A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
gesture at a time, then two, then three, then many. But the two‐word period of language production is when we had most of our data – Mommy sock and all that. So how are you going to find out whether give and eat and sleep have different structures?
Well, let's pretend for the moment – this turns out to be a good pretense – that as far as the output system is concerned, there's this period in which you only have two spaces. You can only say two things. You've got to say the verb. Now, it should be that the required argument always appears as an overt gesture. So where you have {an intransitive verb like} sleep, everything is fine, but where you have eat, each of its arguments will be produced only half of the time, because one space is taken by the verb. You can just do the arithmetic. And for give, {as in She gave him the cake}, the proportion should be even lower,
But another thing about language use is that, when an argument goes unmentioned, it's usually the subject. In fact, this differential omission of the subject NP could easily be seen in the patterns of the deaf children's signing. They “dropped” the subject proportionally more often as the number of required NPs for some predicate increased. Perhaps this is what was later known as “pro drop” in linguistic circles.2
That's what we found – for every kid and every predicate. These children exhibit understanding of argument structure, but filtered through this output constraint. Subjects are treated differently from other arguments and words appear in different structures depending on what they mean. And where did that come from? Not from their mothers.
The evidence against my empiricist leanings was starting to pile up here. I was becoming more open‐minded. But I always had to fight against my innate empiricism [laughter].
7.3.2 Blind Children
A couple of years later, along came another brilliant person, whose name was Barbara Landau. She wanted to work on language of the blind. I said to her, “Why would you do that?” And she said, “Well, like you looked at the deaf.” And I said, “Yeah, and later we'll do people with a broken arm?”
And she said, “But there's a reason.” Because to some extent they're cut off from the meanings, or at least from the referents. When you say “It's a cloudy day,” they're cut off from the clouds. There's some difference or diminution in your ability to relate the words that you hear to what's going on in the world. And after all, you “must” have learned your language that way – of course, a topic that both Locke (1690) and Hume (1738–1740) had discussed centuries earlier.
So this poor blind child who can't see should be slower in learning and should learn weird things. He should fail to learn some things; we didn't quite know what.
You can predict my first empiricist thought: The child could only learn words for things you could reach out and touch, because touching things has to be their way of getting information. This is what every empiricist should say: You're only going to learn words whose meaning you can get evidence for from the outside world, even though you're blind. So imagine our shock. This changed my whole life. Here's where I fell over the edge. The first verb in this kid's vocabulary was: see! With look not far behind.
And just as advisors to the parents of deaf children had said, “Don't gesture to your child,” clinicians tell the parents of blind children, “Don't use words like look and see to your blind child, because that will lead to empty verbalism.” It's a technical word, verbalism. Why? Because, they say, look and see could have no meaning to the blind.
In fact, when Landau asked the blind child to “look up!”, the child raised her hands as if to explore, keeping her eyes and head immobile. This is in contrast even to blindfolded, sighted three‐year‐olds, who in response to the same command will raise their covered eyes skyward. This was a first demonstration (followed by corroborating evidence) that knowledge of sight‐related concepts is abstract rather than limited to the visual apparatus in particular, and that a blind three‐year‐old has means to discover this (Landau and Gleitman 1985). How could they have learned this? Our answer, as it evolved, turned out to be: They play The Great Verb Game, reverse‐engineering the meaning from the form. That is, it is the appearance of look and see with sentence complements (Let's see if there's cheese in the refrigerator) that informs the learner that look and see are terms of perception, not mere contact (one can't say or understand Let's touch if there's cheese in the refrigerator).
7.3.3 Nicaraguan Sign Language: No Linguistic Input
Linguists, including particularly Anne Senghas (Senghas et al., 1997), had the opportunity (and, I might add, the wit) to look at a remarkable case of a language rising in a hithertofore‐isolated deaf community. These were children in the area of Managua, Nicaragua, brought together in a kind of informal deaf club. The result, as Senghas and her colleagues showed, was a constantly self‐enriching gestural system that in semantics and syntax embodied the elements of known natural languages, spoken and gesture.
I had the opportunity to work with Senghas, Goldin‐Meadow, and [Molly] Flaherty on studies of my favorite abstraction, symmetry (and its entailed cousin, reciprocity), in this population (L.R. Gleitman, S. Goldin‐Meadow, A. Senghas and M. Flaherty, {2019}). This work fed several of my obsessions at the same time. It was a new testbed in which an experience‐deprived user population showed how abstractions like symmetry and reciprocity arise under untutored conditions, and how this delicate formal distinction is reflected in the emerging syntax of their language.
Even the very first user‐inventors of this sign language formally distinguished between symmetrical predication (Juan and Carlos high‐five) and reciprocal predications (Juan and Carlos punch each other). Just like English speakers, these untutored children treat the symmetric predicate high‐five as an intransitive verb, with the conjoined Juan and Carlos viewed as a single collective subject argument whose parts are symmetrically involved in the action. In the Nicaraguan Sign Language equivalent for reciprocal Juan and Carlos punch each other, one finds JUAN CARLOS PUNCH–GET PUNCHED CARLOS JUAN PUNCH–GET PUNCHED, where the serial verb construction PUNCH–GET PUNCHED encodes a transitive action with two animate participants, agent and patient. The reciprocal construction puts two such clauses together, with participant order reversed, describing the two reciprocal events.
Remember, there was no input that accounts for this knowledge. I take this and the many related findings from Nicaraguan Sign Language to be the most compelling evidence for the robustness of the human language learning function to differences in external experience.
7.4 Syntactic Bootstrapping: Verbs of a Feather Flock Together
Coming from the work on the blind child, I had another interesting experience. I said to Henry Gleitman, one of the most thoughtful people I know, “Look! So much for your empiricist ideas! A blind child understands the meaning of the words look and see.” He says, “Well, that's really fantastic. How did she learn them?”
I said, “Heh. You and your—. I don't have to answer that question, really, it's—.” And then I thought, Uh‐oh. I decided to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge to visit Noam Chomsky, a person of an entirely different persuasion, and a friend of mine, of course, by that time. And maybe I'll get some help in thinking about this. I told Chomsky, “The first verbs in a blind child's vocabulary include look and see!” He says, “Wow! That's fantastic! How did she learn them?”
Oh my God. When Henry Gleitman and Noam Chomsky are asking me the same question I'm really, really in trouble. Noam says to me, “Well, it couldn't have been by magic!”
There are a number of questions that really have to be asked at this point. Where did the kid come up with the concept of looking? How do you know that the word look is the word for looking – which is approximately “apprehend”