There are more holes in itthan in a boxcar full of Swiss cheese. In fact, the paper may be unique in thatevery single supporting example given by the author – and I mean withoutexception – falls apart under close scrutiny! And this paper passed the peerreview process of a top academic journal! Either that or it was given a freepass.

Let’sstart with this example: the author of the paper, (I’ll call him ProfessorFitz), asks this question: Isn’t it curious that English speakers don’t have away to distinguish between second person singular and plural, even though sucha form would be useful? Thus, something that would be good in terms of usage isabsent in the grammar. Thus, the primary purpose of language cannot becommunication. 

Ahem. Isthat really true, that which the professor claimed? Most Americans use the formyou folks or you guys. Almost all Southerners use y’all and many Northernersuse forms of youse. These look to me like ways of distinguishing singular fromplural. When I made this point to an authority in academic linguistics, theresponse was “No, those don’t count because those are regionalisms.”

So let’ssee if we’ve got this straight: the you/y’all distinction is used by eightymillion inhabitants of the South – a region of the United States – but we mustdisregard that; on the other hand, the tu/vous distinction is used by a merefifty million inhabitants of France – a region of Europe – but somehow that’slegitimate.

Clearly,English-speaking Americans see a need for a second person plural distinctionand are creating various forms of it. The Chomskyans simply choose to ignorethe facts which are right in front of their eyes, because the facts don’t fitwith their theory.

(Ishould note that none of the forms noted above is a standard plural form, suchas vous in French or Sie in German. Perhaps there is a simple reason that ouruse of second person plural is restricted to substandard forms. In languagessuch as German and French, the plural forms evolved to show not just plurality,but social distance or social stratification. Thus, in France one addressesindividuals such as one’s boss as vous. In America, our democratic traditionsinfluence our language, and so we do not use a standard plural form that canacquire secondary meanings of social distance or stratification. That’s whycolloquial forms such as you guys and y’all and the like are used to indicateplurality but nothing else.) (Another example of our democratic traditionsinfluencing language use is the current linguistico-diplomatic problem of hisor her: Each student should put his or her pen on the desk.)

(Anotherquestion anyone should want to ask of Professor Fitz is this: Since so manylanguages such as Spanish, French, German and Russian do have standard secondperson plural forms, and English does not, and since Professor Fitz thinks thatthis lack in English is evidence of something universal at work inside thebrain, does he mean to suggest that American brains work differently from thebrains of Europeans?)

(And Ican’t resist asking this question: Since Arabic has a special second personplural form available which is employed only when addressing females (thoughnot much used anymore), would this be evidence that the brains of speakers ofArabic somehow work differently from the brains of both Americans andEuropeans? Given the decidedly second-class status of women in manyArabic-speaking countries, would Professor Fitz simply dismiss out of hand thepossibility that there may be a correlation between social structure (humaninteraction) and grammatical structure? Just asking.)

(Onemore aside and I’ll move on. According to the Linguistic Society of America’sCommittee on Endangered Languages and Their Preservation, “Dozens of languagestoday have only one native speaker still living, and that person's death willmean the extinction of the language: It will no longer be spoken, or known, byanyone.”

Notethat even though only one person speaks it (“To whom does he speak it?” beingthe unasked question), it’s still considered a language, at least by the LSA.However, if eighty million Southerners (a larger population than unifiedGermany) use y’all or practically the entire country uses either you guys oryou folks – nope, sorry, that doesn’t meet the standard of bona fide language.That’s just a regionalism; that doesn’t count. Criminy!)

OK,let’s look at this next example from Professor Fitz: French is considered anSVO language, meaning that a subject noun acting on an object noun through averb takes this standard form: Subject-Verb-Object: Marie voit la chaise. (Marysees the chair.) However, it is common in French to use pronouns, and pronounsrequire this alternate form: Marie la voit. (Mary sees it.) Professor Fitzargues that, since a commonly used form (with the pronoun) has a differentstructure than the full form (with the object noun), then this shows that thecommonly used form is distinct from the fuller, more grammatical form. Grammarversus usage, in other words.

Ofcourse, this is an utterly ridiculous argument. Both forms are grammatical;neither one is more grammatical than the other. This so-called SVO designationis just a classification invented by humans (or, I should say, a human: thelate Joseph Greenberg, to be precise.)

The factthat the pronoun structure doesn’t follow the same pattern as the noun objectstructure doesn’t prove anything. English is also an SVO language. We couldsay, Paul reads the book. Which is SVO. But we could also say: In the hammocklies Paul. Which is prepositional phrase-verb-noun, and is also perfectlygrammatical.

