Free Flirting With French by William Alexander

language, and translate the Bible into that language). If there was interest in the origin and nature of language, it was largely relegated to the realm of psychology—until 1957, that is, when what is still remembered as “the event” shook up the sleepy world of linguistics.
    The event was the publication of
Syntactic Structures
by Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT. Chomsky’s book moved the discussion from vocabulary to syntax—that is, the fundamental rules of language—and raised an interesting question that, surprisingly, hadn’t been given a lot of thought until then: How is it that a young child, with limited cognitive development, can acquire such a complex, daunting skill as language? Especially considering that a toddler trying to make sense of the babble around him is surrounded not only by grammatically correct language but also by incorrect, incomplete, and garbled sentences (think of the Watergate tapes). Yet the child somehow learns the syntactic rules of language, that “John hit Mary” is not at all the same as the reversed “Mary hit John,” but that “John threw the ball to Mary”
does
mean the same as the reversed “John threw Mary the ball.” Language isn’t acquired from mere mimicry, Chomsky argued, or children wouldn’t say things like, “Tommy hitted me.”
    Furthermore, language involves combining a finite set of words into an infinite set of combinations and meanings, and Chomsky wondered how children are able to develop a rule system, not only for the finite sentences they’ve heard, but also for the infinite variations of sentences they haven’t heard. Here’s an interesting thing about language: Take nearly any sentence on this page, and chances are that this is the first time it’s appeared in print. Ever. Yet I was able to effortlessly compose each sentence, almost without thinking. (Let me rephrase that—without thinking about
syntax.
)
    This intrigued Chomsky. As did another question: How is it that all the languages of the world, even those that apparently have no common origin, have a common basic grammar, a similar set of rules for how language is constructed? Noam Chomsky’s answer to these mysteries of language, the theory that galvanized and divided the world of linguistics in 1957, is that humans are wired for language, are
born
with an innate ability to understand the basic rules of language: what Chomsky calls a universal grammar (UG), a “genetically determined . . . language acquisition device” in the human (and
only
the human) brain.
    Chomsky’s theory was so divisive that the first question a linguist at a convention in the 1960s was likely to be asked was, “Are you pro-Chomsky or anti-Chomsky?” The detractors claimed that Chomsky was essentially trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist; that children learn language from the adults around them; and that the common syntax of the world’s languages can be explained by a single, common origin of the world’s tongues. Plus, they maintained, the theory falls apart when you look at primitive languages in parts of the world Chomsky didn’t probe. There were also objections that the sudden appearance of UG in humans defied the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Yet studies done by, among others, psycholinguists Elissa Newport and Jenny Singleton on deaf children who, even though they weren’t exposed to a proper syntax and grammar, “intuitively” used American Sign Language correctly, support Chomsky.
    Fifty years after the publication of
Syntactic Structures,
Noam Chomsky’s controversial theories have become nearly universally accepted, as the focus of the research has moved from observational studies to the search for a human “language gene,” with some promising but as yet inconclusive results. So accepted is Chomsky’s work today that he is as much remembered for his left-of-center politics as for his groundbreaking linguistic theories. Yet his work continues to