Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics

John R. Searle

The New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972

Throughout the history of the study of man there has been a fundamental opposition between
those who believe that progress is to be made by a rigorous observation of man's actual
behavior and those who believe that such observations are interesting only in so far as they
reveal to us hidden and possibly fairly mysterious underlying laws that only partially and in
distorted form reveal themselves to us in behavior. Freud, for example, is in the latter class,
most of American social science in the former.

Noam Chomsky is unashamedly with the searchers after hidden laws. Actual speech behavior,
speech performance, for him is only the top of a large iceberg of linguistic competence
distorted in its shape by many factors irrelevant to linguistics. Indeed he once remarked that
the very expression "behavioral sciences" suggests a fundamental confusion between evidence
and subject matter. Psychology, for example, he claims is the science of mind; to call
psychology a behavioral science is like calling physics a science of meter readings. One uses
human behavior as evidence for the laws of the operation of the mind, but to suppose that the
laws must be laws of behavior is to suppose that the evidence must be the subject matter.

In this opposition between the methodology of confining research to observable facts and that
of using the observable facts as clues to hidden and underlying laws, Chomsky's revolution is
doubly interesting: first, within the field of linguistics, it has precipitated a conflict which is an
example of the wider conflict; and secondly, Chomsky has used his results about language to
try to develop general anti-behaviorist and anti-empiricist conclusions about the nature of the
human mind that go beyond the scope of linguistics.

His revolution followed fairly closely the general pattern described in Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions: the accepted model or "paradigm" of linguistics was
confronted, largely by Chomsky's work, with increasing numbers of nagging counterexamples
and recalcitrant data which the paradigm could not deal with. Eventually the counter-
examples led Chomsky to break the old model altogether and to create a completely new one.
Prior to the publication of his Syntactic Structures in 1957, many, probably most, American
linguists regarded the aim of their discipline as being the classification of the elements of
human languages. Linguistics was to be a sort of verbal botany. As Hockett wrote in 1942,
"Linguistics is a classificatory science."[1]

Suppose, for example, that such a linguist is giving a description of a language, whether an
exotic language like Cherokee or a familiar one like English. He proceeds by first collecting his
"data," he gathers a large number of utterances of the language, which he records on his tape
recorder or in a phonetic script. This "corpus" of the language constitutes his subject matter.
He then classifies the elements of the corpus at their different linguistic levels: first he classifies
the smallest significant functioning units of sound, the phonemes, then at the next level the
phonemes unite into the minimally significant bearers of meaning, the morphemes (in English,
for example, the word "cat" is a single morpheme made up of three phonemes; the word
"uninteresting" is made up of three morphemes: "un," "interest," and "ing"), at the next higher
level the morphemes join together to form words and word classes such as noun phrases and
verb phrases, and at the highest level of all come sequences of word classes, the possible
sentences and sentence types.

The aim of linguistic theory was to provide the linguist with a set of rigorous methods, a set of
discovery procedures which he would use to extract from the "corpus" the phonemes, the
morphemes, and so on. The study of the meanings of sentences or of the uses to which
speakers of the language put the sentences had little place in this enterprise. Meanings,
scientifically construed, were thought to be patterns of behavior determined by stimulus and
response; they were properly speaking the subject matter of psychologists. Alternatively they
might be some mysterious mental entities altogether outside the scope of a sober science or,
worse yet, they might involve the speaker's whole knowledge of the world around him and
thus fall beyond the scope of a study restricted only to linguistic facts.

Structural linguistics, with its insistence on objective methods of verification and precisely
specified techniques of discovery, with its refusal to allow any talk of meanings or mental
entities or unobservable features, derives from the "behavioral sciences" approach to the
study of man, and is also largely a consequence of the philosophical assumptions of logical
positivism. Chomsky was brought up in this tradition at the University of Pennsylvania as a
student of both Zellig Harris, the linguist, and Nelson Goodman, the philosopher.

Chomsky's work is interesting in large part because, while it is a major attack on the
conception of man implicit in the behavioral sciences, the attack is made from within the very
tradition of scientific rigor and precision that the behavioral sciences have been aspiring to. His
attack on the view that human psychology can be described by correlating stimulus and
response is not an a priori conceptual argument, much less is it the cry of an anguished
humanist resentful at being treated as a machine or an animal. Rather it is a claim that a really
rigorous analysis of language will show that such methods when applied to language produce
nothing but false-hoods or trivialities, that their practitioners have simply imitated "the surface
features of science" without having its "significant intellectual content."

As a graduate student at Pennsylvania, Chomsky attempted to apply the conventional methods

of structural linguistics to the study of syntax, but found that the methods that had apparently
worked so well with phonemes and morphemes did not work very well with sentences. Each
language has a finite number of phonemes and a finite though quite large number of
morphemes. It is possible to get a list of each; but the number of sentences in any natural
language like French or English is, strictly speaking, infinite. There is no limit to the number of
new sentences that can be produced; and for each sentence, no matter how long, it is always
possible to produce a longer one. Within structuralist assumptions it is not easy to account for
the fact that languages have an infinite number of sentences.

Furthermore the structuralist methods of classification do not seem able to account for all of
the internal relations within sentences, or the relations that different sentences have to each
other. For example, to take a famous case, the two sentences "John is easy to please" and
"John is eager to please" look as if they had exactly the same grammatical structure. Each is a
sequence of noun-copula-adjective-infinitive verb. But in spite of this surface similarity the
grammar of the two is quite different. In the first sentence, though it is not apparent from the
surface word order, "John" functions as the direct object of the verb to please; the sentence
means: it is easy for someone to please John. Whereas in the second "John" functions as the
subject of the verb to please; the sentence means: John is eager that he please someone. That
this is a difference in the syntax of the sentences comes out clearly in the fact that English
allows us to form the noun phrase "John's eagerness to please" out of the second, but not
"John's easiness to please" out of the first. There is no easy or natural way to account for these
facts within structuralist assumptions.

Another set of syntactical facts that structuralist assumptions are inadequate to handle is the
existence of certain types of ambiguous sentences where the ambiguity derives not from the
words in the sentence but from the syntactical structure. Consider the sentence "The shooting
of the hunters is terrible." This can mean that it is terrible that the hunters are being shot or
that the hunters are terrible at shooting or that the hunters are being shot in a terrible fashion.
Another example is "I like her cooking." In spite of the fact that it contains no ambiguous
words (or morphemes) and has a very simple superficial grammatical structure of noun-verb-
possessive pronoun-noun, this sentence is in fact remarkably ambiguous. It can mean, among
other things, I like what she cooks, I like the way she cooks, I like the fact that she cooks, even,
I like the fact that she is being cooked.