ProfessorFitz is not an obtuse fellow. I’ve read some of his works; he’s quite erudite.There is no way he could fail to see the fallacies in his arguments, as theyare so obvious, at least in these cases. There are at least twenty moreexamples in his paper, most of which, however, are more complex than the above.Nevertheless, in each of his examples it is possible, if you search hardenough, to find a pattern or a logical explanation that shows why we use oneform but do not use another. I know, because I’ve done it.

Let meshow you one of the more difficult examples. I chose it for a specific reason,however; it has to do with a problem for which a satisfactory solution hasnever been published. The problem is called the Anti-Complement izer Effect(ACE). NYU’s Paul Postal, a very well known linguistics professor, first introducedme to the problem in a draft of his new book, Skeptical Linguistic Essays. Themystery around the ACE is illustrated this way:

Why isit that we think that Sentences (1) and (2) sound wrong but Sentence (3) seemsfine?

(1) Itis in these villages that we believe that can be found the best examples ofthis cuisine.

(2) Itis in these villages that we believe that are contained the best examples ofthis cuisine.

(3) Itis in these villages that we believe (that) the best examples of this cuisinecan be found.

Many people have studied this problem and proposedsolutions but no one has been acknowledged as the discoverer of the solution. Ihave proposed the following solution and can find no counterexamples:

(a)    The wordthat (in bold) is called a complementizer because it introduces a complement;

(b)   Acomplement is a complete thought and can be expressed as a sentence;

(c)    As acomplement is a sentence, it must take a form licensed by English syntax;

(d)   If thecomplement is in a form licensed by English, then it can stand alone as asentence;

(e)    If it can’tstand alone as a sentence, then it can’t be preceded by a complementizer.

Thus:

the best examples of this cuisine can be found.

from S3can stand alone, but this from S1:

can be found the best examples of this cuisine.

and thisfrom S2:

are contained the best examples of this cuisine.

cannotstand alone as English sentences, and thus cannot be preceded bycomplementizers.

And so if you take the complementizer that out of S2 andS3, you get these, which are fine:

(2) Itis in these villages that we believe are contained the best examples of thiscuisine.

(3) Itis in these villages that we believe the best examples of this cuisine can befound.

(Note:in S3, the brackets around that indicate that the complementizer is optionaland can be omitted. In S1 and S2, the complementizer is prohibited.)

To me,that’s a very neat and clear-cut explanation of the Anti-Complementizer Effect.Having resolved that, let’s now turn to the mystery which Professor Fitzdiscusses. Consider these sentences:

a. I wonder who you think likes George.

b. I wonder who you think George likes.

c. *I wonder who you think that likes George.

d. I wonder who you think that George likes.

(Theseparticular sentences come to us from research done by Professor Wayne Cowart ofthe University of Southern Maine, as related in his fascinating bookExperimental Syntax.)

ProfessorFitz says, in effect, We know intuitively that Sentences a., b., and d. aboveare good, but we also somehow know that c. is bad. This must be the result of aformal grammar which is built into the brain, because there appears to be nological explanation for these facts.

Ah, butthere is a perfectly logical reason, Professor Fitz. The reason may becomplicated, but that doesn’t keep it from being logical. It goes like this:

1.      We can ask: Who likes George? andwe can ask George likes who? Those are two separate questions, and it is theinversion of who and George which gives us the difference in meaning.

2.      But look at that I wonderstructure: the interrogative who must follow immediately after I wonder: Iwonder who. Therefore we don’t want to move who to the end of the sentence:George likes who?   We want to keep whotoward the beginning.

3.      There’s a way to do that: Who isit George likes?

4.      Now let’s look at the you thinkpart of the sentence. In Sentence d.

d. I wonder who you think that George likes.

thestatement is really asking a question:             Youthink that George likes who?         

Now inquestions which starts with you think, the word that is a complementizer, asthat can be followed by this standalone sentence:                 George likeswho?

Nowlet’s add I wonder          to         Youthink that George likes who?

We haveto move who to the beginning and we get:

I wonder who you think thatGeorge likes.

which isSentence d., and it’s fine. If we optionally leave the complementizer out, weget

Sentenceb.: I wonder who you think George likes.  which is also fine.

Nowlet’s look at Sentence a.: I wonder who you think likes George.

This isreally asking:      You think that wholikes George?           

Nowlet’s add I wonder          to         Youthink that who likes George?

And weget                   *I wonder who youthink that likes George?

We havecreated Sentence c., which is bad. The reason is that moving who towards thebeginning leaves likes George after that, and since likes George cannot standalone as an English sentence, it cannot be preceded by a complementizer. Inorder to arrive at the good Sentence a., we must remove the complementizer:

a. I wonder who you think likesGeorge. 

