How you think about language is wrong (Part 2)
We're breaking down the last two linguistic facts of life (Lippi-Green) and answering the questions: How do linguists view grammar? Are all languages inherently equal?
Last week, we learned three linguistic facts of life (Lippi-Green):
All living languages change.
Variation is natural to all living languages.
Written and spoken languages are completely different.
This week, we’re wrapping up the introduction of the ways that linguists approach language.
But that’s not all we’re doing.
As I was writing this newsletter, I kept bringing up language being rule-governed. I realized that it could help to have a section, which explores some of the origins of why linguists focus on language being rule-governed. And I can’t really do that without mentioning Noam Chomsky.
Being honest, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to include a deep-dive into Chomsky, especially in the second-ever newsletter. I had a bit of an inner conflict. I named this newsletter after a Translanguaging theory because it is to-date one of my favorite approaches to language.
Chomsky, on the other hand, approaches language in a completely different way.
The thing is, he was the main character in my undergraduate linguistics courses and was often talked about like “the person who started modern linguistics.”
Why I’m bringing up his entire theory and approach to language is for three reasons: 1.) It’s undeniable that Chomsky changed the field and influenced thousands of research papers, so it’s important to have a clear idea of his work; 2.) Because of reason 1, his ideas have influenced many language ideologies of non-linguists, too; 3.) It’s important to give you a solid foundation of Chomskyan linguistics before I start criticizing it.
Here’s my attempt at an unbiased review of Chomsky’s most-famous theories and ideas:
The Mythical Nature of Language
Chomsky was fascinated by human language: How is it that humans are the only species of animals that can create intricate thoughts in their minds, transmit these thoughts to the person they’re speaking to, and then have that person understand the message and then respond to the original message with another unique message—all within seconds?
It’s kind of nuts.
That’s not the only thing that Chomsky thought was crazy. He thought it was crazy how quickly and reliably babies learn language.
He created this whole theory around it: the poverty of the stimulus.
Babies simply do not have enough stimulus (in this case, language) to account for the fact that by the time they’re four years old they’re forming full-on sentences and speaking with more-or-less flawless grammar. How do they do it?
There’s another thing, Chomsky thought.
It’s not just that the babies learn language with remarkable speed, but there’s uniformity—it doesn’t matter whether the baby is intelligent or motivated. If the baby is surrounded by human language, the baby will acquire human language.
Pretty crazy stuff.
And then there’s the key point that drove all of these theories: Language appears to be extremely rule-governed.
You can give a group of ten “native” speakers1 a grammaticality test and they will all answer in a predictable way.
Even stranger, “native” speakers can encounter sentences that they have never heard before, and consistently gauge whether the sentences are grammatical.
Here’s his classic example:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Semantically (meaning wise), it makes absolutely no sense—he just strung words together and formed a sentence.
Syntactically (structure wise), it’s perfect.
“Native” speakers will always say that the above quote is far more grammatical than:
Sleep furiously, green ideas colorless.
Or any other combination for that matter.
They’ve never heard these sentences before. And yet, they know which one is more grammatical.
How?
The theory
The answer that Chomsky arrived to is that humans must be hard-wired with an ability to acquire language.
Clearly, a child who has learned a language has developed an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how sentences are to be formed, used, and understood, (Chomsky, 1965, p. 25).
That’s the only possible solution.
There must be something in our brain, which he calls a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), that includes the grammar rules for all the languages of the world (what he calls Universal Grammar). As babies, the LAD narrows down on the language it picks up on (our first language) and helps us acquire it.2 As we get older, we have less and less access to the LAD.
So, when we’re all learning language, it’s not that we’re starting from scratch.
It’s that the LAD has rules that are activated when we’re babies and hear our first language. It helps us acquire the language quickly and uniformly.
And, Chomsky believes, it must be the job of linguists to figure out all the structures that are inside of the LAD—to discover Universal Grammar.3 To do this, they must study those who have best access to the LAD—“monolingual” “native” speakers of the language:4
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3)
Like the quote shows, sure, “native” speakers make mistakes when speaking. They might get distracted or stutter.
But to explain this, Chomsky differentiates between speakers’ performance of language—the error-prone language that comes out of their mouths—and their competence in the language—the rules they must know of their language.
The job of linguists, to Chomsky, is to study competency.
There’s a lot more that we could talk about Chomsky5, but this gives you a basic idea of his theory.
While there’s disagreement among linguists about the existence of the LAD, the idea that “native” speakers have the greatest competency, the goals of linguistics, etc., most linguists agree that language does appear to be governed by rules.
Back to Lippi-Green
So, the fourth linguistic fact of life is that “grammaticality does not equal communicative effectiveness,” (p. 10).
