Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 79

Coming from the work on the blind child, I had another interesting experience. I said to Henry Gleitman, one of the most thoughtful people I know, “Look! So much for your empiricist ideas! A blind child understands the meaning of the words look and see.” He says, “Well, that's really fantastic. How did she learn them?”

I said, “Heh. You and your—. I don't have to answer that question, really, it's—.” And then I thought, Uh‐oh. I decided to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge to visit Noam Chomsky, a person of an entirely different persuasion, and a friend of mine, of course, by that time. And maybe I'll get some help in thinking about this. I told Chomsky, “The first verbs in a blind child's vocabulary include look and see!” He says, “Wow! That's fantastic! How did she learn them?”

Oh my God. When Henry Gleitman and Noam Chomsky are asking me the same question I'm really, really in trouble. Noam says to me, “Well, it couldn't have been by magic!”

There are a number of questions that really have to be asked at this point. Where did the kid come up with the concept of looking? How do you know that the word look is the word for looking – which is approximately “apprehend” despite the fact that its usage, for the blind, requires touching? What led the blind three‐year‐old to distinguish looking and touching?

That's when my memories as a linguist, and conversations with Barbara Landau, brought back “chains of transformations” and The Great Verb Game. If you can't learn the meaning of see by seeing, perhaps its sense reveals itself in the syntactic structures it licenses. This hypothesis turns on the following idea. If sentence structures are projected from their semantics, then to some extent the semantics itself may be recoverable from the observed surface syntactic forms. Just Harris's position! In fact, such a theory may not be merely a fallback used by the sensorily deprived, but a general clue to the acquisition of word meanings, for almost every word is abstract and mind‐driven and requires more than observation of the world to understand.

Indeed, we discovered that the verbs of cognition and perception as used by the mother to her blind child crucially included sentence complements such as Let's see if there's cheese in the refrigerator. In contrast, Let's touch if there's cheese in the refrigerator never occurred. And it's by using this information that the congenitally blind child learns to “see.”

That's basically the answer. You could now reverse‐engineer it. That is, if you knew about how languages must map from semantics to syntax, and somebody gave you the syntax, you ought to be able to reconstruct something about the semantics, down to some level.

And that's what we called “syntactic bootstrapping,” a term which I invented to mock my good friend Steve Pinker's “semantic bootstrapping” (Pinker 1984). Pinker, who was right in many ways, was saying that you can acquire the syntactic structures by understanding the semantics. But everything I was doing was saying you can't, because that semantics business that he thinks you should have first isn't so easy. While Pinker's premise was false in part, there's something deep in his work about how the syntax–semantics correspondence can help you learn semantics. We get the main clues from what we learned from the deaf and the blind – that you can exploit that correspondence from the other end. At the point where verb learning is going on, enough syntax is accessible for the child to perceive. And from that, if you're a creature endowed in a certain way by nature, you can make a very good guess about the semantics of the verb in a sentence.

Here is an important detail. A verb will occur in several syntactic environments, some with varying numbers of arguments. So one can say, I gave a book to John, or I gave at the office, or I gave cash. But the maximal number of arguments semantically partitions the verb set in useful ways.

Of course this is complicated. But you know, infants aren't just infants; they're smart [laughter]. Right? So the relationship between number of arguments and number of NPs – there's something natural about it. And the same is true for the relation between sentence complementation and words like look and see, since we can perceive both objects and states of affairs. Therefore, just as in the original Great Verb Game, listener‐learners require several framing structures to retrieve the semantics of individual words.

[Mark: Is it fair to say that your syntactic bootstrapping theory is sort of a redemption of Zellig Harris's syntactic discovery procedures on the basis of transformational relations among sentence frames?] Right! Exactly. Because as a child, you don't get to hear underlying structures. You hear some form of a surface sentence. And you have to do something with it. So, yes, I think it's basically Zellig Harris rediscovered, redeemed, and put to purposes which he would hate [laughter].

But how else would you really understand Harris's theory? Here's how Harris expressed it: “You know, you really put together a grammar by intuition. But to have a theory you have to show that it could be mechanically invented.” You have to show that you could have done it algorithmically. A machine could have invented it. That was his story. And that machine which could have invented it is the theory of language.

Well, I believe that too, but I believe that's the language acquisition device, fondly referred to as Universal Grammar.

{The following Sections from original article have been omitted here:

 sec 5. TAKING THE THEORY INTO THE LABORATORY

 sec 6. THE HUMAN SIMULATION PARADIGM

 sec 7. EASY WORDS: FIRST STEPS IN ACQUIRING THE LEXICON

 sec 8. CONCEPTS

 sec 9. WHORF: DO CONCEPTS COME FROM LANGUAGE ITSELF?}