The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (20 page)

The idea that the human mind is designed to use abstract variables and data structures used to be, and in some circles still is, a shocking and revolutionary claim, because the structures have no direct counterpart in the child’s experience. Some of the organization of grammar would have to be there from the start, part of the language-learning mechanism that allows children to make sense out of the noises they hear from their parents. The details of syntax have figured prominently in the history of psychology, because they are a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. And that was real news.

The word
glamour
comes from the word
grammar,
and since the
Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules? There has been a book on mind and matter called
Grammatical Man
, and a Nobel Prize lecture comparing the machinery of life to a generative grammar. Chomsky has been interviewed in
Rolling Stone
and alluded to on
Saturday Night Live
. In Woody Allen’s story “The Whore of Mensa,” the patron asks, “Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?” “It’d cost you,” she replies.

Unlike the mental grammar, the mental dictionary has had no cachet. It seems like nothing more than a humdrum list of words, each transcribed into the head by dull-witted rote memorization. In the preface to his
Dictionary
, Samuel Johnson wrote:

Johnson’s own dictionary defines
lexicographer
as “a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”

In this chapter we will see that the stereotype is unfair. The world of words is just as wondrous as the world of syntax, or even more so. For not only are people as infinitely creative with words as they are with phrases and sentences, but memorizing individual words demands its own special virtuosity.

Recall the
wug
-test, passed by any preschooler: “Here is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two___.” Before being so challenged, the child has neither heard anyone say, nor been rewarded for saying, the word
wugs
. Therefore words are not simply retrieved from a mental archive. People must have a mental rule for generating new words from old ones, something like “To form the plural of a noun, add the suffix
-s
.” The engineering trick behind human language—its being a discrete combinatorial system—is used in at least two different places: sentences and phrases are built out of words by the rules of syntax, and the words themselves are built out of smaller bits by another set of rules, the rules of “morphology.”

The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages. The English noun comes in exactly two forms
(duck
and
ducks)
, the verb in four
(quack, quacks, quacked, quacking)
. In modern Italian and Spanish every verb has about fifty forms; in classical Greek, three hundred and fifty; in Turkish, two million! Many of the languages I have brought up, such as Eskimo, Apache, Hopi, Kivunjo, and American Sign Language, are known for this prodigious ability. How do they do it? Here is an example from Kivunjo, the Bantu language that was said to make English look like checkers compared to chess. The verb “Näïkì@@@lyìià,” meaning “He is eating it for her,” is composed of eight parts:

• N-: A marker indicating that the word is the “focus” of that point in the conversation.
  

• -ä-: A subject agreement marker. It identifies the eater as falling into Class 1 of the sixteen gender classes, “human singular.” (Remember that to a linguist “gender” means kind, not sex.) Other genders embrace nouns that pertain to several humans, thin or extended objects, objects that come in pairs or clusters, the pairs or clusters themselves, instruments, animals, body parts, diminutives (small or cute versions of things), abstract qualities, precise locations, and general locales.
  

• -ï-: Present tense. Other tenses in Bantu can refer to today, earlier today, yesterday, no earlier than yesterday, yesterday, or earlier, in the remote past, habitually, ongoing, consecutively, hypothetically, in the future, at an indeterminate time, not yet, and sometimes.
  

• -kì-: An object agreement marker, in this case indicating that the thing eaten falls into gender Class 7.
  

• -@@@-: A benefactive marker, indicating for whose benefit the action is taking place, in this case a member of gender Class 1.
  

• -lyì-: The verb, “to eat.”
  

• -ï-: An “applicative” marker, indicating that the verb’s cast of players has been augmented by one additional role, in this case the benefactive. (As an analogy, imagine that in English we had to add a suffix to the verb
  bake
  when it is used in
  I baked her a cake
  as opposed to the usual
  I baked a cake
  .)
  

• -à: A final vowel, which can indicate indicative versus subjunctive mood.
  

If you multiply out the number of possible combinations of the seven prefixes and suffixes, the product is about half a million, and that is the number of possible forms per verb in the language. In effect, Kivunjo and languages like it are building an entire sentence inside a single complex word, the verb.

