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

understanding of circumstances, and so on; to that extent, they can interpret what you are saying. It's a more-or-less affair. Everyone assumes that that is the way the sound side of language works.
    So why shouldn't themeaning side of language work like that: no semantics at all – that is, noreference relation – just syntactic instructions to the conceptual apparatus which then acts? Now – once you're in the conceptual apparatus and action – you're in the domain of human action. And whatever the complexities of human action are, the apparatus – sort of – thinks about them in a certain way. And other people who are more or less like us or think of themselves in the same way, or put themselves in our shoes, get a passably good understanding of what we're trying to say. It doesn't seem that there's any more than that.[C]
    Supplemental material from interview 20 January 2009
     
    JM: I'll switch to what you called “semantic information” in a lecture in 2007 at MIT on the perfection of the language system and elsewhere. You mentioned that at the semanticinterface (SEM) of the language faculty, you got two kinds of semantic information, one concerning argument structure that you assumed to be due to external Merge, and another kind of information concerning topic, scope, and new information – matters like these – that you assumed to be due to internal Merge .
    NC: Well, pretty closely. There are arguments to the contrary, such as NorbertHornstein's theory of control, which says that you pick up theta roles. So I don't want to suggest that it's a closed question by any means, but if you adopt a god-like point of view that you sort of expect that if you're going to have two different kinds of Merge, that they should be doing different things. I don't have proof. But the data seem to suggest that it's pretty close to true, so close to true that it seems too much of an accident. The standard cases for argument structure are for external Merge, and the standard cases of discourse orientation and stuff like that are from internalMerge.
    JM: It's a very different kind of information .
    NC: It's very different, and if we knew enough aboutanimal thought, I suspect that we would find that the external Merge parts may even be in some measure common to primates. You can probably find things like actor-action schema with monkeys. But they can't do very much with it; it's like some kind of reflection of things that they perceive. You see it in terms of Cudworth-style properties, Gestalt properties, causal relations; it's a way of perceiving.
    JM: Events with n-adic properties – taking various numbers of arguments, and the like .
    NC: Yes, that kind of thing. And that may just be what external Merge gives you. On the other hand, there's another kind of Merge around, and if it's used, it's going to be used for other properties. Descriptively, it breaks down pretty closely to basic thematic structure on the one hand, and discourse orientation, information structure, scopal properties, and so on, on the other.
    JM: It looks like pragmatic information . . .
    NC: After all, the interface is semantic-pragmatic.[C]
    There is a lot of discussion these days of Dan Everett's work with a Brazilian language,Pirahã – it's described in the New Yorker , among other places. David Pesetsky has a long paper on it with a couple of other linguists [(Nevins, Pesetsky, Rodrigues 2007 )], and according to them, it's just like other languages. It's gotten into the philosophical literature too. Some smart people – a very good English philosopher wrote a paper about it. It's embarrassingly bad. He argues that this shows that it underminesUniversal Grammar, because it shows that language isn't based on recursion. Well, if Everett were right, it would show that Pirahã doesn't use the resources that Universal Grammar makes available. But that's as if you found a tribe of people somewhere who crawled instead of walking. They see other people