The Scholarly Dispute Over The Meaning of Linguistics

Fashions in academe may be a bit more durable than those of Paris couturiers, but, like hemlines, the popularity of disciplines rises and falls. Much in vogue at the moment, right up there with particle physics and computer technology, is the study of linguistics. Its new popularity, contends Princeton Linguist William Moulton, stems from a growing recognition that it is "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences."

In the U.S. today, at least 30 universities now offer a Ph.D. in linguistics, compared with only four just 20 years ago. Ten years ago, the offering of an undergraduate major in linguistics was a rarity; now it is an option at some 30 universities. The field is growing so fast that the nation's 4,000 or so fully qualified linguists (roughly one for each of the world's languages) cannot keep up with the research and teaching load--and the shortage of scholars makes them highly mobile, gradually pushes up their salaries.

Man & Animal. Basically, linguistics is the study of the underlying principles of language. The discipline concerns itself with dissecting the grammar and logic of the world's languages, tracing their shifting patterns and distribution, studying their impact on individuals, groups and institutions. Ultimately, it seeks to explain the ages-old mystery of precisely how and why man developed the unique facility of speech as an expression of thought, which, more than any other activity, separates him from animals.

In tackling his topic, today's linguistics scholar often must command one or more of such diverse fields of expertise as psychology, biology, mathematics, even electrical engineering or analytic philosophy. As it develops, the discipline has spawned such hybrids or specialties as computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, even biological linguistics. All of which has led to a far higher standing in academe than universities traditionally accorded their linguists, who until recently were normally employed as mere appendages to anthropology or foreign-language departments.

As an academic discipline, the study of linguistics can probably be traced back to 400 B.C., when the Indian scholar Panini worked out the first systematic description of Sanskrit. Its recent recognition, however, stems largely from the spirited intellectual battle now going on between two opposing schools: structural linguistics, led by Yale's Leonard Bloomfield in the 1930s and today defended most vigorously by Charles Hockett of Cornell, and the newer transformational linguistics, which was conceived and developed by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Innate v. Imitative. The argument between the schools is extremely complex; in essence it revolves around the fundamental question of how man learns and uses language. The long-dominant structuralists claim that language is a habit man acquires by imitating other men, and thus should be studied by analyzing sounds and how they are manipulated to create sentences. Generally, structural linguistics tend to reject the idea that there is any "right" or "correct" grammar; its permissive principles influenced the word selection of Webster's Third New International Dictionary. By contrast, the school of transformationalists contends that language is an innate, instinctively acquired facility; the study of it should start with sentences, then try to discern the rules by which a sentence conveys its meaning.

Chomsky concedes that an individual must hear someone speak before he can speak meaningfully himself, but says that listening only triggers an intrinsic linguistic competence man already has. If this were not so, asks Chomsky, why is it that man can construct an infinite variety of sentences that he has never heard before, and always in grammatical patterns that are predictable? The transformational linguists thus theorize that a spoken sentence must be analyzed on two different levels--a "surface" level consisting of what one actually hears and an inner "deep" level, predictable but as yet unexplainable, that provides the basic meaning.

Esoteric as it may seem, the transformational argument threatens the validity of the behaviorist approach in social sciences, which rejects as meaningless anything that cannot be objectively measured and observed. For that reason, Structuralist Hockett argues that the followers of Chomsky have abandoned "scientific linguistics" in favor of "the speculations of a neo-medieval philosopher." Others in the field, however, compare Chomsky with Galileo and Freud in his impact on a scientific discipline.

To Fathom the Mind. Despite its all but impenetrable jargon, linguistics has practical applications that reach well beyond the university lecture hall. Linguists helped produce the mathematically based language that computers digest and transmit--and computers, in turn, have been a powerful tool in linguistic analysis. The U.S. Government used the knowledge of the linguists to develop highly effective language-teaching techniques in World War II, and even before Sputnik it made linguistic studies one of the main interests of the National Science Foundation. It is a charter concern for the new National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. Other uses are being explored by the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, financed mainly with federal funds. A whole "new English" grammar, based on transformational linguistics, is spreading through the nation's public schools, reaches nearly 20% of all students.

The Chomsky school, as it happens, is not much interested in whether linguistics is much of a help in teaching grammar. It is, says his M.I.T. colleague Jerry A. Fodor, "like teaching the driver of a car the theory of the internal-combustion engine before letting him drive." Chomsky's own goal is far grander than grammar: to refine a philosophy of language and to fathom the workings of the mind. But he is not arrogant about his task. "It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence," he sighs, "to understand how human intelligence works."

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