The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (15 page)

There is another reason to believe that a sentence is held together by a mental tree. So far I have been talking about stringing words into a grammatical order, ignoring what they mean. But grouping words into phrases is also necessary to connect grammatical sentences with their proper meanings, chunks of mentalese. We know that the sentence shown above is about a girl, not a boy, eating ice cream, and a boy, not a girl, eating hot dogs, and we know that the boy’s snack is contingent on the girl’s, not vice versa. That is because
girl
and
ice cream
are connected inside their own phrase, as are
boy
and
hot dogs
, as are the two sentences involving the girl. With a chaining device it’s just one damn word after another, but with a phrase structure grammar the connectedness of words in the tree reflects the relatedness of ideas in mentalese. Phrase structure, then, is one solution to the engineering problem of taking an interconnected web of thoughts in the mind and encoding them as a string of words that must be uttered, one at a time, by the mouth.

One way to see how invisible phrase structure determines meaning is to recall one of the reasons mentioned in Chapter 3 that language and thought have to be different: a particular stretch of language can correspond to two distinct thoughts. I showed you examples like
Child’s Stool Is Great for Use in Garden
, where the single word
stool
has two meanings, corresponding to two entries in the mental dictionary. But sometimes a whole sentence has two meanings, even if each individual word has only one meaning. In the movie
Animal Crackers
, Groucho Marx says, “I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” Here are some similar ambiguities that accidentally appeared in newspapers:

The two meanings in each sentence come from the different ways in which the words can be joined up in a tree. For example, in
discuss sex with Dick Cavett
, the writer put the words together according to the tree below (“PP” means prepositional phrase): sex is what is to be discussed, and it is to be discussed with Dick Cavett.

The alternative meaning comes from our analyzing the words according to the tree at the right: the words
sex with Dick Cavett
form a single branch of the tree, and sex with Dick Cavett is what is to be discussed.

Phrase structure, clearly, is the kind of stuff language is made of. But what I have shown you is just a toy. In the rest of this chapter I will try to explain the modern Chomskyan theory of how language works. Chomsky’s writing are “classics” in Mark Twain’s sense: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. When I come across one of the countless popular books on mind, language, and human nature that refer to “Chomsky’s deep structure of meaning common to all human languages” (wrong in two ways, we shall see), I know that Chomsky’s books of the last twenty-five years are sitting on a high shelf in the author’s study, their spines uncracked, their folios uncut. Many people want to have a go at speculating about the mind but have the same impatience about mastering the details of how language works that Eliza Doolittle showed to Henry Higgins in
Pygmalion
when she complained, “I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady in a flower shop.”

For nonspecialists the reaction is even more extreme. In Shakespeare’s
The Second Part of King Henry VI
, the rebel Dick the Butcher speaks the well-known line “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Less well known is the second thing Dick suggests they do: behead Lord Say. Why? Here is the indictment presented by the mob’s leader, Jack Cade:

And who can blame the grammarphobe, when a typical passage from one of Chomsky’s technical works reads as follows?

All this is unfortunate. People, especially those who hold forth on the nature of mind, should be just plain curious about the code that the human species uses to speak and understand. In return, the scholars who study language for a living should see that such curiosity can be satisfied. Chomsky’s theory need not be treated by either group as a set of cabalistic incantations that only the initiated can mutter. It is a set of discoveries about the design of language that can be appreciated intuitively if one first understands the problems to which the theory provides solutions. In fact, grasping grammatical theory provides an intellectual pleasure that is rare in the social sciences. When I entered high school in the late 1960s and electives were chosen for their “relevance,” Latin underwent a steep decline in popularity (thanks to students like me, I confess). Our Latin teacher Mrs. Rillie, whose merry birthday parties for Rome failed to slow the decline, tried to persuade us that Latin grammar honed the mind with its demands for precision, logic, and consistency. (Nowadays, such arguments are more likely to come from the computer programming teachers.) Mrs. Rillie had a point, but Latin declensional paradigms are not the best way to convey the inherent beauty of grammar. The insights behind Universal Grammar are much more interesting, not only because they are more general and elegant but because they are about living minds rather than dead tongues.

Let’s start with nouns and verbs. Your grammar teacher may have had you memorize some formula that equated parts of speech with kinds of meanings, like

But as in most matters about language, she did not get it quite right. It is true that most names for persons, places, and things arc nouns, but it is not true that most nouns are names for persons, places, or things. There are nouns with all kinds of meanings:

Likewise, though words for things being done, such as
count
and
jump
, are usually verbs, verbs can be other things, like mental states (
know, like
), possession (
own, have
), and abstract relations among ideas
(falsify, prove)
.