I’m a little nervous talking to you about linguistics, as I feel like I’m walking into a minefield. as a topic, it is often very technical and people seem to have very strong opinions. Before I got to the books, I was wondering if you could provide a bit of background on linguistics as a field and what is the best way to approach it if, like me, you are a layperson who is interested but also a little scared.
I think there are a lot of strong opinions because language is something that we all feel is an intimate part of us. human beings are linguistic animals and we live in a sea of language. we all feel like we know it, because we use it every day. and I think then, when people present a scientific approach to what language is, it’s a natural reaction to say, ‘wait! I already know this. I use it every day. what do you mean it’s not what I think it is?’
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People tend to be very interested in questions about what is okay to say and what is not okay to say. for example, ‘don’t end sentences with prepositions!’ or: ‘what do you mean you are abbreviating words in your texts?’ people don’t like the language to change; they don’t like it to be different from what they expect it to be. while linguists are interested in describing what is going on and explaining it. so we get very excited when we see language change or rules broken. linguists simply have a very different attitude towards language than many people who are not professionally involved in thinking about it.
Why is linguistics technical and difficult to understand? I think that is related to what I just said. people think they know how the language works, so the minute you get a little technical about it, people tune out. people feel they can use the language well and know how it works. So why have all these fun math symbols or complicated statistics?
“the most important thing I wanted to convey, which is at the heart of linguistics, but which we don’t talk much about, is the amazing and creative use we can make of language”
but what modern linguistics has shown us is that language can be studied through the normal methods of science. you hypothesize. you test them. you do experiments you observe things that means it is technical, because science is technical.
and that’s really quite a challenge. I found language unlimited to be the hardest thing I’ve ever written, because it’s really hard to take these abstract things and make them accessible. our arguments in linguistics get very, not convoluted, but involved. they involve many steps. you’re saying, ‘okay, remember this and now remember that and now we’re setting this and then you put those two things together and you combine them with the first thing and then you get x’ and most people, at that point, are like, ‘I’m bored’. that’s another reason why people find linguistics intimidating sometimes, because it has that abstraction. abstraction also leads to technical terminology, which is jargon impenetrable to people who don’t know it.
In your book Language Unlimited, you write about being asked to invent a language for an ITV Beowulf series and how Parseltongue was developed for the Harry Potter movies. Additionally, it discusses an effort to write Moby Dick entirely in emoji, and whether emoji can be a universal language. what was the purpose of the book? Was it to introduce people to linguistics for the first time?
That’s what I had in mind when I started writing it. but then I realized that the most important thing I wanted to convey, which is at the heart of linguistics, but what we don’t really talk about much, is the surprising and creative use we can make of language. I started the book with an invitation to type a complete sentence in google quotes and see if anyone else had written the exact same thing. no one has come back to me yet saying that someone had written the same sentence. practically everything we say is new. we just have this amazing ability to use language creatively.
animals don’t do this. machines, like the kind of ais we build, don’t do this. but we do it, as part of who we are. How do we do it? What is it in us that allows us to have this amazing creative use of language?
is the field divided between for and against noam chomsky?
is much more complex than that. that’s what leaks out to the rest of the world, because chomsky is a well-known figure because of his politics. and he has been a controversial figure within linguistics. but many things that were controversial in the 1950s and 1960s, everyone agrees on now.
People in psychology, for example, used to think that if you had a word, the frequency with which that word is followed by other words will indicate which one is next. that will then tell you which one will be next and so on. no one really thinks that language works like that now. In terms of those kinds of models of how humans think and process language, Chomsky basically won that battle.
There were other polarizing moments on the field. It’s also just that Chomsky is such a great intellectual figure that people get very upset if he is dismissive of something.
“modern linguistics has shown us… that language can be studied through the normal methods of science”
But the way I see the field now, it’s much less like that. it is much less polarized. younger generations of researchers have grown up with fewer of these bitter infightings. they are more excited about putting things together from different perspectives and trying to take a more holistic view.
