Chomsky's Language and Mind (Third Edition)

[Non-fiction/Linguistics *****]

Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind makes me wish I'd been a linguist in the '60s. When I was a child, I had a book of optical illusions that entranced me with its pictures (and its attempts to explain how the illusions worked). Language and Mind creates with pure language a richer, more complex experience that is in many ways similar to viewing optical illusions and having them explained, but this is only a side-effect resulting from the techniques Chomsky uses to make his argument rather than the whole point of the book. Reading this book was for me as much a fun and surreal experience of having my mind be surprised and tickled in ways I would never have anticipated that my mind could be surprised and tickled as it was an introduction to  the ideas that Chomsky presents.

The basic thesis of Chomsky's work in linguistics is that human children have an innate and genetic predisposition to learn human language, and that all human languages derive from some universal generative grammar. People learn through exposure which particular patterns (that the universal grammar permits) their particular language uses, but they couldn't grasp rules as nuanced as the ones that human languages actually use simply by extrapolating them from the available information unless they already had some innate predisposition to guess these rules. Throughout Language and Mind, Chomsky uses complexities of the English language as his source of examples, so he never asks the reader to trust him when he claims that some obscure tribal language exhibits a property that people would naively expect languages not to have. Instead, he constructs many ordinary English sentences that clearly demonstrate ways in which syntax is bafflingly complicated in seemingly arbitrary ways. He also briefly covers a few other topics such as the general characteristics of phonetic rules, the way vowels get reduced when suffixes are added, and the intricate pattern by which different amounts of stress are assigned to different nouns in English sentences that are stated in normal intonations.

To someone who is interested in how language works, many of the examples are actually jaw-dropping. The effect relies on context, so I won't do any of them the disservice of lifting them into my review. What makes this book so fantastic is that linguistics, at least the way Chomsky practices it, is an empirical discipline in which the forcefulness of the evidence can be fully preserved in writing and experienced by the reader. But Language and Mind is more than a book of evidence. It's a book in which Chomsky lays out a very clear argument for how people's internal representation of what they are saying relates to what they actually say. He articulates this argument in masterfully precise prose, and when he has occasion to answer his critics and detractors, he dismantles their counterarguments swiftly, precisely, and with a dry sense of humor. Every sentence in Language and Mind is the work of a genius who knows exactly what he is trying to say and successfully says it.

While Chomsky is a genius, he is not a god, and he doesn't write with perfect accuracy even if does write with perfect precision. I cannot criticize anything Chomsky says about language or philosophy in Language and Mind, but a few of his remarks reveal a rather naive view of evolutionary biology. I don't want to summarize his position uncharitably, but I winced as he used the term emergence to explain how language is too complicated to have evolved gradually and therefore must have occurred spontaneously with a single fortuitous mutation. Thankfully, Chomsky derives his understanding of linguistics from the evidence that language provides, and not from his understanding of biology. As such, his description of the way language works at present does not at all depend on how accurately he understands biology. Moreover, advances in biology in the time since Chomsky wrote Language and Mind have validated what was, in the field of linguistics at the time of his writing, Chomsky's most controversial claim: language has an inherited biological component and is not learned from environmental stimulus alone. In particular, as Kandel et all note in Principal's of Neural Science, modern neuroscience has strongly validated Chomsky's beliefs relating to the existence of a universal grammar. The human brain region known as Broca's area, which is not found in other mammals, responds only to natural languages and not to artificial ones. Thus Language and Mind is one of the few books ever to have accurately presented a theory that strongly contradicted the established beliefs of its field to have been shown to be essentially accurate in its boldest claims by subsequent advances in science. As such, Language and Mind is not just a brilliant exposition of fascinating ideas. It is also a landmark of human achievement that deserves to be read by anyone interested in understanding how language works.