The EconomistAugust 24th 2019 Books & arts 692
Johnson Everyday superheroes
A new book spells out the magic of languageI
n “avengers: endgame”, a superhero
blockbuster, the baddy’s Infinity
Gauntlet gives him the power to snuff
out the universe with the snap of a finger.
This may sound impressive, but—al-
though few realise it—ordinary people
possess an infinite power, too: language.
Write a new sentence and Google it.
The chances are good that it appears
nowhere among the billions on the
internet. Steven Pinker, a professor of
linguistics, reckons a conservative esti-
mate of the number of grammatical,
20-word sentences a human might pro-
duce is at least a hundred million tril-
lion—far more than the number of grains
of sand on Earth. Most can easily be
made longer (try adding “She said that...”
to the beginning of any declarative sen-
tence). In theory, the only thing prevent-
ing this power from being literally in-
finite is the human lifespan: some
possible sentences would be too long to
say even in threescore years and ten.
This awesome talent is the subject of
a new book, “Language Unlimited” by
David Adger of Queen Mary University,
the president of the Linguistics Associa-
tion of Great Britain. Mr Adger does not
just celebrate language’s infinity. He
maintains that it is the distinct result of a
unique capacity, advancing a series of
arguments whose best-known exponent
is Noam Chomsky.
The book’s first, and strongest, claim
is that human language is different from
animal communication not just in
scope, but in kind. Most important, it is
hierarchical and nested in structure. A
highly trained bonobo called Kanzi can
obey commands such as “Give water [to]
Rose”. But Kanzi does no better than
random chance when told to “Give water
and lighter to Rose.” Meanwhile, a two-
year-old child tested alongside Kanzia widely cited paper called “The myth of
language universals”, which seemed to
find exceptions to other putatively uni-
versal rules. The paper said it was not
even clear that all the world’s languages
observed a noun-verb distinction; Mr
Adger counters with evidence that even
the supposed outliers pay some atten-
tion to this split.
Many of the universals that hold up
best are negative. There are many sen-
sible things languages could do, but
don’t. Notably, their grammars do not
make use of “continuous” features, such
as the length of vowels. For instance, a
past-tense verb could be pronounced for
a longer time to indicate how long ago
the action occurred—perfectly logical,
but no language does this. Syntax uses
discrete units, not continuous ones.
Whether this is proof of universality is a
matter of opinion.
Lastly, Mr Adger embraces the latest of
Mr Chomsky’s theories, “Merge”, a men-
tal function in which two units may be
joined to a larger one that can then be
operated on by the mind’s grammar-
processor. The two-year-old who beat
Kanzi could Merge “water and lighter”
and apply the verb to both; Kanzi seemed
to treat words like beads on a string,
rather than mentally grouping them into
bigger units in a structure.
Mr Chomsky thinks a single human
developed the ability to perform Merge
tens of thousands of years ago, and that
this is the only feature unique to human
language. Mr Adger does not explicitly
defend either of these claims. But his
tour of Chomskyan linguistics is enter-
taining and accessible—in contrast to Mr
Chomsky’s own notoriously baffling
prose. His book is a handy introduction
to a vexed debate on the infinite power of
the finite mortal mind.quickly intuits that two nouns can make
up a noun phrase, tucked as a direct object
into a verb phrase, which in turn is part of
a sentence. This “recursive” structure is
key to syntax.
The second claim is that language is
innate, not merely an extension of general
human intelligence. Fascinating evidence
comes from children who are deprived of
it. Deaf pupils at a school in Nicaragua,
having never shared a language with any-
one before, created a grammatically ornate
sign language on their own. A few deaf
children in a Mexican family devised a rich
sign system with complex grammatical
features found in spoken tongues: in their
“homesign”, nouns are preceded by a
“classifier”, a sign indicating their type,
just as they sometimes are in Chinese. It
seems the human mind simply cannot
help but deal in grammar.
A more controversial claim is that all
human languages share what Mr Chomsky
calls “universal grammar”. This proposi-
tion has taken some hard knocks. Whether
recursion is universal, for example, is
contested. In 2009 two linguists publishedhoped for a state containing as few Arabs as
possible. If they fled, fine; if they had to be
expelled, so be it. In public he sought to jus-
tify Israel’s actions (and his own) during
the fighting. Privately, says Mr Segev, the
Arab exodus haunted him: it was the moral
ambiguity at the heart of Israel’s existence.
Ben-Gurion dominated the new coun-
try’s politics into old age; his two stints as
prime minister amounted to over 13 years.
Mr Segev describes the fierce opposition to
two of his most important policies—secur-
ing German reparations for the Holocaust
and launching a nuclear-weapons pro-gramme. His achievements and energy
were undeniable—but so were his failings.
He had an authoritarian streak, wanting, in
Mr Segev’s words, to be a “Zionist Lenin”.
Politics took precedence over everything.
He treated Paula, his wife, shabbily; so dis-
tant was he from his family that he repeat-
edly asked his son how old he was. He had a
chip on his shoulder because, unlike the
rest of the Zionist elite, he lacked a univer-
sity degree. A restless autodidact, he col-
lected diverse books in several languages.
The dilemma of every biographer is
what to put in and what to leave out. Mr Se-gev’s focus is on Zionism and its politics;
the Arabs are mostly present as a problem,
the British hardly at all. (His earlier book,
“One Palestine, Complete”, superbly evokes
the years of British rule.) Even at more than
800 pages, the author has evidently found
it hard to squeeze everything that matters
into “A State at Any Cost”. The result,
though, is a masterly portrait of a titanic
yet unfulfilled man. If others paid a price
for Zionism’s success—the Arabs, his fam-
ily, the rivals he crushed—Ben-Gurion did,
too. This is a gripping study of power, and
the loneliness of power. 7