Such "syntactically ambiguous" sentences form a crucial test case for any theory of syntax. The
examples are ordinary pedestrian English sentences, there is nothing fancy about them. But it
is not easy to see how to account for them. The meaning of any sentence is determined by the
meanings of the component words (or morphemes) and their syntactical arrangement. How
then can we account for these cases where one sentence containing unambiguous words (and
morphemes) has several different meanings? Structuralist linguists had little or nothing to say
about these cases; they simply ignored them. Chomsky was eventually led to claim that these
sentences have several different syntactical structures, that the uniform surface structure of,
e.g., "I like her cooking" conceals several different underlying structures which he called
"deep" structures. The introduction of the notion of the deep structure of sentences, not
always visible in the surface structure, is a crucial element of the Chomsky revolution, and I
shall explain it in more detail later.

One of the merits of Chomsky's work has been that he has persistently tried to call attention to
the puzzling character of facts that are so familiar that we all tend to take them for granted as
not requiring explanation. Just as physics begins in wonder at such obvious facts as that apples
fall to the ground or genetics in wonder that plants and animals reproduce themselves, so the
study of the structure of language beings in wondering at such humdrum facts as that "I like
her cooking" has different meanings, "John is eager to please" isn't quite the same in structure
as "John is easy to please," and the equally obvious but often overlooked facts that we
continually find ourselves saying and hearing things we have never said or heard before and
that the number of possible new sentences is infinite.

The inability of structuralist methods to account for such syntactical facts eventually led
Chomsky to challenge not only the methods but the goals and indeed the definition of the
subject matter of linguistics given by the structuralist linguists. Instead of a taxonomic goal of
classifying elements by performing sets of operations on a corpus of utterances, Chomsky
argued that the goal of linguistic description should be to construct a theory that would
account for the infinite number of sentences of a natural language. Such a theory would show
which strings of words were sentences and which were not, and would provide a description of
the grammatical structure of each sentence.

Such descriptions would have to be able to account for such facts as the internal grammatical
relations and the ambiguities described above. The description of a natural language would be
a formal deductive theory which would contain a set of grammatical rules that could generate
the infinite set of sentences of the language, would not generate anything that was not a
sentence, and would provide a description of the grammatical structure of each sentence.
Such a theory came to be called a "generative grammar" because of its aim of constructing a
device that would generate all and only the sentences of a language.

This conception of the goal of linguistics then altered the conception of the methods and the
subject matter. Chomsky argued that since any language contains an infinite number of
sentences, any "corpus," even if it contained as many sentences as there are in all the books of
the Library of Congress, would still be trivially small. Instead of the appropriate subject matter
of linguistics being a randomly or arbitrarily selected set of sentences, the proper object of
study was the speaker's underlying knowledge of the language, his "linguistic competence"
that enables him to produce and understand sentences he has never heard before.

Once the conception of the "corpus" as the subject matter is rejected, then the notion of
mechanical procedures for discovering linguistic truths goes as well. Chomsky argues that no
science has a mechanical procedure for discovering the truth anyway. Rather, what happens is
that the scientist formulates hypotheses and tests them against evidence. Linguistics is no
different: the linguist makes conjectures about linguistic facts and tests them against the
evidence provided by native speakers of the language. He has in short a procedure for
evaluating rival hypotheses, but no procedure for discovering true theories by mechanically
processing evidence.

The Chomsky revolution can be summarized in the following chart:

Most of this revolution was already presented in Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures. As one
linguist remarked, "The extraordinary and traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic
Structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957 can hardly be appreciated by one who did not live
through this upheaval."[2] In the years after 1957 the spread of the revolution was made more
rapid and more traumatic by certain special features of the organization of linguistics as a
discipline in the United States. Only a few universities had separate departments of linguistics.
The discipline was (by contrast to, say, philosophy or psychology), and still is, a rather cozy
one. Practitioners were few; they all tended to know one another; they read the same very
limited number of journals; they had, and indeed still have, an annual get-together at the
Summer Linguistics Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, where issues are thrashed out
and family squabbles are aired in public meetings.

All of this facilitated a rapid dissemination of new ideas and a dramatic and visible clash of
conflicting views. Chomsky did not convince the established leaders of the field but he did
something more important, he convinced their graduate students. And he attracted some fiery
disciples, notably Robert Lees and Paul Postal.

The spread of Chomsky's revolution, like the spread of analytic philosophy during the same
period, was a striking example of the Young Turk phenomenon in American academic life. The
graduate students became generative grammarians even in departments that had
traditionalist faculties. All of this also engendered a good deal of passion and animosity, much
of which still survives. Many of the older generation still cling resentfully to the great
traditions, regarding Chomsky and his "epigones" as philistines and vulgarians. Meanwhile
Chomsky's views have become the conventional wisdom, and as Chomsky and his disciples of
the Sixties very quickly become Old Turks a new generation of Young Turks (many of them
among Chomsky's best students) arise and challenge Chomsky's views with a new theory of
"generative semantics."

II

The aim of the linguistic theory expounded by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957) was
essentially to describe syntax, that is, to specify the grammatical rules underlying the
construction of sentences. In Chomsky's mature theory, as expounded in Aspects of the Theory
of Syntax (1965), the aims become more ambitious: to explain all of the linguistic relationships
between the sound system and the meaning system of the language. To achieve this, the
complete "grammar" of a language, in Chomsky's technical sense of the word, must have three
parts, a syntactical component that generates and describes the internal structure of the
infinite number of sentences of the language, a phonological component that describes the
sound structure of the sentences generated by the syntactical component, and a semantic
component that describes the meaning structure of the sentences. The heart of the grammar
is the syntax; the phonology and the semantics are purely "interpretative," in the sense that
they describe the sound and the meaning of the sentences produced by the syntax but do not
generate any sentences themselves.

The first task of Chomsky's syntax is to account for the speaker's understanding of the internal
structure of sentences. Sentences are not unordered strings of words, rather the words and
morphemes are grouped into functional constituents such as the subject of the sentence, the
predicate, the direct object, and so on. Chomsky and other grammarians can represent much,
though not all, of the speaker's knowledge of the internal structure of sentences with rules
called "phrase structure" rules.

