This is one branch of the bifurcation then, the structural-descriptive-generative analysis of language as a corpus. The other branch is not so much a working science as it is a shared belief, a faith that human language must surely be of such-and-such an order. Until a few years ago it was set down, again with all the fervor of an article of faith, that human language must not be different in kind from communication in other species. Proposals to the contrary were taken as a rejection of the entire scientific tradition of the West (Hockett). The traditional model was of course that of the behaviorists and learning theorists with one or another refinement, for example, Bloomfield’s notion of language as “secondary response.” The trouble was that this model worked only in carefully chosen cases: Jack getting thirsty and saying “Water” and Jill going up the hill to fetch it, or Malinowski’s example of the Trobriand Island fisherman shouting “Mackerel here!” whereupon other fishermen respond by paddling over. But the theory didn’t seem to work when, the fishing over, the feast eaten, the islanders were sitting around the fire spinning tales about long past or mythical events.
No less astonishing to the Martian is the more recent countervailing view that human language is utterly unlike animal communication (Chomsky), so much so that it was felt necessary to revive the old Rationalist notion of innate ideas to account for it (Chomsky). Maybe Hockett was right after all. Anyhow, what strikes the Martian most about the controversy is the extreme character of the alternatives. If he understands correctly, it appears as if, once the inadequacy of the behaviorist model is admitted, one has no choice but to chuck “empiricism,” rummage in the philosophical attic, and dust off a somewhat decrepit mind-body dualism. Surely, thinks the Martian, empiricism as it applies to science is not a dogma about the nature of the mind — that it is a tabula rasa or whatever — but rather a proposition about the practice of the scientific method, namely, that the scientist relies on data which he obtains through his senses, to account for which he constructs theories and models, and to confirm the latter he must return to sense data.
In what follows, the Martian will revive another idea, not quite so dusty nor so far removed from the practice of science. This is Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction, which is an analysis of scientific hypothesis formation, peculiarly apposite, as the Martian sees it, to linguistic theorizing, and which avoids such ideological extremes as mechanism and mentalism.
From an orbital perspective, it is possible to make other, more or less elementary observations.
It seems to the Martian, to begin with, that the transformationalists’ assault on the learning-theory model was both long overdue and remarkably successful (Fodor and Katz, Chomsky) and that, as a consequence, the latter has been dismantled and can no longer be entertained as a serious explanation of language as phenomenon. The watershed was probably marked by the appearance of Chomsky’s celebrated review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Linguistic theory would never thereafter be the same.
But, unless the Martian is very much mistaken — and it is here that he does resemble somewhat the boy who noticed something wrong with the king — it appears to him that while the prevailing behaviorist theory has been dismantled, no other theory has been advanced to take its place, this in spite of all the talk by transformationalists about “explanatory models.”
It is somewhat as if the Ptolemaic geocentric universe had been dismantled but Copernicus had not yet come along with his heliocentric model.
Accordingly, the assumption will be made in what follows that linguistic theory has not yet reached the level of explanatory adequacy of, say, seventeenth-century biology. It was then that, following the work of Harvey and Malpighi, it became possible to construct crude but accurate models of cardiac and renal function; to suppose, for example, that the heart is like a unidirectional pump or the kidney is like a filter. One may not say as much at the present time about the unique human capacity for language. True, a schema of sorts has been suggested (Chomsky; Katz) to show what happens when a child exposed to fragments of a language acquires a competence in that language: primary linguistic data→ LAD→ Grammar (where LAD is the Language Acquisition Device). What seems fairly obvious, however, is that despite claims to the contrary this schema is in no sense an explanatory model. It is no more than a statement of the problem under investigation. The “LAD” appears to be a black box whose contents are altogether unknown.
Finally, the Martian shall make bold to put forward a crude model not entirely of his own devising — Charles Peirce is its earthly progenitor.
1. Descriptive or structural linguistics cannot be regarded as a theory of language if the word theory is used as it is used in other sciences.
Structural or descriptive linguistics (Harris) deals with regularities in certain features of speech. These regularities are in the distributional relations among the features of speech in question, i.e., the occurrence of these features relative to each other within utterances. The procedure of structural linguistics is “to begin with the raw data of speech and with a statement of grammatical structure…essentially a twice-made application of two major steps: the setting up of elements, and the statement of the distribution of these elements relative to each other. First, the distinct phonological elements are determined and the relations among them investigated. Then the distinct morphological elements are determined and the relations among them investigated.” (Harris)
Such a discipline is undoubtedly beyond reproach — as far as it goes. Indeed one might well agree with Lévi-Strauss in setting up the method of structural linguistics as a model for anthropologists, a distributional method which Lévi-Strauss in fact applies to other cultural phenomena such as art, myth, ritual, religion, even cooking (Lévi-Strauss).
Yet it must not be forgotten that this method, rigorous as it is, does not pretend to be other than descriptive. Thus if one were studying hematology, one could imagine a science called “structural hematology” which consisted of a description of the cellular and chemical components of the blood and of certain “distributional” relations between them, e.g., a high nonprotein nitrogen is regularly associated with a low hemoglobin. But such a discipline, however rigorous, could never serve as a theory of blood formation or as a theory of the function of hemoglobin. Accordingly, the method of structural linguistics has at its core a fundamental ambiguity. This ambiguity can be expressed by two questions which presently go not only unanswered but unasked: (1) Does structuralism make the assumption that both language and culture are by their very nature phenomena of such an order that the search for distributional regularities is a terminus ad quern for both linguists and anthropologists? (2) Or is it rather the case that the current status of both arts is so primitive that we are necessarily at a stage comparable to Linnaean taxonomy, and so it goes without saying that at some future time linguistics shall arrive at a general explanatory theory bearing roughly the same relation to descriptive linguistics that Darwinean theory bears to Linnaean taxonomy?