The Literary Mind

by Mark Turner

  It is often easy to assimilate the detailed work of a linguist who studies spe- cific structures of language to the view that rudimentary grammar arose by par- able. What is distinctive about my proposal is not the data or the analyses but rather the beginning frame. Thus, for example, although Comrie begins with a view of basic tenses as defined relative to the moment of speaking, a very little jiggle of his beginning assumptions can reposition his detailed analyses system- atically to make his study compatible, I think, with the view that language arose through parable.

  This impulse behind my proposal—make no unnecessary hypotheses—puts it at odds with the Chomskyan view that grammar arose because there evolved, with no help from natural selection and no help from preexisting human capaci- ties, a species—specif1c, modular “organ” that is as specialized for grammar as the

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  lungs, heart, and liver are for their particular tasks, expressed at the neurobiologi— cal level exclusively according to genetic instruction, and sharing nothing with other human capacities. There are alternative current varieties of this view, including Derek Bickerton’s “language bioprogram hypothesis” “that suggests that the infra— structure of language is specified at least as narrowly as Chomsky has claimed.” Bickerton draws his evidence for the “language bioprogram” from creole languages.

  Any hypothesis that grammar is historically and individually the exclusive product of a special—purpose genetically provided mental organ for grammar rests upon a negative argument: We have not managed to explain how grammar arises through general processes; therefore we must posit the existence of a special genetic code that is entirely responsible for building in the brain a universal gram— mar organ, which will someday be located and understood in the way the retina and the lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex have been located and (partially) understood. The hypothesis of genetic instruction is not in prin— ciple impossible, but it is methodologically the hypothesis of last resort. It trades Occam’s razor for God’s magic hat: Against all odds, make the most cosmic: and all—embracing extra hypothesis imaginable so as to solve everything at once-— Let there be language.

  Perhaps the main argument that grammar must arise in the individual hu— man being exclusively from some special—purpose device, genetically coded and neurobiologically expressed, is that grammar is too arbitrary, subtle, and quirky to arise otherwise. But if the influence on language acquisition is not only the language an infant hears but also all of narrative imagining, including all of the systems from which narrative imagining recruits, there is plausibly an overabun— dance of sources for subtleties and quirks without conjecturing a special device to introduce them.

  It is also argued that children obey subtleties of grammatical structure they have not heard, so that these subtleties must come from a special device. But if the influence on language acquisition is not only experience of language but‘ also all of narrative imagining, including all of the systems from which narrative imagining recruits, then there is no poverty of relevant stimulus but rather a great wealth of relevant stimulus.

  It is also argued that the subtleties and quirks of grammar are too universal to have arisen except through a universal mental organ for language acquisition. But story, projection, and parable are universal, and if grammar arises through parable, which recruits from universal systems such as vision, then there is no need to resort to a special conjectural mental organ to provide universality of structure.

  Chomsky has been consistently unreceptive to the proposal that the hypo- thetical mental organ for grammar arose by natural selection. Stephen Pinker

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  and Paul Bloom have argued in the most unhedged fashion that it does. Lan— guage, they assert, “is a topic like echolocation in bats or stereopsis in monkeys.” This extra hypothesis—that natural selection is entirely responsible for the hypo- thetical grammar organ—might seem to put Pinker and Bloom even further away than Chomsky from my hypothesis that language arose by projection of story. But not so. In their practical attempts to explain how natural selection could have produced a genetically coded mental organ, Pinker and Bloom implicitly em- brace an account of language in which grammar begins from meaning. They write, “Language is a complex system of many parts, each tailored to mapping a char- acteristic kind of semantic or pragmatic function onto a characteristic kind of symbol sequence.”

  “Mapping” is the critical term and concept in this assertion. It is usually the critical conceptin any explanation of grammar as “encoding” something else, “sig— naling” something else, “mapping” certain structures, and so on. Yet the role of “mapping” in such explanations usually receives no comment, which is astounding. “Mapping,” which I have called “projection,” is a mental competence; it does not come for free in an explanation; it is instead the principal process to be explained. To speak of “mapping” is to make a theoretical commitment to a powerful and robust mental capacity of projection. Pinker and Bloom give various thumbnail sketches of such mappings that appear to me essentially compatible with a claim that grammar arises from the projection of narrative structure:

  Noun phrases . . . are used to describe things. Similarly, a verb like bit is made into a verb phrase by marking it for tense and aspect and add- ing an object, thus enabling it to describe an event. In general, words encode abstract general categories and only by contributing to the struc— ture of major phrasal categories can they describe particular things, events, states, locations, and properties. . . . Verb affixes signal the tem- poral distribution of the event that the verb refers to (aspect) and the time of the event (tense).