I have strong opinions, but I think my interactions with people, even on twitter, are pretty respectful in both directions. people listen to each other, even when they disagree. I think the field is in a much better place from that perspective than it used to be.
but are there parts of your book that people really don’t agree with?
yes, absolutely. there are two perspectives on language, both interesting. one is that language is something specifically human that gives us this creative power and is really very different from other species. the other is a more evolutionary perspective that says that there is nothing really different, it is just that we are very intelligent and our general intelligence is what allows us to use language. If apes were as smart as we are, they would have language.
My opinion is that it is something different. apes are very good at some things and we are very good at others. we are very good with language and apes are not. that’s because they don’t have this particular mental capacity that we have. there’s no species superiority there, it’s just that we’re different.
That’s a great argument. So it comes down to: what aspects of our general intelligence can be used to learn a language? I make a lot of arguments in the book that there are no aspects of a general intelligence that we can use to learn languages. the language is too subspecialized.
so it will be controversial. people won’t agree, but I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to disagree. we can work on it and try to figure out which arguments are the strongest and maybe I’m wrong. I have been wrong many times. that’s normal science and we don’t need to be mad at each other about it.
Let’s look at some of the books you’ve chosen to get a clearer idea of what it’s like to study linguistics. The first is Language Resilience by Susan Goldin-Meadow, who runs a lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. the subtitle of the book is “what gestures can the creation of deaf children tell us about how all children learn language”. tell me about the book and why you have chosen it.
i have been a fan of susan goldin-meadow’s work for a long, long time. she has been working with profoundly deaf children for about 40 years. what he is interested in finding out is the kind of language you get when there is nothing standing in the way of linguistic input from the start. all these children can see is hear their parents’ gestures and they obviously have this deep need to communicate that all humans have.
what kind of language do they end up with? Are the properties of those languages like the properties of language in general? And if so, could those properties of gestures have been learned from parents?
Over and over again, she has shown, quite convincingly, that there are properties in children’s signs that are very much like language, but are not in their parents’ gestures. Where does it come from? if it’s not ‘out there’, what children are experiencing, where does it come from? the idea of goldin-meadow is that it comes from the minds of children.
This, of course, is an idea that fits very well with the general Chomskyan perspective that I take, which is that there is something in us, that is common to all humans, which is this ability to combine meaningful elements and create meaning. More spacious. of them in a very systematic way.
On language resilience, it takes 20 or 30 years of his experimental work and shows his journey in exploring that. the book is beautifully written and has complex linguistics, but it’s a really interesting question what it does. you have to nuance what comes out at the end, we have to be careful, because you don’t want to draw too strong conclusions, but it’s a fascinating book.
can you give an example of something a deaf child will do that you would not expect unless it comes from within?
In English and many other languages, if we use a word like “it” or “this”, we combine it with a noun. so you say ‘this cup’ or ‘that banana’ or ‘those books’ and they create what linguists call a ‘constituent’: a small unit of language built from two smaller units. each of those small units has its own meaning and the larger unit brings those meanings together to give you something new.
So if you look at the gestures of hearing parents of profoundly deaf children, they certainly use pointing to do something like the word “this” or “that” in English. then they will say, ‘this is white’ or ‘that is tasty’ and point to things. and they can make symbols for things: they can make a love heart for ‘I love you’. But what they don’t do, according to the Goldin-Meadow data, is put them together. if you’re gesturing and pointing to that cup, it’s weird to say that you have two separate units: ‘it’ and ‘cup’, because you’re just pointing to that one thing. hearing parents don’t do that in their gestures. they can make a cup gesture and they can point, but they don’t combine them.
but the kids susan goldin-meadow was studying put them together, just like you would in english. they make the ‘it’ sign and the cup sign. So you get these two things, which are not found together in parent gestures, but are found together in other languages. the children put those two things together with their independent meanings into a single unit.
Where are they learning how to do that? they cannot be learning from what they are seeing, because that is not what their parents or caregivers are doing. so why are they doing it? that’s a really fascinating example, and his book is full of them.
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so presumably these are very young children who haven’t read the phrase “this cup” or “that banana” somewhere?
correct. at the moment they’re doing this, they don’t have any English. These are children who will normally learn through signing and later, when they have the skills, they can be taught English as a purely written language.
let’s move on to the next book you’ve chosen, which is language and experience: evidence from the blind child by barbara landau and leila gleitman. why is this on your linguistics book list?
