Introduction
Avram Noam Chomsky (the âchâ is pronounced as in church) was born on 7 December 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. At the time of writing he is still very much alive and working as hard as ever. On a visit to Britain in 1989 he addressed audiences in various cities, recorded a national radio interview, and was the subject of several articles in newspapers and magazines.
Chomskyâs father was a noted Hebrew scholar, and was the author of one of the most popular books about the Hebrew language. 1 The family were deeply involved in Jewish culture, the revival of Hebrew and the Zionist movement. At the same time, Chomsky was strongly influenced as a young man by the vigorous Jewish intellectual life in New York, where the dominant ideas, in contrast, were anti-Zionist and socialist. He was particularly close to an uncle in New York with whom he discussed literature, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, and whose libertarian socialist views he found attractive. Chomsky experienced anti-semitism first-hand on the streets of Philadelphia as a child, and his political and intellectual development were deeply affected both by the rise of fascism and anti-semitism in Europe and by the public celebrations in his neighbourhood over early Nazi triumphs. His early interest in politics is indicated by an editorial about the Spanish civil war which he wrote for a school newspaper in 1939 (he returned to this subject at length in his first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins, published in 1969).
It was through a shared interest in left-libertarian Jewish politics that Chomsky met Zellig Harris, a teacher of linguistics under whom he studied at the University of Pennsylvania. After a short spell at Harvard, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where he has been based ever since. In 1949 he married the linguist Carol Schatz; they have a son and two daughters. Chomskyâs entire working life has been spent as a scholar in linguistics. When he entered the field in the late forties it was a small and specialized one; the high profile that linguistics has achieved since then has been largely due to him.
In the fifties and sixties, Chomsky became renowned within linguistics and in other related fields as the founder and foremost exponent of a new approach to linguistics called Generative Grammar. Chomsky energetically criticized some of the main assumptions in the field, proposing new ideas and new methods of research. At the same time, Chomsky also became widely known for very different reasons: his outspoken and courageous opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He spoke and wrote extensively about American foreign policy, criticizing in particular the role of intellectuals in justifying and promoting the war.
Since that time, Chomsky has written many books and articles about linguistics, and many about politics. He is in great demand as a speaker, travelling widely and often talking â separately â about linguistics and politics to two different audiences. Typically, he will speak to a prestigious academic audience one day about his latest research into language and the next to an audience of socialists and peace activists about politics.
For many people, Chomsky is puzzling. Very few academics of his distinction are willing to dirty their hands with political activity to the extent that he does. His decision to take a stand against United States involvement in Vietnam in the early sixties was made in the belief that he would end up in jail for publicly supporting resistance to the draft. Since then he has been equally outspoken about American involvement in other areas, particularly the Middle East, the Pacific region and Central America, although his writings touch on all parts of the world. Pressure of time has meant that he has been unable to devote himself to linguistics to the extent he would have wished.
It isnât just Chomskyâs involvement in linguistics and politics which has made people sit up and think: the quality of his work in both areas has been outstanding. John Searle writes that âChomskyâs work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era, comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud.â 2 The New York Times Book Review once described Chomsky as âarguably the most important intellectual aliveâ, to which Carlos Otero, suggesting that no one else comes close, added the comment: âit is hard not to wonder who could be a plausible candidate for third placeâ (RP, 11). In a recent anthology of his political writings, the editor James Peck writes: âNo one has exposed more forcefully the self-righteous beliefs on which Americaâs imperial role is based ⌠No one has focussed more compellingly on the violence of our world, or conveyed more directly the responsibility of the United States for much of itâ (CR, viii). These views may be overstated, although even if they are, any thinking person will want at least a minimal knowledge of his ideas so that they can judge for themselves. In any case, Chomskyâs high profile in two very different areas makes it worth asking what makes this extraordinary man tick.
In this book I shall look separately at Chomskyâs linguistics and his politics, and then examine what links there may be between the two. The aim of the book is to give a basic outline of his most important ideas: readers who want to know more can then turn to more specialized books, or read Chomskyâs writings for themselves (see the guide to further reading at the end of the book). We begin with linguistics: the rest of this chapter looks at the basic questions which Chomsky is concerned with in this side of his work.