  Pinker and Bloom’s explanation depends upon the existence of a mental ca- pacity to project one kind of structure (story) onto something entirely different (vocal sound), thereby creating for vocal sound grammatical structure. Pinker and Bloom are assuming that the mental capacity for projection precedes grammar, or at least that grammar cannot arise without projection. Pinker and Bloom obscure the fun- damental importance and complexity of this mental capacity by referring to it as simple “encoding” or “signaling.” This mental capacity—to encode, signal, map, project—is what principally needs explaining in an account of grammar. In ex- plaining grammar, we are not discussing simple encoding such as “We call this

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  dog ‘Harold,”’ where a particular entity is given an arbitrary label. We are instead discussing the projection of vast systems of narrative structure in such a way that complex categories of event correspond to grammatical categories of -verbpbrase. We are discussing the projection of systems of perceiving events with temporal focus and viewpoint to create systems of grammatical structure like tense. This is not a matter of giving a particular object an arbitrary label but of proj ecting struc- tural categories to impart structural categories. Pinker and Bloom are thus assum- ing, as part of their explanatory machinery, the existence of a robust.mental capac- ity to project one kind of thing onto another. In my view, they are right to do so. They are wrong, however, in assuming that this mental capacity is exclusive to language, rather than part of the mental capacityl call parable.

  Pinker and Bloom imagine that the kind of conceptual information that is mapped is propositional structure. This is a misemphasis rather than an error. Story certainly involves propositional structure. The story structure of Mary throws the stone quickly carries the propositional information The throwing is quick. But basic grammatical constructions seem to come from basic stories, with agents and actions and objects and patients and viewpoint and focus and so on, as Pinker and Bloom seem implicitly to grant in their thumbnail sketches of the way gram- mar “encodes” conceptual structure. These basic grammatical constructions that arise from basic stories can secondarily be used for expressing lower—level propo- sitional structure such as “Grass is green.”

  Pinker and Bloom make it clear that they view their contribution as con- sis
ting entirely of the argument that natural selection explains the origin of gram- mar. They disavow any originality in their analyses of grammatical structures: “Any one of them could have been lifted out of the pages of linguistic textbooks.” But if we lay aside Pinker and Bloom’s argument about natural selection and look instead at their actual work in sketching how conceptual structure is projected to create grammatical structure, we see a treatment that appears to me (although almost certainly not to them) not far out of accord with the view that grammar arises from the projection of story.

  The strong Chomskyan view of the origin of language asks us to believe that, against inconceivable odds, genetic instruction arose for a highly complex and sophisticated grammar organ, with no help from preexisting mental capacities and no help from natural selection. It asks us to believe that an extremely com— plex functional trait, language, is entirely genetic yet did not arise through the only mechanism of evolutionary genetics known to produce extremely complex functional traits, natural selection.

  The astonishing unlikelihood of Chomsky’s model of the origin of gram- mar prompted Pinker and Bloom to argue that Chomsky is wrong. They embrace Chomsky’ s picture in all respects except for their claim that natural selection is responsible for the origin of grammar.

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  Chomsky’s argument is weak because it asks us to accept an almost incon- ceivably unlikely event in the absence of any evidence for that event. Pinker and Bloom’s argument is weak in a differentway: It skips briefly and vaguely over its central step. For natural selection to be responsible for the origin of grammar, we must have two events: First, some (minimal) genetic structure must arise that achieves penetrance to result in a trait of (minimal) grammar; second, this trait must occur in an environment in which it confers reproductive advantage. But that environment cannot be one in which a grammatical community already exists, since the origin of grammar is what we are trying to explain. The first event— the evolution of (minimal) genetic structure for (minimal) grammar—is not particularly hard to imagine, although there is as yet no compelling evidence of it. Let us look at the second step—conferring reproductive advantage.

  Parable is a deeply basic capacity of human beings—we must grant this independently of any analysis of grammar. I have already sketched a scenario in which rudimentary grammar arose in a community through parable, not through genetic specialization for grammar. In that community, grammatical speech is a highly useful cognitive and cultural art. In that community, greater facility with grammar confers relative reproductive advantage, making genetic specialization for grammar adaptive. In my scenario, the origin of rudimentary grammar hap- pens before any hypothetical genetic specialization for grammar. The grammati- cal expressions produced by the lone first genetically grammatical person are parsed at least in part as grammar by members of the community who have no special genetic instruction for doing so but who use parable to do so.

  Do Pinker and Bloom offer a contrasting scenario, in which a lone first person with a genetic specialization for grammar has a reproductive advantage even though no one else in the community can recognize or parse any of the grammatical structure of her utterances? No. Such a scenario is not inconceivable—grammatical pro- cessing might assist the lone person’s memory, reasoning, or imagination, and so be adaptive indirectly. But Pinker and Bloom, whose analyses covertly sug- gest a view of grammar as rooted in meaning, adhere overtly to a school of thought committed to the strong view of grammar as autonomous of other cognitive processes. This stops Pinker and Bloom from offering a scenario in which repro- ductive advantage comes from the benefit of grammatical processing to other cognitive processes. It also stops them from offering a scenario in which mem- bers of the community without genetic instruction use parable (or any other cognitive processes) to recognize and parse grammatical structure in the utter- ances of the first lone genetically grammatical person.

