phenomena is more complex than Chomsky allows, this universal grammar
is threatened with assuming a Byzantine complexity and hence lacking
credibility.
There are three troubling things about this text. It multiples the use of
hedges (‘appear to hold’, ‘so it seems’), which actually signal generalisations
that are not justified by the facts. The vagueness of its formulations goes
beyond what is justified by the nature of the text: Chomsky has a few pages
in which to set out his theory and so we should not expect detailed analyses
from him. To his credit, he seeks to conclude with a concrete example. However,
his analysis is not only vague, but it sometimes ignores the facts and sometimes
contradicts them. In so doing, it places the bar very high: innate grammar
does not only concern very general and highly abstract phenomena, but
extremely precise grammatical rules, like those governing reciprocal pronouns.
If it can be shown that these rules do not really cover French – a language
which is nevertheless typologically close to English – the Chomskyan monad
will have the same complexity as its Leibnizian cousin and will require some
transcendence to become philosophically credible. For, even if the detail of
the linguistic phenomena – what differentiates French from English – is
attributed to local parameters rather than universal principles, either these
parameters are innate, and the human brain contains in its innermost recesses
the totality of human languages, past, present and future; or they are not
only triggered by experience, but determined by it – that is, acquired by the
speaker. In the latter case, the imbalance between the acquired and the innate
is reversed in favour of the acquired and, in order to explain the innate
dimension of language, we only need some general human capacity for
learning, which means that the offspring of human beings have more talent
in this domain than those of chimpanzees (this, roughly speaking, was Piaget’s
position). I must therefore compare Chomsky’s ‘rules’ with the facts, and not
only those of the English language.
This is the sticking point, for the phenomena do not live up to Chomsky’s
expectations: the grammar of the reciprocal pronoun is not the same in French
as in English. While Chomsky’s native speakers observe these rules without
ever erring (which seems to me a decidedly hazardous generalisation), my
francophone students commit such ‘errors’ and find it difficult to distinguish
between sentences (6) and (7) on the one hand and (8) and (9) on the other.
Perhaps this is due to the fact that they have not been exposed to the English
language before the age of eleven – too late for the parameters to be triggered.
Critique of Linguistics • 29