New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
Noam Chomsky
Cambridge UP £12.95, pp230
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Professor Noam Chomsky is internationally renowned on two grounds - he is a tireless political publicist and polemicist, and the most influential theoretical linguist of the second half of the twentieth century.

His ideology is one of libertarian, almost anarchist intransigence. He has excoriated the brutal imperialism of United States planetary policies. He has prefaced and defended a tract denying the Holocaust. Chomsky, himself a Jew, deems the right to freedom of expression to be an absolute.

It was the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 which brought on 'the cognitive revolution' and established Chomsky as one of the most influential of modern thinkers. Since that date, his doctrines have undergone significant revisions. However, as this argument on New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind shows, the central themes have remained constant. They are put forward with clarity and urgency. But any brief lay summary runs the risk of getting things wrong.

Chomsky holds that the acquisition of language is internal to the human mind/ brain. A child acquires its first language with formidable ease because there are constraints on all possible grammatical constructs, because the core properties of language are built in from the very start. No human being acquires language 'from scratch'. What we do is to select particular options from an antecedently specified set. All the child has to do, as Neil Smith puts it in his lucid preface, is to 'throw the appropriate switch, fixing the generative structures and confines of whichever language it is learning'.

Chomsky is committed to an axiom of biological determinism. But he is highly sceptical of the possibilities of any ultimate neuro-physiological or biochemical understanding of the cerebral mechanisms and properties that underlie the innateness of linguistic deep structures. He sees as eventually possible a unification of the experimental understanding of the human brain with a mapping of linguistic ground-rules and constraints as he posits them. But such 'unification', he stresses, is not 'a reduction'. The key to language is not neurosurgery.

The capacity of the child to come to understand the meaning of words and grammatical expressions 'with remarkable delicacy, far beyond anything that the most comprehensive dictionaries and grammars begin to convey, with refinements and intricacy that are barely beginning to be understood', depends on semantic properties which are both 'innate and universal'.

It follows that the immense variety of tongues and the wealth of differences between them are only of the 'surface', where 'surface' has nothing to do with 'superficiality'. The deep-lying and rule-bound structures are common to all speech. Indeed, says Chomsky, it would seem 'that much of the variety of language can be reduced to properties of inflectional systems. If this is correct, then language variation is located in a narrow part of the lexicon.' It is 'phonetic realisations' which create an illusion of structural diversity.

The impact of these proposals has been profound. Chomskyan linguistics has dominated the field. Dissenters have been few and, on the whole, marginalised. It has been part of Chomsky's strategic virtuosity to make of dissenting arguments cases of naïve misunderstanding or muddle. Certain questions - that which involves the 'mind-body' conundrum, for example - are ruled out of court. Where indispensable, modifications have been allowed. If I understand the modulation rightly, early claims to exemplify certain concrete universals which rule-bind and feature in all languages have been qualified. The degree of abstraction and formalisation has increased.

And yet, is there in the entire notion of linguistic innate universality a truth whose abstraction entails a measure of triviality - in exactly the sense in which the discovery that all human beings need to breathe oxygen can be said to be a somewhat barren imperative? Why the 10,000-fold variousness of actual languages, each enacting a reading of time and the world which not even the most determined of translations can fully transmit? How deeply into sensibility, into articulating consciousness do these 'non-universals' reach?

As before, Chomsky has set out issues and theories of the utmost interest. To disagree with him, to sense that the jury is out on key assertions, remains a (perilous) privilege.