What linguistics isn't
Chomskyâs basic aim is to make linguistics a science. He has consistently held to this aim throughout his work, and it lies behind everything he has done.
In order to understand what this means, we shall need to look carefully at the terms linguistics and science. Even before we do this, though, one thing is clear. Chomsky didnât invent linguistics, so there must be other types of linguistics which he regards as not scientific. Letâs start, then, by taking a look at linguistics, distinguishing between what Chomsky sees as the unscientific types and his own scientific linguistics.
Linguistics is the name for the field of study which deals with language 3 . That much is easy, but for a number of reasons we need to enlarge this definition. Firstly, everybody is interested in language to some extent. Apart from people with certain disabilities we all talk with others, most people in industrialized countries read and write, and many of us learn more than one language. A few people are fascinated by language â they learn lots of languages, play Scrabble, do crosswords, like looking at dictionaries, admire beautiful and elegant language, or delight in imitating a variety of speech styles. This does not mean, however, that these people are doing linguistics: linguistics is more than an informal interest in language, however strong that interest is.
Most people are only concerned with language when they have a difficulty with it. Sometimes we canât find the right words for what we want to say: we get tongue-tied or muddled. Or we canât remember how to spell a word. We often have trouble with punctuation. We may find it hard to learn a second language. Some people have hearing difficulties, or speech difficulties â perhaps a stammer, or difficulty making certain sounds â or difficulties in learning to read and write. We may find the technical words and convoluted sentences of scientists or lawyers difficult to understand. People who study difficulties like these, and try to help others to deal with them, are not necessarily engaged in linguistics: linguistics is not a collection of methods to help people with language problems.
Some people work with language all the time. Authors and journalists write articles and books. Politicians make speeches. Actors have to memorize their lines. Translators take ideas expressed in one language and recreate them in another language. Advertisers choose the best words to sell a product. Students in schools and colleges use language to write essays. This is still not linguistics: using language is not the same as studying it.
Many people study and discuss language. Literary critics analyse a writerâs use of language. Lexicographers â people who produce dictionaries â look carefully at how words are used. People who are interested in the history of languages (such people are often called philologists) look at how languages change over time, and sometimes use old manuscripts as clues about how people lived in the past, rather like archeologists use other relics. Many philosophers have written about language and its relation to thought and knowledge. The code-breakers who âcrackedâ enemy codes during the Second World War did so largely on the basis of statistical information about which letters and words occur most frequently in different languages. Yet none of these people would automatically accept that what they are doing is linguistics.
The last four paragraphs show four different negative ways to help us see what linguistics is. Firstly, linguistics is not just informal thinking about language, no matter how intensive and challenging. Linguistics is not a way to solve the problems of language users. Linguistics is the study of language, not the use of language. And linguistics is not an interest in language for some other purpose.
What linguistics is
Having seen what linguistics is not, you are probably wondering by now what this leaves. Let us, then, begin to look more positively at linguistics by looking at some questions about language which many of the areas we have excluded from linguistics touch on in passing. Two such questions are these: firstly, how many languages are there in the world? Secondly, what are the main differences and similarities between them?
These are not simple questions. If we want to know how many different languages there are in the world, we first have to be sure that we have covered the whole world, and we next have to agree on what counts as a language. Do northern British English, broad West Country English and New Zealand English count as three different languages or as three varieties of one language? If we count Danish and Norwegian as two distinct languages, what do we say about the fact that a Dane and a Norwegian can probably understand each other better than speakers of the three types of English just mentioned?
Looking at the similarities and differences between languages is also not straightforward. The differences are perhaps easier. People who have learned a foreign language can usually point to one or two sounds which are very different from English sounds: the vowel in the French word lune âmoonâ, for instance, or the sound at the beginning of Welsh words like Llandudno. Likewise, someone who has learned German can point to the word order of German as different from that of English: Heute habe ich das Buck gelesen, translated word for word, comes out as âToday have I the book readâ: the word order in English would be J have read the book today. Some languages have words which are almost impossible to translate into English, either because they have special emotional overtones (French soixante-huitard, or poilu, German GemĂźt or SpiessbĂźrger), or because they refer to things not usually found outside the area where the language is spoken (French baguette, German Praktikantenausweis). What counts as âpoliteâ also varies from language to language: English softens the force of commands by using Will you ⌠or Would you mind âŚ, while other languages do this in other ways, or rarely at all.