The rules themselves are simple enough to understand. For example, the fact that a sentence
(S) can consist of a noun phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP) we can represent in a rule
of the form: S ? NP + VP. And for purposes of constructing a grammatical theory which will
generate and describe the structure of sentences, we can read the arrow as an instruction to
rewrite the left-hand symbol as the string of symbols on the right-hand side. The rewrite rules
tell us that the initial symbol S can be replaced by NP + VP. Other rules will similarly unpack NP
and VP into their constituents. Thus, in a very simple grammar, a noun phrase might consist of
an article (Art) followed by a noun (N); and a verb phrase might consist of an auxiliary verb
(Aux), a main verb (V), and a noun phrase (NP). A very simple grammar of a fragment of
English, then, might look like this:

1. S ? NP + VP

2. NP ? Art + N

3. VP ? Aux + V + NP

4. Aux ? (can, may, will, must, etc.)

5. V ? (read, hit, eat, etc.)

6. Art ? (a, the)

7. N ? (boy, man, book, etc.)

If we introduce the initial symbol S into this system, then construing each arrow as the
instruction to rewrite the left-hand symbol with the elements on the right (and where the
elements are bracketed, to rewrite it as one of the elements), we can construct derivations of
English sentences. If we keep applying the rules to generate strings until we have no elements
in our strings that occur on the left-hand side of a rewrite rule, we have arrived at a "terminal
string." For example, starting with S and rewriting according to the rules mentioned above, we
might construct the following simple derivation of the terminal string underlying the sentence
"The boy will read the book":

NP + VP (by rule 1)

Art + N + VP (by rule 2)

Art + N + Aux + V + NP (by rule 3)

Art + N + Aux + V + Art + N

(by rule 2)

the + boy + will + read + the + book

(by rules 4, 5, 6, and 7)

The information contained in this derivation can be represented graphically in a tree diagram
of the following form:
This "phrase marker" is Chomsky's representation of the syntax of the sentence "The boy will
read the book." It provides a description of the syntactical structure of the sentence. Phrase
structure rules of the sort I have used to construct the derivation were implicit in at least some
of the structuralist grammars; but Chomsky was the first to render them explicit and to show
their role in the derivations of sentences. He is not, of course, claiming that a speaker actually
goes consciously or unconsciously through any such process of applying rules of the form
"rewrite X as Y" to construct sentences. To construe the grammarian's description this way
would be to confuse an account of competence with a theory of performance.

But Chomsky does claim that in some form or other the speaker has "internalized" rules of
sentence construction, that he has "tacit" or "unconscious" knowledge of grammatical rules,
and that the phrase structure rules constructed by the grammarian "represent" his
competence. One of the chief difficulties of Chomsky's theory is that no clear and precise
answer has ever been given to the question of exactly how the grammarian's account of the
construction of sentences is supposed to represent the speaker's ability to speak and
understand sentences, and in precisely what sense of "know" the speaker is supposed to know
the rules of the grammar.

Phrase structure rules were, as I have said, already implicit in at least some of the structuralist
grammars Chomsky was attacking in Syntactic Structures. One of his earliest claims was that
such rules, even in a rigorous and formalized deductive model such as we have just sketched,
were not adequate to account for all the syntactical facts of natural languages. The entering
wedge of his attack on structuralism was the claim that phrase structure rules alone could not
account for the various sorts of cases such as "I like her cooking" and "John is eager to please."

First, within such a grammar there is no natural way to describe the ambiguities in a sentence
such as "I like her cooking." Phrase structure rules alone would provide only one derivation for
this sentence; but as the sentence is syntactically ambiguous, the grammar should reflect that
fact by providing several different syntactical derivations and hence several different
syntactical descriptions.

Secondly, phrase structure grammars have no way to picture the differences between "John is
easy to please" and "John is eager to please." Though the sentences are syntactically different,
phrase structure rules alone would give them similar phrase markers.

Thirdly, just as in the above examples surface similarities conceal underlying differences that
cannot be revealed by phrase structure grammar, so surface differences also conceal
underlying similarities. For example, in spite of the different word order and the addition of
certain elements, the sentence "The book will be read by the boy" and the sentence "The boy
will read the book" have much in common: they both mean the same thing—the only
difference is that one is in the passive mood and the other in the active mood. Phrase structure
grammars alone give us no way to picture this similarity. They would give us two unrelated
descriptions of these two sentences.

To account for such facts, Chomsky claims that in addition to phrase structure rules the
grammar requires a second kind of rule, "transformational" rules, which transform phrase
markers into other phrase markers by moving elements around, by adding elements, and by
deleting elements. For example, by using Chomsky's transformational rules, we can show the
similarity of the passive to the active mood by showing how a phrase marker for the active
mood can be converted into a phrase marker for the passive mood. Thus, instead of generating
two unrelated phrase markers by phrase structure rules, we can construct a simpler grammar
by showing how both the active and the passive can be derived from the same underlying
phrase marker.

To account for sentences like "I like her cooking" we show that what we have is not just one
phrase marker but several different underlying sentences each with a different meaning, and
the phrase markers for these different sentences can all be transformed into one phrase
marker for "I like her cooking." Thus, underlying the one sentence "I like her cooking" are
phrase markers for "I like what she cooks," "I like the way she cooks," "I like the fact that she
cooks," etc. For example, underlying the two meanings, "I like what she cooks" and "I like it
that she is being cooked," are the two phrase markers:[3]
Different transformational rules convert each of these into the same derived phrase marker for
the sentence "I like her cooking." Thus, the ambiguity in the sentence is represented in the
grammar by phrase markers of several quite different sentences. Different phrase markers
produced by the phrase structure rules are transformed into the same phrase marker by the
application of the transformational rules.

Because of the introduction of transformational rules, grammars of Chomsky's kind are often
called "transformational generative grammars" or simply "transformational grammars." Unlike
phrase structure rules which apply to a single left-hand element in virtue of its shape,
transformational rules apply to an element only in virtue of its position in a phrase marker:
instead of rewriting one element as a string of elements, a transformational rule maps one
phrase marker into another. Transformational rules therefore apply after the phrase structure
rules have been applied; they operate on the output of the phrase structure rules of the
grammar.

Corresponding to the phrase structure rules and the transformational rules respectively are
two components to the syntax of the language, a base component and a transformational
component. The base component of Chomsky's grammar contains the phrase structure rules,
and these (together with certain rules restricting which combinations of words are permissible
so that we do not get nonsense sequences like "The book will read the boy") determine the
deep structure of each sentence. The transformational component converts the deep structure
of the sentence into its surface structure. In the example we just considered, "The book will be
boy" and the sentence "The boy will read the book," two surface structures are derived from
one deep structure. In the case of "I like her cooking," one surface structure is derived from
several different deep structures.

