The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  (2) A descriptive rule for the formation of pivot-open constructions has been given as

  S → P + O (e.g., a knee, a man, a Mommy [McNeill])

  A more general rule, which allows for the expansion and differentiation of the pivot class, is given by Brown as a rule for generating noun phrases:

  NP → (Dem) + (Art) + (M) + N

  This rule accommodates not only one-word utterances, car, boat, yellow, and pivot-open constructions, my car, my boat, my yellow, but also such “phrases” as that a car, that a my car, etc.

  What needs to be noted, however, is that none of these expressions is a phrase, save only in that sense decreed by a purely syntactical definition of sentences. Rather, all are complete semiotic sentences as provided by the general rule for naming sentences (1). Where this rule differs from Brown’s descriptive phrase rule is in its specifying (a) that what is formed is not a phrase but a sentence, (b) that the index I is a general semiotic class of which Brown’s demonstratives (that, there) belong to the syntactical subclass, (c) that the copula is added because the final adult form requires it.

  Thus it is not a grammatical vagary, to be accounted for by a descriptive rule, that a child may say that a blue flower but never a that blue flower or blue a that flower (Brown and Bellugi). What Brown calls the “privileges peculiar to demonstrative pronouns” is in fact specified by the more general semiotic rule which requires the initial positioning of the index (I), whether it be a demonstrative (there, that) or a behavioral item (looking, pointing). You can’t name something for someone without first pointing at it.

  To summarize (1) and (2): Nearly the entire class of pivot-open constructions, plus the entire class of expanded utterances generated by the rules for “differentiation of the pivot class,” are not “phrases” to be accounted for by lists of descriptive generative rules. Rather are all such utterances specified by a general semiotic rule of sentence formation, in this case the naming sentence, in which both behavioral and syntactical components are ordered by presiding semiotic considerations.

  (3) The open-open construction, which appears somewhere around the second birthday and accounts for the exponential explosion of language, is semiotically different from the naming sentence. It is in fact nothing more nor less than the adult NP-VP sentence without functors. It always comprises the pairing of contentives, often “nouns,” but also quality words and action words, e.g., baby wet, car go, man car (the man is in the car), etc.

  Braine uses a juncture symbol (#) between the two words of an open-open construction to distinguish it from an otherwise similar utterance having a quite different meaning. Thus, again relying on the mother as the best of all interpreters:

  baby#chair (The baby is in his chair)

  baby chair (There is the baby’s chair)

  The juncture symbol # is thus a semiotic mark which might be inserted between the “subject” S and “predicate” P of all sentences, whether naming sentences or NP-VP syntactical sentences. It marks a behavioral pause between what I am talking about and what I say about it.

  Accordingly, it will be seen that the conventional syntactical “phrase marker” is in fact a special instance of a more general semiotic structure. Everyone is familiar with the NP-VP phrase-marker for a sentence like The baby is in his chair. A quite different but equally justifiable semiotic phrase-marker could be designed for the naming sentence baby chair, as diagrammed in Figure 10. There is only one lexical-syntactical item in this sentence, the NP baby chair. The other elements are behavioral (pointing, pause) or environmental (chair experienced as a class member).

  There is only one lexical-syntactical item in this sentence, the NP baby chair. The other elements are behavioral (pointing, pause) or environmental (chair experienced as a class member).

  Contrast the semiotic phrase-marker of the naming sentence baby chair with the conventional phrase-marker of the open-open construction baby#chair (the baby is in his chair), as in Figure 11.

  To summarize 4.1: There are, semiotically speaking, two basic classes of linguistic sentences (we will say nothing here about nonlinguistic “sentences,” e.g., van Gogh’s painting “The Chair,” which assuredly uses a symbol to assert something about something else): the naming sentence and the NP-VP sentence.

  Both kinds of sentence are acquired, understood, and uttered without the use of functors and other syntactical forms.

  The addition of functors to child speech can be understood as the behaviorally necessary substitutes for a diminishing context. Thus a two-year-old child, sitting on his mother’s lap and looking with her out the window and saying boy lawnmower can be reliably understood to mean: The boy is pushing the lawnmower. But as context drops away, until at length the child is twelve and is reporting over the telephone to his mother about the performance of the gardener, the speaker needs his functors and must say Yes, the boy is still pushing the lawnmower.

  5. As a genetic theory of language acquisition, we may hypothesize two basic stages, at each of which occurs a coupling of elements and in neither does it seem necessary to postulate a “deep syntactical structure” from which uttered sentences are derived by a series of transformations.

  (1) The formation of semophones by the coupling of semological and phonological elements.

  Much of the linguistic activity of the first two years of life goes toward the building up of an inventory, or lexicon, of semantically contentive words through which the world of experience is segmented, perceived, abstracted from, and named. So enduring and stable are these semological-phonological combinations that it seems appropriate to regard them as sound-meaning units, perhaps to be designated by some such term as semophone—the “phone” in this case signifying not a phone in the technical linguistic sense but rather the hierarchy of sound units: sound, phoneme, morpheme, word (Chafe).