First, she highlights the ways that linguists and non-linguists think about grammar.
To most non-linguists, grammar is something you learn in school. There’s rules, there’s textbooks filled with the rules—now go learn them!
Many linguists, however, think of grammar as a rule-driven structure of language.6
So, if we take an example like:
“I might could stop at the store on the way home.”
A non-linguist might say that’s ungrammatical because it uses two modal verbs.
However, a linguist wouldn't judge the language based on already existing rules—they would look at how language is being used by other speakers in that community.
In the U.S. South, there are many communities which use double modals. Might could is used to mean “might be willing."
Everyone uses it. It’s totally grammatical.
So, for a linguist, it’s enough to ask a group of “native” speakers: Would you say this? If they all say yes, that means it is, in fact, grammatical.
Then, what’s the grammar taught in school?
The thing taught in school, linguists would call “socially constructed grammar.” Similar to the section on written language last week, this grammar is viewed by linguists as unnatural. It’s simply the language of the elite, which is being used as the standard.
Good communication does not come from grammaticality
Lippi-Green is saying that grammaticality does not equal communicative effectiveness. This means that something can be grammatical and not communicate an idea. Likewise, something can be perceived by non-linguists as ungrammatical and communicate an idea effectively.
Take Chomsky’s colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
It’s grammatical because it follows the rules of English. However, no idea is being communicated. It’s gibberish.
Whether something is grammatical is separate from whether an idea is being communicated or not.
Grammatical judgments often come from social judgments about language
Parents “correct” children, not because of actual grammar (i.e. their prepositions are behind their noun phrases), but in terms of socially constructed grammar.
From my own life: “Don’t speak Spanglish. Speak in either English or Spanish.” Spanglish is rule-governed, but socially stigmatized. My parents corrected the form (language) even when my message was clear.
I was communicating a message effectively. I was using what a linguist would consider rule-governed grammar. Yet, it was perceived as incorrect due to socially constructed grammar that says that mixing languages is bad.
A lesson from linguistics
One of the key lessons I think linguistics can teach is this: Speakers know their language. You don’t need to teach or correct them.
There’s simply too many varieties of English for you to know with one hundred percent accuracy that your correction is right.
The key take-away from Lippi-Green: Speakers often make fun of each other’s form (socially constructed grammaticality) instead of focusing on whether their message was communicated effectively.
So, what would a linguist consider ungrammatical?
If an English speaker said something like, “Market the is five minutes away about,” that’s completely ungrammatical.
Not because a book says so, but because placing a determiner after a noun and a preposition after a noun phrase goes against the rules of the English language.
The final linguistic fact of life
This is a short one. I’ll quote Lippi-Green, because she said it best:
All spoken languages are equal in linguistic terms (p. 8).
In all respects, all spoken languages are equal.
English is not better than other languages because it has more speakers and words.
The fact that English has so many speakers is just a sociopolitical outcome.
The fact that English has so many words doesn’t make it a better language. Even if languages differ in number of words, every language can express the same ideas.
For example, English might have dozens of synonyms for an emotion like happy. In a language that doesn’t have these synonyms, speakers might use adverbs to show the degree of happy.
I’m ecstatic = I’m really happy (same thing).
Likewise, languages can differ in what they can do with grammar. Several languages, for example, differentiate formal and informal registers through grammar.
Sure, English doesn’t have a tú-versus-usted equivalent, but English speakers just adapt by using different vocabulary (and grammar, etc.) in different settings.
We do the same thing, just a little differently.
Discussion
Thank you so much for reading this newsletter! Every message I received last week made me so happy and I’m so grateful to have you here! Let’s keep discussing:
Even if you have never studied Chomsky in a traditional sense, do his ideas sound familiar to you?
How would you define grammaticality?
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Works Cited
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. In Syntactic Structures. De Gruyter Mouton.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT press.
Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge.
I absolutely hate the term “native” speaker, but when discussing Chomsky, I need to use it because it’s very central to his argument.
As we get older, his theory goes, we lose access to Universal Grammar, which is one reason why second language acquisition is different than first language acquisition (again, according to Chomsky).
AKA let’s place syntax front and center. Things like sociolinguistics isn’t even really considered linguistics to Chomsky because he is only concerned with understanding the rules inside our brains in the LAD.
Maybe you understand now why I was having an inner conflict about talking about Chomsky.
If you’re interested in learning more about Chomsky, you can look up parameters versus principles to better understand what the LAD is theorized to be.
Many define language as “a rule governed system.” Compare that to the definition of languaging I have in my About page and you’ll realize how different the different approaches of language are.