This is another book about language acquisition by young children who have some kind of sensory input problem. my own work tends to be about adult speakers of different spoken languages, so you’re probably wondering why I chose these two books about children. it’s because they both deal with really deep, almost philosophical questions. where does knowledge of language come from when you can’t hear it? That’s the question Susan Goldin-Meadow asks in her book.
the book, the language and the experience of landau and gleitman, I first read it when I was a student, a long, long time ago. I read some philosophy and learned that at one point john locke posed a question in a letter to another philosopher: “what kind of sight-related word meanings would a blind person have?” you know from experience, because locke had the notion that everything in your mind comes through experience. I don’t know if this book goes against locke or not, but it raises a fascinating question: how do children learn which words connect with which meanings?
what landau and gleitman did was to look at blind children’s knowledge of the meanings of words related to sight. given that they do not have sight, how much knowledge do they have of the meanings of words related to that sense, words like “see” or “look” or words of colors? is asking the same interesting question: how do we have knowledge of language? where does it come from?
“I have strong opinions, but I think my interactions with people, even on twitter, are pretty respectful in both directions”
and what they showed in that book is very different from susan goldin-meadow’s book in some ways, but very similar in others. what they showed is that blind children have an understanding of aspects of sight-related word meaning for which they do not seem to have any obvious evidence, in terms of their experience.
they argue in the book that it is the language that surrounds these children that gives them an idea, a little understanding, of what those kinds of words like “see” or “look” or words of color end up meaning. but they also say that it can’t just be the language that does this. there must be more to it. there has to be some kind of predisposition to go in certain directions and not in others.
for example, they talk about a child who acquires the meaning of the word “look” and understands what it means not only for him, but also for other people. she ends up discovering that “looking at something” means that the thing may be at a distance, but it must be in the line of sight of the person she is looking at. there can be no barrier in between. she understands everything that ‘look’ means.
Since she’s not watching any of this, where does she get that information from? and why is that accurate information that she gets? they argue that she takes something from language, from what she hears being used around her in a very particular way. grammar is key to that. this is an argument that the grammar of language is a way of determining knowledge of its meaning, which is really fascinating.
The other thing the authors argue is that this child needs some sort of internal bias to make those generalizations about the word “look” as opposed to others. what the child does is learn what ‘look’ means for sighted people, but when someone asks her to look at something, she looks at it with her hands. if you say to him, ‘he looks at this cup’, he will take a cup and feel it all over, to get an idea of what it is. she transferred the visual modality to a tactile modality, but obtaining information through this particular sense still has the same kind of meaning.
I remember reading the book when I was much younger and it was a strange revelation. It seems obvious to me now, but when we learn meanings, we learn them not just from the word plus its environment, but from the word and all the other words around it and how we use them in sentences. they all feed into each other in a really complex way, and that gives us part of the meanings of the words. that’s not obvious, but this book really shows you that that had to be the case, that actually part of our knowledge of meaning, even in situations where we have no evidence of the thing sensually or experientially, has to come from the grammar of the language itself.
what does the book say about colors?
These children do not see colors and, when they are very young, they use colors randomly. they will say, this is a green card, this is a red card and this is a blue card, but they have no idea and they are wrong. but they know that color words are adjectives, that they modify nouns, and they end up knowing things about them that are really interesting.
so in the book they did an experiment where they gave children objects. they are told that objects have certain colors and those colors always correlate with some other aspect of the objects. so, for example, all large objects can be red, and all rough objects can be blue, and all small objects can be green. then see if children naturally understand the meaning of ‘red’, ‘blue’ and ‘green’ as ‘big’, ‘rough’ and ‘small’ and they don’t. they know full well that color is independent of those other aspects of the object.
That’s really intriguing, isn’t it? so they don’t know colors, but they know that things can be colored, and the fact that color is different from other properties, although they don’t have any evidence for that. they have evidence that all big things are red, but then they know that red and size are different things. they end up having a pretty rich understanding of the meaning of the color words.
so it’s the same again. Landau and Gleitman say that it’s partly the language you hear these words used in and partly what our human brains do with that language that ends up giving you a certain amount of information about something you don’t otherwise have no sensory input.
