(1) He painted the house brown.
And he concludes his analysis as follows:
The fact that a brown house has a brown exterior, not interior, appears to
be a language universal, holding of ‘container’ words of a broad category,
including ones we might invent: box, airplane, igloo, lean-to, etc. To paint a
spherical cube brown is to give it a brown exterior.^10This is part of a more general claim that ‘concepts are fixed’^11 – that is, they
belong to the innate universal grammar of the I-language. The argument
offered in support of this is the usual one: our rate of lexical acquisition is
too rapid to be explained other than by the unfolding of innate capacities;
we understand immediately and, in one go, nuances of meaning that are
much more subtle than those registered by the most comprehensive dictionary.
Over and above the fact that I find this argument utterly unconvincing (it
in no way corresponds to my experience of learning the vocabulary of a
foreign language, or to that of my students: Chomsky will respond that we
are too old and that, after the age of eight, the triggering does not occur), I
find it difficult to accept that concepts – even the most simple among them,
like ‘house’ (in contrast to theoretical concepts like ‘surplus-value’ or ‘subject’) –
are ‘fixed’ in Chomsky’s sense. Chomsky’s claim is that what is fixed is not
the concept ‘house’ itself, but a considerably more abstract concept of
‘container’, which serves as a superordinate for the names of all possible
containers. And he will indicate the vagueness of this abstraction by specifying
that the container is typically seen from the outside, as shown by the contrast
between my initial utterance and the following one:
(2) He painted his cave in red ochre.
But this is a perceptual, not a linguistic, contrast: certain container objects
are typically or primarily perceived from the outside, others from the inside.
The house pertains to the former category, the grotto or flat to the latter. The
choice is determined by the position of the speaker’s body in relation to the
object. What Chomsky describes is not a linguistic universal, but a feature of
experience, as determined by the orientation of my body in space: this is
what is inscribed and represented in language. Lakoff and Johnson’s theory
Critique of Linguistics • 25(^10) Chomsky 2000, p. 35.
(^11) Chomsky 2000, p. 120.