Suppose we wanted to investigate these matters in more depth. To get a broader picture of pronunciation differences, we would need to know how we make speech sounds, and develop a way of classifying different sounds. To study word-order differences we would need to classify words in each language and devise a way to describe different word-order patterns. To look at vocabulary differences we would need to look at how languages refer to the world, and distinguish different types of meaning that an expression can have: general, specific, emotional, scientific, and so on. To look at politeness in language we would need to classify different relationships between speakers and look at the ways in which a language reflects these relationships.
We have looked at four types of difference between languages: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and relationships between speakers. In each case we have highlighted the need to classify the relevant facts, so that we can distinguish between them. Now we are beginning to see what is distinctive about linguistics. All the examples we gave earlier which didnât come under the heading of linguistics were of people who want to talk about language for a particular purpose. What all these people need is agreement on the basic terminology which they can use to talk about language. Any specialized terminology presupposes that the things to which you want to give names have been classified, so that there is agreement about when to use which term. In the four areas we mentioned, we need to agree about terms like vowel, consonant, noun, participle, meaning, and command. Linguistics, then, is the field which classifies (among other things) the pronunciation, grammar, meaning and use of language and hence provides terminology to talk about these matters along with clear criteria for the correct use of each term.
This way of thinking about linguistics makes the field sound as if its role is purely to serve other fields of knowledge. If linguistics merely provides some terminology which can be used by lexicographers, speech therapists, translators, language teachers and Scrabble enthusiasts, then the field is no doubt useful but not very exciting or high-powered. While many linguists would accept their servicing role, they would argue that their subject does indeed have great depth and intellectual rigour. There are several thousand languages in the world, each one a rich and complex system which is deeply embedded in the culture and society of its speakers. Developing a terminology to encompass such a vast and diverse range of languages is an intellectual feat of the first order.
Modern linguistics emerged as a distinct field in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was the heyday of colonialism, when Europeans and Americans went out and seized large parts of the planet. One result of this process was a growing realization that the languages of Europe, diverse though they may be, are but a fraction of the languages of the world. At the same time, it became clear that many of the languages of Africa, Asia and the native peoples of America were under threat as their speakers were wiped out by colonialists or switched to colonial languages. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a huge effort by European and American linguists to travel to where these languages were spoken, make friends with one or more native speakers, and learn enough about the language to describe it as fully as possible in a short time. The expertise, intuition, human warmth, patience and determination this work demands are enormous (especially since the tape recorder, an invaluable tool for such work, did not appear on the scene until very late on).
The picture I have painted of linguistics as a discipline ancillary to others is quite accurate for the period before Chomsky. Many of the major figures from this time studied linguistics along with other fields: some were also anthropologists, like Edward Sapir; some were teachers of foreign languages and literature, like Martin Joos; some were philosophers, like John Austin; others were psychologists, mathematicians and sociologists. There were few university departments devoted to nothing but linguistics. Journals, books and professional associations devoted to linguistics appeared, but many of the people involved also worked in other areas of study.
One further point about this type of linguistics is its relationship to language teaching. The period we are talking about â the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century â was one in which international travel and contacts increased enormously, as a result partly of colonialism and partly of technological advances in transport and communication. The need to learn foreign languages increased accordingly. Linguists who were experts in such languages and could describe them accurately were in a good position to help. During the Second World War, when it was important for many people to learn the basics of languages like Russian and Japanese quickly, many experts in linguistics were heavily involved in teaching them. A body of expertise in language learning and teaching grew up, once again with a clear servicing role: to help people teach and learn languages.
Differences, then similarities
Our discussion so far has concentrated on differences between languages. The kind of linguistics we have outlined does indeed emphasize differences, rather than similarities, between languages, for very understandable reasons. The main danger in writing descriptions of a wide range of languages is that the linguist wi...