At the time of the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax it seemed that all of the
semantically relevant parts of the sentence, all the things that determine its meaning, were
contained in the deep structure of the sentence. The examples we mentioned above fit in
nicely with this view. "I like her cooking" has different meanings because it has different deep
structures though only one surface structure; "The boy will read the book" and "The book will
be read by the boy" have different surface structures, but one and the same deep structure,
hence they have the same meaning.

This produced a rather elegant theory of the relation of syntax to semantics and phonology:
the two components of the syntax, the base component and the transformational component,
generate deep structures and surface structures respectively. Deep structures are the input to
the semantic component, which describes their meaning. Surface structures are the input to
the phonological component, which describes their sound. In short, deep structure determines
meaning, surface structure determines sound. Graphically the theory of a language was
supposed to look like this:
The task of the grammarian is to state the rules that are in each of the little boxes. These rules
are supposed to represent the speaker's competence. In knowing how to produce and
understand sentences, the speaker, in some sense, is supposed to know or to have
"internalized" or have an "internal representation of" these rules.

The elegance of this picture has been marred in recent years, partly by Chomsky himself, who
now concedes that surface structures determine at least part of meaning, and more radically
by the younger Turks, the generative semanticists, who insist that there is no boundary
between syntax and semantics and hence no such entities as syntactic deep structures.

III

Seen as an attack on the methods and assumptions of structural linguistics, Chomsky's

revolution appears to many of his students to be not quite revolutionary enough. Chomsky
inherits and maintains from his structuralist upbringing the conviction that syntax can and
should be studied independently of semantics; that form is to be characterized independently
of meaning. As early as Syntactic Structures he was arguing that "investigation of such
[semantic] proposals invariably leads to the conclusion that only a purely formal basis can
provide a firm and productive foundation for the construction of grammatical theory."[4]

The structuralists feared the intrusion of semantics into syntax because meaning seemed too
vaporous and unscientific a notion for use in a rigorous science of language. Some of this
attitude appears to survive in Chomsky's persistent preference for syntactical over semantic
explanations of linguistic phenomena. But, I believe, the desire to keep syntax autonomous
springs from a more profound philosophical commitment: man, for Chomsky, is essentially a
syntactical animal. The structure of his brain determines the structure of his syntax, and for
this reason the study of syntax is one of the keys, perhaps the most important key, to the
study of the human mind.

It is of course true, Chomsky would say, that men use their syntactical objects for semantic
purposes (that is, they talk with their sentences), but the semantic purposes do not determine
the form of the syntax or even influence it in any significant way. It is because form is only
incidentally related to function that the study of language as a formal system is such a
marvelous way of studying the human mind.

It is important to emphasize how peculiar and eccentric Chomsky's overall approach to

language is. Most sympathetic commentators have been so dazzled by the results in syntax
that they have not noted how much of the theory runs counter to quite ordinary, plausible,
and common-sense assumptions about language. The commonsense picture of human
language runs something like this. The purpose of language is communication in much the
same sense that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood. In both cases it is possible to study
the structure independently of function but pointless and perverse to do so, since structure
and function so obviously interact. We communicate primarily with other people, but also with
ourselves, as when we talk or think in words to ourselves. Human languages are among several
systems of human communication (some others are gestures, symbol systems, and
representational art) but language has immeasurably greater communicative power than the
others.
We don't know how language evolved in human prehistory, but it is quite reasonable to
suppose that the needs of communication influenced the structure. For example,
transformational rules facilitate economy and so have survival value: we don't have to say, "I
like it that she cooks in a certain way," we can say, simply, "I like her cooking." We pay a small
price for such economies in having ambiguities, but it does not hamper communication much
to have ambiguous sentences because when people actually talk the context usually sorts out
the ambiguities. Transformations also facilitate communication by enabling us to emphasize
certain things at the expense of others: we can say not only "Bill loves Sally" but also "It is Bill
that loves Sally" and "It is Sally that Bill loves." In general an understanding of syntactical facts
requires an understanding of their function in communication since communication is what
language is all about.

Chomsky's picture, on the other hand, seems to be something like this: except for having such
general purposes as the expression of human thoughts, language doesn't have any essential
purpose, or if it does there is no interesting connection between its purpose and its structure.
The syntactical structures of human languages are the products of innate features of the
human mind, and they have no significant connection with communication, though, of course,
people do use them for, among other purposes, communication. The essential thing about
languages, their defining trait, is their structure. The so-called "bee language," for example, is
not a language at all because it doesn't have the right structure, and the fact that bees
apparently use it to communicate is irrelevant. If human beings evolved to the point where
they used syntactical forms to communicate that are quite unlike the forms we have now and
would be beyond our present comprehension, then human beings would no longer have
language, but something else.

For Chomsky language is defined by syntactical structure (not by the use of the structure in
communication) and syntactical structure is determined by innate properties of the human
mind (not by the needs of communication). On this picture of language it is not surprising that
Chomsky's main contribution has been to syntax. The semantic results that he and his
colleagues have achieved have so far been trivial.

Many of Chomsky's best students find this picture of language implausible and the linguistic
theory that emerges from it unnecessarily cumbersome. They argue that one of the crucial
factors shaping syntactic structure is semantics. Even such notions as "a grammatically correct
sentence" or a "well-formed" sentence, they claim, require the introduction of semantic
concepts. For example, the sentence "John called Mary a Republican and then SHE insulted
HIM" [5] is a wellformed sentence only on the assumption that the participants regard it as
insulting to be called a Republican.

Much as Chomsky once argued that structuralists could not comfortably accommodate the
syntactical facts of language, so the generative semanticists now argue that his system cannot
comfortably account for the facts of the interpenetration of semantics and syntax. There is no
unanimity among Chomsky's critics—Ross, Postal, Lakoff, McCawley, Fillmore (some of these
are among his best students)—but they generally agree that syntax and semantics cannot be
sharply separated, and hence there is no need to postulate the existence of purely syntactical
deep structures.
Those who call themselves generative semanticists believe that the generative component of a
linguistic theory is not the syntax, as in the above diagrams, but the semantics, that the
grammar starts with a description of the meaning of a sentence and then generates the
syntactical structures through the introduction of syntactical rules and lexical rules. The syntax
then becomes just a collection of rules for expressing meaning.

