I Speak, Therefore I Am

Seventeen Thoughts About Language

Andrea Moro, Ian Roberts

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231533928
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

There are no men so dull and stupid, not even idiots, as to be incapable of joining together different words, and thereby constructing a declaration by which to make their thoughts understood.... On the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect or happily circumstanced which can do the like.—Descartes

Language is more like a snowflake than a giraffe's neck. Its specific properties are determined by laws of nature, they have not developed through the accumulation of historical accidents.—Noam Chomsky

In I Speak, Therefore I Am, the Italian linguist and neuroscientist Andrea Moro composes an album of his favorite quotations from the history of linguistics, beginning with the Book of Genesis and the power of naming and concluding with Noam Chomsky's metaphor that language is a snowflake. Moro's seventeen linguistic thoughts and his commentary on them display the humanness of language: our need to name and interpret this world and create imaginary ones, to express and understand ourselves. This book is sure to delight anyone who enjoys the ineffable paradox that is human language.

1 GOD

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

—Genesis 2:19

In the beginning it might seem obvious to find Him, but in fact it isn’t. Because, unexpectedly, God the Creator is a God who listens. The paradox is that language, our distinguishing characteristic above all other creatures, is in the first book of the Old Testament a gift that confirms beyond any doubt our freedom and our creativity. The consequences of this are made clear. We read that God created us in His image, but no one has ever seen the face of God. So what does it mean to say that we are created in His image? This is where language comes in. Perhaps our resemblance to God can be perceived in realizing we are able to give names to things. That is, the Creator has made us in His image because He recognizes our creations; although they are made only of air and thought, they are nonetheless creations: names. And not just any names: these are the names we give to His other creations. In the Jewish tradition, the God who created Man is the same God who stops and listens to Man naming things.

This is a kind of embryonic linguistics—names, not sentences—maybe “atomic” linguistics, but linguistics nonetheless. This is because thinking of and giving a name are not trivial acts. Names, in fact, are not just conventional labels: except in a few exceptional cases, nothing tells is that a given sound is right for a given name. This is obvious if we compare different languages, but, even leaving sounds aside, names are not just freely given conventional labels. For example, look at your hand. You instinctively recognize a natural object that can be broken down into parts: palm, fingers, knuckles, nails; we also give special names to the different fingers, funny names, childish names, noble or scientific names. In every language there are names for the pieces of what we see as making up a hand. But there are no tattoos marking the borders of these pieces: the combination of the fingertip and the distal phalange of a finger is an object in the real world too. Also, it is a coherent object, in the sense that it is not made of discontinuous pieces, just like the ring finger in relation to the whole hand. The difference is that in the second case there’s a special name for the object, and in the first case there isn’t.

Fortunately, we don’t feel a need to give names to all the combinations of pieces of the world; sometimes it’s convenient to invent names for certain things, but not for every possible combination of things. This is lucky, because the set of pieces of the world borders on uncountably infinite, and it would not be easy for a child to find themselves confronted with a percept of a wall made up of infinite subwalls, all of which have to be given a name. This would separate us forever from the city, because it would separate us from language, from what makes us human beings. What we need instead is a catalogue, capacious and partly elastic, but not infinite: in other words, a dictionary.

It would be good to catch our breath here, but we can’t: talk of God and names leads inevitably to the endless tangle raised by the problem of His name. In the Jewish tradition, this is the tetragrammaton, a name that commands respect, whose pronounciation, never mind meaning, is unknown. We could perhaps leave the question aside, were it not for the fact that in the principal Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, which was based on a Jewish precursor, the name of God is immediately invoked. We say “Hallowed be Thy name”; that is, may the Lord’s name be recognized as holy and treated as holy. So we have a God whom we can’t (and wouldn’t know how to) name, whose name features centrally in a prayer. It cannot be an accident that in that prayer there is a constant interplay between the pronouns “thou” and “we.” Perhaps the name of God is to be found entirely in relation to us.

Continuing our ascent toward the name of God, we come across another, almost insurmountable obstacle. In the other tradition that forms the basis of our culture, the Greek tradition, the name (of the role) given to God is not “father,” but logos. The logos is not only the beginning of everything but also what is made flesh. This word has been translated in different ways at different times, except when it has not been translated at all. Sometimes we use the simple word “word,” sometimes the word by antonomasia, “verb,” sometimes “number,” sometimes “reason” (Zellini 2010). The only certain thing is that the root from which the word logos is formed originally alluded to the act of collecting, of putting chosen elements together in an organized way. Thus “anthology” is a “collection of flowers” and not “a discourse on flowers.” Having said this, logos is meant to be made flesh: flesh, not something else. That is, our bodies, a blend of laws of nature and of history, are not only compatible with language but also an inseparable expression of it, and this is not at all accidental. We are thus made of the same substance as words, and so is God, who in this sense made us like Him: free, free to give names to things. We are all words made flesh.

So right from the start we see that thinking about language is a complicated, stormy, and mysterious business. For now, however, one certainty is clearly striking: however much veiled in mystery, the ability to name things is, as far as we are concerned, the real big bang that pertains to us.

2 PLATO

(Athens, 428–348 B.C.E.)

So too some vocal signs do not harmonize, but some of them do harmonize and form discourse.

