theory of language thus constructed enables us to explain, even if abstractly
and indirectly, the grammatical phenomena of natural languages. And, in this
respect, there is, as I have suggested, an involution in the Chomskyan research
programme. In its initial versions, it offered rich perspectives for explaining
grammatical phenomena, with significant paedagogical spin offs. In its latest
version, it has completely abandoned these empirical ambitions (natural
languages are no longer relevant objects) for increasingly abstract considerations,
whose relation to linguistic phenomena is ever more uncertain.
Nor shall we be shocked by the idea that language is specific to the human
species, that it assumes a ‘biological endowment’: chimpanzees do not speak
(I am grossly over-simplifying: experts know that they possess forms of
communication perfectly adapted to the needs of the species). But it is equally
clear that there is no language without social practice, that language is imposed
on its speaker in social interaction, and that, by this token, it must be learnt.
We are therefore dealing with a gradient extending from the innate to the
acquired.
Empiricists, for whom virtually everything is acquired, will concede that
chimpanzees do not speak; and will also accept that, after a certain age,
language-learning is no longer possible. (This is true of wolf children, which
is less simple than it appears when considered in detail: if Victor of Aveyron
was abandoned to the wilderness, it was possibly precisely because he was
already displaying signs of mental handicap.) Chomskyan rationalists, for
whom virtually everything is innate, will concede that Chinese babies do not
speak English, but will argue that the rules of grammar, even the most detailed
among them (e.g., as we shall see, the grammar of reciprocal pronouns), are
innate and need only be triggered: they are always ‘under-determined’ by
experience. Marxism, for which language is in the first instance a social
phenomenon, and which does not believe in human nature, will tend to
sympathise with the empiricist position: general learning capacities, bound
up with the development of the human brain, which, like the hand, has a
history, suffice to explain the apparent under-determination of linguistic
competence by the experience of interlocution.
But sympathising with the empiricist position is not enough. The
presuppositions involved in the innate/acquired opposition must also be
criticised. It will be noted that both empiricists and rationalists adopt the
standpoint of the individual, the individual speaker: whether the child is a
Critique of Linguistics • 23