(2) A single open-open sentence is susceptible to as many sentential interpretations as context allows. Thus a child, sitting on his mother’s lap and looking out the window, who utters the sentence car Daddy, can be reliably understood by his mother to be saying Daddy is getting in the car, Daddy is washing the car, Daddy is kicking the car, depending on whether in fact Daddy is getting in the car, washing the car, kicking the car.
Indeed, the number of sentences made possible by (1) the exponential increase of the number of open-open combinations and (2) the contextual application of any one such combination to any number of mutually perceived situations becomes, for all practical purposes, unlimited.
5.1. Two characteristic transformations occur in the two types of coupling or sentence formation.
In (1), the naming sentence, the phonological element is transformed by the semological element. Yellow becomes yellow, wet becomes wet, hollow becomes hollow.
In (2), the open-open coupling, it is the linkage itself which is transformed. Thus the linkage between Daddy and car in Daddy#car becomes is getting into, is washing, is kicking, as the case may be.
Functors or grammatical markers are added to open-open combinations not as a result of overt imitation of adult sentences (Ervin) but the other way around, through the parent’s imitation and expansion of the child’s sentence (Brown and Bellugi).
Presumably the exigencies of communication require that, as context is withdrawn, functors be added. With the child’s increasing mobility and his increasing number of reports of what has happened out of the hearer’s sight, functors come into play. The following conversation occurred between my two-year-old grandson, arriving in some excitement to make a report, and his mother:
Child: Daddy tractor!
Mother: Daddy is driving the tractor?
Child: (Silence)
Mother: Daddy is fixing the tractor?
Child: (Silence with a half nod)
Mother: Daddy is under tractor?
Child: Daddy under tractor!
5.11. The question must be raised about grammatical transformations: Is there any evidence to support the theory that the so-called grammatical transformation, whatever its usefulness to the linguist as an analytical tool, actually operates in the acquisition of language?
Thus, it may be unexceptionable to say with Chomsky that:
If S1 is a grammatical sentence of the form
NP1-Aux-V-NP2
then the corresponding string of the form
NP2-Aux +be +en-V-by +NP1
is also a grammatical sentence.
Using this transformation rule, one can obtain Lunch is being eaten by John from John is eating lunch.
But it does not necessarily follow that because a linguist analyzing the corpus of a language can derive one kind of sentence from another kind of sentence by a rule, a formal operation, or because he hypothesizes putative “deep structures” from which “surface structures” are generated by “transformations,” this is what happens when a child learns a language. Indeed, if one follows the principle of parsimony in theorizing, one wonders why such a formal schematism cannot be dispensed with altogether.
For is not the adult passive sentence already implicit in the early open-open construction, later to be filled out by the required functors which the child learns through adult imitation and expansion?
For example, keeping in mind the general S-P form of the sentence, that is, its division into what one is talking about and what one says about it, one can easily imagine some such sequence as follows: Mother and child are watching a dog from the window. Various events occur in which the dog is both subject of attention and subject of sentences about these events. Whether the dog does things or whether things happen to the dog, the dog is what we are talking about.
Child Mother
Dog run Yes, the dog is running.
Dog man Yes, the dog is barking at the man.
Dog car Yes, the dog is chasing the car.
Dog car! Yes, the dog was run over by the car!
Conceivably, then, the child might “verify” the mother’s interpretation of the last sentence by adding one of her passive functors: Dog run by car! (Such, in fact, was my grandson’s first attempt at the passive: his imitation of an adult’s expansion of his original open-open construction.)
The question of course can only be answered by systematic behavioral studies. The point is that it is open to confirmation, or nonconfirmation, by such studies.
6. Is an explanatory theory of language possible?
In this connection, I would like to mention Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction, or explanatory hypothesis, as a valid and possibly useful strategy in approaching language as a phenomenon. My reasons for doing so are two: (1) The present state of theoretical linguistics, considered as a natural science, is so confused, comprising as it does incoherent elements of structuralism and “learning theory” and even Cartesian mentalism, that it might be worthwhile to take a step back, so to speak, in order to view the phenomenon of language from the perspective of perhaps the best-known American theorist of the scientific method. If one should object that Peirce’s theory is almost a hundred years old, I can only reply that since theoretical linguistics is at least three hundred years behind theoretical physics, Peirce can be regarded as being, linguistically at least, ahead of his time. (2) Peirce’s theory of abduction has been revived recently (Chomsky) but in such an odd and what I consider a wrongheaded fashion that there is some danger that its usefulness to linguistics might be permanently impaired.
The assumption will be made then that an explanatory theory of language does not presently exist: that behaviorism does indeed provide an explanatory model but that it is wrong; that structural linguistics and transformational grammar are not explanatory theories (v.s.).
Further, we will accept the following description of both the problem at hand and our ignorance: that every normal human being, and no doubt most abnormal ones as well, are uniquely equipped with what can be characterized abstractly as a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) whose structure and function are unknown but which receives as input primary linguistic data, speech from fluent speakers within hearing range, and has as its output a competence in the language, that is, the ability to utter and understand any number of new sentences (Katz; Chomsky). Now how does Peirce’s theory of abduction relate to the problem at hand, namely, approaching the black box, LAD, toward the end of discovering its workings? Let us reassure ourselves at the outset. Surely the enterprise is worth undertaking, if for no other reason than the depth of our ignorance and the wide divergence of the guesses on the subject. In view of the uniqueness of the human capacity for speech, how different are these workings from the workings of other brains? Are they qualitatively different or quantitatively different? Does the black box hold Cartesian mind-stuff or S-s-r-R neuron circuitry? or both? Certainly it would be a start in the right direction if we had some notion of what to look for, what kind of thing. It is here that abduction or Peirce’s explanatory hypothesis might be of some help.