It is too early to assess the conflict between Chomsky's generative syntax and the new theory
of generative semantics, partly because at present the arguments are so confused. Chomsky
himself thinks that there is no substance to the issues because his critics have only rephrased
his theory in a new terminology.[6]

But it is clear that a great deal of Chomsky's over-all vision of language hangs on the issue of
whether there is such a thing as syntactical deep structure. Chomsky argues that if there were
no deep structure, linguistics as a study would be much less interesting because one could not
then argue from syntax to the structure of the human mind, which for Chomsky is the chief
interest of linguistics. I believe on the contrary that if the generative semanticists are right (and
it is by no means clear that they are) that there is no boundary between syntax and semantics
and hence no syntactical deep structures, linguistics if anything would be even more
interesting because we could then begin the systematic investigation of the way form and
function interact, how use and structure influence each other, instead of arbitrarily assuming
that they do not, as Chomsky has so often tended to assume.

It is one of the ironies of the Chomsky revolution that the author of the revolution now
occupies a minority position in the movement he created. Most of the active people in
generative grammar regard Chomsky's position as having been rendered obsolete by the
various arguments concerning the inter-action between syntax and semantics. The old time
structuralists whom Chomsky originally attacked look on with delight at this revolution within
the revolution, rubbing their hands in glee at the sight of their adversaries fighting each other.
"Those TG [transformational grammar] people are in deep trouble," one warhorse of the old
school told me. But the traditionalists are mistaken to regard the fight as support for their
position. The conflict is being carried on entirely within a conceptual system that Chomsky
created. Whoever wins, the old structuralism will be the loser.

IV

The most spectacular conclusion about the nature of the human mind that Chomsky derives
from his work in linguistics is that his results vindicate the claims of the seventeenth-century
rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, that there are innate ideas in the mind.
The rationalists claim that human beings have knowledge that is not derived from experience
but is prior to all experience and determines the form of the knowledge that can be gained
from experience. The empiricist tradition by contrast, from Locke down to contemporary
behaviorist learning theorists, has tended to treat the mind as a tabula rasa, containing no
knowledge prior to experience and placing no constraints on the forms of possible knowledge,
except that they must be derived from experience by such mechanisms as the association of
ideas or the habitual connection of stimulus and response. For empiricists all knowledge comes
from experience, for rationalists some knowledge is implanted innately and prior to
experience. In his bluntest moods, Chomsky claims to have refuted the empiricists and
vindicated the rationalists.

His argument centers around the way in which children learn language. Suppose we assume
that the account of the structure of natural languages we gave in Section II is correct. Then the
grammar of a natural language will consist of a set of phrase structure rules that generate
underlying phrase markers, a set of transformational rules that map deep structures onto
surface structures, a set of phonological rules that assign phonetic interpretations to surface
structures, and so on. Now, asks Chomsky, if all of this is part of the child's linguistic
competence, how does he ever acquire it? That is, in learning how to talk, how does the child
acquire that part of knowing how to talk which is described by the grammar and which
constitutes his linguistic competence?

Notice, Chomsky says, several features of the learning situation: The information that the child
is presented with—when other people address him or when he hears them talk to each other
—is limited in amount, fragmentary, and imperfect. There seems to be no way the child could
learn the language just by generalizing from his inadequate experiences, from the utterances
he hears. Furthermore, the child acquires the language at a very early age, before his general
intellectual faculties are developed.

Indeed, the ability to learn a language is only marginally dependent on intelligence and
motivation—stupid children and intelligent children, motivated and unmotivated children, all
learn to speak their native tongue. If a child does not acquire his first language by puberty, it is
difficult, and perhaps impossible, for him to learn one after that time. Formal teaching of the
first language is unnecessary: the child may have to go to school to learn to read and write but
he does not have to go to school to learn how to talk.

Now, in spite of all these facts the child who learns his first language, claims Chomsky,
performs a remarkable intellectual feat: in "internalizing" the grammar he does something akin
to constructing a theory of the language. The only explanation for all these facts, says
Chomsky, is that the mind is not a tabula rasa, but rather, the child has the form of the
language already built into his mind before he ever learns to talk. The child has a universal
grammar, so to speak, programmed into his brain as part of his genetic inheritance. In the
most ambitious versions of this theory, Chomsky speaks of the child as being born "with a
perfect knowledge of universal grammar, that is, with a fixed schematism that he uses,…in
acquiring language."[7] A child can learn any human language on the basis of very imperfect
information. That being the case, he must have the forms that are common to all human
languages as part of his innate mental equipment.

As further evidence in support of a specifically human "faculté de langage" Chomsky points out
that animal communication systems are radically unlike human languages. Animal systems
have only a finite number of communicative devices, and they are usually controlled by certain
stimuli. Human languages by contrast, all have an infinite generative capacity and the
utterances of sentences are not predictable on the basis of external stimuli. This "creative
aspect of language use" is peculiarly human.
One traditional argument against the existence of an innate language learning faculty is that
human languages are so diverse. The differences between Chinese, Nootka, Hungarian, and
English, for example, are so great as to destroy the possibility of any universal grammar, and
hence languages could only be learned by a general intelligence, not by any innate language
learning device. Chomsky has attempted to turn this argument on its head: In spite of surface
differences, all human languages have very similar underlying structures; they all have phrase
structure rules and transformational rules. They all contain sentences, and these sentences are
composed of subject noun phrases and predicate verb phrases, etc.

Chomsky is really making two claims here. First, a historical claim that his views on language
were prefigured by the seventeenth-century rationalists, especially Descartes. Second, a
theoretical claim that empiricist learning theory cannot account for the acquisition of
language. Both claims are more tenuous than he suggests. Descartes did indeed claim that we
have innate ideas, such as the idea of a triangle or the idea of perfection or the idea of God.
But I know of no passage in Descartes to suggest that he thought the syntax of natural
languages was innate. Quite the contrary, Descartes appears to have thought that language
was arbitrary; he thought that we arbitrarily attach words to our ideas. Concepts for Descartes
are innate, whereas language is arbitrary and acquired. Furthermore Descartes does not allow
for the possibility of unconscious knowledge, a notion that is crucial to Chomsky's system.
Chomsky cites correctly Descartes's claim that the creative use of language distinguishes man
from the lower animals. But that by itself does not support the thesis that Descartes is a
precursor of Chomsky's theory of innate ideas.