Now we’re shifting gears and looking at a philosophy book. This is Jerry Fodor’s language of thought. It begins with a quote from Brecht, “The laughing man is the one who has not yet heard the terrible news”, and there are also many references to Wittgenstein. tell me why he is on your linguistics book list.
the language of thought is a very famous book in the philosophy of mind and is also very important for linguistics. Fodor was a brilliant writer. he died a couple of years ago. he writes really hard stuff, but it’s actually funny. (Although this isn’t his funniest book by any means, I think he was just starting out.)
this book does a lot of things, but the reason I chose it is that it is the first articulation of an idea that he later carried further and further in his career: that you can be very creative not only with language, but also with thought. that has been very interesting for my own research.
the language is very systematic. If I tell you the sentence, ‘anson bit lilly,’ you know what that means. And if I say ‘lilly bit anson,’ you know what that means. the bits you have come together to create certain meanings in a systematic way. if a did something to b, then it might be the case that b did something to a. there is a system for it.
what fodor does in that book is argue that thought is productive. You have this creative ability. you can think all kinds of crazy thoughts that you’ve never had before and it’s very systematic. so thought must work like language works.
At the time of writing, Chomsky had recently been saying, “the way language works is that you have basic chunks of language and then you have a general set of rules that combine them to create larger chunks.” of language systematically. that is what gives us this free ability to construct sentences in a way where we understand the meaning of new sentences that people say to us and we can create new sentences as we need them.”
“apes are very good at some things and we are very good at others. we are very good with language and apes are not”
that was chomsky’s idea for language and what fodor said is, ‘thought has the same properties’. That means basically our minds are working the way Chomsky said language works. At the heart of human psychology is what Chomsky calls—and Fodor calls it—something like a computational machine. it takes things and puts them together and creates new things out of them. that is what gives us this ability to be systematic and productive.
for fodor and chomsky, this all stems from the work done on the theory of computation by mathematicians like turing in the 1930s. although he was working on other things, turing had one of the best ideas in psychology, which is that you can treat aspects of the human mind like a computer. We can explain this systematicity and productivity of thought by appealing to what Turing did when he discovered how to make computers work. I’ve oversimplified this, but that’s the basic idea.
There are many other things in the book that will surprise philosophers more than me, but as a linguist that is what struck me: the notion that this approach to computation is fundamental not only to language but also to language. for our general psychology. too.
Has this book been overturned?
no and yes. this is an area where there is quite a bit of controversy, similar to what might be in linguistics. you can make a computer look like what you think a brain looks like, with computational neurons in it. and they all just connect to each other and then what you do is feed information into this collection of neurons and tell them what you want from it. and just shoogle, ‘shoogle’ is a scottish word that means to shake, until they match the input to what you want the output to be. that idea is the basis of most ais these days.
so if you have siri or alexa which can do these amazing things the way speech synthesis works is you have these artificial neurons and it plays them like “the dog jumped over the fox” and then they launch their neurons around until they line up to give you the correct results. again, it’s more complex than that, but that’s the basic idea.
That’s very different from the computational vision that Fodor was pushing in this book. that view says you get to the dog by jumping over the fox by saying ‘the’ and ‘dog’ and ‘jump’ and ‘over’ and ‘the’ and ‘fox’ and you have ‘the’ twice and it is combined with dog once and fox once. it is the systematic construction of meaning through rules.
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so those are two different ways that people think about the mind. there’s fodor’s way, which is called computational theory of mind, and then there’s this other way, which is neural network theory of mind. that’s still a great fight.
I have the feeling that to study linguistics you also have to be quite scientific and philosophical?
is a mark of linguistics; It’s definitely my brand. but there are many other really interesting areas of linguistics, which are not like that. In the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve done a lot of work with sociolinguists who are interested in how language is used socially, how language changes, how your identity is expressed by the kind of language you choose to use. you collect all the data and do statistics on the data, but it’s a very different kind of science. that’s also philosophical in the sense that you’re thinking about questions of identity, of class, gender and sexuality, but it’s different from the questions of cognition and meaning that I’ve been talking about.