Voila! Alogical, albeit complicated means to debunk what the Chomskyans claim to be amystery of the brain – a mystery which they believe supports the notion thattrue grammar follows its own rules, rules which are not influenced by anythingso mundane as matters of usage or communication. Best of all, we use thesolution to a heretofore unsolved problem (the Anti-Complementizer Effect) inorder to do it.

Remember,you saw it here first.

Finally,let me note that the University of New Mexico linguistics professor Joan Bybee,recently elected president of the Linguistic Society of America, gave thekeynote address at the society’s most recent national conference. In heraddress, she rejected the idea that grammar and usage were separate domains.Although she did not attempt a point-by-point refutation of Professor Fitz’sarticle, she wrote a paper which was full of common sense and which made a verygood general case for her point of view. Her paper is called, not surprisingly,Grammar is usage and usage is grammar. It will be published in a forthcomingissue of Language.

Part Seven. Chom Ling and me: thesaga continues.

Manyreaders of this article may recall my article “A Deaf Ear for Language,”inwhich I attacked the Chomskyans for trying to analyze this sentence:

Who will be easy for us to gethis mother to talk to?

withouttheir realizing that the grammatical form of the question should be:

Who will it be easy for us to gethis mother to talk to?

My claimwas immediately challenged by an anonymous and very capable Chomskyan linguist– I call him Chom Ling – and we got into a fast and furious debate using thecomment pages of this website. In attempting to prove to the satisfaction ofChom Ling the ungrammaticality of the sentence in question, I did somethingrather ill-considered and amateurish: in order to prove that Sentence A waswrong, I tried to prove indirectly that a similar-but-not-quite-the-samestructure, Sentence B, was wrong.

Theeditors of this website then published another article of mine, Chomsky’sLinguistics Refuted, in which I broadened the scope of my criticism. I attackeda major pillar of their theory – intuitivity – by which the Chomskyans say thatwhatever sounds correct to a speaker of a language is in fact grammatical. (Seealso Parts One and Two above.) I showed several examples of how intuitivityproduces all kinds of problems for linguistic analysis, using example sentencessuch as Me and Larry went to the races., etc. I argued that one reason the Chomskyanshave not been able to explain as much as they had expected was that they do notrecognize a divide between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. I alsoincluded the indirect proof described above.

ChomLing contacted me via the website some weeks later, and pointed out some flawsin my indirect proof. I saw immediately that he was right, and went about doingwhat I should have attempted in the first place: a direct proof of theungrammaticality of Sentence A. This I have done, and it is reproduced as afootnote at the end of this article. For those who do not wish to get into thatmuch detail, I will give the highlights:

·        There is a special structure inEnglish which has been around for centuries, but which is used by only a tinyfraction of English speakers;

·        The purpose of the structure isto allow one to be very grammatically precise in asking certain kinds ofquestions or in making certain types of statements;

·        Although most people don’t usethis structure and are in fact not aware of it, sentences constructed withoutit may sound OK, and yet may be technically ungrammatical;

·        Chomskyans, as a matter ofprinciple, concern themselves with what most people say or what sounds OK tomost people (“We describe; we don’t prescribe.”) and thus, in the article inquestion, the author showed no evidence of his being aware of this specialstructure;

·        Understanding why the specialstructure is useful, and knowing that it has been around for a long time,though little used, tells us something important about language, something thatwe can’t learn by studying what most people say, which is a Chomskyan precept.

I thankChom Ling for pressing the point, as his persistence enabled me to go in andtake a closer look at the problem in order to clarify my thinking. (I said “hispersistence”, but in fact I have no evidence to suggest that the highlyintelligent Chom Ling is a male. Unlike the president of a certain Ivy Leagueuniversity, I do not wish to suggest that scientific intelligence is moreclosely associated with one gender as opposed to another.) 

Part Eight.      Linguists gone wild.

If youhave read this far, then you deserve a little diversionary treat. Take a lookat this sentence:

Under the table was lying an elderlycrocodile.*

What is the subject of this sentence? Is it:

A.    An invisible subject?

B.    The phrase an elderly crocodile? or,

C.    The phrase under the table?

If you guessed B, you would be…wrong!!!

*I took this example from Paul Postal’s recent book, andI thank him for compiling the information.

You or I – as amateurs, I assume – might be inclined tosay, Well, it’s the elderly crocodile that’s doing the lying, and was lyingseems to be the verb, and under the table looks for all the world like aprepositional phrase. So what else could the right answer be but B?

Tut, tut. Child that you are, you will one day learnthat it is simply not wise to make common sense assumptions when you’re dealingwith modern theoretical linguistics.

Would you be surprised to know that a number oflinguists believe that the correct answer is C? That’s right, the subject ofthe sentence is under the table. Seriously, you can stop laughing now.