But I have been a bit unfair to English. English is genuinely crude in its “inflectional” morphology, where one modifies a word to fit the sentence, like marking a noun for the plural with -
s
or a verb for past tense with -
ed
. But English holds its own in “derivational” morphology, where one creates a new word out of an old one. For example, the suffix -
able
, as in
learnable, teachable
, and
huggable
, converts a verb meaning “to do X” into an adjective meaning “capable of having X done to it.” Most people are surprised to learn how many derivational suffixes there are in English. Here are the more common ones:

-able

-age

-al

-an

-ant

-ance

-ary

-ate

-ed

-en

-er

-ful

-hood

-ic

-ify

-ion

-ish

-ism

-ist

-ity

-ive

-ize

-ly

-ment

-ness

-ory

-ous

-y

In addition, English is free and easy with “compounding,” which glues two words together to form a new one, like
toothbrush
and
mouse-eater
. Thanks to these processes, the number of possible words, even in morphologically impoverished English, is immense. The computational linguist Richard Sproat compiled all the distinct words used in the forty-four million words of text from Associated Press news stories beginning in mid-February 1988. Up through December 30, the list contained three hundred thousand distinct word forms, about as many as in a good unabridged dictionary. You might guess that this would exhaust the English words that would ever appear in such stories. But when Sproat looked at what came over the wire on December 31, he found no fewer than thirty-five new forms, including
instrumenting, counterprograms, armhole, part-Vulcan, fuzzier, groveled, boulderlike, mega-lizard, traumatological
, and
ex-critters
.

Even more impressive, the output of one morphological rule can be the input to another, or to itself: one can talk about the
unmicro-waveability
of some French fries or a
toothbrush-holder fastener box
in which to keep one’s toothbrush-holder fasteners. This makes the number of possible words in a language bigger than immense; like the number of sentences, it is infinite. Putting aside fanciful coinages concocted for immortality in
Guinness
, a candidate for the longest word to date in English might be
floccinaucinihilipilification
, defined in the
Oxford English Dictionary
as “the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial.” But that is a record meant to be broken:

Or, if you suffer from sesquipedaliaphobia, you can think of your
great-grandmother
, your
great-great-grandmother
, your
great-great-great-grandmother
, and so on, limited only in practice by the number of generations since Eve.

What’s more, words, like sentences, are too delicately layered to be generated by a chaining device (a system that selects an item from one list, then moves on to some other list, then to another). When Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, he imagined a future in which an incoming Soviet missile would be shot down by an
anti-missile missile
. But critics pointed out that the Soviet Union could counterattack with an
anti-anti-missile-missile missile
. No problem, said his MIT-educated engineers; we’ll just build an
anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile missile
. These high-tech weapons need a high-tech grammar—something that can keep track of all the
anti
’s at the beginning of the word so that it can complete the word with an equal number of
missile
’s, plus one, at the end. A word structure grammar (a phrase structure grammar for words) that can embed a word in between an
anti
- and its
missile
can achieve these objectives; a chaining device cannot, because it has forgotten the pieces that it laid down at the beginning of the long word by the time it gets to the end.

Like syntax, morphology is a cleverly designed system, and many of the seeming oddities of words are predictable products of its internal logic. Words have a delicate anatomy consisting of pieces, called morphemes, that fit together in certain ways. The word structure system is an extension of the X-bar phase structure system, in which big nourish things are built out of smaller nounish things, smaller nounish things are built out of still smaller nounish things, and so on. The biggest phrase involving nouns is the noun phrase; a noun phrase contains an N-bar; an N-bar contains a noun—the word. Jumping from syntax to morphology, we simply continue the dissection, analyzing the word into smaller and smaller nounish pieces.

Here is a picture of the structure of the word
dogs:

The top of this mini-tree is “N” for “noun”; this allows the docking maneuver in which the whole word can be plugged into the noun slot inside any noun phrase. Down inside the word, we have two parts: the bare word form
dog
, usually called the stem, and the plural inflection -
s
. The rule responsible for inflected words (the rule of
wug
-test fame) is simply