These are two very different areas of linguistics and you can do either of them. Not that many people do both. that actually goes back to one of your earlier questions, about whether there’s a bit of a struggle in linguistics. Admittedly, these two areas of linguistics parted company in the 1970s and didn’t talk to each other during the 1980s and 1990s. But now they’ve started talking to each other again, in the last 20 years.
There have been several people involved in trying to get this to work. I ended up sharing a flat with a sociolinguist when I was a teacher in York. we used to have arguments about things but we ended up working together. so I ended up being a weird cross between Chomskyan linguistics which is my heart and sociolinguistics which is a very different set of ideas which I also find totally fascinating. I write about them in the last chapter of my book.
so now we’re at book number 4 on your list, which is by noam chomsky. the titles of his books give me the feeling that he is not good at writing popular and very accessible linguistics books. you have chosen a book that is based on a series of lectures he gave in 1999 in siena and is called on nature and language.
I needed to have a chomsky. i chose it because i looked at what books were in the five book archive and wanted to pick something different and maybe a little more readable. this is the best i could do. Chomsky’s linguistic work is technical, and where it is not technical, it is highly philosophical.
There are three other Chomsky books I could have chosen. Syntactic Structures (1957) was the first book of his that I read and it was totally what made me go, ‘oh, this is great.’ I want to do this’. In my sophomore year of college, I read Aspects of Syntax Theory (1965) and thought, ‘My God, this is fascinating.’ then there is Knowledge of Language (1986), which I read as a graduate student. and he made me say, ‘oh! that’s how it all works’.
I chose nature and language because it is more modern. it is quite speculative and a bit rhetorical, it must be said. I like it because it does two things. It raises, very clearly, a general question. Chomsky focuses on the cognitive-psychological side of linguistics and has always said that language has a biological part, that it is part of our being since humans and other animals do not.
if you focus on that, what is it? if it is really like a piece of biology, should we study it like the liver or the heart? Or is it more like a computer, as Fodor says, in which case we should study it as we do the natural laws of physical things?
“about language and nature asks the question: ‘what is it that makes language like language and lightning like lightning and ferns like ferns?’”
one of the things i argued in my book language unlimited is that language works through a principle of self-similarity. if you have a fern leaf, it’s made of smaller fern leaves and each one of them is made of even smaller fern leaves and each one of them has a tiny, tiny fern leaf. or if you think about the way lightning forks when it comes from the sky: it forks in this very binary way, go down and go into 2 go into 2 go into 2 and you end up with the classic forked lightning pattern. Many, many other things are also organized through this self-similarity principle: x is similar to part of x.
chomsky’s point is that language works like this too. as I said before, you take two things and you put them together, you have ‘it’ and ‘cup’ and you put them together and you get a new thing ‘that cup’ when I say, ‘I broke that cup’ and I’ve had ‘that cup’ and the I’ve joined with ‘broke’ to make a bigger thing, ‘broke that glass’. that’s the same notion, that the largest thing has a similar shape to the things inside it. all the languages we know, all the human languages we have studied, are organized around this principle of hierarchical structure.
about language and nature asks the question: “what is it that makes language like language and lightning like lightning and ferns like ferns?”, it doesn’t put it that simply, but one of the lectures in the book is basically asking that question. How can language be understood as a purely natural and physical type of object? Does it have the same principles that govern it as ferns and lightning and the spinning of galaxies and narwhal horns and nautilus shells, this principle of self-similarity?
This book is from the late 1990s. There was still a glitch in it. It seemed to Chomsky at the time that this idea of a hierarchical structure of sentences required two separate mechanisms to build, two separate things. Later, Chomsky had another idea. it’s in a whitepaper and I think that’s the best idea of his for a long time, which is that you can combine these two different sources of the hierarchy in human language into one, if you understand it from a particular perspective.
so it’s interesting to see this book as a snapshot of where we were. 20 years later, we are in an improved place. we have a deeper understanding of how that set of questions can be answered and that’s a really good thing. everybody always says, ‘chomsky said this, he’s wrong’. that’s fine. but it always raises totally fascinating questions. now, we can look back and say, “it didn’t work this way, but actually now we have a good answer or a better answer to that question.”
