A Brief Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Linguistic Theory, Narrated by The X‑Files’ Gillian Anderson

How is it that chil­dren just enter­ing tod­dler­hood pick up the struc­ture of their respec­tive lan­guages with ease? They are not for­mal­ly taught to use speech; they have lim­it­ed cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties and a “pover­ty of stim­u­lus,” giv­en their high­ly cir­cum­scribed envi­ron­ments. And yet, they learn the func­tion and order of sub­jects, verbs, and objects, and learn to rec­og­nize improp­er usage. Chil­dren might make rou­tine mis­takes, but they under­stand and can be under­stood from a very ear­ly age, and for the most part with­out very much dif­fi­cul­ty. How?

These are the ques­tions that con­front­ed Noam Chom­sky in the ear­ly years of his career in lin­guis­tics. His answers pro­duced a the­o­ry of Uni­ver­sal Gram­mar in the 1960s, and for decades, it has been the reign­ing the­o­ry in the field to beat, ini­ti­at­ing what is often referred to as the “Chom­skyan Era,” a phrase the man him­self dis­likes but which nonethe­less sums up the kinds of issues that have been at stake in lin­guis­tics for over fifty years.

Ques­tions about lan­guage acqui­si­tion have always been the sub­ject of intense philo­soph­i­cal spec­u­la­tion. They were fold­ed into gen­er­al the­o­ries of epis­te­mol­o­gy, like Plato’s the­o­ry of forms or John Locke’s so-called “blank slate” hypoth­e­sis. Vari­a­tions on these posi­tions sur­face in dif­fer­ent forms through­out West­ern intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry. Descartes picks up Plato’s dual­ism, argu­ing that humans speak and ani­mals don’t because of the exis­tence of an immor­tal “ratio­nal soul.” Behav­ior­ist B.F. Skin­ner sug­gests that oper­ant con­di­tion­ing writes lan­guage onto a total­ly impres­sion­able mind. (“Give me a child,” said Skin­ner, “and I will shape him into any­thing.”)

Chom­sky “gave a twist” to this age-old debate over the exis­tence of innate ideas, as Gillian Ander­son tells us in the ani­mat­ed video above from BBC 4’s His­to­ry of Ideas series. Chomsky’s the­o­ry is biolin­guis­tic: it sit­u­ates lan­guage acqui­si­tion in the struc­tures of the brain. Not being him­self a neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist, he talks of those the­o­ret­i­cal struc­tures, respon­si­ble for repro­duc­ing accu­rate syn­tax, as a metaphor­i­cal “lan­guage acqui­si­tion device” (LAD), a hard­wired fac­ul­ty that sep­a­rates the human brain from that of a dog or cat.

Chomsky’s the­o­ry has lit­tle to do with the con­tent of lan­guage, but rather with its struc­ture, which he says is uni­ver­sal­ly encod­ed in our neur­al archi­tec­ture. Chil­dren, he writes, “devel­op lan­guage because they’re pre-pro­grammed to do this.” Syn­tax is pri­or to and inde­pen­dent of spe­cif­ic mean­ing, a point he demon­strat­ed with the poet­ic sen­tence “Col­or­less green ideas sleep furi­ous­ly.” Every Eng­lish speak­er can rec­og­nize the sen­tence as gram­mat­i­cal, even very small chil­dren, though it refers to no real objects and would nev­er occur in con­ver­sa­tion.

Con­verse­ly, we rec­og­nize “Furi­ous­ly sleep ideas green col­or­less” as ungram­mat­i­cal, though it means no more nor less than the first sen­tence. The region­al vari­a­tions on word order only under­line his point since, in every case, chil­dren quick­ly under­stand how to use the ver­sion they’re pre­sent­ed with at rough­ly the same devel­op­men­tal age and in the same way. The exis­tence of a the­o­ret­i­cal Lan­guage Acqui­si­tion Device solves the chick­en-egg prob­lem of how chil­dren with no under­stand­ing of and only a very lim­it­ed expo­sure to lan­guage, can learn to speak just by lis­ten­ing to lan­guage.

Chomsky’s the­o­ry was rev­o­lu­tion­ary in large part because it was testable, and researchers at the professor’s long­time employ­er, MIT, recent­ly pub­lished evi­dence of a “lan­guage uni­ver­sal” they dis­cov­ered in a com­par­a­tive study of 37 lan­guages. It’s com­pelling research that just might antic­i­pate the dis­cov­ery of a phys­i­cal Lan­guage Acqui­si­tion Device, or its neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal equiv­a­lent, in every human brain.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Michel Gondry Ani­mate Philoso­pher, Lin­guist & Activist Noam Chom­sky

The Ideas of Noam Chom­sky: An Intro­duc­tion to His The­o­ries on Lan­guage & Knowl­edge (1977)

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness