Noam Chomsky (1928 - )

Chomsky, more often quoted than any other living author, has turned linguistics from an art into a science. It is often said that the most difficult thing in science is to ask the right questions. The question Chomsky asked was: how does a child learn to talk? It seems easy, but in the 50 years since Chomsky first asked himself this seemingly simple question, all the obvious answers have been clearly shown to be wrong. Not by copying, drilling, imitating, being punished for gettings wrong or rewarded for getting them right, having things explained, seeing diagrams, experimenting, or any of the hundred and one ways in which other difficult things are usually learnt. The child who says "I might have misunderstoodended that" is using four past tense forms, and plainly not copying. But somehow we stop making such childish mistakes, and learn to talk. The question is: how?

Chomsky proposes that language is a capacity, rather than something we do. Plainly it is learnt in a way nothing else is learnt. There is simple evidence for this. Language-learning does not normally work completely and perfectly other than during the first ten or so years of life. Most people, if they only start learning a language after the end of this 'critical period', as it is known, can never fully overcome a foreign accent or speak without what native-speakers regard as mistakes. For other difficult skills, like learning to read and write, things are not so critical.

Chomsky's first major work, Syntactic Structures, in 1957 took the first step towards answering Chomsky's question by dividing the grammar into just two key parts. The division Chomsky proposed was subtle, and had never been thought of before. One part involved 'transformations' which could reverse the order of elements or bring abstract elements to the surface, as in "Where's the tea?" or "Don't you like tea?" This 'transformational grammar', as it became known, provided the first ever full analysis of the English verb in all its parts, a good indication that it was on the right lines.

But in 1967, after Chomsky had made some radical improvements in 1965, including the idea of a dedicated 'Language Acquisition Device', it was shown that a grammar with multiple transformations could not be learnt. The same thing would apply to any more complex grammar - traditional grammars being much more complex, and thus failing even more badly than transformational grammar.

Chomsky's solution to the problem here, one that is still continuing to evolve, has been one of progressive simplification. First, transformations were reduced to one general and abstract process. Second, all differences between languages, such as how and where this process happens, were reduced to a series of simple, two-way variables. To learn to talk, the child just has to work out how the variables are set, one way in English, another way in French, another way in Japanese, and so on.

In 1983, one of Chomsky's students, Hagit Borer, came up with the idea that all of these variables were with respect to the behaviour of 'little words' of sorts which occur in all languages. In English, we have "me" and "I", "do" and "did", "a tea" and "the tea", "I'm doing it" and "What am I doing?". It now seems that there are between ten and twenty of these variable behaviours, all involving the same sorts of little words, in a way that applies to all languages. But these little words are the very ones which children mostly leave out. So children must be better listeners than they seem.

In 1969, Chomsky's wife, Carol, showed that most children are still learning the grammar of English at 9. So the process of learning language is still going on long after most children learn to read and write. The process of learning language can be helped if early practice in reading and writing happens in an environment which is interesting and engaging. Pigeon Post is designed to achieve this.