You must be dying to know what the rationale is. Believeit or not, there is one. You’ll recall in Part Six above that I discussed theAnti-Complementizer Effect. Notice that the following sentence does not allow acomplementizer (the bolded that):

(K) *It is these villages that we all believe thatcontain the best examples of this cuisine.

Although without that it is OK:

(K2) It is these villages that we all believe containthe best examples of this cuisine.

Nor can we allow a complementizer in (L), although (L2)is OK:

(L) *It is in these villages that we all believe thatcan be found the best examples of this cuisine.

(L2) It is in these villages that we all believe can befound the best examples of this cuisine.

Notice that Sentence K has a subject: these villagesfollowing It is…

Notice that Sentence L has a prepositional phrase inthese villages following It is…

Thus, of the sentence containing the subject thesevillages and the sentence containing in these villages, both appear to besubject to the Anti-Complementizer Effect (ACE).

(Now you and I know that the determiner for the presenceor absence of a complementizer has to do with whether the entity following thecomplementizer can stand alone as an English sentence or not.)

But that’s not the way others see it. Their reasoninggoes like this:

·       Since sentences containing subjects and prepositional phrase are subjectto the ACE, that means that they have something in common;

·       If they have something in common, then that means they must befundamentally the same (!);

·       Therefore, when prepositional phrases are in the subject positionpreceding a verb, the prepositional phrases are…subjects;

·       Thus, under the table is a subject.

It’s completely cuckoo and you will be amazed todiscover that PhDs at major universities are paid enormous salaries to drool ontheir keyboards and come up with stuff like this.

OK. Let’s wrap this up.

Part Nine.  BeyondChomskyan Linguistics.

Let’s say that wewanted to create a general theory of linguistics to compare to Chomsky’s ideas.Rather than taking as our starting point the rather dubious proposition thatlanguage is hard-wired into the brain, would it not make more sense to try to useas our foundational idea a fact which is indisputable and which is supported byevidence found in every language in the world, living or dead – better still,in every word of every language? And then would it not make sense to try toconnect all of our theoretical postulates to that foundational idea? If thatseems like a reasonable way to proceed, then the foundational idea I wouldchoose reads like this:

In all human language, theconnection between meaning and representation is arbitrary.

One thing we can say with certainty about the brainis that it is capable of associating any chosen word with any chosen idea.Thus, there is no reason to think that the Tanzanian fisherman’s samaki is anybetter or any worse than the Samoan sailor’s i’a as a word that indicates aparticular animal that we speakers of English happen to call a fish. As theabove is true, then this must be equally true:

There are no limitations on how many or how complexthe meanings associated with a word can be.

Thus, the word firm can be a noun, a verb, or anadjective, and coronation can have a large complex of meanings associated withit. I once read that the Chinese word “i” has eighty-three meanings.Cauliflower, on the other hand, seems to have but one meaning. Ask Chomsky toexplain what anarcho-syndicalism means. I guarantee the explanation will take awhile.

As a third fundamental idea, I wouldadd this:

It is the arbitrary nature oflanguage which gives it its labile, or unstable, quality but which at the sametime gives it the power of creativity.

Let’s see if we can take these fewuncontroversial facts and elaborate on them somewhat in order to explain moreabout how language works than Chomsky can explain with the biolinguistic model:

·        Given, as seen above and in PartFour, the range of complexity and breadth of ideas which can be found invocabulary words, there is no reason to believe that complex and wide-rangingideas cannot operate as grammatical constructs as well;

·        From there it follows that, sincelanguage is a creative process, and since people can be quite ingenious intheir use of language, there is no reason to think that we cannot encode intoour grammars ideas which represent human relations between speaker, hearer, andothers (the seems construct);

·        From the above we can reasonthat, since there is no reason to think that highly specific ideas such ascomplex human relations (seems) are encoded by the process of evolution anymore than we would think that highly complex vocabulary words such ascoronation are encoded by evolutionary processes, the notion of language as anintricate construction and agglomeration of ideas makes far more sense thandoes the notion that language is hard-wired into the brain;

·        This leads us to the notion that,taking into account that ideas can parallel one another, can work harmoniously,can be contradictory, ambiguous, or even nonsensical, we now have the basis forthe wide range of variation in language production – from the highly poetic tothe merely grammatical to the barely comprehensible to utter nonsense;

·        From there we can go to thenotion that if language is a set of ideas, then logical contradictions inlanguage produce ungrammaticality. Thus there is a grammatical/ungrammaticaldivide, Chomsky and Wittgenstein notwithstanding;

·        If we assume that a commonalityof experience accounts for a commonality of ideas, the so-called universalswhich have been found in languages can be attributed to the effort on the partof all speakers to express similar grammatical ideas. Human ingenuity allowspeople to encode a wide range of grammatical ideas; thus, the universality offunction in languages is a concept with far more legitimacy than Chomsky’sprofessed but failed endeavor, which was to find a universality of form;

