Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 72

From the beginning of my graduate school days I was exposed to the best of the best among linguists: Zellig Harris and his greatest student, Noam Chomsky, who had just moved to MIT when we met. They represent, at least to my understanding, two opposed trends in the study of language and its learner‐users. Harris was the pinnacle of structuralists, {believing} that what you saw (rather: heard) was what you got, and to my mind is the father of “big data” analysis as it appears in the current computational and psychological literature. For him, the sole legitimate approach was relative‐distributional analysis, and his theoretical aim, in these terms, was to find mechanical procedures that moved theory from phoneme to morpheme, thence to phrase, thence to sentence, and finally to connected discourse (Harris 1951, 1952).

One obstacle to identifying principles of coherent discourse was that sentences with the same information content could have very different syntactic structures. {Chomsky's} big step toward a solution was to render all sentences in a normal or “kernel” form, removing optional variations in form and style while preserving content. The relations by which one could get to the kernel forms of sentences were what was first known as “transformations.” One might think of this bottom‐up analysis as a proposal about how language acquisition works. That's how I understood it, but certainly and emphatically not how Harris {did}. He disdained “psychologizing” and meant to describe “language,” rather than the activities or acquirers of such a system.

In my first year of graduate school with Harris, I concretized my own idiosyncratic understanding of the Harrisian point of view in a game – perhaps, more correctly, an evangelical demonstration – which I called The Great Verb Game. It was designed to show that one could recover a specific verb, or small cluster, just from an enumeration of the surface structures in which it appeared. I would think up some “mystery verb” and write it down, covering it. The “players” were to guess it from hearing, essentially, subcategorization frames. So, after a little instruction, the player hears/sees the frame N1 V N2 from N3 and is to come up with an example (say, take: John took candy from the baby). Next the player was offered another such frame, understood to be a paraphrase or entailment of the first, maybe N1 V N3 from N2. Notice that take will not work in this second case ( John took the baby from the candy); it won't preserve meaning or might even be ungrammatical. So the player revises her guess. After a couple more clue frames, such as N2 V from N3, and N1 V N2 and N3 (and if the players are smart undergraduates or other verbal whizzes), they come up with the (or a) verb that survives this winnowing‐down procedure (in the present case, separate). Turning over my card, I now triumphantly show them “my” verb, hoping to convince them that the meanings are embedded in the structure in some way. In my first year or two as Harris's graduate student, I tried to formalize these ideas in terms of some derivational web (“chains of Harrisian transformations”), but this turned out to be a false step. In later years, however, these ill‐formulated but interesting ideas returned to me in the context of studies in word‐meaning acquisition, as I'll mention. But in my first years, this bit of verbal legerdemain so amused audiences that I think this is what caused Swarthmore College to give me my first job.

For the most part, though, my views were rapidly changing because of contact with, and reading of, Noam Chomsky (Chomsky 1957, 1959, 1965). His thinking and findings began to suggest to me, and to a large following of younger scholars who began to surround him, that these surface sentences at the core of Harris's thinking were mere artifacts of an underlying innate system that was only indirectly reflected in our everyday speech forms. Even more importantly, I became convinced of that approach, bolstered by the preliminary findings emerging from my (and collaborators') earliest studies of language in infants and young children. From an autobiographical point of view, I was dragged kicking and screaming toward Chomsky's view, which offended my innately empiricist leanings. Anyhow, I'll now try to say something about the work I did with many brilliant younger collaborators and where it has led me over the years.