COWEN: Moving chronologically through your
career, let me ask you a big‑picture question
about language.
I come to linguistics very much as an outsider.
Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar,
which is somehow built into the structures
of the human mind: in its early years there
seemed to be a promise of some very definite
accounting of what that structure would be.
After a while it seemed to collapse into this
very general idea of recursion, which to me
as an economist seems almost tautological.
If I came away from this debate and then I
read people writing within popular science:
“Today language is a number of different
capacities brought together.
They’re independent and just combined with
our ability to divine meaning from others.”
Could it be the case that Chomsky’s hypothesis
was simply wrong?
2016, I know your books, but what’s your
take on that today?
PINKER: It’s not easy to pin down what the
hypothesis is, partly because Chomsky himself
revises his theory every decade or so, on
a principle of Mao’s Continuous Revolution.
Just never let people settle into any kind
of comfortable consensus.
[laughter]
PINKER: It’s a moving target.
Also, as you say, it was neither specified
in a precise way nor field‑tested against
a dataset of language variation, which I think
is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific
practice.
Linguistics is an eccentric field in some
ways partly because it was so polarized by
a charismatic figure [Noam Chomsky] and his
opponents that it didn’t proceed in the
ordinary direction of making the theory more
precise, more testable.
With that caveat in mind, I think there is
such a thing as, you can call it “universal
grammar” in the following sense: that the
child is biased to analyze the speech that
he or she hears in particular ways.
It does not simply record sentences verbatim.
That’s the memory half of the language system,
but the algorithmic or computational or rule‑governed
half tries to pull out combinatorial rules
from the speech stream.
There are certain kinds of rules and elements
that a child is keyed to look for.
That set of abilities would be what I would
call (if I used the term) universal grammar.
There are commonalities across the world’s
languages that come from the fact that language
is created anew every generation by the minds
of the children who construct it out of the
data that they get from their parents and
peers.
