DOI 10.

1515/css-2016-0003  Chinese Semiotic Studies 12(1): 13-24

Noam Chomsky*
Minimal Computation and the Architecture
of Language
Abstract: The article argues that humans are endowed with an inborn language
faculty. The ‘Basic Property’ of language is defined as a finitely-specified
procedure represented in the brain, which generates a discrete infinity of
hierarchically structured expressions. These unordered structures are linked to
two interfaces: (i) the sensorimotor interface and (ii) the conceptual-intentional
interface. The sensorimotor interface externalizes and linearizes internal
structures, usually in the sound modality. Externalization and linearization
account for the structural diversity of the world’s languages. Human language
did not evolve from simpler communication systems. The available evidence
suggests that language is primarily an instrument of thought, not of
communication.

Keywords: ‘Basic Property’; inborn language faculty; origin of language;

function of language


*Corresponding author, Noam Chomsky: Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
E-mail: [email protected]

Editorial note: In preparing this contribution for publication in Chinese Semiotic

Studies it was modified in the following ways: an abstract and keywords were
added as well as section divisions and labels; footnotes were incorporated into
the text and sources for some quoted material were provided. The original
version of the paper will be published in Japanese in a forthcoming volume, 21
世紀の言語学 (Linguistics in the 21st Century), edited by Takashi Imai and Shinji
Saito.

1 Historical background
From the early days of the modern scientific revolution, there has been intense
interest in human language, recognized to be a core feature of human nature
and the primary capacity distinguishing modern humans from other creatures.
14  Noam Chomsky

In a contemporary interpretation, Ian Tattersall (2012: xi), one of the leading

students of human evolution, writes,

[T]he acquisition of the uniquely modern [human] sensibility was instead an abrupt and
recent event. […] And the expression of this new sensibility was almost certainly crucially
abetted by the invention of what is perhaps the single most remarkable thing about our
modern selves: language.

Centuries earlier, Galileo and the seventeenth century Port Royal logicians
and grammarians were awed by the “marvelous invention” of a means to
construct “from 25 or 30 sounds that infinity of expressions, which bear no
resemblance to what takes place in our minds, yet enable us to reveal [to others]
everything that we think, and all the various movements of our soul” (Arnauld
& Lancelot, 1975: 65). Descartes took this capacity to be a primary difference
between humans and any beast-machine, providing a basic argument for his
mind-body dualism. The great humanist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836)
characterized language as “a generative activity [eine Erzeugung]” (p. 39) rather
than “a lifeless product” [ein todtes Erzeugtes] (p. 39), Energeia rather than
Ergon (p. 41), and pondered the fact that somehow this activity “makes infinite
use of finite means”[…] sie mussvon endlichen Mitteln einen unendlichen
Gebrauch machen] (p. 106) (for sources see Chomsky, 1966/2009). For the last
great representative of this tradition, Otto Jespersen (1924), the central question
of the study of language is how its structures “come into existence in the mind
of a speaker” (p. 19) on the basis of finite experience, yielding a “notion of […]
structure” (p. 19) that is “definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of
his own”, (p. 19) crucially “free expressions” (p. 20) that are typically new to
speaker and hearer. And more deeply, to go beyond to unearth “the great
principles underlying the grammars of all languages” (p. 344) and by so doing
to gain “a deeper insight into the innermost nature of human language and of
human thought” (p. 347) – ideas that sound much less strange today than they
did during the structuralist/behavioral science era that came to dominate much
of the field through the first half of the twentieth century, marginalizing the
leading ideas and concerns of the tradition (see Jespersen, 1924).
Throughout this rich tradition of reflection and inquiry there were efforts to
comprehend how humans can freely and creatively employ “an infinity of
expressions” to express their thoughts in ways that are appropriate to
circumstances though not determined by them, a crucial distinction. However,
tools were not available to make much progress in carrying these ideas forward.
That difficulty was partially overcome by mid-twentieth century, thanks to the
work of Gödel, Turing, and other great mathematicians that laid the basis for
 Minimal Computation and the Architecture of Language  15

