The (exaggerated) weakness of their position makes Everett’s supposed victory seem trivial. One comes away with an impression that Chomskyan syntacticians are a puerile bunch simply insisting that there is a literal, regional "language organ" in the brain despite having zero evidence for it. However, a more serious problem is that Wolfe’s portrait of the linguistic aspect of the issue is so superficial that participants on both sides of the debate end up looking silly. This part comes across as a disproportionately lengthy throat clearing. The entire first half of the book, for example, recounts Charles Darwin's grappling with the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace hit upon natural selection before him, but the connection between this and the Chomsky-Everett dustup is tenuous, at best. Passages like this are rife in the book and inevitably fun, but overall the book is a baggy splotch, seemingly a padded version of the section, focusing on Chomsky and Everett, that recently appeared in Harper’s. Besides, he didn't enjoy the outdoors, where "the field" was. They, not sacks of scattered facts, were the ultimate reality, the only true objects of knowledge. Only wearily could Chomsky endure traditional linguists who … thought fieldwork was essential and wound up in primitive places, emerging from the tall grass zipping their pants up.… What difference did it make, knowing all those native tongues? Chomsky made it clear he was elevating linguistics to the altitude of Plato's - and the Martian's - transcendental eternal universals. To Wolfe, Everett is a "rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair." In contrast, Chomsky and the gang are pale, computer-bound geeks: Wolfe casts Everett as the deus ex machina saving the world from a Chomsky whose hermetic linguistic geekery would have fooled no one without the reflected glory of his fame as a political pundit. Does the language of a small tribe in the Amazon upend Chomsky’s life’s work? Needless to say, Chomskyans didn’t like this. And since these tribespeople are Homo sapiens like everyone else, this absence proves that no universal grammar could exist. ("Recursion" is what lets you stack clauses to say something like, " The man / whose boat I saw / said / that he couldn’t imagine / why anyone would try that"). Chomsky famously believes that a Martian would see all 7,000 of the world’s languages as a single one - universal grammar - with variations.īut in 2005, linguist Daniel Everett, then at Illinois State University, announced that the language of a tiny group in the Amazon lacks a fundamental feature of Chomsky’s proposed universal grammar: "recursion," or the ability to nest ideas inside one another. Flip one this way and you get a language where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, flip it that way for languages like English where the verb sits in the middle of the sentence, and so on. ![]() One might object that languages seem to differ mightily also in how they put words together, but Chomsky hypothesizes that these differences all come down to a few "switches" that flip in a toddler’s brain. Unfortunately, while Wolfe, as always, certainly keeps you reading, he barely scratches the surface of the rich topic of linguistics, and winds up caricaturing both the man he wants to knock off the pedestal as well as the insurgent academics who have questioned the very premises of his approach to language.Īccording to Chomsky’s revolutionary view, first introduced the 1950s and early '60s, we need only learn which words our particular language uses for things the variation in vocabulary is trivial compared with the deep machinery of universal grammar. Wolfe mounts a grand debunking - attempting to take down not just Chomsky the linguist but, as collateral damage, Chomsky the left intellectual. To put it slightly more broadly, Wolfe’s topic is Noam Chomsky’s proposal that all humans are born with a sentence structure blueprint programmed in their brains, invariant across the species, and that each language is but a variation upon this "universal grammar" generated by an as-yet unidentified "language organ." In other words, we are born already knowing language. ![]() But the debate is considered by some linguists to be one of the most important in the social sciences, with implications for evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and "human nature" itself. ![]() Sound dull? On one level, it’s an intermural academic catfight - one that I confess I never expected to see cast in the behind-the-music format of Wolfe’s classics Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. ![]() Does he get the linguistics right? That’s the question many may expect a linguist to answer about Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, a chronicle in high Wolfean about - to put it narrowly - a debate between linguists about sentence structure.
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