—Plato, The Sophist

Here language becomes language, or rather linguistics becomes linguistics. We are no longer dealing with atoms in isolation—lists of names, as in the case of the Book of Genesis. Instead we are looking at combinations among atoms. This is the birth, or rather the recognition, of the most important molecules of words: sentences. At the same time it is recognized that not all combinations of words work. In this connection Plato uses the verb harmóttein, which we can translate as “to harmonize, to agree.” But it is interesting to note that harmóttein comes from a different domain. For example, a carpenter assembling pieces of wood to make a stool would use this verb to say that one piece of wood fits better than another. Plato was aware of this, so much so that when he talks about words he begins with “so too,” because just before he was giving exactly the example of how pieces of wood fit together. Fitting together means having two forms that are not only compatible but also complementary; that is, together they form something new that stands on its own. This means recognizing that language consists in harmony, of putting together parts in a way that is not random. This is the fundamental point regarding the structure of human language: it says that, starting from a set of primitive elements (whether sounds or words), not all combinations give rise to possible structures. It didn’t take long to recognize this characteristic of language and give it a name: “syntax,” i.e., composition (Graffi 2001, 2010). But it took more than two thousand years for linguists to recognize that these combinations manifest special mathematical properties that can be neither derived from experience nor constructed by chance, a result often ignored partly, due to a certain perverse tendency to privilege ideology over data (Berwick 1985; Chomsky 2012, 2013). The empirically based deductions concerning these mathematical properties are now established—later we will see some of them—and in some cases have the status of theorems. Continued attempts to dismantle and refute them are like trying to tickle a marble statue.

It should come as no surprise that the verb harmóttein, and the word “harmony” derived from it, are used in music, in art, in architecture, and in the theory where beauty matters, aesthetics. We can wonder why Plato used precisely this image and not a different one, but as Saussure once said in an unpublished note: “When we venture into the territory of language all the analogies in heaven and earth abandon us.” Perhaps one image is as good as another; however, in talking about words, this attempt to convey the idea of the right combination in concrete, geometrical terms does not seem accidental. But if we look at language in particular, all kinds of different ways of fitting things together come to mind straightaway, all kinds of harmony: an article, for example, can harmonize with a noun, an auxiliary with a participle, a preposition with a verb, while still the mother of all linguistic harmonies is the agreement of noun and verb. In fact, Plato gives this case a special status, so special as to have it coincide with the essence of the logos, that is, discourse: that human reality, a uniquely human reality, made up of meanings, signifiers, and rules of combination. It is this reality that your eyes are seeing in a particular form, the written form, as they pass over this page at this very moment. You see it so naturally that it passes unnoticed, and yet it is so powerful and pervasive as to be able to evoke a mental image that has practically no probability of being predicted on the basis of the surrounding environment or the circumstances you are in at this moment, such as “a long line of lizards crossed the desert without even stopping to dream.” Nobody can voluntarily fail to understand a sentence.

Plato doesn’t explain to us what creates this harmony, but he presents it as intuitively obvious, and it is difficult to disagree with him in this. Even if we don’t know how to define a noun, a verb, or a sentence, or if questions of linguistics do not interest us, we have no difficulty in recognizing the difference between two-word sequences such as “they thing” and “they think”: in the second it seems that the words show a harmony missing in the first, whatever exactly we mean by “harmony.” If, as Alfred North Whitehead said, all Western philosophy can be seen as a series of footnotes to the Platonic dialogues, the special harmony between nouns and verbs that creates discourse is one of the clearest examples of an original insight and, at the same time, of an idea that has persisted throughout Western thought in general: from linguistics to logic, from mathematics to artificial intelligence. The harmonic fit of nouns and verbs thus becomes the backbone of language and thought.

3 ARISTOTLE

(born Stageira 384 B.C.E.; died Euboea 322 B.C.E.)

For truth and falsity have to do with combination and separation.

—Aristotle, De Interpretatione

If I told you you were swallows, you would immediately object that that is not true. But then if I asked you what it means to say that it isn’t true, the answer would not be so immediate. But everything is clear. Modern linguistics, armed with the weapons forged from logic and mathematics, tells us that a fundamental aspect of the meaning of a sentence like “All the readers of this book are swallows” is represented as a relation between two sets, the set of readers of this book and the set of swallows—a relation in which the set of readers of this book is contained in the set of swallows. To say that the sentence “All the readers of this book are swallows” is true or false then amounts, at a certain level of representation, to the possibility of saying whether this combination of the two sets associated with the sentence is correct. If the sentence had been “All the readers of this book are not swallows,” on the other hand, this would have been a relation of separation: no individual in the first set is also in the second.

Aristotle tied the notion of truth—and therefore falsity—to language so closely that not even today, 2,300 years later, can we get away from treating the problem in these terms, although today the approach is constrained and enhanced by new techniques (see Chierchia 1995, Chierchia & McConnell 1995 for references). But, as everyone knows, Aristotle was Plato’s pupil, and for Aristotle the bond between language and truth goes further, exploiting the knowledge of the harmonic fit between noun and verb recognized by his teacher. In fact, Aristotle said that there are no combinations or separations—and hence truth or falsity—without the combination of noun and verb, or, more precisely, subject and predicate. It seems that we are saying the same thing using different words: “subject” instead of “noun,” and “predicate” instead of “verb”—but it’s not so. The analogy between noun and verb on the one hand and subject and predicate on the other breaks down when we bring into consideration, in Greek and other languages that have it, the verb “to be.” Why? Let us proceed step by step. When he tried to find a way to define a sentence, Aristotle realized that it isn’t possible to give a general account: sentences can be used, for example, to order, to ask, to beg, to pray, to be ironic, to hypothesize, to implore, and to describe. So, for various reasons connected above all with his interest in deductive reasoning, Aristotle concentrated on this last fundamental capacity of language and stated that a sequence of words is a sentence only if it means something true or false. So, “that woman thinks” is a sentence, but “that woman who thinks” isn’t. In this way, he goes ...