the modern theory of computability. These accomplishments provided a very

clear understanding of how “finite means” can generate an “infinity of
expressions”, thereby opening the way to formulating and investigating what
we may consider to be the Basic Property of the human language faculty: a
finitely-specified generative procedure, represented in the brain, that yields a
discrete infinity of hierarchically structured expressions, each with a
determinate interpretation at two interfaces: the sensorymotor interface SM for
externalization in one or another sensory modality (usually, though not
necessarily, sound); and the conceptual-intentional interface CI for reflection,
interpretation, inference, planning, and other mental acts. Nothing analogous,
even remotely similar, has been discovered in any other organism, thus lending
substance to the judgments of the rich tradition.
It is important to recognize that the unbounded use of these finite means –
the actual production of speech in the free and creative ways that intrigued the
great figures of the past – still remains a mystery, not just in this domain, but for
voluntary action generally. The mystery is graphically described by two of the
most prominent scientists who study voluntary motion, Emilio Bizzi and Robert
Ajemian (2015), reviewing the state of the art today: “we have some idea as to
the intricate design of the puppet and the puppet strings”, they write, “but we
lack insight into the mind of the puppeteer” (p. 93).
That is not a slight problem. It lies at the borders of feasible scientific
inquiry if not beyond, in a domain which human intelligence cannot penetrate.
And if we are willing to accept the fact that we are organic creatures, not angels,
we will join leading thinkers of the past – Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and
others – in recognizing that some problems may be permanent mysteries for us.

2 The generative enterprise and the biolinguistic

framework

2.1 The ‘Basic Property’ of language

The study of the finite means that are used in linguistic behavior – the puppet
and the strings – has been pursued very successfully since the mid-twentieth
century in what has come to be called the “generative enterprise” and
“biolinguistic framework”, drawing from and contributing to the “cognitive
revolution” that has been underway during this period. The kinds of questions
that students are investigating today could not even have been formulated not
16  Noam Chomsky

many years ago, and there has been a vast explosion in the languages of the
widest typological variety that have come under investigation, at a level of
depth never before contemplated in the long and rich history of investigation of
language since classical Greece and ancient India. There have been many
discoveries along the way, regularly raising new problems and opening new
directions of inquiry. In these respects the enterprise has had considerable
success.
Departing from the assumptions of the structuralist/behaviorist era and
returning to the spirit of the tradition in new forms, the generative/biolinguistic
enterprise takes a language to be an internal system, a “module” of the system
of human cognitive capacities. In technical terms, a language is taken to be an
“I-language” – where “I” stands for internal, individual, and intensional
(meaning that we are concerned with the actual nature of the biological object
itself rather than with some set of objects that it generates, such as a corpus of
expressions or set of behaviors). Each I-language satisfies the Basic Property of
human language, formulated above. Jespersen’s “great principles underlying
the grammars of all languages” are the topic of Universal Grammar (UG),
adapting a traditional term to a new framework, interpreted now as the theory
of the genetic endowment for the faculty of language, the innate factors that
determine the class of possible I-languages.
There is by now substantial evidence that UG is a species property, uniform
among humans apart from severe pathology, and with no close analogue, let
alone anything truly homologous, in the rest of the animal world. It seems to
have emerged quite recently in evolutionary time, as Tattersall concluded,
probably within the last 100,000 years. And we can be fairly confident that it
has not evolved at least since our ancestors began to leave Africa some 50-60
thousand years ago. If so, then the emergence of the language faculty – of UG –
was quite sudden in evolutionary time, which leads us to suspect that the Basic
Property, and whatever else constitutes UG, should be very simple. Furthermore,
since Eric Lenneberg’s pioneering work in the 1950s, evidence has been
accumulating that the human language faculty is dissociated from other
cognitive capacities – though of course the use of language in perception
(parsing) and production integrates the internal I-language with other
capacities (see Lenneberg, 1967; Curtiss, 2012).That too suggests that whatever
emerged quite suddenly (in evolutionary time) should be quite simple.
As the structuralist and behavioral science approaches took shape through
the first half of the twentieth century, it came to be generally assumed that the
field faced no fundamental problems. Methods of analysis were available,
notably Zellig Harris’s Methods in Structural Linguistics, which provided the
means to reduce a corpus of materials to an organized form, the primary task of
 Minimal Computation and the Architecture of Language  17

