Noam Chomsky (5 page)

In the meantime one must reiterate that Chomsky’s thesis was ‘as different from structural linguistics as anything could be’.
¹²
With it he had sown the seeds of a revolutionary new approach to the study of language. The agenda was set for an investigation of the dynamics of language, how levels of representation transform and generate each other, and how the brain generates thought that generates language and vice versa. In addition any theory so postulated had to be tested against the praxis of language acquisition. In other words, we are moving from a description of language to an explanation of language.

Chomsky, in doing so, experienced the sheer delight of scientific discovery even if at this stage no one else was on his wavelength. Comparisons can be made to the young Einstein, who had a few sympathetic listeners when he expounded his revolutionary ideas but practically no one who fully understood the implications. Such self-contained genius can be hard to take at times, as illustrated by Einstein’s response to a question regarding his reaction if measurements were to disprove his thesis: that the measurements would have been wrong. Chomsky too has this supreme confidence in his discoveries. He needs no verification by others, but it is welcome when it comes.

Having thus become fascinated by his own work, Chomsky entered graduate school at Pennsylvania University and in 1951 graduated with a master’s thesis that was a revision of his
BA
thesis. He did it for his own entertainment entirely. Harris had his own consuming interests and, as far as Chomsky knew, didn’t care one way or another about these matters. They were quite close, but their intellectual relationships were in other areas.

It was also at this stage that Chomsky became deeply immersed in philosophy, hence his eventual dual status as a linguist and philosopher. The philosopher who influenced him most was Nelson Goodman (1906–1998), both his teacher and later his good friend. Chomsky went to Harvard in 1951, mostly to study with the philosopher W. V. Quine (1908–2000), whose theories he would later denounce. Apart from these two, the greatest personal influence was the Oxford philosopher John Austin, who visited Harvard a number of times and whom Chomsky came to know quite well. Through Goodman and Quine, Chomsky was introduced to the work of Carnap, then of Russell, Frege and the early Wittgenstein. It was only fitting that Chomsky’s first published academic text (in 1953) should appear, not in a linguistics journal, but in that icon of logical positivism,
The Journal of Symbolic Logic
. His article, ‘Systems of Syntactic Analysis’, sets the scene for the wider and interdisciplinary aspects of his research.

Notwithstanding his first publishing success and his highly idiosyncratic career so far, there seemed to be little prospect of advancement in academia or elsewhere for that matter. But Nelson Goodman, Chomsky’s philosophy teacher, encouraged him to apply for a Harvard University Junior Fellowship. Such fellowships are designed for promising academic talent expected to do quality research that normally leads to a PhD. Chomsky was accepted; and the stipend provided was sufficient to live on. Fellow students included Morris Halle, with whom he would publish one of the great works in linguistics, namely
The Sound Pattern of English
(1968), and Eric Lenneberg (1921–1975), a psychologist who had fled Nazi Germany and who later taught psychology at Harvard Medical School. Lenneberg had a special interest in language and language acquisition as part of cognitive psychology. He was one of the first scientists of that era to propose that there was an innate language capacity situated in the brain. Chomsky, in a 2004 speech, notes that:

Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky, 1955.

Such an approach was in sharp contrast to the prevailing theories of the time, namely behaviourism. This foreshadows the now famous review Chomsky wrote in 1959 about B. F. Skinner’s book
Verbal Behaviour
(1957), in which he demolished the notion of language as learned behaviour.

After a brief sojourn in Europe and Israel in 1953, Chomsky returned to Harvard and resumed his studies, with his fellowship extended until 1955. Apart from accumulating a vast amount of notes and ideas, he was none the wiser as to what would happen next. The only sure prospect was conscription: in April 1955 he received his draft notice. As he recalls in an interview with Samuel Hughes:

That PhD got Chomsky out of military service. It is an enduring irony that militarists the world over seem to exclude the intelligentsia from active duty. On the other hand the ensuing work of academics is often supported and directed by the military and armaments industry. Typically Chomsky’s first work at a lab (Research Lab of Electronics) was funded by the
US
’s three armed services, as was most of
MIT
at the time.