The positions are in fact crucially different. Descartes thought of man as essentially a language-
using animal who arbitrarily assigns verbal labels to an innate system of concepts. Chomsky, as
remarked earlier, thinks of man as essentially a syntactical animal producing and
understanding sentences by virtue of possessing an innate system of grammar, triggered in
various possible forms by the different human languages to which he has been exposed. A
better historical analogy than with Descartes is with Leibniz, who claimed that innate ideas are
in us in the way that the statue is already prefigured in a block of marble. In a passage of
Leibniz Chomsky frequently quotes, Leibniz makes

…the comparison of a block of marble which has veins, rather than a block of marble wholly
even, or of blank tablets, i.e., of what is called among philosophers, a tabula rasa. For if the
soul resembles these blank tablets, truth would be in us as the figure of Hercules is in the
marble, when the marble is wholly indifferent to the reception of this figure or some other. But
if there were veins in the block which would indicate the figure of Hercules rather than other
figures, this block would be more determined thereto, and Hercules would be in it as in some
sense innate, although it would be needful to labor to discover these veins, to clear them by
polishing, and by cutting away what prevents them from appearing. Thus, it is that ideas and
truths are for us innate, as inclinations, dispositions, habits, or natural potentialities, and not as
actions, although these potentialities are always accompanied by some actions, often
insensible, which correspond to them.[8]

But if the correct model for the notion of innate ideas is the block of marble that contains the
figure of Hercules as "disposition," "inclination," or "natural potentiality," then at least some of
the dispute between Chomsky and the empiricist learning theorists will dissolve like so much
mist on a hot morning. Many of the fiercest partisans of empiricist and behaviorist learning
theories are willing to concede that the child has innate learning capacities in the sense that he
has innate dispositions, inclinations, and natural potentialities. Just as the block of marble has
the innate capacity of being turned into a statue, so the child has the innate capacity of
learning. W. V. Quine, for example, in his response to Chomsky's innateness hypothesis argues,
"The behaviorist is knowingly and cheerfully up to his neck in innate mechanisms of learning
readiness." Indeed, claims Quine, "Innate biases and dispositions are the cornerstone of
behaviorism."[9]

If innateness is the cornerstone of behaviorism what then is left of the dispute? Even after all
these ecumenical disclaimers by behaviorists to the effect that of course behaviorism and
empiricism require innate mechanisms to make the stimulus-response patterns work, there
still remains a hard core of genuine disagreement. Chomsky is arguing not simply that the child
must have "learning readiness," "biases," and "dispositions," but that he must have a specific
set of linguistic mechanisms at work. Claims by behaviorists that general learning strategies are
based on mechanisms of feedback, information processing, analogy, and so on are not going to
be enough. One has to postulate an innate faculty of language in order to account for the fact
that the child comes up with the right grammar on the basis of his exposure to the language.

The heart of Chomsky's argument is that the syntactical core of any language is so complicated
and so specific in its form, so unlike other kinds of knowledge, that no child could learn it
unless he already had the form of the grammar programmed into his brain, unless, that is, he
had "perfect knowledge of a universal grammar." Since there is at the present state of
neurophysiology no way to test such a hypothesis by inspection of the brain, the evidence for
the conclusion rests entirely on the facts of the grammar. In order to meet the argument, the
anti-Chomskyan would have to propose a simpler grammar that would account for the child's
ability to learn a language and for linguistic competence in general. No defender of traditional
learning theory has so far done this (though the generative grammarians do claim that their
account of competence is much simpler than the diagram we drew in Section II above).

The behaviorist and empiricist learning theorist who concedes the complexity of grammar is
faced with a dilemma: either he relies solely on stimulus-response mechanisms, in which case
he cannot account for the acquisition of the grammar, or he concedes, à la Quine, that there
are innate mechanisms which enable the child to learn the language. But as soon as the
mechanisms are rich enough to account for the complexity and specificity of the grammar,
then the stimulus-response part of the theory, which was supposed to be its core, becomes
uninteresting; for such interest as it still has now derives entirely from its ability to trigger the
innate mechanisms that are now the crucial element of the learning theory. Either way, the
behaviorist has no effective reply to Chomsky's arguments.

The weakest element of Chomsky's grammar is the semantic component, as he himself

repeatedly admits.[10] But while he believes that the semantic component suffers from
various minor technical limitations, I think that it is radically inadequate; that the theory of
meaning it contains is too impoverished to enable the grammar to achieve its objective of
explaining all the linguistic relationships between sound and meaning.

Most, though not all, of the diverse theories of meaning advanced in the past several centuries
from Locke to Chomsky and Quine are guilty of exactly the same fallacy. The fallacy can be put
in the form of a dilemma for the theory: either the analysis of meaning itself contains certain
of the crucial elements of the notion to be analyzed, in which case the analysis fails because of
circularity; or the analysis reduces the thing to be analyzed into simpler elements which lack its
crucial features, in which case the analysis fails because of inadequacy.

Before we apply this dilemma to Chomsky let us see how it works for a simple theory of
meaning such as is found in the classical empirical philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
These great British empiricists all thought that words got their meaning by standing for ideas in
the mind. A sentence like "The flower is red" gets its meaning from the fact that anyone who
understands the sentence will conjoin in his mind an idea of a flower with an idea of redness.
Historically there were various arguments about the details of the theory (e.g., were the ideas
for which general words stood themselves general ideas or were they particular ideas that
were made "general in their representation"?). But the broad outlines of the theory were
accepted by all. To understand a sentence is to associate ideas in the mind with the descriptive
terms in the sentence.

But immediately the theory is faced with a difficulty. What makes the ideas in the mind into a
judgment? What makes the sequence of images into a representation of the speech act of
stating that the flower is red? According to the theory, first I have an idea of a flower, then I
have an idea of redness. So far the sequence is just a sequence of unconnected images and
does not amount to the judgment that the flower is red, which is what is expressed in the
sentence. I can assume that the ideas come to someone who understands the sentence in the
form of a judgment, that they just are somehow connected as representing the speech act of
stating that the flower is red—in which case we have the first horn of our dilemma and the
theory is circular, since it employs some of the crucial elements of the notion of meaning in the
effort to explain meaning. Or on the other hand if I do not assume the ideas come in the form
of a judgment then I have only a sequence of images in my mind and not the crucial feature of
the original sentence, namely, the fact that the sentence says that the flower is red—in which
case we have the second horn of our dilemma and the analysis fails because it is inadequate to
account for the meaning of the sentence.

The semantic theory of Chomsky's generative grammar commits exactly the same fallacy. To
show this I will first give a sketch of what the theory is supposed to do. Just as the syntactical
component of the grammar is supposed to describe the speaker's syntactical competence (his
knowledge of the structure of sentences) and the phonological component is supposed to
describe his phonological competence (his knowledge of how the sentences of his language
sound), so the semantic component is supposed to describe the speaker's semantic
competence (his knowledge of what the sentences mean and how they mean what they
mean).

The semantic component of a grammar of a language embodies the semantic theory of that
language. It consists of the set of rules that determine the meanings of the sentences of the
language. It operates on the assumption, surely a correct one, that the meaning of any
sentence is determined by the meaning of all the meaningful elements of the sentence and by
their syntactical combination. Since these elements and their arrangement are represented in
the deep structure of the sentence, the "input" to the semantic component of the grammar
will consist of deep structures of sentences as generated by the syntactic component, in the
way we described in Section II.