·        Additionally, because theconnection between meaning and representation is arbitrary, giving to languageits unstable nature, there must exist braking mechanisms which hold languagestogether in order to ensure common understanding. There are two major forceswhich do this: sociopolitical forces and creativity itself;

·        Sociopolitical forces act as abrake on linguistic change. These forces can be benign, as in the case ofparents or teachers; benign or neutral for those who are in a position ofsocial superiority. On the other hand, malign social forces such as conquest orpolitical suppression induce language change for the less powerful and providelanguage stability for the more powerful;

·        The creative nature of language,deriving as well from its arbitrary nature, is an important source of languagechange. However, some creative works, such as plays, poetry and other works,including religious works, through publication and wide dissemination, help topreserve linguistic traditions, thus stabilizing the language. For speakers ofEnglish, good examples of this phenomenon would be the Oxford English Dictionary, which uses the literary history ofEngland for its vocabulary citations; the King James version of the Bible; anda huge output of literary works.

·        And so if a teacher recommends aliterary classic to a student, language stability is being enhanced by thesociopolitical status of the teacher, who recognizes value in a work oflinguistic creativity, thus reinforcing the traditions of the language. But ifthe student decides to blare his rap music in class, the student is asserting anew form of creativity, usually employing language which is alien to theteacher, who would most likely suppress the student’s initiative. The teacherwould see the matter as disruptive to the purposes of the class, whereas thestudent would view the suppression as a political act. So goes the world.

·        Finally, because there has beenso much political fragmentation in the course of history, there is now a large– but shrinking – number of languages in the world. And because of moderncommunications and, in recent past times, colonialism, the world has seen theemergence of a number of very widely spoken languages, such as English,Spanish, and French. Chinese is spoken by a great many speakers due topolitical consolidations of past millennia in Southeast Asia, and Arabic isspoken in a large number of culturally diverse countries due to the spread ofIslam.

All of the ideas expressed above – ideas with enoughcohesiveness, I would suggest, as to constitute a theory of language – arederived directly from the simple and undoubted fact that in all languages therelationship between meaning and representation is arbitrary. Biolinguistictheory, on the other hand, takes, as its fundamental presupposition, a clearand unambiguous pathway by which language is processed through the brain. Acasual study of this concept reveals the following deficiencies:

·        Assuming that such a pathwaycould be found, biolinguistics would then be at a loss to explain how it isthat a single organic pathway is capable of producing such a wide range ofproductive result, to say nothing of why it is that reason, judgment andexperience must then be invoked in order to choose the proper level ofgrammaticality, formality, register and tone which an individual employs indaily speech;

·        Biolinguistics fails to explainmany grammatical constructs, particularly those which can be seen as codifyinghuman relationships, because biolinguistics does not take into account matterswhich are external to the function of the brain;

·        Biolinguistics has nothing to sayabout the vital role of sociopolitical forces in language change and stability;indeed, the theory minimizes the importance of such forces (poverty of thestimulus);

·        Biolinguistics has nothing to sayabout the relationships among the forces of creativity, language change andlanguage stability;

·        Biolinguistics treats syntax as aworld unto itself, and fails to see the obvious connection between syntax andmorphology as complexes of ideation. Furthermore, the biolinguistic modelignores the ingenuity of humans, as seen in their various forms of literature,and completely ignores the possibility that syntax is also the product ofcreativity and ingenuity;

·        Biolinguistics, by not seeinglanguage as ideation, with the inherent implication of ideational conflict,fails to see a grammatical/ungrammatical divide, even though such evidence isabundant. Consider Sentence (A) from Chomsky’s speech:

(A)*There seems a man to be in the room.

(B)There seems to be a man in the room.

           Chomsky himself can’t tell you why we don’t employ Sentence (A) (nor canhe tell you why the biolinguistic process produces flawed products) but no onewould dispute the fact that (B) is fine. Since both sentences contain the exactsame elements, then this means that the difference must be explainable by logicalone. One doesn’t need to know how the brain is wired, or what the language ofthought is or how language evolved over millions of years in order to explainthe difference, any more than one would need to know those things in order tosolve a problem in geometry. We have already seen abundant evidence in Part Sixthat the biolinguistic model is not concerned with finding logical solutions toproblems such as the above.

Throughout history, the way in which the truth ofideas is verified is through logic; the biolinguistic model, however, does nottrade in logic, but in circuitry. In fact, I would suggest that the reason theChomskyans are having such a hard time figuring out how language works is thatthey decided a long time ago that the grammaticality/ungrammaticality dividewas an unfashionable concept. It seemed too much like right versus wrong. For theChomskyans, the age of Aquarius has never ended.