  Pinker and Bloom provide no alternative to the scenario in which the adap- tiveness of genetic specialization for grammar depends upon the presence of a grammatical community. All of their speculations concerning reproductive advan- tage depend upon a community of speakers with rudimentary grammar. This is

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  understandable. There is no obvious way in which a lone grammatical person would have a direct reproductive advantage in a community whose other mem— bers are completely incapable of recognizing or parsing grammar by any means, general or special. The utterances directed at her would not be grammatical. Her own grammar would have no audience, since none of the grammatical structure she produced could be recognized by companions. Of course, her grammatical utterance could still be understood as ungrammatical communication, and she could still. attribute grammar to the ungrammatical communication directed at her, and there could surely be reproductive advantage conferred by communica- tion; but it is difficult to see that there would be any additional advantage con— ferred by the grammatical component.

  In a brief moment in their argument, Pinker and Bloom do consider explic- itly the right scenario their argument needs: a grammatical community of kin. They write, “Geschwind, among others, has wondered how a hypothetical ‘ben- eficial’ grammatical mutation could really have benefited its possessor, given that such an individual would not have been understood by less evolved compatriots. One possible answer is that any such mutation is likely to be shared by individu- als who are genetically related. Because much communication is among kin, a linguistic mutant will be understood by some relatives and the resulting enhance- ments in information sharing will benefit each one of them relative to others who are not related.” This is the only suggestion Pinker and Bloom offer of a com- munity in which grammar is not widespread. It is still not a picture of reproduc- tive advantage to the lone grammatical individual in a community whose other members are completely incapable of recognizing grammar by any means, pre- sumably because Pinker and Bloom can see no such advantage.

  But it is not true that such a mutation is likely to be shared by individuals who are genetically related. Consider the first genetically grammatical person. By definition, none of her ancestors or older siblings is genetically grammatical. If the genetic material expressed in her minimal grammatical competence arose by mutation from her parents’ genetic material, as in a copying error in making a sperm or eg, it is extraordinarily unlikely that her younger siblings would have that mutation. If it arose because error—free sexual recombination of her parents’ genetic material finally put together the right package, then later siblings would receive quite different genetic packages (especially if they do not have the same two parents). There is also the important difficulty that even if a later sibling had the right package, the first genetically grammatical infant would nonethe- less still live in grammatical isolation (under Pinker and Bloom’s suggestion) during the period in infancy in which she develops grammar.

  If evolution could think ahead, it would certainly see that producing a gene- tically grammatical community, even a small one, would be enormously useful

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  to members of that community. Pinker and Bloom are certainly right about that. But evolution cannot think ahead. It cannot think even one step ahead. As George C. Williams puts it in Natural Selection, “Every step of the way, as Darwin made clear, had to be immediately useful to each individual possessor. No future use- fulness is ever relevant.” A good natural selection story for the origin of rudi- mentary grammar must show that the first lone genetically grammatical human being had a reproductive advantage. If she was born into a community whose members had, by virtue of parable, a minimal capacity for grammar, then the reproductive advantage to her is obvious; but in that case, the origin of rudimen- tary grammar comes from parable, not from genetic specialization. Pinker and Bloom must disallow on principle the existence of such a community. They are therefore obliged to show benefit to the first genetically grammatical person, born into a community whose other m
embers have zero capacity for grammar, who lack the ability even to recognize the existence of grammar, much less to parse it. This is the hard and all~important step in the argument. It is a step they skip over.

  The least implausible picture Pinker and Bloom might have offered would be one in which the lone grammatical individual somehow develops grammar by using its grammar module in the absence of any grammatical utterances from other members of the community, grows up, passes the trait to one or more of her children, and converses with them in such a way that the minimal additional grammatical component that they add to communication confers, in some fash- ion, reproductive advantage to them, beyond the advantage conferred by the nongrammatical form of that communication, and skirting any costs in fitness associated with that genetic change, especially costs to the first lone grammati- cal person early in life, before she had a chance to reproduce and converse with offspring. This is a hazy picture, with central components missing, but none- theless one in which genetic specialization for grammar could in principle have been adaptive even though rudimentary grammar was otherwise absent.

  But there is no need to resort to such a picture. Very little grammatical com- petence would be needed to create an environment in which genetic specialization for grammar could be adaptive, and parable can supply a substantial grammar. The view that rudimentary grammar arises from parable provides an appropriate envi- ronment of evolutionary adaptiveness of the sort that any good natural selection story must have.

  The hypothesis that human beings now living have some genetic special- ization for grammar is an open question, to be decided on empirical grounds, principally in the study of genetics and neurobiology. The view of parable as the origin of grammar is not incompatible with this hypothesis. On the contrary, the parabolic account is the only one I see that straightforwardly provides the