The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky Read Free Book Online Page A

fundamental respects. Every infant does. So, somehow, these things are there. They show up in language; whether they are ‘there’ independently of language, we have no way of knowing. We don't have any way of studying them – or very few ways, at least.
    We can study some things about conceptual development apart from language, but they have to do with other things, such as perception of motion, stability of objects, things like that. It's interesting, but pretty superficial as compared with whatever those concepts are. So the question whether it came from language seems beyond our investigation capacities; we can't understand infant thought very far beyond that.
    But then the question is, where did it come from? You can imagine how a genetic mutation might have givenMerge, but how does it give our concept of psychic identity as the defining property of entities? Or many other such properties quite remote from experience.
    JM: I've sometimes speculated about whether or not lexical concepts might be in some way or another generative. It seems plausible on the face of it – it offers some ways of understanding it .
    NC: The ones that have been best studied are not the ones we have been talking about – the ones that are [sometimes] used [by us] to refer to the world, [such as WATER and RIVER,] but the relational ones, such as the temporal[ly relational] ones – stative versus active verbs[, for example] – or relational concepts, concepts involving motion, the analogies between space and time, and so on. There is a fair amount of interesting descriptive work [done on these]. But these are the parts of the semantic apparatus that are fairly closely syntactically related, so [in studying them] you're really studying a relational system that has something of a syntactic character.
    The point where it becomes an impasse is when you ask, how is any of this used to talk about the world – the traditional question of semantics. Just about everything that is done – let's suppose everything – in formal semantics or linguistic semantics or theory of aspect, and so on, is almost all internal [and syntactic in the broad sense]. It would work the same if there weren't any world. So you might as well put the brain in a vat, or whatever. And then the question comes along, well look, we use these to talk about the world; how do we do it? Here, I think, philosophers and linguists and others who are in the modern intellectual tradition are caught in a kind of trap, namely, the trap that assumes that there is areference relation.[C]
    I've found it useful and have tried to convince others – without success – to think of it on an analogy withphonology. The same question arises. All the work in phonology is internal [to the mind/brain]. You do assume that narrow phonetics gives some kind of instructions to the articulatory and auditory system – or whatever system you're using for externalization. But that's outside of the faculty of language. It's so crazy that nobody suggests that there is a sound–symbol relation; nobody thinks that the symbol æ , let's say(“a” in cat ), picks out some mind-external object. You could play the game that philosophers do; you could say that there's a four-dimensional construct of motions of molecules that is the phonetic value of æ . And then æ picks that out, and when I say æ (or perhaps cat ) you understand it because it refers to the same four-dimensional construct. That's so insane that no one – well, almost no one, as you know – does it. What actually happens – this is well understood – is that you give instructions to, say, your articulatory apparatus and they convert it into motions of molecules in different ways in different circumstances, and depending on whether you have a sore throat or not, or whether you're screaming, or whatever. And somebody else interprets it if they are close enough to you in their internal language and their conception of the world and