In conclusion, we can explain far more aboutlanguage by using the most basic law of language – the arbitrariness of meaningand representation – than we could possibly explain with the biolinguistic model.Chomsky’s model is novel and innovative but ultimately it is not intellectuallywell-founded; in addition, it is self-limiting in the scope of its inquiry. Onthe contrary, the ideational model takes a very commonplace and universallyemployed property of human language and follows that idea to its many logicaland cohesive conclusions.  

John Williamson is a contributorto The Anti-Chomsky Reader and is writing a book about linguistics. 

Footnote from Part Seven: (Addressed to Chom Ling)

1. First of all, let me say that even if I am ableto convince you of my claim, I will not deserve any credit for solving thisspecific problem. That is because this problem was solved a long time ago; infact, the problem has probably been rediscovered, solved and recorded numeroustimes over a number of centuries by various people in English-speakingcountries.

What we are dealing with is a problem which has beennoticed by people, mainly serious writers, I suppose, who care about precisionin writing. And so a special structure was invented in order to solve thisparticular problem. I don’t know who invented it, but it’s been kept alive forall these years because people keep noticing the problem and they want a way todeal with it.

I first took note of this special structure overtwenty years ago while reading a grammar book in a public library inAlexandria, Virginia. I was very interested because, although I had seensentences containing it, I had never seen an explanation of it. Although Ican’t recall the exact semantics of the sentence, the syntax is contained inthis similar sentence:

(B1)     Theseare the arguments which it is impossible for me to refute.

Now you are no doubt wondering what that it is doingthere after which. You and the great majority of people in the English-speakingworld would probably have said:

(B2)     Thesearguments are impossible for me to refute.                       or,

(B2b)   Theseare the arguments that are impossible for me to refute.    

The potential problem with structure (B2) is thatthe question has presupposed the structure of the answer, the presumed questionbeing:

(B3)     Whicharguments are impossible for you to refute?

But suppose the real answer is not (B2) but (B4):

(B4)     Thisargument is impossible for me to refute.                  or,

(B4b)   This isthe argument that is impossible for me to refute.

And so the plurality anticipated in (B3) is notanswered by the singularity expressed in (B4). The question presupposesmultiple arguments, but the answer refers to only one. Or vice versa:

(B5)     Whichargument is impossible for you to refute?

(B2)     Thesearguments are impossible for me to refute.

You see the problem, of course; but suppose thequestion were the very elegant:

(B7)     Ofthese arguments, which is it impossible for you to refute?                  

Or these alternates:

(B7b)   Whichof these arguments is it impossible for you to refute?                   

(B7c)   It isimpossible for you to refute which arguments?                      

Either the singular (B4) or the plural (B2) willanswer (B7). This is because of the following advantages of this specialstructure:

(a) The question’s main subject and main verbagreement is between it and is and that relationship is fixed; 

(b) Which can stand for either singular or pluralresponses; from the Oxford English Dictionary: “Which: Expressing a request forselection from a definite number: What one or ones of a stated or implied setof persons, things or alternative?” I would add that which can also anticipatenone.

(c) The other verb form in the sentence (to refute)is an infinitive, and thus not to be conjugated, and so agreement isn’t anissue.

Now, if you word your answers in a subject pluscopula plus adjectival phrase form, you get:

(B2)     Thesearguments are impossible for me to refute.

(B4)     Thisargument is impossible for me to refute.

where are must agree with arguments and is mustagree with argument.

But the important thing is that both (B2) and (B4)are anticipated by Question (B7), and yet neither the singular nor the pluralis presupposed.

It is a quite useful structural element; whetherpeople choose to take advantage of that utility is another issue.

2. Let’s postulate that, in order for a question tobe grammatically correct, any potential answer should be able to be substitutedfor the interrogative, in either a reformulation of the question or in areformulation of the question as a statement. By the term any potential answer,I mean any answer which is not constrained by the semantics of the questionsentence. Thus, if the question were:

Who was the guy I saw you talkingto when I passed you in front of the bank on Saturday?

then we know that there can be one and only onepotential answer: that one person who I was talking to, etc. Let’s say thatthat person’s name is Jim. Thus, reformulating the question:

Was Jim the guy I saw you talkingto when I passed you in front of the bank on Saturday?

And then reformulating the question as a statement:

The guy I saw you talking to whenI passed you in front of the bank on Saturday was Jim.

But now suppose the question is this:

Who were those two guys I saw youtalking to when I passed you in front of the bank on Saturday?

And suppose the answer that comes back is Jim.Substituting Jim in both reformulations, we get:

* Were Jim those two guys I sawyou talking to when I passed you in front of the bank on Saturday?

