It Is What It Says...

It's curious how Noam Chomsky [as linguist, particularly, rather than as political theorist] keeps cropping up in my daily discourse with the world. I studied Transformational Grammar [blog posts passim] as a module in my postgraduate studies at Bangor University [then University College of North Wales], back in 1980/81. My first impressions of his ideas were positive: his notion of 'poverty of stimulus' regarding language acquisition seemed logical and almost beguiling. According to him, there was no way that children could acquire language in all its effectively infinite variety and permutation via mere imitation; that there had to be an innate 'deep structure' of syntactical intuition only resident in the human brain, in order to create the infinite utterances that natural language affords.

His researches over the several decades before my student encounter with his theories were tellingly, in the early days at least, funded by the US Navy Department to develop machine translation for national security reasons. Where there's money, there's opportunity, and Chomsky's politics align rather more with mine than the American establishment's; so the dead-end his linguistic theories ended up in - in my estimation - may well have have been a deliberate ploy on behalf of one of the greatest left-wing political thinkers still breathing to throw the establishment off the scent whilst pocketing a large amount of cash in return. Who knows? Whatever the actuality of the motivations behind all of it - it could and most probably was ego, after all - his basic thesis proved to be full of holes.

I revisited the literature for current thinking on it several years after leaving Bangor - and it was obviously becoming a completely unworkable framework, botched with patch after patch to catch exception after exception to each and every rule: the basic 'rules' simply didn't work. And yet, even in 2025, in this week's TLS letters, I find at least two individuals tacitly defending the linguistically indefensible. Chomsky ignored or was simply unaware of the plasticity of the human brain, particularly in the infant - and as is more recently known to be the case, the unborn - and its capacity to ensure the survival of its owner by whatever means necessary, including the acquisition of language. First language acquisition is very much a trial and error process, as anyone who has had children will attest.

Every human language has developed a set of rules for and of itself, not always in common with other languages, and on occasion almost in total isolation from other languages. But that doesn't of necessity require an underlying proto-linguistic structure common to all humans, and rather than Chomsky's 'poverty of stimulus', the developing human is awash with stimuli that inform its gradual transformation into the social being it will become.The one piece of firmware that we as humans will never fathom the code of is that of our own intelligence. As I said in a recent post '... a lens is unable to focus on itself...' Chomsky is [still] a great and much-published thinker, and I have much admiration for him, but he just called the language thing wrong...