the discipline. The problems of phonology, the major focus of inquiry, seemed
to be largely understood. As a student in the late 1940s, I remember well the
feeling that “this is really interesting work, but what happens to the field when
we have structural grammars for all languages?” These beliefs made sense
within the prevailing framework, as did the widely-held “Boasian” conception
articulated by theoretical linguist Martin Joos (1957: 96) that languages can
“differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways” (p. 96) so that
the study of each language must be approached “without any preexistent
scheme of what a language must be” (Joos, 1957: v).
These beliefs collapsed as soon as the first efforts to construct generative
grammars were undertaken by mid-twentieth century. It quickly became clear
that very little was known about human language, even the languages that had
been well studied. It also became clear that many of the fundamental properties
of language that were unearthed must derive in substantial part from the innate
language faculty, since they are acquired with little or no evidence. Hence there
must be sharp and determinate limits to what a language can be. Furthermore,
many of the properties that were revealed with the first efforts to construct rules
satisfying the Basic Principle posed serious puzzles, some still alive today,
along with many new ones that continue to be unearthed.
In this framework, the study of a specific language need not rely just on the
behavior and products of speakers of this language. It can also draw from
conclusions about other languages, from neuroscience and psychology, from
genetics, in fact from any source of evidence, much like science generally,
liberating the inquiry from the narrow constraints imposed by strict
structuralist/behavioral science approaches.
In the early days of the generative enterprise, it seemed necessary to
attribute great complexity to UG in order to capture the empirical phenomena of
languages. It was always understood, however, that this cannot be correct. UG
must meet the condition of evolvability, and the more complex its assumed
character, the greater the burden on some future account of how it might have
evolved – a very heavy burden in the light of the few available facts about
evolution of the faculty of language, as just indicated.
From the earliest days, there were efforts to reduce the assumed complexity
of UG while maintaining, and often extending, its empirical coverage. And over
the years there have been significant steps in this direction. By the early 1990s it
seemed to a number of researchers that it might be possible to approach the
problems in a new way: by constructing an “ideal solution” and asking how
closely it can be approximated by careful analysis of apparently recalcitrant
data, an approach that has been called “the minimalist program”. The notion
“ideal solution” is not precisely determined a priori, but we have a grasp of
18  Noam Chomsky