The "output" is a set of "readings" for each sentence, where the readings are supposed to be a
"semantic representation" of the sentence; that is, they are supposed to be descriptions of the
meanings of the sentence. If for example a sentence has three different meanings the
semantic component will duplicate the speaker's competence by producing three different
readings. If the sentence is nonsense the semantic component will produce no readings. If two
sentences mean the same thing, it will produce the same reading for both sentences. If a
sentence is "analytic," that is, if it is true by definition because the meaning of the predicate is
contained in the meaning of the subject (for example, "All bachelors are unmarried" is analytic
because the meaning of the subject "bachelor" contains the meaning of the predicate
"unmarried"), the semantic component will produce a reading for the sentence in which the
reading of the predicate is contained in the reading of the subject.

Chomsky's grammarian in constructing a semantic component tries to construct a set of rules

that will provide a model of the speaker's semantic competence. The model must duplicate the
speaker's understanding of ambiguity, synonymy, nonsense, analyticity, self-contradiction, and
so on. Thus, for example, consider the ambiguous sentence "I went to the bank." As part of his
competence the speaker of English knows that the sentence is ambiguous because the word
"bank" has at least two different meanings. The sentence can mean either I went to the
finance house or I went to the side of the river. The aim of the grammarian is to describe this
kind of competence; he describes it by constructing a model, a set of rules, that will duplicate
it. His semantic theory must produce two readings for this sentence.

If, on the other hand, the sentence is "I went to the bank and deposited some money in my
account" the semantic component will produce only one reading because the portion of the
sentence about depositing money determines that the other meaning of bank—namely, side
of the river—is excluded as a possible meaning in this sentence. The semantic component then
will have to contain a set of rules describing which kinds of combinations of words make which
kind of sense, and this is supposed to account for the speaker's knowledge of which kinds of
combinations of words in his language make which kind of sense.

All of this can be, and indeed has been; worked up into a very elaborate formal theory by
Chomsky and his followers; but when we have constructed a description of what the semantic
component is supposed to look like, a nagging question remains: What exactly are these
"readings"? What is the string of symbols that comes out of the semantic component
supposed to represent or express in such a way as to constitute a description of the meaning
of a sentence?

The same dilemma with which we confronted Locke applies here: either the readings are just
paraphrases, in which case the analysis is circular, or the readings consist only of lists of
elements, in which case the analysis fails because of inadequacy; it cannot account for the fact
that the sentence expresses a statement. Consider each horn of the dilemma. In the example
above when giving two different readings for "I went to the bank" I gave two English
paraphrases, but that possibility is not open to a semantic theory which seeks to explain
competence in English, since the ability to understand paraphrases presupposes the very
competence the semantic theory is seeking to explain. I cannot explain general competence in
English by translating English sentences into other English sentences. In the literature of the
Chomskyan semantic theorists, the examples given of "readings" are usually rather bad
paraphrases of English sentences together with some jargon about "semantic markers" and
"distinguishers" and so on.[11] We are assured that the paraphrases are only for illustrative
purposes, that they are not the real readings.

But what can the real readings be? The purely formal constraints placed on the semantic
theory are not much help in telling us what the readings are. They tell us only that a sentence
that is ambiguous in three ways must have three readings, a nonsense sentence no readings,
two synonymous sentences must have the same readings, and so on. But so far as these
requirements go, the readings need not be composed of words but could be composed of any
formally specifiable set of objects. They could be numerals, piles of stones, old cars, strings of
symbols, anything whatever. Suppose we decide to interpret the readings as piles of stones.
Then for a three-ways ambiguous sentence the theory will give us three piles of stones, for a
nonsense sentence, no piles of stones, for an analytic sentence the arrangement of stones in
the predicate pile will be duplicated in the subject pile, and so on. There is nothing in the
formal properties of the semantic component to prevent us from interpreting it in this way.
But clearly this will not do because now instead of explaining the relationships between sound
and meaning the theory has produced an unexplained relationship between sounds and
stones.

When confronted with this objection the semantic theorists always make the same reply.
Though we cannot produce adequate readings at present, ultimately the readings will be
expressed in a yet to be discovered universal semantic alphabet. The elements in the alphabet
will stand for the meaning units in all languages in much the way that the universal phonetic
alphabet now represents the sound units in all languages. But would a universal semantic
alphabet escape the dilemma? I think not.

Either the alphabet is a kind of a new artificial language, a new Esperanto, and the readings are
once again paraphrases, only this time in the Esperanto and not in the original language; or we
have the second horn of the dilemma and the readings in the semantic alphabet are just a list
of features of language, and the analysis is inadequate because it substitutes a list of elements
for a speech act.

The semantic theory of Chomsky's grammar does indeed give us a useful and interesting
adjunct to the theory of semantic competence, since it gives us a model that duplicates the
speaker's competence in recognizing ambiguity, synonymy, nonsense, etc. But as soon as we
ask what exactly the speaker is recognizing when he recognizes one of these semantic
properties, or as soon as we try to take the semantheory as a general account of semantic
competence, it cannot cope with the dilemma. Either it gives us a sterile formalism, an
uninterpreted list of elements, or it gives us paraphrases, which explain nothing.
Various philosophers working on an account of meaning in the past generation[12] have
provided us with a way out of this dilemma. But to accept the solution would involve enriching
the semantic theory in ways not so far contemplated by Chomsky or the other Cambridge
grammarians. Chomsky characterizes the speaker's linguistic competence as his ability to
"produce and understand" sentences. But this is at best very misleading: a person's knowledge
of the meaning of sentences consists in large part in his knowledge of how to use sentences to
make statements, ask questions, give orders, make requests, make promises, warnings, etc.,
and to understand other people when they use sentences for such purposes. Semantic
competence is in large part the ability to perform and understand what philosophers and
linguists call speech acts.

Now if we approach the study of semantic competence from the point of view of the ability to
use sentences to perform speech acts, we discover that speech acts have two properties, the
combination of which will get us out of the dilemma: they are governed by rules and they are
intentional. The speaker who utters a sentence and means it literally utters it in accordance
with certain semantic rules and with the intention of invoking those rules to render his
utterance the performance of a certain speech act.

