Wired-in Grammar

Richard Ostrofsky
(May, 1997)
Last month’s column about the play theory of language ended with a
promise to talk about grammar in the next issue of OSCAR. I’m sure the
Ottawa South community has not exactly been panting with suspense.
Probably, like myself, you were thoroughly bored by the subject in school.
But, in elementary school, they did not teach us that all human languages
seem to share the same “deep structure” – a structure that may somehow be
hard wired into the human brain. Indeed, these discoveries had not been
made when I was going to school. They emerged only in the late 50's and
60's, and are among the most interesting ideas of our time.
The idea of grammatical “deep structure” helps to account both for the
differences and the fundamental similarities of human languages. Though
not all languages have explicitly marked nouns and verbs, they all seem to
organize the world as miniature narratives: as things performing actions,
either alone or on other things: “Susan told a story”. Another remarkable
common feature is that all allow recursive construction of arbitrarily
lengthy and complex sentences: “The woman I met yesterday, whose name
was Susan, told a long and tedious story”. “The thirty-something woman
with long, black braids that I met at that ridiculous party yesterday, who
wanted me to call her Shoshana although her actual name is Susan, put us
all to sleep by telling an outrageously long and tedious story in excruciating
detail about Noam Chomsky’s associates at the Massachusetts Insitute of
Technology and the development of transformational grammar.” Etc.
The idea of deep structure also accounts for the fact that human
languages provide different ways of saying essentially the same thing, with
varying emphasis and cadence. So for example, competent speakers of
English will have no trouble seeing that the sentence, “That story was told
to me by Susan.” contains exactly the same information as, “Susan told me
that story”. The conjecture is that the brain represents that information in a
common format – i.e. the deep structure – which is then capable of
transformation into the alternative “surface structures” of various well-
formed English sentences.
 The evidence that grammatical deep structure is somehow coded into
human genes and then reflected in the configuration of our brains originally
took two forms, although by now I think there is some neurophysiological
confirmation also: First, as any parent has witnessed, children learn to speak
their native languages in an amazingly short time, based on amazingly little
information. No formal teaching or correction is needed. It is not even
necessary that the infants be directly spoken to. In some cultures, it is not
customary to speak to babies until they are already talking, which happens
right on schedule all the same. The second piece of evidence is the
imposition of grammar onto grammarless “pidgin” tongues by second-
generation speakers. During the 18th and 19th centuries, on ships, or cotton
plantations, or south Pacific islands, it sometimes happened that people
without a language in common were thrown together. Such communities
spoke a kind of word salad, or “pidgin”, with vocabulary lifted from
everywhere, and no grammar to organize the flow of ideas into coherent
statements. Remarkably, the children of these castaways learned to speak in
the same mixed vocabulary, but with more grammar than their parents!
They could not have learned it from anyone, nor could they just have
invented it out of whole cloth. Rather, they seemed to have found some kind
of grammar ready-made, in their own nervous systems.
Now, what I find interesting about all this is the hint it gives that a
predisposition to construe the world in stories seems to be wired into human
brains, as the basis of our gift for language, and of consciousness itself. A
facility with stories, after all, confers the possibility of counter-factual and
hypothetical stories – of an imaginative, instead of a merely responsive
mode of existence. It suggests too that the sentence, the natural unit of
story-telling, may be more fundamental than the individual word. Children
do not, after all, acquire their mother tongue as separate items of
vocabulary. They hear sentences. Listening to and practicing its sounds,
they attune their ears and mouths to its significant distinctions of sound – its
phonemes. Equipped with the phonemes of the language, they begin to
understand whole utterances, relying first on situational contexts that they
have already mastered but then more and more on the sounds themselves. In
these cadences, separate words and grammatical markers begin to stand out,
organizing the world into noun phrases and verb phrases which can
recombine and string together into the infinite variety, yet underlying
sameness, of human speech. What we seem to have here is a ready-made
scheme of metaphysics, wired into our nervous systems and then
manifesting in our languages, that deals very well with middle-sized
physical objects, and conspicuously less well with anything else. If anyone
wants to think about how language influences thought, the metaphysics of
natural grammar is probably an excellent place to start.