enough of its properties for the program to be pursued constructively (see

Chomsky, 1995).
I-languages are computational systems, and ideally should meet conditions
of Minimal Computation MC, which are to a significant extent well understood.
I-languages should furthermore be based on operations that are minimally
complex. The challenges facing this program are naturally very demanding
ones, but there has been encouraging progress in meeting them, though vast
empirical domains remain to be explored.
The natural starting point in this endeavor is to ask “What is the simplest
computational operation that would satisfy the Basic Property?”. The answer is
quite clear. Every unbounded computational system includes, in some form, an
operation that selects two objects X and Y already constructed, and forms a new
object Z. In the simplest and hence optimal case, X and Y are not modified in
this operation, and no new properties are introduced (in particular, order).
Accordingly, the operation is simple set-formation: Z = {X,Y}. The operation is
called Merge in recent literature.
Every computational procedure must have a set of atoms that initiate the
computation – but like the atoms of chemistry, may be analyzed by other
systems of language. The atoms are the minimal meaning-bearing elements of
the lexicon, mostly word-like but of course not words. Merge must have access
to these, and since it is a recursive operation, it must also apply to syntactic
objects SO constructed from these, to the new SOs formed by this application,
etc., without limit. Furthermore, to satisfy the Basic Property some of the SOs
created by Merge must be mapped by fixed procedures to the SM and CI
interfaces.
By simple logic, there are two cases of Merge(X,Y). Either Y is distinct from
X (External Merge EM) or one of the two (say Y) is a part of the other that has
already been generated (Internal Merge IM). In both cases, Merge(X,Y) = {X,Y},
by definition. In the case of IM, with Y a part of X, Merge(X,Y) = {X,Y} contains
two copies of Y, one the SO that is merged and the other the one that remains in
X. For example, EM takes the SOs read and books (actually, the SOs underlying
them, but let us skip this refinement for simplicity of exposition) and forms the
new SO {read, books} (unordered). IM takes the SOs John will read which book
and which book and forms {which book, John will read which book}.
In both cases, other rules convert the SOs to the SM and CI forms. Mapping
to CI is straightforward in both cases. The IM example has (roughly) the form
“for which x, x a book, John will read the book x”. Mapping to SM adds linear
order, prosody, and detailed phonetic properties, and in the IM example deletes
the lower copy of which book, yielding which book John will read. This SO can
appear either unchanged, as in guess [which book John will read],or with a
 Minimal Computation and the Architecture of Language  19

raising rule of a type familiar in many languages, yielding which book will John
read.
It is important to note that throughout, the operations described satisfy MC.
That includes the deletion operation in the mapping to SM, which sharply
reduces the computational and articulatory load in externalizing the Merge-
generated SO. To put it loosely, what reaches the mind has the right semantic
form, but what reaches the ear has gaps that have to be filled by the hearer.
These “filler-gap” problems pose significant complications for
parsing/perception. In such cases, I-language is “well-designed” for thought
but poses difficulties for language use, an important observation that in fact
generalizes quite widely and might turn out to be exceptionless, when the
question arises.
Note that what reaches the mind lacks order, while what reaches the ear is
ordered. Linear order, then, should not enter into the syntactic-semantic
computation. Rather, it is imposed by externalization, presumably as a reflex of
properties of the SM system, which requires linearization: we cannot speak in
parallel or articulate structures. For many simple cases, this seems accurate:
thus there is no difference in the interpretation of verb-object constructions in
head-initial or head-final constructions.
The same is true in more complex cases, including “exotic” structures that
are particularly interesting because they rarely occur but are understood in a
determinate way, for example, parasitic gap constructions. The “real gap” RG
(which cannot be filled) may either precede or follow the “parasitic gap” PG
(which can be filled), but cannot be in a dominant (c-command) structural
relation to the PG, as illustrated in the following:

(1) Guess who [[your interest in PG] clearly appeals to RG

(2) Who did you [talk to RG [without recognizing PG].
(3) *Guess who [GAP[admires [NP your interest in GAP]]

Crucially, grammatical status and semantic interpretation are determined by

structural hierarchy while linear order is irrelevant, much as in the case of verb-
initial versus verb-final. And all of this is known by the language user even
though evidence for language acquisition is minuscule or entirely non-existent.
The general property of language illustrated by these cases is that linguistic
rules are invariably structure-dependent. The principle is so strong that when
there is a conflict between the computationally simple property of minimal
linear distance and the far more complex computational property of minimal
structural distance, the latter is always selected. That is an important and
puzzling fact, which was observed when early efforts to construct generative
20  Noam Chomsky

grammars were undertaken. On the surface, it seems to conflict with the quite
natural and generally operative principles of MC.
To illustrate, consider the following sentences:

(4) Birds that fly instinctively swim

(5) The desire to fly instinctively appeals to children
(6) Instinctively, birds that fly swim
(7) Instinctively, the desire to fly appeals to children.