This is not the place to recapitulate the whole theory of meaning and speech acts,[13] but the
basic idea is this. Saying something and meaning it is essentially a matter of saying it with the
intention to produce certain effects on the hearer. And these effects are determined by the
rules that attach to the sentence that is uttered. Thus, for example, the speaker who knows
the meaning of the sentence "The flower is red" knows that its utterance constitutes the
making of a statement. But making a statement to the effect that the flower is red consists in
performing an action with the intention of producing in the hearer the belief that the speaker
is committed to the existence of a certain state of affairs, as determined by the semantic rules
attaching to the sentence.

Semantic competence is largely a matter of knowing the relationships between semantic

intentions, rules, and conditions specified by the rules. Such an analysis of competence may in
the end prove incorrect, but it is not open to the obvious dilemmas I have posed to classical
empiricist and Chomskyan semantic theorists. It is not reduced to providing us with paraphrase
or a list of elements. The glue that holds the elements together into a speech act is the
semantic intentions of the speaker.

The defect of the Chomskyan theory arises from the same weakness we noted earlier, the
failure to see the essential connection between language and communication, between
meaning and speech acts. The picture that underlies the semantic theory and indeed
Chomsky's whole theory of language is that sentences are abstract objects that are produced
and understood independently of their role in communication. Indeed, Chomsky sometimes
writes as if sentences were only incidentally used to talk with.[14] I am claiming that any
attempt to account for the meaning of sentences within such assumptions is either circular or
inadequate.

The dilemma is not just an argumentative trick, it reveals a more profound inadequacy. Any
attempt to account for the meaning of sentences must take into account their role in
communication, in the performance of speech acts, because an essential part of the meaning
of any sentence is its potential for being used to perform a speech act. There are two radically
different conceptions of language in conflict here: one, Chomsky's, sees language as a self-
contained formal system used more or less incidentally for communication. The other sees
language as essentially a system for communication.

The limitations of Chomsky's assumptions become clear only when we attempt to account for
the meaning of sentences within his system, because there is no way to account for the
meaning of a sentence without considering its role in communication, since the two are
essentially connected. So long as we confine our research to syntax, where in fact most of
Chomsky's work has been done, it is possible to conceal the limitations of the approach,
because syntax can be studied as a formal system independently of its use, just as we could
study the currency and credit system of an economy as an abstract formal system
independently of the fact that people use money to buy things with or we could study the
rules of baseball as a formal system independently of the fact that baseball is a game people
play. But as soon as we attempt to account for meaning, for semantic competence, such a
purely formalistic approach breaks down, because it cannot account for the fact that semantic
competence is mostly a matter of knowing how to talk, i.e., how to perform speech acts.

The Chomsky revolution is largely a revolution in the study of syntax. The obvious next step in
the development of the study of language is to graft the study of syntax onto the study of
speech acts. And this is indeed happening, though Chomsky continues to fight a rearguard
action against it, or at least against the version of it that the generative semanticists who are
building on his own work now present.

There are, I believe, several reasons why Chomsky is reluctant to incorporate a theory of
speech acts into his grammar: First, he has a mistaken conception of the distinction between
performance and competence. He seems to think that a theory of speech acts must be a
theory of performance rather than of competence, because he fails to see that competence is
ultimately the competence to perform, and that for this reason a study of the linguistic aspects
of the ability to perform speech acts is a study of linguistic competence. Secondly, Chomsky
seems to have a residual suspicion that any theory that treats the speech act, a piece of speech
behavior, as the basic unit of meaning must involve some kind of a retreat to behaviorism.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It is one of the ironies of the history of behaviorism
that behaviorists should have failed to see that the notion of a human action must be a
"mentalistic" and "introspective" notion since it essentially involves the notion of human
intentions.

The study of speech acts is indeed the study of a certain kind of human behavior, but for that
reason it is in conflict with any form of behaviorism, which is conceptually incapable of
studying human behavior. But the third, and most important reason, I believe, is Chomsky's
only partly articulated belief that language does not have any essential connection with
communication, but is an abstract formal system produced by the innate properties of the
human mind.

Chomsky's work is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era,
comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud. It has done more than
simply produce a revolution in linguistics; it has created a new discipline of generative
grammar and is having a revolutionary effect on two other subjects, philosophy and
psychology. Not the least of its merits is that it provides an extremely powerful tool even for
those who disagree with many features of Chomsky's approach to language. In the long run, I
believe his greatest contribution will be that he has taken a major step toward restoring the
traditional conception of the dignity and uniqueness of man.

Notes

[1] Quoted in R. H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (Indiana University Press, 1967), p.
239.

[2] Howard Maclay, "Overview," in D. Steinberg and L. Jacobovitz, eds., Semantics (Cambridge
University Press, 1971), p. 163.

[3] Not all grammarians would agree that these are exactly the right phrase markers for these
two meanings. My point here is only to illustrate how different phrase markers can represent
different meanings.

[4] Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Mouton & Co., 1957), p. 100.

[5] As distinct from "John called Mary beautiful and then she INSULTED him."

[6] Cf., e.g., Noam Chomsky, "Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation,"
in D. Steinberg and L. Jacobovitz, eds., Semantics (Cambridge University Press, 1971).

[7] Noam Chomsky, "Linguistics and Philosophy," in S. Hook, ed., Language and Philosophy
(NYU Press, 1969), p. 88.

[8] G. Leibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (Open Court, 1949), pp. 45-46.

[9] W. V. O. Quine, "Linguistics and Philosophy," in S. Hook, ed., Language and Philosophy (NYU
Press, 1969), pp. 95-96.

[10] I am a little reluctant to attribute the semantic component to Chomsky, since most of its
features were worked out not by him but by his colleagues at MIT; nonetheless since he
incorporates it entirely as part of his grammar I shall assess it as such.

[11] For example, one of the readings given for the sentence "The man hits the colorful ball"
contains the elements: [Some contextually definite] (Physical object) (Human) (Adult) (Male)
(Action) (Instancy) (Intensity) [Collides with an impact] [Some contextually definite] (Physical
object) (Color) [[Abounding in contrast or variety of bright colors] [Having a globular shape]]. J.
Katz and J. Fodor, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory," in The Structure of Language, J. Katz
and J. Fodor, eds., (Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 513.

[12] In, e.g., L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Macmillan, 1953); J. L. Austin, How to
Do Things with Words (Harvard, 1962); P. Grice, "Meaning," in Philosophical Review, 1957; J. R.
Searle, Speech Acts, An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge University Press,
1969); and P. F. Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers (Methuen, 1971).
[13] For an attempt to work out some of the details, see J. R. Searle, Speech Acts, An Essay in
the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge University Press, 1969), Chapters 1-3.

[14] E.g., meaning, he writes, "need not involve communication or even the attempt to
communicate," Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 19.