  As the neurophysiological correlate of such a coupling, one can only suppose that there come to be established stable functional interconnections between the visual and auditory cortexes. May we not at this point make bold to reach for the explanatory level of seventeenth-century physiology with its crude but accurate models of body functions—the heart is like a pump, the kidney is like a filter? Accordingly, may we not suggest that the LAD is like a coupler?

  The semological and phonological components of the semophone are thoroughly interpenetrated. The resulting configuration is a much more stable and enduring entity than can be expressed by association psychology. Thus it is not so much the case that words like yellow, wet, glass, hop, Elmer, quick “call up” such and such an association or have such and such a “connotation.” Rather is it the case that these sounds are interpenetrated and transformed by the classes of experience to which they refer. The contentive word in a sense contains the thing. Yellow becomes yellow.

  (2) The formation of NP-VP sentences by the coupling of semophones.

  Semophones are paired in the child’s open-open constructions to form the basic or contentive elements of the adult NP-VP sentence. One of the major tasks of an explanatory linguistic theory is to account for the practically unlimited number of new sentences which can be uttered and understood by a three or four-year-old child, following the input of limited and fragmentary data. If the basic component of the LAD is a coupler, it will be seen that this extraordinary generative capacity can be accounted for in two ways:

  (1) The exponential increase in the number of open-open constructions which can be formed once an inventory of semophones is established. Thus, an inventory of n semophones (car, wet, Daddy, sock…) will yield an n2—n number of open-open sentences (car wet, car Daddy, Daddy wet, Daddy sock...). An inventory of 100 semophones will yield a possible 9,900 open-open sentences.

  (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.

  Let us be clear, first, how Peirce distinguished abduction from induction and deduction, the other two logical components of the scientific method. He believed that neither deduction nor induction could arrive at explanatory theory but only abduction. No new truth can come from deduction or induction. Deduction explores the logical consequences of statements. Induction seeks to establish facts. Abduction starts from facts and seeks an explanatory theory (Peirce). As a classical example of abduction, Peirce cited Kepler’s theory of the elliptical form of Mars’s orbit. Though Kepler had made a large number of observations of the longitudes and latitudes of Mars, and even if he had made a million more, no induction or generalization from these facts could have arrived at the nature of Mars’s orbit. At some stage or other, Kepler had to make a guess, construct a model, then see if the model would (1) fit all the facts at hand and (2) predict new facts which could be verified by observation.

  Peirce listed three kinds of abductions or explanatory hypotheses: (1) those which account for observed facts through “natural chance” or statistical methods, e.g., the kinetic theory of gases; (2) those which render the facts necessary through a mathematical demonstration of their truth, e.g., Kepler’s elliptical th
eory of planetary orbits; and (3) those which account for facts by virtue of the very economy and simplicity of the explanatory model (Peirce).

  Presumably we are looking here for 3, at least for the present. Certainly no statistical method or mathematical model known to me has any relevance to what goes on inside a child’s head when he acquires language in the second and third year of life.

  Peirce also makes much of the fact, and Chomsky echoes it, that “man’s mind has a natural adaptation to imagining correct theories” (Chomsky). A physicist comes across some new phenomenon in the laboratory. According to Peirce, there are “trillions of trillions of hypotheses” which might be made to account for it, “of which only one is true” (Peirce). Yet as matters usually turn out, the physicist usually hits on the correct hypothesis “after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses.” This successful guessing or hypothesizing of scientists is not, according to Peirce, a matter of luck. Peirce’s own explanation of the extraordinary success (in the face of such odds) of scientific theorizing is founded in his own allegiance to philosophical realism, the belief that general principles actually operate in nature apart from men’s minds and that men’s minds are nevertheless capable of knowing these principles. But how is this possible? Peirce hazards the guess that, since “the reasoning mind is a product of the universe,” it is natural to suppose that the laws and uniformities that prevail throughout the universe should also be “incorporated in his own being” (Peirce).

  Maybe so. This is only speculation, however interesting, about why abduction works. What concerns us here, entirely apart from Peirce’s philosophical realism and his explanation of it, is his theory of abduction itself, which I take to be nothing more nor less than the method of hypothesis formation as it is used in practice by scientists in general, whether one is theorizing about why volcanoes erupt or why people speak and animals don’t. Peirce’s theory of abduction, particularly of the third type, is both sufficiently rigorous that it achieves the level of explanatory adequacy and sufficiently nonspecific that it does not require a commitment to ideology and hence does not fall into the deterministic trap of behaviorism and learning theory. Explanatory theory at the level of the human acquisition of language, it seems fair to paraphrase Peirce, does not require a mechanism, or, in Peircean terms, a “dyadic” model.