The structures of (6) and (7) are, roughly, as indicated by bracketing in (6’)
and (7’) respectively:

(6’) Instinctively, [birds that fly] [swim]]

(7’) Instinctively, [[the desire to fly] [appeals [to children]]]

In both cases, “fly” is the closest verb to “instinctively” in linear distance,

but the more remote in structural distance.
Examples (4) and (5) are ambiguous (“fly instinctively”, “instinctively
swim/appeal”), but in (6’) and (7’) the adverb is construed only with the remote
verb. The immediate question is why the ambiguity disappears; and more
puzzling, why is it resolved in terms of the computationally complex operation
of locating the structurally closest verb rather than the much simpler operation
of locating the linearly closest verb? The property holds of all relevant
constructions in all languages, in apparent conflict with MC. Furthermore, the
knowledge is once again acquired without relevant evidence.
There have been many attempts by linguists and other cognitive scientists
to show that these outcomes can be determined by some kind of learning
mechanism from available data. All fail, irremediably, which is not surprising,
as the simple example just given indicates (for a review, see Berwick et al., 2011).
There is a very simple and quite natural solution to the puzzle, the only one
known: languages are optimally designed, based on the simplest computational
operation, Merge, which is order-free. Equipped with just this information, the
child acquiring language never considers linear order in determining how to
account for the data of experience; this is the only option open to the I-language
satisfying the Basic Property, given that the general architecture of language
established by UG satisfies MC.
The strongest thesis we can formulate about human language is that MC
holds quite generally: the Strong Minimalist Thesis SMT. Not many years ago it
would have appeared to be so absurd that it was never even contemplated. In
recent years, evidence has been mounting that suggests otherwise.
 Minimal Computation and the Architecture of Language  21

Assuming SMT we at once have an explanation for a number of quite

puzzling phenomena. One is the ubiquity of displacement – interpretation of a
phrase where it appears as well as in another position in which its basic
semantic role is determined, a phenomenon that appeared to require
mechanisms that are an “imperfection” of language design. Under SMT, as we
have seen, displacement should be the norm (namely, by IM) and would have to
be blocked by some arbitrary stipulation. Hence a barrier against displacement
would be an “imperfection”. Correspondingly, any approach to language that
bars IM has a double burden of justification: for the stipulation blocking the
simplest case, and for any new mechanisms introduced to account for the
phenomena. Furthermore, SMT yields at once the “copy theory” of
displacement, which provides an appropriate structure for interpretation at CI,
dispensing with complex operations of “reconstruction”. And as we have just
seen, it provides a solution to the puzzles of structure-dependence, an
overarching principle of language design. These are, I think, quite significant
results, of a kind hitherto not attained or even contemplated in the rich tradition
of linguistic inquiry. (Further inquiries, which I cannot review here, carry the
account further.)
Note again that while MC yields appropriate structures at CI, it poses
difficulties at SM. Looking further, there is substantial evidence that
externalization to SM is the primary locus of the complexity, variability, and
mutability of language, and that, correspondingly, mastering the specific mode
of externalization is the main task of language acquisition: mastering the
phonetics and phonology of the language, its morphology, and its lexical
idiosyncrasies (including what is called “Saussurean arbitrariness”, the specific
choice of sound-meaning correspondences for minimal word-like elements).

2.2 Origin and function of language

We might proceed to entertain another bold but not implausible thesis: that
generation of CI – narrow syntax and construal/interpretive rules – is uniform
among languages, or nearly so. In fact, realistic alternatives are not easy to
imagine, in the light of the fact that the systems are acquired on the basis of
little or no evidence, as even the few simple examples given earlier illustrate.
The conclusion also comports well with the very few known facts about origin of
language. These appear to place the emergence of language within a time frame
that is very brief in evolutionary time, hardly more than an instant, and with no
evolutionary change since. Hence we would expect what evolved – UG – to be
quite simple.
22  Noam Chomsky

