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RICHARD OHMANN
underlying
competence.
Linguistics, by implication, has erred in savoring
its all too successful revolt against mentalism: to describe a language
adequately is to characterize a system of mental capacities.
Beyond doing that, a theory of language must try to achieve what
Chomsky calls "explanatory adequacy"; that is, "it aims to provide a
principled basis, independent of any particular language," for choosing
the appropriate grammar of every particular language. What might such
a basis be? Essentially an account of two things: fil'St, the general fonn
of languages, and second, the linguistic capacity shared by all human
beings. But almost certainly the former is equivalent to the latter. To
see this, consider the situation of a child learning to talk. He hears a
random scattering of sentences, of which many but not all are well·
formed; adults may correct his speech occasionally. Building on this
irregular experience, he constructs an abstract, infinitely creative hypo–
thesis about the form of language. As Katz and Postal point out, there is
no possibility of his doing so by induction, or by "generalization," in the
psychologist'S terms; for he has no "stimuli" to generalize from except
surface structures which are mainly severe distortions of the deep
structures that he must-and does-discover. Rather, the child apparently
has an a priori notion of what he is to learn. And since he will learn
with equal ease whatever language he is exposed to, his innate assump–
tions must pertain equally to all human languages. Thus Chomsky
proposes that "the child approaches the data with the presumption that
they are drawn from a language of a certain antecedently well-defined
type. . . . Language learning would be impossible unless Vtis were
the case."
In linguistic practice, adopting this hypothesis means attributing to
the general form of languages as much of the structure of each particular
language as is feasible. That may be quite a bit. That there are universals
in phonology, important work by Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, and
Chomsky strongly implies. Certainly transformational rules enter into the
syntax of every language. Katz and Postal think that the basic word
classes, word orders, and grammatical relations are universals of deep
structure, though of course surface structures vary widely. And the
conclusion seems inescapable that all languages share a system of mean·
ings-oc, to put it philosophically, that there is an "a priori structure
to
the system of 'attainable concepts'" (Chomsky).
There can be no final verdict on such ambitious claims until we
have far more detailed grammars than those currently available, and
for many more languages. But at least within the framework of genera–
tive grammar it has become natural once more to ask the old interesting
