The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler Read Free Book Online Page A

does not say, 'The dog kicked the
postman', though he might say, 'Doggy was kicked by the postman'; and again, he will not say, 'Was the dog kicked by
the postman?', and least of all, 'Dog the by was the kicked postman'.
     
     
This was an example of a very simple sentence consisting of four words
only ('the' being used twice). Yet a change of the order of two words
gave a totally different meaning; a more radical reshuffling, with two
new words added, left the meaning unaltered; and most of the ninety-five
possible permutations of the original words give no meaning at all. The
problem is how a child ever learns the several thousand abstract rules and
corollaries necessary to generate and comprehend meaningful sentences --
rules which his parents would be unable to name and define; which you and
I are equally unable to define; and which nevertheless unfalteringly
guide our speech. The few rules of grammar which the child learns
at school long after it has learned to speak correctly -- and
which it promptly forgets, are descriptive statements about language,
not recipes to generate language. These recipes, or formulae, the
child somehow discovers by intuitive processes -- probably not unlike
the unconscious inferences which go into scientific discovery -- by
the time it has reached the age of four. By that time 'he will have
mastered very nearly the entire complex and abstract structure of the
English language. In slightly more than two years, therefore [starting at
about the age of two] children acquire full knowledge of the grammatical
system of their native tongue. This stunning intellectual achievement
is routinely performed by every pre-school child (McNeill [6])'. As
another renegade Behaviourist, Professor James Jenkins, remarked at
our Stanford seminar: 'The fact that we can freely produce sentences
we had never heard before is amazing. The fact that we can understand
them when produced is nothing short of miraculous. . . . A child never
has a look at the machinery that produces English sentences. He could never have a look at that machinery. Nor is he being told
about it since most speakers are completely unaware of it.'
     
     
The facts must indeed appear miraculous so long as we persist in confusing
the string of words which is speech, with the silent machinery which
generates speech. The difficulty is that the machinery is invisible,
its working mostly unconscious, beyond the reach of inspection and introspection. But at least psycholinguistics has shown that the only
conceivable model to represent the generation of a sentence does not work
'from left to right', but hierarchically, branching from the top downward.
     
     
The diagram below is a slightly modified version of Noam
Chomsky's so-called 'phrase-structure generating grammar'.*
This is about the simplest schema for generating a sentence.
     
* Chomsky did not claim that it shows how a sentence is actually
     produced, but observational analysis of how small children learn
     to speak (by Roger Brown [7], McNeill [8] and others) has confirmed
     that the model represents the basic principles involved.
     

     
     
At the apex of the inverted tree is /I/ -- it might be an Idea, a visual
Image, the Intention of saying something -- which is not yet verbally
articulated . Let us call this the /I/ stage.* Then the two main branches
of the tree shoot out: the doer and his doing, which at the /I/ stage
were still experienced as an indivisible unit, are split up into different
speech categories: noun-phrase and verb-phrase.** This separation must be
a tremendous feat of abstraction for the child -- how can you separate the
cat from the grin, or the kick from the postman? -- yet it is a universal
property of all known languages; and it is precisely with this feat of
'abstract thinking' that the child starts its adventures in language at
a very early age -- in languages as different as Japanese and English. [9]
     
* Chomsky calls the apex S, standing for the whole