Note that to be seriously considered, any speculation about origin of

language must account for the emergence of the Basic Property, which cannot
be approached in small steps, just as evolution of the arithmetical capacity is
not facilitated by ability to deal with small numbers. The leap from 4 or 1 million
to an unbounded number system is no easier than the leap from 1 to that goal.
The considerations just reviewed are a sample of those that suggest that the
Basic Property is not quite as formulated so far in this discussion. Rather, the
Basic Property of I-language, determined by UG, is a finitely-specified
generative procedure, represented in the brain, that yields a discrete infinity of
hierarchically structured expressions, each with a determinate interpretation at
the CI interface. Ancillary principles may externalize the internally-generated
expression in one or another sensory modality.
There is neurological and psycholinguistic evidence to support these
conclusions about the architecture of language and the ancillary character of
externalization. Research conducted in Milan a decade ago, initiated by Andrea
Moro, showed that nonsense systems keeping to UG principles of structure-
dependence elicit normal activation in the language areas of the brain, but
much simpler systems using linear order in violation of UG yield diffuse
activation, implying that subjects are treating them as a puzzle, not a language.
There is confirming evidence by Neil Smith and Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli in their
investigation of a cognitively deficient but linguistically gifted subject; he was
able to master the nonsense language satisfying structure-dependence, but not
the one using the simpler computation involving linear order. Smith and
Tsimpli also made the interesting observation that normals can solve the
problem of the UG-violating language if it is presented to them as a puzzle, but
not if it is presented as a language, presumably activating the language faculty.
These studies suggest very intriguing paths that can be pursued in neuroscience
and experimental psycholinguistics (Musso et al., 2003; Smith & Tsimpli, 1995;
Smith, 1999).
Note that these conclusions about language architecture undermine a
conventional contemporary doctrine that language is primarily a system of
communication, and presumably evolved from simpler communication systems.
If, as the evidence strongly indicates, even externalization is an ancillary
property of language, then specific uses of externalized language, as in
communication, are an even more peripheral phenomenon – a conclusion also
supported by other evidence, I think. Language appears to be primarily an
instrument of thought, much in accord with the spirit of the tradition. There is
no reason to suppose that it evolved as a system of communication.
A reasonable surmise today, I think, is that within the narrow time frame
suggested by the available facts, some small rewiring of the brain yielded the
 Minimal Computation and the Architecture of Language  23

modified Basic Property – of course in an individual, who was then uniquely

capable of thought: reflection, planning, inference, and so on, in principle
without bounds. It is possible that other capacities, notably arithmetical
competence, are by-products. In the absence of external pressures, the Basic
Property should be optimal, as determined by laws of nature, notably MC,
satisfying SMT, rather as a snowflake takes its intricate shape. The mutation
might proliferate to further generations, possibly coming to dominate a small
breeding group. At that point, externalization would be valuable. The task
would be to map the products of the internal system satisfying SMT to
sensorimotor systems that had been present for hundreds of thousands of years,
in some cases far more; thus there is evidence that the auditory systems of apes
are very much like those of humans. That mapping poses a hard cognitive
problem, which can be solved in many ways, each of them complex, all of them
mutable – very much what we observe, as noted earlier. Carrying out these tasks
might involve little or no evolutionary change.
If these reflections are on the right track, then the primary task for linguistic
research is to fill in the huge gaps in this picture, that is, to show that the vast
array of phenomena in the humanly accessible languages can be explained
properly in something like these terms. And remaining in the domain of mystery
for the moment – perhaps forever – is the origin of the atoms of computation
and the nature of the “puppeteer”, the creative aspect of language use that was
the prime concern of the long and rich tradition that has been revived in a new
form in the generative/biolinguistic enterprise.

3 Concluding remarks
I remarked earlier that in my student days in mid-twentieth century, it seemed
as though the major problems of the study of language had been pretty much
solved and that the enterprise, though challenging, was approaching a terminal
point that could be fairly clearly perceived. The picture today could not be more
different.

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Bionote
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research areas include linguistic theory, syntax,
semantics, and philosophy of language.