* Those two guys I saw youtalking to when I passed you in front of the bank on Saturday were Jim.

Both of these answers are both semantically andsyntactically flawed. Semantically, because the question itself demanded ananswer which named two people; syntactically, because a single personsubstituted for the interrogative in either reformulation produces a syntacticconflict in the form of the verb. And so the question itself wasn’tungrammatical; rather, the answer given could not have satisfied the semanticrequirements of the question. Furthermore, the semantic requirements for any correctanswer required a plural form of the verb. This answer, however, would havesufficed:

Jim and Roy were those two guys I saw you talking towhen I saw you in front of the bank on Saturday?

Those two guys I saw you talking to when I saw youin front of the bank on Saturday were Jim and Roy.

So we see that, in order for any answer given to becorrect, it must be responsive to the semantic requirements of the question –requirements which in turn determine the syntactical form of the question. Itmust follow logically then, that no correct answer, defined as an answer whichmeets the semantic requirements of the question, should be prohibited by thesyntax of the question from being able to be substituted for the interrogative,either as a reformulation of the question or as a reformulation of the questionas a statement. And so let’s this test idea with these examples:

Who did you see at the party last night? 

The subject-verb agreement is between you and see;who is unrestricted as to singular or plural; the semantics of the question donot restrict in any way the number of people who could have been seen at theparty.

Potential answers: (a) Sarah   (b) Sarah and Louise. (c) Sarah and Louiseand Mary.  etc.

Let’s substitute (a) and (b):

(a) Reformulation of question, substitutingpotential answers for interrogative:

Did you see Sarah at the party last night?  

Did you see Sarah and Louise at the party lastnight?

(b) Reformulation of question as statement,substituting potential answers for interrogative:

You did see Sarah at the party last night.

You did see Sarah and Louise at the party lastnight.

Now let’s try this with the LI question:   Who is easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to?

There is nothing in the semantics of the sentencewhich limits the number of potential answers. Thus, if we asked the question ofMary, she might answer “Louise” and if we asked Louise she might answer“Hilda”. On the other hand, if we construe the semantics in this way:

Who is always the easiest personto get Bob’s mother to talk to?

then there is only one correct answer and the verbwould have to be singular.

Now, why can’t we just assume that who in (LI) isrestricted to singular since we are using a singular verb? Well, the extremelyobvious answer to that is that the subject determines the number of the verb,and not vice versa:

                                    Thegirls are out shopping.

                                    Thegirl is out shopping.

Thus, the verb is can’t just restrict the scope ofwho to make it singular. Since the scope of who can’t be restricted by theverb, then it has to be restricted by the semantics of the sentence; however,as we see above, the semantics of the (LI) sentence are not restrictive as tothe number of potential answers. So here’s the test:

Potential answers: (a) Larry   (b) Larry and Muriel  (c) Larry and Muriel and Mabel. etc.

(c) Reformulation of question, substitutingpotential answers for interrogative:

Is Larry easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to?

*Is Larry and Muriel easy to get Bob’s mother totalk to?

(d) Reformulation of question as statement,substituting potential answers for interrogative:

Larry is easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to.

*Larry and Muriel is easy to get Bob’s mother totalk to.

As seen, there is an answer which is not prohibitedby the semantics of the question but which is in fact restricted by the syntaxof the question from being able to be substituted for the interrogative in boththe reformulation of the question and the reformulation of the question as astatement. Thus, the (LI) sentence is ungrammatical. QED

On the other hand, the sentence below, which Isuggested in my first article as being correct, has no such problems:

Who is it easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to?

Potential answers: (a) Larry   (b) Larry and Muriel  (c) Larry and Muriel and Mabel. etc.

(e) Reformulation of question, substitutingpotential answers for interrogative:

Is it easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to Larry?

Is it easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to Larry andMuriel?

(f) Reformulation of question as statement,substituting potential answers for interrogative:

It is easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to Larry.

It is easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to Larry andMuriel.

A few notes:

1. (a) The semantics of easy to get Bob’s mother totalk to determines the scope of who. Since there is nothing restrictive aboutthose semantics, who is unrestricted.

(b) It is the scope of who which determines the formof the verb. Since who is unrestricted, it can license neither is nor are,since both of those forms are restricted. Thus, the failure of the (LI)sentence is at the semantic-syntactic interface.

2.     The structure I have suggested:                   

(Q2) Who is it easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to?       works this way:

(a) The question’s main subject and main verbagreement is between it and is and that relationship is fixed;

(b) Who is unrestricted as to scope;

(c) Who is the object of the other verb form in thesentence (to refute), an infinitive. It is hard to get more unrestrictive thanan infinitive.

