Table Of ContentLanguage, Frogs and Savants
More Linguistic Problems, Puzzles
and Polemics
Neil Smith
Language, Frogs and Savants
To Zachary and Joshua
Unalloyed Joy
Language, Frogs and Savants
More Linguistic Problems, Puzzles
and Polemics
Neil Smith
© 2005 by Neil Smith
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First published 2005 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, N. V. (Neilson Voyne)
Language, frogs, and savants : more linguistic problems, puzzles, and
polemics / Neil Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3037-0 (hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-3037-7 (hard cover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3038-7 (pbk. : alk paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-3038-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Language and languages. 2. Linguistics. I. Title.
P107 S65 2005
400—dc22
2005009256
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Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: What Everyone Should Know about
Language and Linguistics 1
I The Meaning of ‘Language’ 2
II Knowledge of Language 5
III Describing Knowledge of Language 13
IV Explanation in Language 17
V Linguistics as a ‘Science’ 26
VI Beyond Language: Pragmatics and the Language
of Thought 32
Part I Language in the Limit 37
1 Savants 39
2 Singing by the Dead 45
3 Maganar Hannu 51
4 Sneering at the Arts 56
5 Babes and Sucklings 61
6 Censored? 66
7 Did you Know that the Portuguese for Turkey is Peru? 71
Part II Language in the Genes 77
8 Obstinacy 79
9 Backlash 84
10 Is There a Gene for Linguists? 90
11 Frogs, Parrots, Grooming, the Basal Ganglia and
Language 94
vi Contents
Part III Core Concerns 101
12 Parametric Poverty 103
13 Linguistics by Numbers 109
14 Modules, Modals, Maths and the Mind 114
15 Nothing 120
16 The 128
17 Are Gucks Mentally Represented? 139
Postscript: A Refutation? 144
18 Wonder 153
Glossary 159
References 179
Index 195
Preface
A craving for understanding.
Language holds a fascination for everyone. For some it can
become an obsession, and for a privileged few it can be the basis
for making a living. As a professional linguist all my life I have been
able to indulge my obsession at the tax-payers’ expense, and in
this collection of essays I want to repay some of the accumulated
debt. I would like to share the fun, enlighten the lay reader, and
simultaneously perhaps remove some of the misapprehensions of
psychologists, neurologists, and other members of the cognitive
science community who are professionally involved with language.
The essays that follow consist partly of revised and updated
versions of columns that appeared in the electronic journal Glot
International, and partly of lectures and reviews that have either
not been previously published or have been radically changed. They
were initially addressed to an audience with some basic expertise
in linguistics. As this cannot be expected of everyone reading this
collection, and as I wish to make the essays as accessible as possible,
I have provided a lengthy introduction to one version of current
linguistics: that associated most closely with the work of Noam
Chomsky. I have also compiled a glossary in which I have defined
and exemplified any terms that may be unfamiliar or used in ways
that differ from their normal non-linguistic usage.
As in my previous collection, Language, Bananas and Bonobos, the
essays fall into three categories, of Problems, Puzzles and Polemics.
As before, all of them address issues which are simultaneously prob-
lematic, puzzling or polemical in one way or another, so I have
viii Preface
ordered them not under those headings but into three different
groups. The first, ‘Language in the Limit’, deals with cases which
are in some way or other exceptional: they deal with the remark-
able talents of savants, with the complexities of signed languages,
with the insights and foibles of those on the periphery of formal
studies of language, from Shakespeare’s rhetorical devices to
etymology and linguistic censorship. This is followed by a genetic
interlude, ‘Language in the Genes’, discussing the fashionable pre-
occupation with innateness and the genetic determination of the
language faculty. The final group, ‘Core Concerns’, turns to issues
which are, perhaps surprisingly, more central to current theoreti-
cal linguistics: the definition of the, the mispronunciations of two-
year-olds, and the use of statistics. The grouping is not mandatory,
and the essays can be read in any order. Most of them should
be accessible to anyone prepared to go slowly and think about the
examples, though I have sometimes included technicalities for my
colleagues.
Linguistics is ultimately preoccupied with specifying what it
means to ‘know a language’, and providing explanations for how
this knowledge is possible. Our mastery of language can seem decept-
ively straightforward until we try to make explicit what precisely
an infant exposed to English or any other language has to master
before it counts as a speaker of that language, or what precisely
has been lost by someone who has had a stroke. An illustration of
a minute fraction of what we know can be given with examples
of words and sentences about which we have particular intuitions,
that we can judge as well- or ill-formed, or ambiguous. Listening
to the radio this morning I heard a minister declare that ‘the
government promised not to force people to work until they were
seventy’. I first took this to mean that the government would wait
until we were seventy before forcing us to work, and only a sec-
ond or two later came up with the less cynical interpretation that
working until we were seventy was something the government
would not force us to do. Being potentially aware of both these
possibilities is part of what it means to know English. Take an even
simpler, and less loaded, example: a linguist might say either I am
studying word order in Arabic or I am studying the word order of Arabic,
but it would be odd to say either I am studying the word order in Arabic
or I am studying word order of Arabic. For the moment it doesn’t
matter precisely why this should be the case; what is important is