Of more interest at this juncture is, however, the question of how Chomsky could come up with a PhD thesis at such short notice, notwithstanding the highly unorthodox procedures involved. Unbeknown to anyone, and in virtual isolation, during the previous months he had written up everything he knew – close to 1, 000 pages. This monumental work was eventually published as
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
(1975). Chomsky had taken one chapter from his research and submitted it as his thesis, ‘Transformational Analysis’. It foreshadows a key concept that would revolutionize linguistics, namely that various ‘deep structures’ of linguistic representation (typically at sentence level) get ‘transformed’, by way of various rules, into ‘surface structures’. A simplistic example would be the ‘transformation’ of an active sentence into a passive one. In English an active sentence like ‘the cat ate the rat’ contains many features of a deep structure that can be transformed into a less used (hence ‘marked’) passive sentence, ‘the rat was eaten by the cat’. The sentence ‘the cat ate the rat’ is of course also at the level of the ‘surface structure’, but only a few transformations had to be effected to arrive at it from the deep structure. Deep structures could also be abstracted, especially as phrasal constituents. Hence the traditional subject-verb-object description of an active sentence like ‘the cat ate the rat’ was rendered as a tree structure (where s = sentence,
NP
= Noun Phrase,
VP
= Verb Phrase, Det = determiner,
N
= noun, v = verb):

Another key concept inherent in this model is the binary branching, which assumes more and more importance as the model undergoes its numerous improvements. This type of tree diagram analysis is nowadays widely accepted and practised, even at the level of introductory linguistics for language teachers. It can all get horribly complicated when complex sentences are involved and when complex transformations are thus represented. Multiple pages can be taken up by a single such diagram. An alternative formalism, also popularized by Chomsky early on, was to represent sentence strings in bracketed form, analogous to the language of symbolic logic. The above sentence would thus be written as:

As can be imagined, such an analysis sparked a vast amount of data, often concentrating on a single sentence and its type. Linguists would debate conflicting analyses and propose ever more sophisticated solutions to highly intricate problems. At this stage, however, Chomsky was only at the very beginning of that process.
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (
LSLT
)
was microfilmed for the Harvard Libraries, and it soon became a sort of underground classic for the small circle of people in the know. Indeed much of Chomsky’s work was published long after it had first appeared in manuscript form and been freely distributed among those who had an interest in it. Access to as yet unpublished materials creates a circle of insiders who are well advanced compared to those who have to wait for publication. That circle of insiders around Chomsky at
MIT
and a few other select institutions became legend and at times aroused a certain animosity among outsiders.

In 1955 the circle was very small indeed, and it still consisted mainly of a few graduate students. The one senior faculty member who became interested quite early was George Miller, one of the founders of cognitive psychology, then a professor at Harvard. He was perhaps the only faculty member anywhere who actually read
LSLT
, and he and Chomsky began to work together, publishing technical papers in mathematical linguistics. In 1957 Miller was teaching a summer session at Stanford and invited Chomsky to join him, so Chomsky and his wife and first child shared an otherwise empty fraternity house that summer with George Miller, his wife and two children: a story seldom heard in the world of academia. As noted before, another who understood Chomsky’s linguistics was his fellow researcher Morris Halle, who already had a research position at the
MIT
electronics laboratory. Halle was at Harvard to do advanced studies under Roman Jakobson. This triangular relationship prompted Jakobson to arrange for Chomsky to be offered a research position at
MIT
. With typical self-effacement Chomsky has noted that, while he was made an assistant professor to work on a machine translation project at the
MIT
Research Laboratory of Electronics, he ‘had no identifiable field or credentials in anything’.
¹⁵
Even worse, he told the project director that the project had ‘no intellectual interest and was also pointless’.

His disdain for technology is based on his observation that much of it is simply brute force. In relation to computers and computational linguistics, he points out that computers can do precisely nothing unless directed by a program written by humans. Nevertheless he acknowledges that there may be some merit in computer applications and he retains a critical interest in the field. Actually the work Chomsky did in automata theory in the late 1950s and early ‘60s is quite well known in computer science. It was the basis for the Benjamin Franklin medal he received a few years ago, given for work in technology (including theoretical work, which was Chomsky’s forte). The binary branching model of Chomskyan linguistic description is obviously well suited to the binary processing language in computers. As recently as 2005 Chomsky took part in a seminar on computational linguistics at
MIT
, where a paper was presented by a researcher entitled ‘Modeling Linguistic Theory on a Computer: From
GB
to Minimalism’ – where
GB
and Minimalism stand for Chomsky’s theories, as we shall see. Ironically perhaps, Chomsky is thus much cited in computational linguistics. Another example is Dougherty, who in 1994 published
Natural Language Computing
, with the telling subtitle ‘An English Generative Grammar in Prolog’, and in the introduction of which we are told ‘that the main goal is to show the reader how to use the linguistics theory of Noam Chomsky … to represent some of the grammatical processes … on a computer’.
¹⁶
Such eventual advances, and the nowadays widely accepted tools of machine translation, pay tribute to Chomsky, even though he himself remains very sceptical.