Kathryn S. Brown*
Science
Feb 5 1999: 774-775.It's been more than 3 decades since scientist-dissident Noam Chomsky hit his colleagues with a controversial theory: that babies learn how to speak so easily because they're born with a sense of grammar that transcends individual languages. Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), challenged researchers to find simple rules that govern all languages, from Arabic to Zulu. Now some linguists claim to have at last uncovered key elements of this universal grammar--and their findings, presented at the meeting, are rekindling a debate over whether grammar is innate.
Guglielmo Cinque got the fireworks started at a packed symposium with his description of common grammar elements spanning dozens of cultures. Cinque, a linguist at the University of Venice in Italy, recalls being struck several years ago by how certain adverbs--"always" and "completely," for example--appear in the same order in a sentence in languages as disparate as Italian, Bosnian, and Chinese. Looking more closely, Cinque realized the same was true for auxiliary verbs, particles, and other parts of speech.
He and his students then set out on a linguistic odyssey, surveying word order and meaning in some 500 languages and dialects. After more than 4 years of sifting through grammatical analyses and querying native speakers, the researchers found that every language consists of sentences based on a verb phrase surrounded by modifiers in predictable patterns. Because this core structure does not vary, Cinque concludes that "our human species imposes these rules on language as part of our genetic endowment." Cinque, who lays out his argument in a new book, Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Approach (Oxford University Press, 1999), adds: "It's an accident of birth, like having five fingers instead of seven."
More focused comparisons have yielded similarly provocative conclusions. In another talk, MIT linguist David Pesetsky, a former student of Chomsky's, examined the Question Rule, or the arrangement of parts of speech in a question. At first glance, questions appear strikingly different in many languages. In English, for example, we ask, "Whose book did Mary buy?" In Russian, the same question, "Chju Marija kupila knigu?" (translated word for word), comes out as "Whose Mary bought book?" Comparing these sentences and equivalents in Bulgarian and Okinawan, a Japanese dialect, Pesetsky and students Paul Hagstrom and Norvin Richards have discovered a recurring syntax theme: No matter what their native tongue, people consistently place variations on the word "whose" and accompanying words at one end of a sentence.
Both sets of findings are compelling, says Victoria Fromkin, a linguist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "The universal properties they've found--combined with the fact that children show an amazing ability to pick up language--make a very strong case that our species is biologically endowed with a set of rules for communication," she says. But some researchers contend that Cinque, Pesetsky, and their colleagues are overreaching. "We all agree that humans have a language faculty," says UCLA's Edward Keenan. "What's at issue is how specific it is." But regarding precise rules for a universal grammar, he says, "the evidence just isn't in." Pesetsky demurs: "I think we're tapping something basic here."