People often don’t like to read Chomsky’s more rhetorical and speculative stuff. I quite like it because I always find in it a perspective on something that is very useful for me when thinking about what topics I want to investigate or want to promote.
so finally on your linguistics book list we have a work of fiction. this is the embassy city of china miéville. He has won several awards for his books, including the Arthur C Clarke Prize for Science Fiction on three separate occasions, which is unheard of. so is this a very enjoyable novel about linguistics?
There is an unusually large number of novels on linguistics and almost all of them are science fiction. most of them are about the sapir-whorf hypothesis, which is the idea that the language you speak controls the way you think. you could think of orwell’s new language in 1984 as something like that. there is also a linguist named suzette haden elgin who wrote a fascinating novel in which she developed a language meant to eliminate all sexism. and one of my favorite authors, ursula le guin, developed a language for a colony of anarchists that she put on a moon, which had no way of expressing possession. I am a great admirer of this type of speculative novel. It is another way of philosophizing. I tend to read anything that seems to be that kind of book.
I really enjoyed embassytown because it wasn’t about sapir-whorf, but about the relationship between language and reality. while reading it, i tweeted, ‘it’s chomsky versus quine in outer space’. Quine is a famous philosopher who said that the meaning of the word cup is a cup, a real thing in the world. chomsky’s point of view is, ‘no, no, no, the meaning of the word ‘cup’ is a concept in your mind. we all live in our minds and communicate with each other trying to synchronize our minds through language.”
embassytown is about who’s right. Is it who—and most philosophers—who say that words are directly connected to things? that seems like common sense. Or is it Chomsky and others who argue that we build these models of the world in our minds, and that when we speak or when we act we connect those mental models with the world? and [spoiler alert] chomsky wins.
“There is an unusually large number of novels on linguistics and almost all of them are science fiction. ”
miéville has a brilliant imagination, and in the book he develops these aliens that have two mouths. they have two organs to speak and you would think it’s like a forked tongue but ironically they can’t lie because their language must connect directly with real reality.
However, they want to lie. they find the lie totally fascinating, but they can’t. even if they want to use a simile, they have to get someone to act it out. so they make humans act weird things for them. the heroine of the novel ends up eating something in the dark in a restaurant. so they can say, ‘ah, this is like the girl who eats in the dark’ and that means whatever it means to aliens, some weird simile, but they have to make it real to use it.
then of course what happens is humans mess everything up. they end up introducing the ability to lie into the ecosystem of these aliens. they get these telepathic twins who will speak with both voices, but who can lie because they’re human. the aliens get addicted to it and it will totally destroy the alien society and kill all the humans. then the heroine basically sort of solves it by teaching the aliens to lie. Which is kind of a horrible comment on how we humans randomly wander around bumping into things and making a mess of what was a perfectly good ecosystem.
but at the same time, it’s fascinating because of the whole issue of how language actually works. could you have a language like these aliens? It is a very well written book. much of miéville’s work is very elegantly thought out.
so this is a good fifth book because it’s one of the many fiction books I’ve read in my life that tells us something really interesting or asks us really interesting questions about language. if people haven’t read embassytown and want to read something about linguistics, it’s fascinating. there is also the arrival of the film, which is science fiction and is very much based on language. I always show it to my early years. it was great for linguistics because people saw it and thought it was amazing. this book is similar. if you like science fiction and are interested in languages, this is a great book to read.
what do you usually suggest to students as a good introductory linguistics text?
I’ll definitely suggest my own book! the original reason I wrote it is because I felt there wasn’t a book that would do that. I wrote it thinking of my nephew, who was 17 at the time. It is aimed at people who have no knowledge of linguistics or even a university degree but are interested in the subject.
Another book to recommend is Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct (1994), but it’s a bit out of date now. things have changed a lot since then.
There are many other fascinating books on language. For example, there is Gretchen McCulloch’s book on Internet Linguistics, because the Internet. it’s totally brilliant and you learn a lot about sociolinguistics. it is interesting for people who spend their lives on the internet. I definitely recommend it to people as a good introduction to the sociological side, whereas my book is probably a good introduction to the more cognitive side of linguistics.
The other books out there at the moment tend to focus on this notion that linguists are descriptive about language rather than prescriptive. Lane Greene’s book, Talk on the Wild Side, is like that. that’s a pretty good book too.
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