3.  However,all is not lost. If your purpose is to ask the question:

What is the name of just one person who is easy toget Bob’s mother to talk to?

there is an available solution:

Who is someone who is easy to get Bob’s mother totalk to?

Larry.

Larry comes readily to mind,among many others.

Larry, but if he’s not in town,try Nancy.

4. If you want to know why (LI) “sounds OK”, that,too, is easy to see. We can restrict the interrogative subject of thisstructure thus:

                        (Q4)Which one of them is easy to get…

and we would then have a singular subject plus iseasy to. Of course, we have to use one to restrict which that narrowly, (althoughnote that we can’t say                       *Who one is easy to get…)

Thus (LI) parallels (Q4) pretty closely in terms ofsyntax, but the semantics aren’t precise enough to make (LI) good.

5. In the event you are asking whether semanticconflict makes an otherwise syntactically acceptable sentence ungrammatical, Ioffer this:

He isbuying the book for himself.

*He isbuying the book for herself.

6.     If you want to say that the (LI) sentence is grammatical, then does thatmake my suggested sentence (Q2) ungrammatical? Does that make the it redundant?What would be your argument along those lines? Please clarify.

3. Relevance of this problem to larger issues.

1. I believe that this problem highlights the dangerof using personal intuition as the basis for determining grammaticality. Iwould have to assume that more than ninety-nine percent of English speakers donot use the structure which I have suggested is grammatical, nor are they evenaware of its existence. But that’s not particularly relevant to the grammaticalityof the structure: it is logically based, and so it is correct.

Generative grammarians talk about how they describerather than prescribe. But I think that that is the wrong distinction to make.The important thing is whether or not they understand.

I assume that you have read Chomsky’s MinimalistProgram. In that book he discusses structures very much like these we have beendiscussing. However, at no place in the book does he show a unified, clear, understandableway of resolving issues such as those discussed above. MinPro is just a lot oftheoretical speculation and one dead end after another.

In fact, if the generativists had been able to solveproblems such as these, we wouldn’t be seeing the (LI) sentence in the latestissue of Linguistic Inquiry in 2004.

The irony is that the generativists threw out allthe old ways of looking at language, and basically they have ended up trying toreinvent the wheel, not realizing that a good deal of what they threw out orignored was accumulated knowledge which they would eventually be looking for.In essence, the generativists have been trying to rediscover a lost world, andnot doing a very good job of it at that.

2. I know that generative grammarians bandy aboutterms like computational efficiency and so forth. The problem under discussionis a good test of whether you folks practice what you preach because, in thisinstance, computational efficiency is in direct conflict with what people say.Most people say, Who is easy to get Bob’s mother to talk to. If we say thatwhatever people say is grammatical, then that sentence would have to begrammatical. Yet in terms of computational efficiency, it’s a disaster. If theanswer to the question is Larry and Maude, then we have to say, in effect, “Iwas expecting to plug in a singular answer before is, but now I will have toremove the singular form, retrieve the plural form are, and insert it.” (I amassuming that the brain works just like a computer. It’s kind of fun. I can seethe attraction.)

To me, the sentence Who is it easy to get Bob’smother to talk to? does not have the problem described above, because neitherthe singular nor the plural is assumed in who. No presuppositions are committedto, and therefore no corrections need to be made.

How can generativity be valid if the brain “creates”these inefficiencies for itself? It doesn’t make any sense. It seems to me,rather, that computational efficiency comes through education, motivation,practice and study, (kind of like practicing the piano). These, of course, arecultural constructs.

Speaking of practicing the piano, you may say, “Waita minute. A concert pianist has to practice, since the musical structuresaren’t already there in his brain. OK, you’re right. But I am currentlystudying Arabic, as I mentioned, and I can guarantee you that the only thing Iknow of the language is what I have learned. If anybody should be able to turnon the “Arabic” parameters pretty quickly, I should, but that’s just not theway it is. It’s a laborious process.

3. In my article I also wrote about the sentence: Meand Larry went to the races. Many people use that locution. The computationseems to go like this:

1.     If a singular subject, use nominative: I went to the races.

2.     If two or more subjects, override nominative and use oblique form: Me andLarry went to the races.

3.     If you hear someone say He and I went to the races.  you must convert both subjects to theoblique case in order to understand the sentence. Thus: Him and me went to theraces.

4.     Better still, invert the order of the oblique subjects: Me and him wentto the races.

I would suggest that, since we are assuming that thebrain generates language through hard-wiring, that the above processes arehugely inefficient. One also must wonder whether the generativists aresuggesting that, since the standard sentence in (3) is more likely to be usedby more educated, higher income persons, and the substandard sentences in (2)and (4) are used by those who are less educated and in lower income groups,that we should conclude therefrom that those in the lower socioeconomicbrackets have brains which operate differently from others.